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Not an ex. I’ve already cyberst.., er, yeah, whatever.

Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about this person for about 10 years. 10 years ago, my DisneyWorld trip was supposed to (and did) include my sister and her family, JJ and their kids. It was, in theory, also going to include the H.’s (they wound up getting divorced), an ex, and the person that I am currently researching. None of those people showed up. Planning the trip was kind of surreal, because I was trying to figure out at least dinner reservations for this very large group of an uncertain size, but it kept getting easier as people bailed out on us. I was super relieved the ex didn’t show up.

But J was really distressed that the person I’m currently researching never showed up. That person, DAS, only told J that he wasn’t coming when he found out that he was being included on dinner reservations. At that point, DAS offered up a whole bunch of information: he no longer was living in Florida caring for his aging parents, because his dad had died, and he had moved to NYC to help his sister raise her very young child or children. J was kinda freaked out about the whole thing and somewhat frosty at finding out only in this very strange way.

Over the years, some information came out about J that J had not previously known, or if he had, he’d suppressed it. His mother was not Jewish, so in the view of some, he was not Jewish, but his father was Jewish. The other J, his wife, had a mother who was Jewish, but her father was not. But she counted as Jewish by people who think of things in this particular way. I don’t recall exactly the point at which J figured it all out — it was when J did a bunch of ancestry research, if I recall correctly. Finally, I want to point out that Jewish-but-didn’t-know-it J had a mother who was RLDS. I’m somewhere in this picture too (exJW) so there’s a lot of reason to see all of this as foreshadowing.

Anyway. J is worried that DAS is being taken advantage of by a crazy / domineering / verbally unpleasant sister and will be turfed out when the kids are grown. I’m skeptical. Kids tend to love the person who raised them, and it takes a lot to erase that. I knew DAS at least a little, and I didn’t see any kids he raised as hating him and being okay with mom turfing him out when they went to college. Also, the story J is telling is one of DAS’ sister orchestrating the care of their aging parents by telling her brother (or brothers) where to go and what to do. Does not sound like a person who will use ‘em and lose ‘em.

I thought, Self, do what you do best. Find out what the hell is going on here. Because it more and more sounds like there’s a religious component here that has not been fully appreciated. And indeed there is. I knew that DAS was vegetarian when eating out at other people’s houses / in restaurants, and kosher isn’t something you do lightly. I was betting on Orthodox in the background and boy did I find Orthodox in the background. Close enough to where everyone was living in Seattle, in Florida, and in NYC to be walkable on Sabbath. So. Gotta have a weird phone call with J. where I tell him that DAS didn’t let him into his house for Reasons and everyone is suspicious of DAS having social connection to J for same Reasons, and it all comes down to none of us are Orthodox, and if you are Orthodox, you aren’t supposed to have close connections to people who aren’t.

Ugh. I guess it’s better than randomly awful family. There’s at least congregational support in the background.
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Today was the last day of the NYGBS NYSFHC. Lots of great stuff but I learned about the Virtual Genealogical Association, so that's kinda cool. $25, and they are running their own conference Nov 3-5, so I've missed all but tomorrow. OTOH, Alec Ferretti is doing a presentation about FOIA tomorrow, so maybe I'll add one more day to the excessive amount of genealogical information being shoved into my brain while I clean my office and organize things.

I uploaded a ton of my photos on my cell phone up to Flickr, which I've been meaning to do for months. I also poked at the remaining books and picked some out to get rid of.

I also washed the sheets and remade two beds and did laundry. A. took it very easy today, but did finish reading Trevor Noah's _Born a Crime_, about which she had some questions.

I walked with M.

An extra hour of sleep tonight! Super exciting!
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I walked with M.

Today was the first day of the New York State Family History Conference, which they continue to do in hybrid form and I registered for virtual. Great day! Skip Duett, Jane Wilcox are always great. Keynote was A’Lelia Bundles and she was _way_ more fun than the one last year. Priestess and I have been kinda-planning a NYC trip for next year, and on her list is the Schomburg center so it was nice to see it mentioned in Bundles’ resources. I think this is the first time I’ve listened to Pamela Vittoria; her presentation on New York canals was fantastic.

