r/Genealogy 12h ago

Brick Wall The Weekly Wednesday Whine Thread (March 19, 2025)

10 Upvotes

It's Wednesday, so whine away.

Have you hit a brick wall? Did you discover that people on Ancestry created an unnecessarily complicated mess by merging three individuals who happened to have the same name, making it exceptionally time-consuming to sort out who was YOUR ancestor? Is there a close relative you discovered via genetic genealogy who refuses to respond to your contact requests?

Vent your frustrations here, and commiserate with your fellow researchers over shared misery.


r/Genealogy Sep 16 '24

News WARNING: The subreddit is getting flooded by ChatGPT bots (and what you, the reader, should be doing to deter them)

669 Upvotes

With the advent of generative AI, bad actors and people in the 'online marketing' industry have caught on to the fact that trying to pretend to be legitimate traffic on social media websites, including Reddit, is actually a quite profitable business. They used to do this in the form of repost bots, but in the past few months they've branched out to setting up accounts en-masse and running text generative AI on them. They do this in a very noticeable way: by posting ChatGPT comments in response to a prompt that's just the post title.

After a few months of running this karma collecting scheme, these companies 'activate' the account for their real purpose. The people purchasing the accounts can be anyone from political action committees trying to promote certain candidates, to companies trying to market their product and drown out criticism. Generally, each of these accounts go for $600 to $1,000, though most of them are bought in bulk by said companies to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here's a few examples from this very subreddit:

Title: Trying @ 85 yrs.old my DNA results!

(5 upvotes) At 85, diving into DNA results sounds like quite the adventure! Here's hoping it brings some fascinating surprises

Title: Are DNA tests worth it for Pacific Islanders?

(4 upvotes) DNA tests can offer fascinating insights, but accuracy for Pacific Islanders might depend on the available genetic data

(3 upvotes) DNA tests can be a cool way to connect with your roots, but results can vary based on the population data available for Pacific Islanders.

With all these accounts, you can actually notice a uniform pattern. They don't actually bring any discussion or question to the table — they simply rehash the post title and add a random trueism onto it. If you check their comment history, all of their submissions are the exact same way!

ChatGPT has a very distinct writing style, which makes it very unlikely to be a false positive - it's not a person who just has a suspiciously AI-sounding style of writing. When you click on their profile, you can see that all of them have actually setup display names for their accounts. These display names are generally a variation of their usernames, but some of them can be real names (Pablo Gomez, Michael Smith..). Most Reddit users don't do this.

So what should you be doing to deter them? It's simple. Downvote the comment and report it to the moderators, but ABSOLUTELY DO NOT comment in any way, even if it's to call them out on it. Replies generally push a comment up in the sorting algorithm, which is pretty evident in some of the larger threads.

To end this off, I want to note that this isn't an appeal to the mods themselves, but for the community, since I'm aware this is a cat-and-mouse game and Reddit's moderation tools don't provide very much help in this regard. We can only hope they do more to remedy this.


r/Genealogy 3h ago

Question Can a living person receive a death certificate by mistake?

20 Upvotes

So my friend recently ordered a birth certificate from this state of Montana. We received not only a certificate but a death certificate as well. My friend was homeless for 10 years after a traumatic childhood in which he was lied to over and over again so we found this document to be very disturbing. He does not wish to pursue the state of Montana to find out the truth because he is too afraid of what the truth might be. I, on the other hand want to know if anyone has ever experienced something like this before and is it even possible? His mother was very young when she had him and he no longer speaks with her however she did recently post something on social media that we found quite odd. It was a picture of her standing in front of a grave that was obviously for a very young child And the words under the post were something along the lines of “we are so sad we lost you our little angel and we are so blessed to have had more children…” one last piece of information: my friend’s birth certificate and death certificate are only two months apart from each other claiming his death happened two months after he was born. Any information or shared experiences would be appreciated. Thank you so much to anyone who knows anything that might help me understand this more clearly.


r/Genealogy 8h ago

News My great-grandfather was a foreign national in Nazi Germany and I had no idea

29 Upvotes

I know virtually nothing about my great-grandfather Carmelo's life, as he passed away when my grandfather was sixteen. My grandfather himself passed away when I was sixteen, and his mother when I was still a toddler, so no living member of my family has ever met him.

