Digital roots massage
My genealogy hobby hasn't gotten a lot of attention. I've been trying to do something at least once a week, looking for matching trees and relevant data for the folks I have documented. Ancestry.com has made this almost like a game, which is good, but it doesn't take away the tedium of plucking through one name after another.
Another thing ancestry.com has provided is a DNA test for a really reasonable price. At first, I was happy to use the tools on the site to examine heritage info and search for relatives -- and these are very nice tools for this. A previously unknown, probable relative contacted me through the ancestry.com site and told me about gedmatch.com as a means to compare our DNA kits.
Gedmatch.com is a free site where you can upload your DNA and GEDCOM data, then perform a number of searches and comparisons against their data. I was able to calculate heritage data using several different strategies, even showing how much and where each individual chromosome came from which bronze-age source. DNA kits can be compared between two or three people, or compared against the entire database. Fundamentally, these aren't different services than those provided by ancestry.com, and the ancestry.com GUI is very modern, while gedmatch.com is more a 90's style, home-rolled job, but I think the latter provides more interesting results.
Another tool I've been playing with lately is Oxy-gen. This tool lets me convert my GEDCOM file into a static website, a SQL-based PHP website, an Oracle app, or an XML data pool. The HTML version is surprisingly dynamic, providing all of the expected pedigree and prodigy trees and directory features. It has a feature that puts all of the event information into a calendar for quick reference. Now I can look on any day of the year and see who else in my family was born, married, or died on that day. The SQL/PHP version appears to have more features, but was buggy enough to not actually be useful.
Another feature of the Oxy-gen-built application was a tree specifically for me (since it's my tree), showing ancestors going back 23 generations. I've got five names of Irish ancestors born in the 1200's. I don't have a lot of confidence in this connection, but this is what I've found. From the beginning of the ancestry tree, though, I thought it was interesting how each generation doubled. For me, my 9th and 10th generations of ancestors were folks who were born prior to the American revolution: there should be over 500 7th great-grandparents, and over a thousand 8th great-grandparents. Mathematically, this means that 23 generations back, I have 8.4 million 21st great-grandparents. Even so, being able to potentially name two of them is still exciting.
Another thing ancestry.com has provided is a DNA test for a really reasonable price. At first, I was happy to use the tools on the site to examine heritage info and search for relatives -- and these are very nice tools for this. A previously unknown, probable relative contacted me through the ancestry.com site and told me about gedmatch.com as a means to compare our DNA kits.
Gedmatch.com is a free site where you can upload your DNA and GEDCOM data, then perform a number of searches and comparisons against their data. I was able to calculate heritage data using several different strategies, even showing how much and where each individual chromosome came from which bronze-age source. DNA kits can be compared between two or three people, or compared against the entire database. Fundamentally, these aren't different services than those provided by ancestry.com, and the ancestry.com GUI is very modern, while gedmatch.com is more a 90's style, home-rolled job, but I think the latter provides more interesting results.
Another tool I've been playing with lately is Oxy-gen. This tool lets me convert my GEDCOM file into a static website, a SQL-based PHP website, an Oracle app, or an XML data pool. The HTML version is surprisingly dynamic, providing all of the expected pedigree and prodigy trees and directory features. It has a feature that puts all of the event information into a calendar for quick reference. Now I can look on any day of the year and see who else in my family was born, married, or died on that day. The SQL/PHP version appears to have more features, but was buggy enough to not actually be useful.
Another feature of the Oxy-gen-built application was a tree specifically for me (since it's my tree), showing ancestors going back 23 generations. I've got five names of Irish ancestors born in the 1200's. I don't have a lot of confidence in this connection, but this is what I've found. From the beginning of the ancestry tree, though, I thought it was interesting how each generation doubled. For me, my 9th and 10th generations of ancestors were folks who were born prior to the American revolution: there should be over 500 7th great-grandparents, and over a thousand 8th great-grandparents. Mathematically, this means that 23 generations back, I have 8.4 million 21st great-grandparents. Even so, being able to potentially name two of them is still exciting.