Lots of docusign today — contract for the house, an IEP. I don’t usually get more than one source of people wanting me to sign stuff via docusign so this is a little unusual.

It was a very different day, but an enjoyable one.
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I bought this book in e-form, altho I first saw it at a local bookstore (you can be mad about this, and I will also note that I bought several other books at the bookstore). I was really excited to read it — and other books I bought around the same time — but the lockdowns changed my focus and I am only recently returning to this book. I tried several times to read it, but it was incredibly difficult in 2020 and 2021 and even into 2022 to read about people traveling to meet extended family they learned about through genealogy.

The sections on using genetic genealogy to identify victims of crimes and the people who left DNA at a crime scene are really interesting, because Copeland captures some of who was talking about the ethics of this _before_ the GSK moved this into wider awareness, and what they were saying and the responses they got, and also how rapidly people’s reactions moved in the wake of GSK and related cold cases.

I remember working at a startup in the 90s, and the founder/CEO of the company sifting through the kinds of people to hire at an executive level as we grew rapidly. One of the possible positions was “Strategist”, or for one of the other executives to take on “Strategy” as part of their role. He concluded that it did not make sense to hire for this position or to assign this role to anyone but himself at that point in time, and subsequent events have absolutely confirmed that this decision was correct. While strategy and ethics are extremely different activities / topics / lenses, they _do_ overlap, and they share the important characteristic of imagining alternative worlds/futures and making value judgments about which one to steer towards (or away from). Since watching him go through this process and listening to how he described the tradeoffs and why he decided what he did, I have thought over the years many times about how groups of people make this decision. With genetic genealogy and crime, most of the people thinking about it before it became a broad topic were very concerned about privacy and individual control of their genetic information and the potential for large organizations (corporate or governmental) to abuse this information in pursuit of Bad Goals. Once genetic genealogy and crime became a broad topic, a few people continued to think about it in these terms. The attraction of identifying a violent criminal, or the victim of a violent crime, washed away concerns about whether or not one’s second cousin’s DNA could be used to identify oneself or vice versa. However, the solution to the pressures of these disparate positions was resolved in at least one important service to move all existing accounts to “opt out” of being included in searches and to otherwise allow these types of searches on everyone who “opted in”. At least the initial impact was to make it a bit more difficult to do that kind of search (altho not _that_ much more difficult, as warrants started to be produced to access that information).

The Jim Collins / Philip Benson babies-switched-at-birth story winds through the book, providing a frame for thinking about the changes over time in genetic testing and the size of the accessible databases. Because one of the families is Ashkenazi, the family that got the Ashkenazi baby had a very difficult time navigating cousin matches to track down the close family of their person because of endogamy. It’s amazing that Copeland used this story to show how the matching algorithms and databases evolved over time so that the basically impossible search of the beginning of the Collins/Benson search undertaken by Alice was solved shortly before that basically impossible search would become trivially easy. Technology!

Finally, as I noted in a post last night, Benson’s first wife was an Abolofia. I _said_ I wasn’t going to try to figure out how we were related, but I lied. It only took about five minutes to figure out the relationship. My dad’s first cousin married an Abolofia. His father’s niece — so, I guess her cousin by marriage — was Benson’s first wife. Every Single Time I work on this surname, the serendipity is _delightful_.

Fun book, really happy I finally read it. I can’t say I wish I’d read it sooner, because I tried and obviously, I just wasn’t ready. I bought some other books at the same time that I haven’t read so maybe one of those will be next.
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The Lost Family by Libby Copeland roams over the vast landscape of genetic genealogy circa 2019. It came out in March of 2020. I was at the Silver Unicorn very shortly before the lockdowns and bought a book or two at a school-connected event (some sort of reading) that was very hot and crowded.

https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/1778498.html

Anyway.

I picked it up again to continue reading today, some years later (I think I have picked it up at least once, maybe twice and then put it down again). I’m most of the way through, and have reached a picture of Phillip Benson (switched at birth with Collins) and his first wife, Esther Abolafia Benson, sitting with their son Kenny.