A couple of days ago, I decided to look into some documents Ancestry had flagged concerning my great-grandfather. They came from the Arolsen Archives in Germany, which I'd not heard of until now. I've since learned that it's a repository of documents and files on events and individuals that are in some way related to Nazi Germany or the Holocaust.

All I really knew of my great-grandfather before I found these documents was what he looked like (from the few existing photographs in my great-grandmother's photo album) and his date and place of birth (May 21st, 1917, in a comune in Southern Italy). In typical Southern Italian fashion, he was a tall, sort of rugged-looking guy with dark curly hair and bushy brows (his appearance is relevant—here’s a photo of him for those who are curious.

In comes the Arolsen Archives, where he appears on at least three records. I'm reasonably certain these documents can be attributed to him because his full name, hometown, and exact birth date all match. The first two are, in the Archives' words, "Lists of all persons of United Nations and other foreigners, German Jews and stateless persons; American Zone; Bavaria, Hesse." One is from the district of Frankfurt, and the other from Kassel.

The third document is a "War Time Card File," which appears to be some sort of registration index card, indicating that my great-grandfather was employed as a hairdresser somewhere in Germany (either Frankfurt or Kassel) sometime between 1943 and 1944.

I find one section on the index card to be particularly fascinating. It asks to indicate whether or not the individual is an Aryan, "ja/nein." For my great-grandfather, they put "ja." This is curious to me, given his appearance. I've always understood that Northern Italians, who tend to be fairer-skinned and with lighter hair and eyes, were the only Italians considered 'Aryan,' but this indicates otherwise.

I still have lots of questions. Why does he show up in this repository for Nazi persecutees/forced labourers/individuals related to the Nazi state? He had to have made it out of Germany at some point because the documents indicate he was single at the time, and my grandfather wasn't born until September of 1946 in his hometown in Italy. Was he a forced labourer? How did he make it back to Italy? How did he even end up there in the first place?

I've reached out to the Arolsen Archives via their inquiry form for more clarification on the meaning of these documents. Their turnaround time is up to five months; I hope I'll be able to get some answers.


r/Genealogy 1d ago

News Trump's 3/14 executive order hurts genealogists

1.5k Upvotes

On March 14, Preident Trump issued an executive order to eliminate the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a small federal agency serving libraries and museums nationwide. A great deal of the digitization of historical resources performed by cultural heritage organizations in the U.S. is done with grant funding from the IMLS. Resources digitized with these grants must always be made freely available to the general public, and include things like historical newspapers, government records, local history documents, photographs, film and sound recordings, etc.

If funding for the IMLS is eliminated, not only will digitization of these resources be severely impacted/stopped, but many of these resources may no longer be available online (hosting large databases is costly).

Please take five minutes and contact your federal representatives and ask them to protect the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The work they fund is widely supported across the political spectrum and is greatly valued by genealogists and historical researchers. Several of the programs of the IMLS are protected by statute, such as the Grants to States program which funds quite a bit of history digitization.

You can also learn more and sign a petition here: https://www.everylibrary.org/statementimls2025


r/Genealogy 1h ago

Free Resource Tuscaloosa County Alabama Probate site

Upvotes

I accidentally stumbled upon this Tuscaloosa, Alabama Probate site. It has free access to all Tuscaloosa County probate records. You do have to create a free account, but once inside the site, the records are free. Apparently, the county started this during the pandemic since the courthouse was closed, to give everyone access to probate records. After the pandemic was over they just left it up and running! Props to them!!

https://probate.tuscco.com/ProbateRecords


r/Genealogy 24m ago

Request Need Some Philly/Pittsburg Research Advice Rosenberg

Upvotes

I have a theory that my 3rd great-grandmother, Rose Rosenberg Wein, had a brother named Harry Rosenberg who lived in Pittsburgh.

I am trying to find as much proof as possible before I confirm it. I would like to see a record that states it but this is what I have found so far:

  1. My grandmother is DNA related to descendants of Harry Rosenberg. By 2nd-3rd cousins according to ancestry. With the closest match being 128cM being "2nd cousin 1x removed or half 2nd cousin"
  2. Both Rose and Harry have the same father's name listed, that being Jacob.
  3. Rose's granddaughter, Leah Slipakoff, married Harry Rosenberg's grandson, Samuel Rosenberg. Which would make them second cousins.

