Thanks to genetic genealogy, I believe my biggest brick wall has finally been knocked down, shattered, destroyed. I now have a huge lead as to who my biological father is.
Searching for who my biological father might have always been a major purpose behind my genealogical passion. I have been trying to figure it out for decades without real success, until now.
In 2012, Y-DNA tests I took indicated that I was a “Roberts.” Family Tree DNA’s results indicated that my four closest relatives were all surnamed Roberts.
My Closest Y-DNA Matches on Family Tree DNA
Name
% Common Ancestor is likely in 4 generations
Comments
W. A. Roberts
59%
Has a great tree available on-line.
D. R. Roberts
59%
Unable to Contact. Possibly deceased.
G. Roberts
30%
N. Roberts
12%
C. E. Lathem
4%
50% likelihood in 11 generations
From this and similar results on the now defunct Ancestry Y-DNA, I surmised that my ancestor was probably a Roberts. W. A. Roberts was kind enough to share his tree with me, so I began looking closely at his ancestors’ descendants, looking for potential individuals that might have been in the right place at the right time. No success. Nothing seems to fit.
The DNA is matching!
When Ancestry began its autosomal DNA testing, I was an early adopter. When Family Tree DNA began accepting transfers of results from Ancestry DNA, I did a DNA Transfer with them. I also imported my results into GED Match. I figured that the more places you have your DNA out there, the greater the likelihood you will have a match. Maybe even a close match. No such luck. There were a few, four to 8 generations away. Some had nicely developed trees; some only had a couple generations documented. I helped some of the latter improve their trees, but nothing I found seemed to connect with the Roberts “notional tree” I was working on – Until now.
This week, I rechecked my results on Ancestry DNA and couldn’t believe the results. There was a new person, T.C.[i] who was identified as a 1st or 2nd cousin. Wow! She and I shared 313 centimorgans across 20 segments. And she has a tree that included a grandmother and great grandparents with the surname of Roberts. Could this be the breakthrough I’ve been looking for?
I added the names and the general relationships to my “Roberts Notional Tree” and took note of some of her sources. Then I began researching this potential line. If we really are 1st or 2nd cousins, then we must share a grandparent or great grandparent. I was almost giddy in my excitement. The initial problem was I didn’t see anything that fit the dates and places that my biological father needed to come from. I knew it wasn’t going to be quick, but if I researched, I might find the link I was looking for.
I found that TC’s great grandparents had five children – two girls and three boys. Any of the three boys would be the correct age to be my biological father. So, the search was on.
The first son I investigated was Bert Allen Roberts, Jr. He was born in Terre Haute, IN. He grew up there and relocated to Cleveland, OH as an adult. As I looked more and more closely at his life, I determined that he wasn’t likely.
The second son I investigated was Hugh Eugene Roberts. He was born in Detroit, MI, (like my mother) but moved to Terre Haute, IN, as a child. I found evidence that in May 1950, he was back in Detroit. From that, it is easy to surmise that he could have been in Detroit in October of 1949, when I was conceived.
The third son was J. H. Roberts[ii]. He was also born in Terre Haute. He married in 1947 in Detroit, MI. It appears that their marriage continued beyond 1950. I haven’t found much more about his life yet, but I don’t believe he is the “baby daddy” at this time.
Bert doesn’t appear to have located to Detroit.
J. H. although in Detroit at the right time was married and is a less likely candidate.
Hugh was in Detroit at about the right time and is a highly likely candidate.
I see two major directions for my research to take from here.
Research the ancestors of Bert Allen Roberts, Sr. and see if there is a connection into my known Y-DNA cousins. That would prove that the Roberts line in TC’s tree is the correct connection in her
atDNA
results.
Research the children of Hugh Eugene Roberts, contact them, and see if any of them would be willing to take a DNA test. If they are my half-siblings, as I suspect, we should share about 25% of our DNA. So, if they show up in that 787-2134 centimorgan range, I will have proven a very close relationship, probably half-siblings.
Oh, yes, also I will continue my research of this Roberts line.
Finally, am I certain that Hugh Eugene Roberts is my biological father? No, but I am certain that this finding is the biggest, best lead I’ve ever had in determining who my biological father is.
Talk about a Christmas present… Wow.
Endnotes
[i] In order to maintain privacy, I am only including initials of potentially living individuals.
