May seems to have been taken up with research into some of the other subjects I am interested in, rather than my own family history, as well as a spot of gardening but, to keep up with my intention for this year, of making at least one post here each month, this is a quick update on several aspects relating to family history and DNA.
I mentioned last month about attending the FamilyTreeMaker session in Swansea and, largely as a result of that, I've changed my mind about how many family trees I maintain that are connected to my own ancestry. I am now working to bring them all into one, rather than keeping separate "public", "working", and "private" trees.
I think the tools in the program, and on sites sites as Ancestry, which FTM syncs with, are much better than they used to be. This means I am not so concerned about privacy breaches as I was. And, as long as "working theories" are properly documented as such on the relevant profiles, I think including them might actually prompt more communication with other researchers.
Of course, I had to create a few 'issues' for myself when merging the files, by forgetting about some potential overlaps in them, and therefore not sufficiently checking who was just being 'added' and who was actually getting 'merged', so I have ended up with a few duplicates, which I now need to deal with.
But those shouldn't take too long to sort out and I think it's going to be so much easier to progress from now on, not having to consider 'which file' I add information to.
Family story wise, I'm pleased that I have managed to continue pulling together the daily "Life Index", which I mentioned here. The book probably isn't as neatly written as I had originally envisioned but going through the process is helping me think about how to organise, and categorise, the information about the past events, which will be very useful, particularly in situations where events over several different days come together to make up a story. I'm also being reminded of so many little, "fun times" that I had forgotten about.
On the DNA front, the current total of my "4th cousin or closer" catagory at Ancestry stands at 392, and I have a total number of matches there of 20,659. So that's increased by over 600 since the 14th February, with 13 new close matches in the same period.
The totals for the two kits I compared at MyHeritage now stand at 17,693 (MyHeritage WGS kit) and 17,127 (FTDNA upload), as opposed to 17,328, and 16,820 respectively, when I wrote about them in March.
So not quite the same rate of increase as at Ancestry, but still very reasonable.
Regarding mitochondrial DNA, I passed the 500 mark, and now have 503 exact matches on the full sequence test, with no further haplogroup definition beyond H1c1.
In April, my relative's mt-DNA haplogroup was updated, from J1c3r to J1c3cn - but, in May, it reverted back to J1c3r. I still need to read up about that. (And my relative still has no exact matches. What a difference the haplogroup makes!)
I had hoped to have had a go with the Gephi networking program by now, following the demonstration at the Guild Conference (which I wrote about on my PARRY blog, here) but haven't yet managed to do so. I could have used some of my previous DNA downloads but decided to update my current match files first instead. This turned out not to be so straightforward, since the Client App I use to gather information stopped working with Ancestry for a while, after there were changes on the site. That is now sorted but I do want to check whether the program has collected all of the 'in common with' properly, before I start trying to use the files with Gephi.
No point contributing to my potential confusion, by using incomplete data! ☺
Something else that I am keen to get back to this year is chromosome mapping, something I first wrote about in 2016 and 2017, in my two "Analysing my DNA: Crossovers" posts. I removed all my kits from Gedmatch a few years ago, but I still have the previous downloads, from which to identify the crossover points between the set of siblings that I shall be working with. I also recently spotted, in the "Visual Phasing Working Group" on Facebook, that there is a "Visual Phaser" program, which will run on Windows, so I'm hoping to give that a go. (Once I've worked out what to do with it! ☺)
I thought I'd end with a few photographs taken while we were in Hull last year. These first are of Holy Trinity (now Hull Minster), where it is possible 'my' George NAYLER, son of Joshua NAYLER, was christened on the 3rd December 1724.
I loved that area of tiled flooring - it made me think of patchwork quilts!
And then these other photographs are of St Mary the Virgin, in Cottingham, where I believe a Joshua NAYLER married Mary GALL, on the 30th January 1718.
If the connections are all correct, then Joshua and Mary were my 6th great grandparents.