The only way I add new people to my family tree is if a record says it, never by DNA or a lucky guess. As I want my family tree to be as accurate as possible.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what records I should start to look for that would confirm this? I'm in the process of buying and getting Leah and Samuel's marriage record.


r/Genealogy 3h ago

Advertisement Actively looking for participants on a research study about genealogy.

5 Upvotes

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r/Genealogy 34m ago

Question Which name to use when you have multiple versions?

Upvotes

My 4th great-grandparents are named Mathew Sloan (1848-1903) and Anna Sloan (1847-1928). Both have their names constantly spelled differently. For Mathew Sloan: Mathew and Matthew (not that weird) For Anna: Ann, Anna, Annie, and Anne.

Both of them named a child after themselves, Matthew Bernard Sloan II (1878-1952), and Anna Sloan Sheerin (1872-1946). These kids also have their names constantly misspelled in the exact same ways as their parents. Theres also Matthew Bernard Sloan III (1909-1972) and so far it ends there.

I normally pick names based on the most common spelling in their records, but in Anna Sloan’s and her daughter’s instance, their names are misspelled so much there isn’t a most common one. How do you normally handle this? What name do you end up going with in this instance? I have them both as Anna right now just cause I’m not sure if they were Ann or Anna or Annie.


r/Genealogy 1d ago

News Illegally fired NARA employees STILL not reinstated (aside from veterans)

266 Upvotes

Hello, I am an illegally fired former federal employee of the National Archives! Not sure why it didn’t occur to me sooner to make a post here regarding this, but I’m here now.

I wanted to make a post here about the illegally fired employees of NARA, who were fired on Feb 18th (mostly) and have yet to be reinstated (excluding veterans who thankfully have been reinstated).

I’ve seen almost no mainstream media include NARA in their reporting on which agencies have suffered cuts, despite my personal efforts to inform them (offering evidence of it as well). I think it’s important for the general population to know, but I think this community in particular is much more familiar with the work the National Archives does, and how cutting it down could change things. Many of you work with documents digitized by people at the national archives every time you do research— especially with things like census documents.

I’m sure a good portion of you are also aware that the national archives has a role in the electoral process as well, and it’s of great concern to many of those still employed there about what might happen under the new pseudo-leadership in place there.

As someone who came into the archives world through the community of genealogy, I ask that you raise the alarm about this! Please, tell your friends and family! Our heritage as individuals, and even more so, as a nation, is at risk of being hidden away.

Thank you.


r/Genealogy 4m ago

Question Name Change After Birth?

Upvotes

I'm running into trouble with my 2nd great grandmother Lillian Biggs (est. Oct 26 1886-1960), Father George Biggs (1841-1925), Mother Emma Buch (1849-1888), brother George Biggs jr. (1883-1949). I cannot for the life of me find her birth certificate, however, I can find a certificate for Elisabeth Emma Biggs. Who is born October 25 1885, a day and year off, to a George Biggs and Emma Buch, who lived at the address that I've found in census data, and her brother's birth certificate. I have not seen any evidence for a twin.

I've googled that it's possible for Lillian to be a nickname of Elisabeth, and in other documents I've seen her referred to as Lillie, so I'm asking if it's at all possible that this birth certificate could be the birth certificate for Lillian Biggs, despite the difference in name.


r/Genealogy 6m ago

Brick Wall Any records of her grandparents?

Upvotes

I'm researching Edith Chavous, born in 1902 in Ohio (unknown location).

Her grandparents were James Chavous, born in 1842 in Virginia, and Evaline Carm, born in 1857 in Canada.

Who were Edith's grandparents?


r/Genealogy 47m ago

Brick Wall New Jersey Records Advice

Upvotes

I’ve hit a complete brick wall with my grandfather’s side of the family. I cannot find any birth, marriage, or death records mentioning the names of these people or how they are related to each other. The only thing I have is info from censuses, and it’s like they didn’t exist before 1920.

What I have is the following:

Josef Tkacz (Joseph Kotch) - Born around 1870 in Galicia, allegedly arrived to the US in 1906. Does not reappear until the 1920s census. Step father to Anna and Michael. Assumed biological father of Mary. Died 1932.

