I found it useful. It enabled me to break through a genealogy “brick wall” by connecting with a 3rd cousin who had more info on a pair of my (our) great-great-grandparents.
I’m not too concerned about privacy. I shed DNA all over the place just by existing, so I’m not really expecting that information to be private going forward.
There has been some controversy regarding the results of such tests. So, personally, I highly doubt the claims regarding what I can learn from a test, while I absolutely don’t trust the companies doing the test, so personally it’s an easy no.
Well, it works fine to find relatives. But it’s sad if you then find out those relatives have absolutely no idea of their heritage so you won’t find out how you’re connected.
But it’s nice to upload the data to Promethease and see what kind of diseases may await you in the future.
No the only way for the evidence to match up was the DNA so they asked a relative to take a DNA test to see if it was him for sure and that was what confirmed it.
I wouldn’t go that far. I think your great grandparents are relatives, and anyone further back is an ancestor. I might stretch to great great grandparents, but I don’t think I’d go any further
I’d say even one’s parents are technically ancestors, though they might not take kindly to being referred to as such :)
I think all ancestors are relatives, but not all relatives are ancestors. Aunts and cousins and such are relatives, but not ancestors, as you are not directly descended from them.
We went through my Great Aunt’s old photo album with her a few years before she passed at 101(!) We recorded the audio and scanned the whole photo album, so we now basically have a whole slideshow narrated by her going through her old photos. She was the last person in our family from her generation and there were people and places in that photo album that no one else would have been able to identify. At her memorial service, my brother took the raw material and edited together a five minute video presentation that included music, photos and her voice narrating. It was great at the service for everyone to have that contact with her voice again.
Both my father and my mother (divorced) have old 8mm film which I’ve recently digitized, and we’re now in the process of sitting down with them and informally recording their voiceovers with the old footage so we have a record of everyone and every place in the old footage.
We’ve also gotten subscriptions for my mother, father, and father-in-law to a service called storyworth that sends them a question a week via email and gives them a web form to answer the question in. They can also do more than one a week, select a different question if they don’t want to do the one they were sent, or make up their own question. At the end of a year, storyworth collects it all together and prints a book of all the generated material. Photos can also be added. It’s gone well, though their consistency has varied a bit. We’ve renewed all of their subscriptions for another year and we’re getting some great stories out of it.
old 8mm film which I’ve recently digitized, and we’re now in the process of sitting down with them and informally recording their voiceovers with the old footage so we have a record of everyone and every place in the old footage.
That’s really cool. My family is working on an almost identical project.
When i was at uni 20 years ago or so I did one with my gran about when she went out to Australia as part of the ten pound pom scheme. They all hated it and spent their whole time saving to come back to the UK.
Sadly the computer I had it saved on had an absolute melt down and I was really bad at backing up back then.
Informal, but yeah. It wasn’t structured really, just a conversation that flowed after suggesting it to my grandfather that was in poor health and expressed a regret at not being able to tell my niece some of the stories from his family history.
It wasn’t specifically about genealogy, though it did include that as a side benefit. Hard to tell a story about his great-great grandfather without covering a big patch of of genealogy.
Most of it was about him, his mother and father, and then some of the stories that got passed down about family further back.
I very strongly suggest doing it if it is at all possible. Once you get started, questions will come to mind you can’t plan for. You can get details they might not think to include if they were just writing it down or self recording.
People just don’t think to record normal life, or even unique and interesting stories about themselves, so such things get talked about by others, but still never written down or otherwise recorded. You might run across someone’s journal if they kept one, but that isn’t as common as you’d think.
Just as an example, my grandfather would sometimes mention in passing that he left the little mountain town he was born in to get a job in Ohio. What he never mentioned until it was a sit-down with questions was that the entire trip was him walking, catching rides, and hopping a train. He had never mentioned that he had just turned 16 at the time. He had never talked about the first night sleeping under nothing but a blanket on the side of the road, shivering and startling awake at the sounds of larger animals in the woods.
All of that came out (and more) because I was asking for details. Like, how long did it take to get there? He’d never thought to mention it, just that he made the trip and stayed with an uncle once he got there. He said it took about three days. That led to questions about how he traveled which opened up the story about sleeping near the road, no fire, and alone.
I promise you, if your relatives are willing, and you take the time to let them wander a bit, you’ll find out little things that are worth the time and effort.
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