What You Missed in Our March 2023 p&p Sessions
pajamas & pedigrees™ just became a whole lot more valuable! In March, for the first time, in addition to the regular three sessions for the month with me (Crista Cowan) we introduced a monthly bonus session. Our inaugural bonus session guest genealogist was the incomparable Nicka Sewell-Smith. Read on to find out what family history gems she shared from her own family tree. Oh, and you'll find summaries of the three sessions I did as well. 😉
Tracing a Jewish Family Through New York City to Their Naturalization
Session highlights included:
- search tips and tricks for those hard to find in the census including how to use wild cards effectively
- best practices for saving census records to make sure everyone in the household is accounted for and no duplicate people or information is added to your tree
- dealing with name changes for people in your family tree
- dealing with alternate information in your family tree
Family Tree Maker: Syncing, Color Coding, Filtering, and More
This session was a little bit of a grab bag. Here's what I covered:
- A walk through best practices for syncing your Ancestry online family tree with your tree in Family Tree Maker 2019.
- How to use the color coding system in Family Tree Maker to color code all of your ancestors and all of their descendants. I also share some of the benefits of having my tree color coded this way.
- Examples of different ways to filter the index of all people in your family tree to help with your family history research.
- An explanation about what does and does not sync between Ancestry and FTM.
- My best tips for using the Card Catalog on Ancestry and the Wiki on FamilySearch to see what records exist and where to find them.
Canadian Censuses and Newspapers
In this session, I took a brick wall in the family tree of one of our genealogy community members and smash right through it.
The mysterious grandfather was from Winnipeg, though there is a family story that he might have been born in Austria. We start a new tree with everything that is known about the mysterious grandfather and use this new tree as a sandbox to see what we can find.
Searching Newspapers.com, we locate a marriage record with his father's name and his sister's name. Searching for the sister, we uncover an obituary for a man with an entirely different given name and surname. This leads to discovering the family in the 1921 Canadian census. And that census and the obituaries tell an interesting story about an immigrant family and an inter-faith marriage.
Bonus Session with Nicka Sewell-Smith
Nicka shared how she uses the USGS website to get specific coordinates for current and historic locations in the U.S., right down to specific plantations. She also shared the HistoryGeo.com website to show first landowners in a specific area and explained some of the tricks for navigating it.
Then, she demonstrated search tips and tricks for Newspapers.com and included a demonstration on how to clip articles, tag them, and save them to Ancestry.
If you joined prior to the end of the month of March (and haven't cancelled your membership, these sessions are still available to you on replay. Here are the links for quick reference:
13 Mar 2023 - Tracing a Jewish Family Through New York City to Their Naturalization
22 Mar 2023 - Family Tree Maker: Syncing, Color Coding, Filtering, and More
25 Mar 2023 - Bonus Session w/ Nicka Sewell-Smith
30 Mar 2023 - Canadian Census and Newspapers
If you haven't joined pajamas & pedigrees™ yet, it's not too late. For the next couple of weeks you can sign up for our April sessions and purchase the March sessions as a bonus. But, once we get to the end of April, these March sessions will no longer be available for new members. Don't miss out!