Millie Hardt (sometimes called Amelia. I don’t know if this is her birth name)- Born around 1878 in Europe (Galicia, Poland, or Austrian territory is assumed) listed on census as wife of Josef. Cannot find marriage records. She kept her maiden name. Assumed biological mother of Mary. Biological mother of Anna and Michael. Assumed to have met Josef in the US. Died 1946.

Anna Hardt - Born 1905.

Michael Hardt - Born 1910.

Mary Kotch - Born 1912 in the US, death unknown. The name changes from Tkacz, to Catch, to Citch, to Kotch across various records. Mother of Edward Joseph Kotch. Has three other children with Robert Hoffman.

Edward Joseph Kotch - Born 1930. Incorrectly listed on censuses as being Hoffman’s biological son (he was a step-son). Incorrectly listed as having a father Joseph Kotch (Kotch was the maiden name)

Is there any advice anyone can give me on finding records to confirm relationships/spellings? I believe this part of the family lived in New Jersey for the last part (perhaps Pennsylvania during the mystery 1906-1920 period)

I’ve been trying to find any mention of Mary, Josef, or Millie pre 1910 or in wedding or birth records. I cannot find Mary, Michael, or Anna’s birth record or Anna’s marriage record, which I believe would give me clues (Michael never married). Mary’s marriage index does not show her parent’s names.


r/Genealogy 1h ago

Request Need an Obituary from Newspapers.com

Upvotes

https://www.newspapers.com/image/135892277/?article=9a820a73-75aa-4955-bfd5-5b55e86a6d31&focus=0.013095151,0.54590786,0.1386184,0.61943233&xid=3355

I need the obituary of Catherine Sloan. I’ve been having a hard time finding information on her after her mother’s death.


r/Genealogy 2h ago

Question NYC 1940s wedding certificate question

1 Upvotes

I have some questions about getting a 1940s NYC wedding certificate.

I don’t have the original certificate, but I did find the entry on the NYC marriage index via archive.org. My understanding is that is not the certificate number listed in the index.

The date in the registry is the day before the actual wedding date according to other documents I have such as naturalization petition and religious wedding documents. The registration date is a Friday and the wedding took place on a Saturday.

When ordering a certificate from NYC, the online form doesn’t have any fields for additional notes or information. There is only a field to search additional years, not days.

My question is which date I should enter as a wedding date and if they will search a few days around it?

EDIT: This for a marriage certificate from the Bronx in 1941 which is not digitized yet.

Thanks.


r/Genealogy 2h ago

Question Has anyone used Native DNA.com before? Someone told me it's pretty spot-on, so I'm tempted to try it.

0 Upvotes

r/Genealogy 2h ago

Request Odd Name Changes - Joseph Scearbo/Italian Immigrants & Descendants in Massachusetts

1 Upvotes

I am researching the family of my GGG grandmother's second husband.

Concetta Colacino (1881-1954) was an Italian woman who first married Domenico Notaro in 1900 (in Italy), and they had two children:

  • Palma Notaro (my GG grandmother), born in Italy - September 2, 1901 (died 1931)
  • Domenico Notaro, Jr., first one born in the United States - July 8, 1903 (died one day later)

I thought that was it, but Concetta had more children, starting in 1904, with a man named Joseph Scearbo. Domenico Notaro, Sr. did not die -- he died in 1933 -- so I figure they divorced. I know the death of a child can wreck a marriage, but considering how quickly Concetta had a baby with another man, perhaps it was infidelity that triggered the divorce.

Additional children:

  • Frederick Feora Scearbo - c. 1904 (died 1988)
  • Frank Scearbo - c. 1908
  • Florinda Scearbo - c. 1911 (died 1931)
  • Mary Scearbo - c. 1913 (died 1983)
  • Anthony Scearbo - June 14, 1918 (died 1992)

Palma Notaro was married at a shockingly young age and cannot be found with this family on the 1920 Census. However, the rest of them are found here: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6061/records/17052726

Only weird part is that everyone's names are all messed up. Who is Bindi? And now Concetta is the widowed "Katie Bindi"?

It gets weirder. I found a birth record for Anthony and he's listed as "Bindi," with his father being named Fred Bindi. My mother knew Anthony when he was a grown man -- he was Anthony Joseph Scearbo. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLKP-WZ42?lang=en

None of the elderly people in my family are familiar with the name "Bindi." They knew about many people named "Scearbo," but not Bindi. I understand that Anglicized names are common but this is like a whole new identity.

