Monday, July 17, 2017

How I Became Interested in Genealogy

Sometime during my 6th grade year we were learning about the American Revolution. For some reason or another the topic came up at home and that was when my mom told me the story of Isaac Van Wart.

She told me that as Major John André was en route to deliver secret documents detailing the plans of the American Army to Benedict Arnold three men stopped him. They discovered the documents and turned him in as a spy and a traitor. These men stopped an event that could have led to the defeat of the United States and a victory for the British. She also told me that one of these men, Isaac Van Wart, was related to me in some way. She said her uncle had done a lot of research on the family and discovered some really cool things. I then looked Isaac up on google and came across this picture:
Image result for Isaac Van Wart

The future of Genetic Genealogy

I recently came across this article by ancestry.com. A quick summary: Ancestry was able to reconstruct a partial genome for a man named David Speegle and his two wives using the shared segments of his descendants. The article finishes with "AncestryDNA (will probably not) help reconstruct the DNA of your great-great-great-grandfather". This is probably true since Ancestry currently does not incorporate a chromosome browser into their DNA package. It does, however, bring up the question: would it be possible to reconstruct the DNA of our ancestors on a larger scale?

Monday, July 3, 2017

How to track Twins in Legacy Family Tree

As many of you may know, the tendency of mothers to have fraternal twins is a genetic one. Fraternal twins run in nearly all lines of my family tree. In fact, I am one myself! I recently decided to start tracking these twins using Legacy Family Tree and decided to share the steps to do this.

There are 2 main options for tracking twins in Legacy Family Tree. The first is by marking their 'child status' as a twin. I will show the steps for this using my great grandmother, Lillian Penas, and her twin sister, Helen Penas.

First, navigate to the "family view" of the person you wish to mark as a twin.
The family view for Lillian Penas