[ii] I have been unable to find death information regarding J. H. Roberts, so I am only
I was recently asked about my first pet. I thought immediately about “Ginger,” a ginger colored cat we had back in the late 1950s. Not only did Ginger love to play, but she liked to “hang out.” She was a great cat. I knew that I had a couple photos of her so I decided to find them. When I found photos of Ginger I realized a previous blog I wrote was wrong. When I wrote about my first television a couple weeks ago I completely forgot about having a television while we lived in Fridley. There, in the background of me playing with Ginger, was a television. Oh my.
Ginger “hanging out” in my
tent. c. 1960
I then thought about memories and how we often need triggers to recall them. Because of that photo with Ginger, I knew that we had a television years earlier than I had recalled before. I don’t recall watching it, but now I know we had one. That makes me wonder about what was my first pet. I know about and remember Ginger because I have photos of her and me together. I remember that Christmas and her being totally freaked out by the electric train set I received that year. However, I believe that I remember Ginger, that Christmas, and the train set because I have reinforced that memory through seeing these photos over the years. So, was Ginger really my first pet, or did I have pets before her that I don’t remember because we don’t have any photos? Certainly, it is possible.
Donna with “Wolf” & a cat, c. 1951
I have a photo of my grandmother with a dog, Wolf, and a cat. It is from about 1951. My grandmother lived with us then so we must have had pets then. I just don’t recall either of them. The photo makes me wonder just how long we had Wolf and that cat. Were they replaced when I was a child and I just don’t recall them because we don’t have any photos of them? Maybe, maybe not, I just don’t know because I don’t have the photos to trigger those memories.
I guess the take away from this is that there is a need to take photos of family members, particularly young ones, with their pets. Those photos may be the basis for warm memories for their entire lives. Memories like my playing with Ginger on Christmas morning or memories of Ginger hanging out in my tent.
Pets of my Family
Aunt Barbara says: I grew up in the Chicago Julia Lathrop housing project and pets weren’t allowed…ha..ha..ha..I had a pet it was a little turtle I called him Turtle. He would get loose every so often and be gone for days
My niece Kerresa: Oh so many pets I guess the first pet of mine would be Dee Dee the extra furry pony when I was around five. I don’t remember how it got named Dee Dee maybe because she/he walked soooo slow. But my mom and aunt have always been into horses so naturally I loved it.
My sister-in-law Libby: Growing up we had a family cat named Meow Pinkel Purr. [The name] came from a book of poems [which included “Pinkle Purr” by A. A. Milne.] The first line was, “Tattoo was the mother of Pinkel Purr.”
My sister-in-law Liz: The family has always had either a couple of cats or a dog. Sunbug and George were the cats I grew up with and Tesha was our dog, My own cat wasn’t until I got Casey for Christmas when I was living in the Brookside building in the 90s. That cat went everywhere around the old Down East building with me.
My great niece Maggie: The first pet that I remember was a cockatiel named Amadeus. I was 6 or 7, I think (maybe [Libby] can confirm that), living in Indiana. I chose that name because I had recently seen the movie.
Future Actions
Take lots of photos of family members interacting with their pets and print those photos for permanent use.
After all the work I put in regarding eliminating Family Tree Maker and looking at various products over the past couple weeks, it is good to get back working on actual genealogy projects again. To document this work, I am using Reunion 11 and am seeing how it works during extended research. So far, I am really pleased with it. I really like the way it allows me to create a source then go to my individuals, create events and facts and associate my sources with those events and facts. I still need to spend some time learning how to better use the logs, but I’m getting there.
Elmer (of Georgia) (1910-bef 2011)
Sometimes there just isn’t anything to find online. That is the case of Elmer (aka Tuggle). He was born in Georgia between 20 Aug 1910 and 27 Dec 1910.
One register I found him in indicates him to be 20 years old on 19 Aug 1931, inferring a birth between 20 Aug 1910 and 19 Aug 1911.[i] Another register I found him in indicates he was 29 years old on 27 December 1910, inferring a birth between 26 Dec 1909 and 27 Dec 1910[ii]. Consequently, I infer his birth between 20 Aug and 27 Dec 1910.
I know that Elmer was in Paulding County in 1931 and in Cobb County in 1939, but I don’t know much else about his life.
1940 Census shows Elmer’s wife widowed.
The 1940 Census indicates that his wife was widowed and living with her parents with the children[iii]; however, the 1945 Atlanta City Directory indicates he and his wife living together in Atlanta and that he was working for the Benton Transportation Company.[iv] This leads to more questions about Elmer and his life. Was he alive in 1945 or did the city directory erroneously carry Elmer and his wife for five years? Did Elmer and his wife reconcile for a while? Lots more to investigate.