I cannot stop laughing. I absolutely did not expect to meet a relative-by-marriage in these pages, but it was probably inevitable. When my dad’s first cousin asked me to track down Mrs. Abolafia after my first visit to her, I had no recollection of ever having heard that last name. It’s especially funny showing up here, because Abolafia isn’t even an Ashkenazi Jewish surname (and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage in an Irish family is what started the whole search for the babies swapped at birth), so Philip Benson, supposedly Ashkenazi but actually Irish, first married a Sephardic Jew.

That last name has been the source of so much unexpected for me. The mother-in-law and father-in-law and assorted other relatives of Mrs. Abolafia are buried in the Seattle Sephardic Brotherhood cemetery which makes perfect sense given that last name, but I was trying to identify the plot in the cemetery using an online map when I realized I’d spent the first 24 years of my life across the street from that cemetery. When I reconnected with another cousin after a multi-decade gap, she told me stories of going to that cemetery for one of the burials. I told a good friend who was my next door neighbor for several of those years that story, and she said she worked with an Abolafia for quite a few years.

I’m going to resist the temptation to attempt to trace the connection between Esther Abolafia Benson and my extended family, at least tonight.

ETA:

Apparently — and I just learned this on sep 3 2023 — there are _two_ Sephardic cemeteries very close to where I grew up and I misunderstood which one the Abolofias are buried in. It isn’t the one across the street from where I grew up, but rather a few blocks over. Oh well!
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My father’s father was born in Achlum, which is a very small village. I’ve visited the burial ground around the church there with family, who pointed out a monument that had our surname. It was not until somewhat later that I worked out the precise relationship.

In any event, Achlum, and larger villages and towns in Friesland are familiar to me from our several visits over the years, first by myself, then with my fiance, and finally with my husband and children. It is clear to me why my father’s father arrived in Skagit valley and decided to settle there.

My mother’s father was born in a Mennonite community in Canada, and I learned as a small child from relatives on that side of the family about the travels of the Mennonites across Europe and eventually to Canada. Much later, I found books that detailed those migrations and of course I’ve spent many enjoyable hours lost in entries in GAMEO. I’ve also read some books specifically about Menno Simons, and I have noticed — more than once — how close Achlum is to Witmarsum (under 5 miles). And before you go, sure, but lots of Mennonites don’t come from Friesland, I’ll just note that it’s quite clear that my ancestors very much did.

Today on twitter, I ran across someone tweeting a link to a TikTok about Blumenau in Brazil, and asking snarkily, “who’s gonna tell her”, with an unambiguous Nazi implication. And I’m like, uh. Blumenau is not Blumenort — it wasn’t founded by Mennonites, but rather by an earlier, _actual_ German arrival in the middle of the 19th century. The Mennonites near Blumenau wouldn’t show up until the 1930s.

https://anabaptistwiki.org/mediawiki/images/1/14/Mar1939jan-Bender%2C_With_the_Mennonite_refugee_colonies_in_Brazil_and_Paraguay-.pdf

Granted, that narrative is from before when Nazis might or might not have fled to Blumenau. But it is pretty clear that at least at that point, the Mennonites in the area maintained their commitment to Not Participating in War.

Also, they’ve got a Witmarsum there, too.

In any event, it was mostly Mennonite Brethren (seems to still be, for that matter). When my ancestors came over in the 1870s, none of the Mennonite Brethren went to Canada, so all those relations would be comparatively distant. Understanding who might be the kirchen gemeinde as the more traditional Mennonites (vs. the Brethren who broke away, as my ancestors’ groups also broke away at various points in time), I think the distance to those folks would be if anything even greater.
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Rosh Hashanah, so no school for the kids. Nice to sleep in, but I still felt tired today. I walked with M., but went to bed early since it rained before I headed out on my long walk and then kept raining.

