So, its been a while since I last posted so what have I been up to? Well a fair amount of time has been spent having a hedonistic time in Greece and getting the daughter married off. ( At last)
Also some time on the website. No great new sections but a few pages and links tidied up. There has always been a collection of maps of the relevant areas, but these were not very well signposted and were a bit hard to find. Actually I don't think there has been a single page view of them. So now the maps around Strathspey have their own link from the Cameron Entry Page, and there are links on other pages where the maps may be relevant.
A great deal of time has been spent on the family tree itself. So far I really have drawn a blank on a connection between the Turvey Pursers and the Turvey Higgins / Languet Higgins. It was a nice idea whilst it lasted but sadly I can only conclude that Grandma got this one wrong.
I recently got an update on DNA matches from Ancestry, with a couple of surprisingly close matches. Neither of these had an identified common ancestor so I have been trying to work back to find it. One I really have drawn a blank with but the other would seem to be connected either through the Watsons, Ann Watson 1808-1885 or through the Cummings, Elspet Cumming 1777-1875. I have been trying to extend both of these further back as well as doing the same with the Watsons in the matching guy's tree in the hope that I would find the common ancestor. This sounds simple but It is really not, its is seriously time consuming comparing the lists of names in the trees looking for one that is the same in both. Simple enough in principal, but when each one consists of a few thousand individuals, seriously time consuming.
I have unsuccessfully tried to lobby "Ancestry" that this would be a great new feature, build into the programme the ability to compare two or more public trees to look for names and DOB that crop up in both. Surely this should not be beyond them, they can do it to find the DNA matches.
In theory it should be simple enough for anyone to set up a database that would do this, at a push I could do it myself in "Access" . The problem would be getting the information into a database. To do it manually would take longer than manually comparing the lists. Any bright ideas of how to export a list of all the names and dates of birth from a tree in a format that could be directly imported into a database?
Sorry I digress. The Watsons have proven to be a tough nut to crack with a complex family relationships, poor records and every sodding man being called John. aaAARGH !!!!!
I will vent my spleen about this in a separate post as I may just go on a bit.
Comments