Elmer’s death is unknown; however, the obituary for one of his sons indicates he preceded his son’s death in 2011.[v] I will need to further investigate each of Elmer’s children’s lives and see if I can better determine his death.
So, after exhausting my on-line resources, I need to try various other methods to find further information. First, I need to try a microfilm loan. When I lived in Smyrna, GA, I was able to get service copies of microfilm located at the Univ. of Georgia at Augusta for another project I was working on. I will try to order another set of microfilm and see if they will share it with me now that I live in Maine. I hope so. In addition, there are possibly court records in Paulding County, Georgia, which may shed some light onto this family research. I’ve contacted the Clerk of Court regarding that. There are also some other newspaper articles available through Genealogy Bank. I plan to switch to them next year, so I will put this into my queue to work on it once I make the shift.
Future actions:
Trace Elmer’s children’s lives, particularly their obituaries.
Track down documents from Paulding County in 1931.
Track down documents from Cobb County in 1939.
Create family tree islands for all of the families in Paulding with the same Surname and seek to determine if Elmer/Tuggle fits into one of those families.
Endnotes
[i] Georgia, Central Register of Convicts, 1817-1976, Page 18 of 564 – ___, Elmer, Ancestry.com.
[ii] Georgia, Central Register of Convicts, 1817-1976, 1936-1942, Cobb, Georgia, USA, Image 95 of 642, Line 16, Ancestry.
[iii] “1940 United States Federal Census,” Name: Online publication – Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.Original data – United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627; Ancestry.com.
My Search for a Family Tree Maker for Mac Replacement.
Part 2
I decided to go back to looking at Mac specific products. The difficulties of working with C: and F: drives and lack of adequately accessing my file system was too frustrating.
What I didn’t mention on my blog was that I only used it for three of the dozen or so family trees I manage. I liked a lot about it but the surname issue I mentioned before and the cumbersome process of associating my source and citations to a fact, event, or location that I couldn’t seem to overcome caused me to continue working with Family Tree Maker for Mac 3 with my larger trees and not convert them to Heredis. I tried working with it again in earnest and decided I might use it, but I thought there must be something I like better.
Gramps
Gramps is an open source program for managing genealogical data. There were quite a few things about it that I liked. (No cost is good.) I liked how you could focus upon an individual and not be burdened by family unit information. The way you could enter relationships that didn’t include marriage yet did include children was nice. However, the proof of the pudding was how it handled entering source/citation/textual data then associating it to multiple facts involving multiple individuals. Again, I found it cumbersome. I only gave it a few hours and I think I might have figured out better processes to handle it, but I decided to continue and research some other products.
Mac Family Tree
I had version 5.5.5 several years ago and see that they have updated it several times since. The latest is Mac Family Tree 7. I downloaded their demo version, 7.6.2. It is supposedly the same as their paid version except you can’t import, can’t save, and can’t print. So, I began putting a tree together using my process for documenting a source and then associating it was individuals and their facts and/or events. Not bad — certainly better than Gramps and Heredis and much simpler than RootsMagic. I decided that it was definitely a contender, but I wanted to continue.
Reunion
One of the many websites I looked indicated that they thought Reunion was the best. I had Reunion 9 a number of years ago and liked it. I used it until I went to Family Tree Maker for Mac (FTM4M) because I wanted the replication to Ancestry Trees that FTM4M allowed. Their new version, Reunion 11, has a free evaluation version that allows for 50 people, no import or export, watermarked reports and some other limited features. Luckily, it allowed enough functionality for me to test my work processes. Wow – I was impressed.
I really loved how you can put almost anything you want on the left side of the screen, including sources. Then you can enter your facts, events, or notes and drag and drop the appropriate source citation to the fact. It was a really a smooth process.
Reunion, like many other systems, doesn’t deal well with multiple names. For example, my grandfather was born Clifford Durwood Brown. He went by Richard Durand for many years (married and had two children) and then changed his name to Richard Earl Brown. RootsMagic handles that really well. Most other genealogy programs don’t. Many require you to pick one name as the individual’s name then make aliases for the other names. Reunion has a few suggestions. In the case of my grandfather, I could use Richard Earl Brown because that was his name at his death. I could also use Richard Durand because that is the surname that most of his children were raised with the Durand surname. In either case, Clifford Brown would be an alias or “AKA.” It just doesn’t seem right to me to make someone’s birth name an alias. They mention the problems with that as the alias names don’t show up in the indexes reports.