I did some genealogy with T. We were attaching census records to people. It‘s pretty calming for the most part, and not super challenging … until it is. We couldn‘t find _any_ appearance in 1920, 1930 or 1940 for a person born in 1915 (Rabbi AK). I had a naturalization petition for his mom, and I had the whole family in the censuses, just missing the one I was looking for. Whenever I have trouble finding a person, I move out and look for the people they should be with. I found them, but he wasn‘t with them. I _still_ can‘t find him in 1920 (when he was 5!). I did find him in 1930, in NYC, living as the “nephew” of another Rabbi and his family. I think he was living with them for education. That Rabbi had been in Denver living near AK’s family, so it made sense. By 1940, I _still_ can’t find him in that census, but AK is at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati according to his draft card which absolutely makes sense for someone who will be a chaplain in the war and then serve various Reform groups over the years.

Along the way, I learned a whole lot about Denver, and about the Jewish community in Denver. I also learned about Hebrew Union College.

I made a cake for A.’s birthday. She wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, two layers with the heart pans. So that’s what we did.

CSA arrived. No more tomato share, but there was still the last corn and fruit (lots of pears and a few apples), as well as the usual share and the mushrooms. I cooked the mushrooms and the kale and got everything put away before I made the cake.
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Day 3 of NYSFHC. I did the one mile loop by myself and the 3 mile loop by myself. Things just did not coordinate with M.

I took T. to martial arts and Vic’s.

I worked with T. to look at some of what he did to my tree over on ancestry and we went over errors that he made. Notably, he put a death month in for my grandmother, when I have not been able to nail that down. I just do not remember, and I cannot find accurate records online — the Canadian death certificate will not be public for another 12 or so years.

I also worked on attaching 1950 census records to R.’s parents, my mother’s oldest brother, his first wife, my dad’s sister in law M. So many _ridiculous_ misspellings, some errors in the census, some transcription errors. I only found aunt M. because I had her address (with a street name spelled wrong!) in her high school year book. In most of these, I had to strip out all surnames and search on patterns of first name / birth year after getting as dialed in on the location as I could. City directory helped with FIL. I used Steve Morse’s pages to try to identify the right enumeration district. A lot of work that really I should not have needed to do. Oh well!

Oh, and in keeping with that line, my mother’s oldest brother got married and then his daughter was born 6 months and a week and a half later.
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A while ago, I pulled a ton of death certificates from Washington State. Apparently, I failed to pull the certificate for a step-grandfather OR I completely blocked out of my head the contents of the death certificate. I just pulled it up online (Washington State Digital Archives has a lot more images now than the last time I was there). A little backstory, first, tho.

When I was a child, I was aware that my mother’s mother (maternal grandmother) had been married several times. I was much less clear on what had happened to the various husbands. She wasn’t married at all for some of my childhood, and then she married a brother of her first husband. She divorced her first husband (story was he cheated, and it does not seem incorrect, per se, altho he married the other woman and they stayed married until he died and while the other woman had had previous husband(s), she did not remarry again). Another marriage didn’t last very long. But a third marriage lasted a while, involved children from the previous marriage and produced a child who was therefore a half-uncle. What happened to that husband? I conferred with my sister on this, and we weren’t really sure what we were told, but one of us had heard that he had died of cancer or possibly suicide connected to learning he had cancer. Of course that was utter bullshit. There was a divorce and it was acrimonious. I pulled some of those records and was a little appalled.

Anyway.

He lived until 1991. He remarried in 1959 and they remained married until she died in 1981. I had read an obit, and was surprised the obit mentioned the son who was my half-uncle, because AFAIK, there had never been any contact between my half-uncle and his father but honestly, I know nothing and what I do know is confused and/or lies.

Today, I read the death certificate. There are a variety of elements of a death certificate, for things like “spouse” and “informant”. The “informant” in this case was the son (not my half-uncle — child of first marriage for the man in question). Under spouse was listed _the first wife_. There were _two_ other marriages after that one, but neither of those wives is listed. !!! You know what? Fair.

So how’d he die?

Chronic depression leading to suicide by strangulation by hanging himself.

There was some unexpected ultimate truth to the suicide claim, apparently. (Of course, he was still alive when I was told he’d died by suicide.)

If there is a moral here, it’s probably that you shouldn’t read death certificates.
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A lot of people think about genealogy in terms of looking up parents, grandparents etc. They get a little further along, and they get interested in finding cousins, or better stories, or celebrity connections and start looking at collateral relatives — aunts, great uncles, third cousins twice removed, whatever. But even then, still tend to be thinking in terms of when were they born, when did they die. After a while, maybe _where_ were they born, where did they die. They get interested in marriages.