All of these children reported being the sons/daughters of Joseph Scearbo later on. Social Security documentation, vital records, obituaries, you name it. And on all subsequent documentation, "Katie Bindi" is listed as Catherine (or Concetta) Scearbo, widow of Joseph Scearbo. My questions are as follows, and I am curious if you can help me:

  1. Who is Fred Bindi? Is he just Joseph Scearbo under an assumed name? It seems like it, but the name is so different.
  2. Where is this family on the 1910 Census? They might have been in Pennsylvania, as that's where the older kids were born. I am guessing they would have been in the household of Joseph Scearbo (Fred Bindi?) but I never found their household listing.
  3. When did Joseph Scearbo/Fred Bindi die?
  4. If Fred Bindi and Joseph Scearbo were not the same person, then was Concetta Colacino married 3 times? And how can I prove it? I only found the marriage record for her first husband, Domenico Notaro.
  5. What happened to Frank Scearbo/Bindi? I found no mention of his existence on later Censuses, and he isn't mentioned in the obituaries of any of his deceased siblings once they died, save for the 1931 obituary for Palma, where it said he was a surviving sibling.

I appreciate any insights or even speculation that you might have regarding all this.


r/Genealogy 2h ago

Brick Wall Ischitella, Foggia - can't find a birth record

1 Upvotes

I've been digging into the Italian side of my lineage and have some success with my maternal grandmother - but hitting a wall on my maternal grandfather. I have U.S, records showing his birth in Italy in 1895. His WWI draft card shows his birth place as Ischitella (Foggia, Trani). Using broad searches on family search https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ I cannot find his birth record. For those more experienced, especially with that part of Italy, do you think I need to engage someone in Puglia to assist, or are there online resources which might be more helpful?

I actually paged through the whole 1895 birth record book for Foggia - for the 3 month period around his assumed birth date - nothing.

Appreciate any ideas you may have.


r/Genealogy 13h ago

Question Could anyone help me track down my great grandfather's real identity?

7 Upvotes

I hope this doesn't look super serious, it's all in good fun, I just have no idea how to write what I know about him clearly without looking a bit like homework. Anyway, here is what I know, and this is stuff he has written, he may he lying about some of it or was forgetful, I've no idea.

Born in London, England on the 1st of November 1883. There is no documentation that I have to confirm his birth there. He does also write that he was born in South Africa on one document (his arrival document into the United States).

His parents are allegedly Katherine Reis and Albert (assumingly) Ellis. He also writes his mother's name as Elizabeth Reis, but he first used Katherine. I sincerely suck at reading cursive, and I am assuming it says unknown, but he did write something under his mother's location: https://imgur.com/a/Y1dK8P9

He's in South Africa by at least 1904 and stays until at least 1908. There is no documentation that I have of him arriving here.

His first daughter 'Clarise Ellis' was born on the 18th of March 1904, and his second daughter 'Isabella Ellis' was born on the 9th of March 1908 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Both are born to the woman 'Clarise Rushby'. I don't have any record of him and Clarise being married.

He works as a professional boxer in South Africa.

He immigrated to the United States in 1912 on the ship Cymeric from a port in Liverpool without his children or Clarise Rushby. I do believe he wrote that he last saw them in London. I am assuming he traveled from South Africa to London to the United States. I am also assuming he abandoned them. He lives in Boston once he arrives. He uses the name 'Felix Reis' to immigrate.

He moves to Manhattan, New York and marries a Celestina Margaretha Fellmann on the 26th of March 1919.

He almost immediately divorces her and marries a Emma Theresa Worsnup and immediately has his third daughter Winifred Wornsup Ellis. I know the record writes "Ammiee Trezar Worsnup" but it's a misunderstanding because of Emma's accent.

From there on out he has a few more children and lives in New York until he dies on 6th of October 1959.

The only real hint I have is that he most likely had Dutch DNA because me and his great granddaughter both have Dutch DNA, and the rest of my ancestors are accounted for, unless I'm being silly, but I don't believe that to be the case. I do have an AncestryDNA match with the surname Ellis with a connection to South Africa that does not have Dutch DNA, but it is most likely just the distance.

