Hello! If you find yourself here then you (hopefully) followed a URL from either FamilyTreeDNA or one of two Ancestry.com profiles (so much more can fit into a dedicated website than into one of those profile descriptions!).
This subdomain is a temporary measure to decide what a 'website based around genealogy' would look like from me. It might never come to anything, but at least basic code manipulation is fun and provides a better space for storing notes, especially notes which I want others (like my relatives) to see. Some of you might remember the old Google Docs files I had displayed in several places.
Right now my primary interests genealogy-wise revolve around my direct patrilineal ancestry, my whakapapa, and my West or African ancestry.
Since this is a bit of a landing page, here are some URLs which I think more people need to see:
- Why You Need to Stop Adding Names to Your Family Tree
- Stop Adding These Images to Ancestry
- How to Use Ancestry's Hints Without Going Crazy
- Number of Ancestors in a Given Generation
- Cousin Calculator
- Strathclyde Institute for Genealogical Studies – I particularly like the page 'Scottish Clans and Families'.
- Transfer autosomal DNA data to FamilyTreeDNA for free – You can download your raw (autosomal) DNA data from several websites and upload them freely to others. You cannot upload such data to AncestryDNA or 23andMe so naturally either of these should be the first choice, with AncestryDNA being the better option with its bigger database while 23andMe is more geared towards health. Fun fact: the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe (Anne Wojcicki) is the sister of the former YouTube CEO (Susan Wojcicki).
- Advanced Matches – when logged into FamilyTreeDNA this can be accessed via the Dashboard. It is particularly useful in tracking autosomal relatives in group projects, potentially identifying which Y-DNA lineage an ancestress belonged to.
- FamilyTreeDNA account settings – Tiger Walsh gives the advice not to name your ancestors’ countries of origin as USA unless they were of indigenous Amerindian descent. Likewise for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. The reason is (my reason, anyway) because this skews with statistics. Likewise, use either England, Scotland, or Wales instead of United Kingdom. If you do not know where your lineage came from, you should just leave it as 'unknown'.
- Genealogy server on Discord – I am not a fan of Discord, but this is a place where old and young from many backgrounds join and discuss their histories. Users are willing to look up pay-to-view records and help transcribe those in other languages, or hard-to-read handwriting.
1086 – last name era in England
While the Normans were not the first to use last names, they did introduce the modern usage of such in England. This then represents the maximum reasonable timeframe for Western European lineages to find the Y-DNA haplogroups for their last names.
- — 6,000 English fight at the 1147 Siege of Lisbon as part of the Portuguese Reconquista and Second Crusade.
- — English fight at the 1148 Siege of Tortosa as part of the Second Crusade.
- — At least 8,000 Angevins fought with King Richard I of England during the Third Crusade (1189).
The below image was taken from R L21, Z290 and Subclades project on FamilyTreeDNA. I think about it a lot!