People who get into genealogy because of a health concern will sometimes look into _why_ they died, and look for patterns in age at death and similar. When I realized that Washington State had a really open records law, I pulled all the death records I could. It was really depressing.

I also pulled divorce records for one grandmother who I knew was married several times, and for a great-grandfather who I had realized was married several times. Those were absolutely bizarre excursions into court systems and kinda sad?

Lately, I’ve been just doing “hints”, which is a lot of 1950s census records, and some other things that have been added since the last time I was actively working on my tree. And let me just say: all those cliches about homophobes being gay turn out to _also_ apply to divorce. If you have a family that is just _death_ on the topic of divorce, you are looking at a family in which just about every marriage has at least one previous marriage that is being actively concealed.

I posted about Audrey. Audrey’s unusual in a host of ways (married at 14! Then at 22. And then at 12 year intervals, like clockwork. I mean, what?). But what I had not realized was how many _other_ divorces were scattered liberally through my father’s immediate family. One sister had a tragic life with no marriage. But the other sister had a squeaky clean life history: missionary for the cult, married once, life long marriage ending with the death of her husband, good relationships with the in-laws and with the cult side of the family. And now I’m looking at a hint that indicates husband had a previous marriage? What? The remaining brother (not the one who married Audrey) again, squeaky clean life history; in that case, I was well aware of the wife’s previous marriage. She also was in a circus for a while; there is a picture of her riding an elephant. She was a delight and everyone loved her and we all miss her still.

I’m quite skeptical of marriage in general, altho as a genealogist, it’s kind of nice that it leaves records of relationships for later generations to explore. I have no problem with divorce, other than that a lot of people probably wait way too long to get divorced and it would all be so much better if people called it off quicker. But I was raised by people who were really, really, really against divorce. And I’m starting to see that as them telling on themselves.
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My son has been using my ancestry account and adding people who are related to some of his cousins. I thought, hunh, I could go poke around, add some stuff that is showing as a hint. As I was doing that, I noticed that there were some differences of opinions about the date of my aunt’s death (I had it wrong by a day, because I’d used a state death index date, and it was off slightly). I fixed that. I added some records. And then I got to looking at an uncle’s wife.

This was a wild one, because I didn’t realize this uncle had ever been married. The divorce occurred when I was about 4 and no one ever talked about his ex or her son thereafter. I only ran across this because I was looking at my baby book and systematically tracking down who everyone was who had sent a card and/or gift to my family when I was born. So: who is Audrey?

I found the marriage record, at the time, and I now have the divorce certificate (he filed, reason given was cruelty). I also found some other marriages for her in Washington State Digital Archives. But there were enough marriages that I got really confused. Also, I took a guess at what her name at death might have been and it turns out I got that wrong. I discovered that today, when I saw that someone who had grabbed things off of my tree had a Very Different Set of Facts for Audrey and my uncle (like: his middle named was spelled weird, among other things). I thought, all right, remove all the guesses and use the other person’s work and see if I can convince myself of anything.

After a few hours of this — highly, highly, highly interrupted, like by going to see Paws of Fury: the Legend of Hank, and also some random catch up conversations with my son — I have concluded that Audrey first married at the tender age 14, in Idaho, while living in Eastern Washington, to a man 11 years older than her. They had two kids. When the youngest of the two kids is 9, the kids and the father are living in Oregon, but Audrey is not with them. She is instead in Washington, and has been married to someone else for a few years. Basically, within a couple years of the birth of her second child, she’s married to a different man. That’s a little unexpected in the 1940s. Then again, remember, she’s still _really young herself_ — 22. I don’t know how long that marriage lasted. I next find her marrying a third man in 1955. She finally married my uncle in 1967, and they divorce in 1973. Her final — as near as I can tell — marriage is in 1979. I have no idea what happened to him.

5 marriages. That’s a very optimistic woman! To be fair, husband number 2 married two more times, and the second time, it was annulled due to failure to consummate (under 2 months from start to finish). For the most part, however, I’m not finding a ton of other repeaters.