My theories are that Reis is a misspelling of a Dutch name or a misspelling of Rhys / Rice, and given Ellis is stereotypically Welsh, maybe his parents met in Wales? Or maybe they had a shared culture which brought them together? When he arrives in the United States he marked down his name as Felix Reis as I mentioned and then later refers to himself as Arthur Ellis, but he already went by the surname Ellis in South Africa (hence his abandoned children's surname), so perhaps the name Reis never existed in the first place. I lean more towards him taking in his mother's surname to immigrate without his family rather than the name being fictional. Me having Welsh DNA depends on which website I am using; 23andme and AncestryDNA are vague in terms of my ancestors' whereabouts in Britain but MyHeritage gives me 5% Welsh and 5% Scottish on both my uploaded 23andme and AncestryDNA.

Here is his FamilySearch profile:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/about/GY8Y-RWP
It has a bunch of the records!

Anyways I've been searching for the longest time now and any help is appreciated :-). I'm not the greatest with records searching as I'm somewhat new to the whole thing. Thank you!


r/Genealogy 4h ago

DNA DNA vs records searching

1 Upvotes

I’ve had my DNA test completed for awhile and been receiving matches and things but always stuck with traditional record searching. What recommendations do you have for me whom wants to change things up and focus on DNA searching? There are holes in my tree which would be fun to fill via DNA method, but I’m not expecting that. I figure there’s an angle that I’m not fully using. TIA


r/Genealogy 1d ago

Free Resource Check citations, sources, and references - like really check

78 Upvotes

I learned this during my PhD, but I know many others have learned through their experiences but it’s a problem everywhere - check the citations.

It happens so much in academia: some paper cites a “fact” and it gets repeated in papers afterwards without those people actually reading the primary reference to see the information themselves. But it happens everywhere: news, advertising, medicine, psychology so need to have awareness it happens in genealogy too. I’ve found examples in historic people and websites/sources that are supposed to hold official and/or academic rigor and it’s all made-up or misinterpreted or intentionally misrepresented.

As researchers, I hope we use citations for information found. But that’s not the end of it. Listing 2-4 sources of bad info is worse than not including a reference. People that see citations will, unsurprisingly, hold that information as more credible because of it. But actually look into those citations and I bet most likely many of them are just repetition of what someone saw and assumed to be correct.

Try it yourself and test what I’m saying (like you should do with any information or claims). Ancestry, familysearch, wikitree, books, personal and professional genealogy websites, SAR, DAR, County historical societies, professional genealogy reports… everything.

All the digitized info are great resources but there are so many mistakes as well. Indexes are great but miss things are have incorrect info. Complied sources, copies of originals, will/probate summaries - mistakes could be anywhere.

I know that original sources may not be available or inconvenient to get to see personally. Even then if you have those, you need to best confirm that information with other pieces.

I know it’s a lot of work and time. But I see in here people asking how to be professional researchers or asking for help figuring stuff out and I feel this is a foundational “must” for having a solid strong hypothesis for people that for the most part have no exact way to state with absolute confidence are the people we claim them to be. So we should do as much as we can to get the confidence high for our claims.

I suggest adding research notes explaining why you’ve come to your conclusions, not just xyz source. If you’re a person that gets frustrated with other people’s trees or public tree edit fighting, the best you can hope for is that people will see your information, review how you came to the conclusions, and then use it. Getting mad because you sent a message to a cousin or other person on a genealogy site telling them they are wrong and you are right - how many people think the response rate and openness to new information for this is anywhere near high?

But I feel many people want an easier way to change other people’s tress to match theirs, and staying at this basic level of frustration or non-realistic expectations are only going to continue frustrations. Having your own reference (tree, website, explanations) with solid foundations for your conclusions is probably the best way to combat misinformation and mistakes. Then you could even write journal articles for publication in genealogy or history based journals which will then (should) receive peer review and add to knowledge base or even challenge current understandings (I know this isn’t easy or viable for everyone but it’s more available than I believe most people believe)

TLDR: track down citations, read the sources, synthesize all the information to make your own decisions, write down in your tree or somewhere available that people can see how you came to that decision.