They also suggest using brackets to for the alias names. For example, my grandfather would be: [Clifford Durwood] Richard Earl for his first and middle name and [Durand] Brown for his surname. It just seems cumbersome confusing. I wish they did what Roots Magic does where both names are entered and are visible in the indexes with the aliases identified by a prefix of “+.”
I wish that Roots Magic, or Legacy Family Tree for that matter, made an actual Mac product. Until they do, I’m going to use Reunion and hope they can improve their multiple name handling issues cause the rest of Reunion seems to be just what I’m looking for.
My Search for a Family Tree Maker for Mac 3 Replacement
Part 1 of 2
Legacy Family Tree
I have long recommended Legacy Family Tree to my friends that have Windows. Their product only operates in a Windows environment. On a Mac that means you need to run Parallels, CrossOver, VMWare, or something similar that allows you to run Windows programs on a Mac. I used VMWare for a year or two when I switched to Mac. It allowed me to run all of my legacy Windows programs on my new Mac while I converted to using Mac programs. That way I didn’t have to replace all of my software all at once. I upgraded my Mac to a newer OS (operating system) a couple years later and found that my version of VMWare didn’t run on that updated OS. I had to do a paid upgrade of VMWare to continue using it or drop it. I only had one Windows based program remaining and buying a new Mac version of that program was less expensive than upgrading VMWare. If you have a Mac, have a Windows running program, and are used to Windows programs, I still recommend Legacy Family Tree as a solid solution to your Family Tree Maker for Mac dilemma.
Roots Magic 7
The president of my local chapter of the Maine Genealogical Society posted a sales notice regarding Roots Magic. I have long heard good things about Roots Magic. I went to their site and saw it was on sale for $20 instead of the regular $44.90 price – A sale too good to pass up. They also indicated they have a new Mac Version. I’m not big on “free” versions of software, so I bought the full version, installed it, and ran it. I quickly found out it isn’t an actual Mac version; rather it uses CrossOver as a Windows environment emulator. As such, it works like Windows software and not like Mac software.
I opened one of my smaller trees in Family Tree Maker for Mac and exported to a GED file. I then imported it into RootsMagic 7. Then I walked through each of the menu options and looked at what my options were. Some of the options I really liked, such as identifying the married name for a woman. Some of the options I didn’t understand, such as “general source, an individual source, and a family source. Some of my work didn’t import as I expected, for example my “to do” tasks, but I expected that. Those minor shortages were overcome by the some of the really cool features, such as generating the files for a website and creating a shareable CD.
As I expected much of my data was all over the place. I had descriptions in locations and many other problems. All in all, it will take a long time for me to clean up all of my files, sources, places, and individuals — A very long time.
I was looking at the Media gallery and under tools, found “fix broken media links.” I found the disconcerting Windows type of file system. The prompt didn’t allow me to select any directories so search so I had to search an entire drive. Not cool. I let it run for several hours and it seemed to have locked up. I gave up and hit cancel. It did give me the option to import what it had found thus far. Therefore, I was able to import 80 of the 133 media items that I had in Family Tree Maker for Mac. That said, I’m not positive if the 53 missing items were because of RootsMagic or because my Family Tree Maker file had already started corrupting – Probably the latter.
I adjusted the fonts and other settings to make it better for me and used it for a couple days. Roots Magic is a complicated program and I just couldn’t get the hang of it. There were times I felt like the tail was wagging the dog. That is to say, it seemed that the software was driving what I needed to do rather than my workflow being able to be documented easily by the software. Using Roots Magic really helped me understand how I like to work.
Painting by Henry Thomas Alken
[Public domain]
As I mentioned in a previous blog posting (Jump Hunting and the Maine Register), it is like jump-hunting ducks. I decide where I’m going to go hunting, go there, and “bag” the available information. Then I clean it, cook it and eat it – analyze the information, extract the information, and incorporate it into my family history. I don’t like to eat things I don’t know where they came from. Likewise, I try to have every fact, event, and story in my family history clearly documented as to the source.
The bottom line is that after a couple days of working with Roots Magic 7, I just could not learn to love it. I can definitely see why many others use it, but I just couldn’t fit my jump shooting stratagy into it’s use. Between the complexity of the software and the Windows interface, I decided to abandon my Roots Magic test and begin my search for a Family Tree Maker for Mac replacement once again.
To be continued….
[By the way, if you are interested in converting from Family Tree Maker to Roots Magic 7 , now is the time to do it with their special FTM to RM offer of only $20.]
