After much pre-publicity, DNA Ancestry is finally here.

Since I haven’t tried this yet myself, and it’s pretty much news for all of us, I know about this much:

You buy a kit, swab the inside of your cheek, just like in the CSI shows, send it back to Ancestry and they will process your results and mail them back to you. Your results can also be added to an Ancestry database to be compared with other people’s results or be kept totally private. DNA matches are communicated anonymously.

Please open this user-friendly pdf called DNA Ancestry and read all about the process. They say it as well as it can be said.

What DNA Ancestry Tests Can Reveal

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Check this out. Geographic Names Information System. Rick Eastman wrote about it in his blog, and I’m just passing it along in case you don’t get over there on a regular basis.

This is a way to find otherwise difficult or ‘impossible’ locations. Not just towns. Other stuff. Buildings, bridges, cemeteries …

Start here. Click on your location. “Domestic” for U.S. (There’s also a GNS International under ‘Foreign Links’. Just follow along.) On the next page, click under that heading for “Search GNIS”. On the next page, you fill in the name of the place you’re looking for, click ‘Send Query’ and there it is, with latitude and longitude.

Sometimes you’ll have a few to choose from, so those times it helps if you can at least narrow down the county. After you click on your choice, over on the right is a selection of map types for zooming in on your target.

If you can’t print or right-click and save the map, you can always Screen Capture it.

In five minutes, I’d found two of my stubborn ‘lost’ locations. This can be locations too tiny to mention, or locations long ago absorbed into others.

Brilliant. Bookmark it.

Reportedly, Legacy 7.0, that’s due out soon, will be doing something different with Sources. I can hardly wait to find out what.

I’ve heard there’s some connection to Elizabeth Shown Mill’s work, Evidence Explained, which is about source citation models. That shouldn’t affect what I’m going to talk about here. Not unless they completely re-design the Assigned Sources window and kill my present use of it.

If you’re using the digital component of the MRIN Filing System, or even if you’re not, you may have realized by now that it’s easy to link your digital images if you want to. It’s not necessary, but Legacy does make that possible. Just browse to your source image and link it up. Make sure you distinguish between Master Source and Source Detail images. In other words, if you have a Death Certificate for an individual, that’s a Source Detail image, not a Master Source image. continued …

My cousin, Sam, has some new companions who have just come on board.

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Do we believe in ghosts? Of course, we do. We’re genealogists. Ghosts are our specialty.

Sometimes I can feel one tapping me hard on the shoulder saying, “No, not 1852. It was 1855.” Or “No, not his brother. It was his uncle.” Sometimes I imagine they’re twisting in their graves with everything we get wrong.

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