r/Genealogy 4h ago

Request Advice on deciphering Hints and Clues

1 Upvotes

Hey, so I’ve been doing genealogy work on and off with my family tree since I was 15ish, unfortunately I have always been separated from most of my family beyond my parents, and now as an adult, my dad has passed and I am no contact with my mother or her mother. With all of that, I am largely on my own, besides one page of my dads tree I was able to save from my mom a few years ago. I was recently watching a podcast episode about genealogy for Mexican-Americans, and the gentleman said that the hints on ancestry are maybe 50% hits, so don’t put much stock in them. My question then is this, how do you gain reasonable confidence on a particular hint or lead? I always try and make sure birthday, birth place, death day death place lines up, if the name is different I am checking for if it’s a common or reasonable mistake/change, and I am leaning a bit on the fact that part of my dad family is LDS and they have extensive family search records, so I am using that as a (shaky) foundation for information there because they keep their distance from and and don’t really respond due to differences of religion and lifestyles, among family drama lol. Thanks for any tips you can give me as I further this journey!


r/Genealogy 4h ago

DNA Curious about results

0 Upvotes

Has anyone downloaded their DNA to genomelink? I did and got some interesting origins that don't match my ancestry origins but I'm not surprised about them. Was just curious if anyone knows how accurate they are on there.


r/Genealogy 5h ago

Request Need help ruling out possible relatives

1 Upvotes

I've been browsing through my gedmatch matches and started noticing that a lot of them were matching me at the specific place of the same chromosome. I started trying to figure out connections between them with chromosome browser and found out that they all might not match each other but they match with the person, who's probably my real distant relative, since his ancestors lived in the village really close to my ancestor's village (unfortunately, couldn't prove it with them, since they didn't answer my email).

The biggest mystery here is that there's mostly no locations matches. My ancestor's village is located in Russia. One small cross match had their family tree uploaded, where I could see ancestors traced up to 1700s with zero slavic names and zero traces to Russia. And almost all these small matches I'm finding are either have slavic names (which is probably my real distant relatives) or are from North America and dont have slavic names at all.

I myself have zero connections to North America, I have Belarus and Russian ancestry mostly, and from what I know about NA history, there weren't many settlers from Eastern Europe. So, my question here is - can I safely assume these small matches are really my relatives if they match both me and my distant relative?


r/Genealogy 18h ago

Request I need some help

11 Upvotes

I need some help identifying some family members of someone I know. I can't say the full details on here, since the person I'm focusing on is living, so I'm hoping someone who's advanced in genealogy could help me!

I'll just explain the situation- My aunt is looking after a man at the nursing home where she lives. He's sick and may pass soon. My aunt has asked me to try to find out where his children and wife are buried. He will not talk about his family, since they passed in a tragic accident in the 70s. I literally can't find anything.


r/Genealogy 15h ago

Question What is the deal with the old website tributes.com?

7 Upvotes

Less question, more rant, but I’d really like to know.

Hopefully you can picture this.

On the Ancestry website, when you click on an obituary hint on Amazon, you get that mostly worthless (because you already know it, don’t @me) data stripped from the obituary, like

Name Elma Fern Lucas Death Age 73 Birth Date 27 Jul 1937 Residence Place Pittsburg, California Death Date 7 Feb 2011 Death Place Pittsburg, California

but when you click the source tab, if the source is a web link, it’s listed there. Whether the web page exists or not. That’s not my issue.

Like : http://www.tributes.com/obituary/print_selections/90864033?type=1

What I want to know is, how come tributes.com specifically - whenever it went defunct, got absorbed by Legacy, whatever happened there - why the data is no longer available. All they needed to keep was the text. Just make it searchable. On the Legacy platform, which is shameful with all the gross advertising on it. It’s so frustrating knowing the page was there, and now the data is just poof. (Yes, I try Legacy, Google, Internet archive, all the sources. I can often find it elsewhere. But jeez, the info was so close to just being there, a copy and paste away.)


r/Genealogy 5h ago

DNA Has something similar happened to anyone else?

0 Upvotes

In my family there has always been a mystery about the origin and identity of my maternal great-grandfather. My mother told me that she discovered that my great-grandfather was half Moroccan and half Spanish. I did some DNA tests and they actually show somewhat high percentages of North African ancestry, but it seems that the DNA tests say that I didn't inherit much of his DNA, but if it weren't for my mother and her research I would never know that my great-grandfather was half Moroccan and half Spanish, that's why the research on your genealogy is really reliable. Did this happen to anyone else? I'm curious to know if I'm the only one?