While I was trying to figure out what happened after husband number 5, I ran across a obit for one of Audrey’s sisters who lived not too far from where Audrey wound up in northern California. I was a little startled to learn that at least one of Audrey’s sister’s was a JW (my uncle was a lifelong JW). Next project is probably to try to figure out whether this was a weird fluke, or if JWs are a theme.

ETA: I kinda failed to point out the best part of the story. 1935. 1943. 1955. 1967. 1979. 8 years between marriage 1 and marriage 2, but after that, every 12 years. Why?!? (The only time I have spotted a weird date pattern in marriages is with my grandmother and her preference for summer solstice adjacent weddings. Audrey’s got June twice, but other than that, Feb, April and August;, so no obvious pattern there.)
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Maybe I’ve been reading Matt Levine’s column for a little too long, but when I learned that Blackstone had bought Ancestry, I immediately thought, yeah, nice juicy little payment stream there; of course Blackstone wants it.

Apparently, everyone who is not in finance assumes there are other motives.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-13/column-blackstone-ancestry-genetic-privacy

“I don’t believe for a second that Blackstone bought Ancestry simply because they love people,” Ruge said. “You don’t spend $4.7 billion unless you have a plan to make it back, and more.” [Ruge is a long-time researcher into her own family tree, using Ancestry.]

Also:

“Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University. “I don’t believe it for a second.””

“Amy Lynn McGuire, a professor of biomedical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine, said that regardless of what Blackstone says now, “that could change with changes in leadership and as new business opportunities present.””

“”It’s naive to think Blackstone would spend almost $5 billion for an asset it has no plans to exploit, said Ellen W. Clayton, a professor of law and health policy at Vanderbilt University. “Why else would they buy it?” she asked.”

All I can really say here is what is obviously Blackstone’s motive, and which Blackstone is quoted as giving as its motive repeatedly in the article: We Bought It Because It Is A Nice, Juicy Payment Stream.

I would add, in addition to that, given what little I know about the Juiciness of that payment stream from the outside, $5B is a screaming deal for that payment stream. Especially since if you, say, wanted to duplicate that payment stream with any kind of debt instrument, it would take 5-10 times as much money currently. Best of all, _Everything_ about genetic genealogy indicates that the growth runway is … ample.

“Exploiting” DNA through Ancestry is simple: tell people they can pay $100 or whatever they currently charge for each person to spit in a cup, mail it in, and then look at all their nth cousins. Oh, but if they want to _keep_ looking at their cousins, they’ll need to cough up an additional $30 a month, or thereabouts.

No one, and I mean _no one_ is going to disrupt that Juicy of a payment stream with any other effort to monetize the data that Ancestry has access to.

ETA:

This seems to be Ellen W. Clayton:

https://law.vanderbilt.edu/bio/ellen-clayton

She has a really impressive list of initials from a remarkable group of institutions. I am sure she is smarter than me. I mean, obviously. However, smarter != better at understanding money, and both doctors and lawyers are notorious for being spectacularly bad at investing. Professors are not generally _as bad_ as doctors and lawyers, but they are definitely worse than average, and she has achieved the trifecta of Incredibly Brilliant While Simultaneously Unable to Grasp Investing.

This seems so simple, tho. $30 a _month_. A $100 a vial. You can give it as a present to everyone at the holidays, and then they too will probably sign up at $30 a month for at least a while. Genealogy is shockingly addictive as a hobby and extremely respectable. The older you get, the more likely you are to find it appealing. _It_ _is_ _an_ _immune_ _to_ _inflation_ _demographic_. Unlike signing up for a streaming service, there is essentially no churn. For $5 B, you get some perverted cross between a golden goose and a cash cow.

I haven’t even mentioned how one of the most successful religions in the country considers participation in genealogical research to be a core component of their spiritual practice. Nor have I mentioned the shocking lack of competition for Ancestry. I particularly haven’t gotten into how the limited competition that does exist for Ancestry is all _non-payment-stream_, offline, etc. And if you are sitting around thinking, gosh, What Might They Do With My DNA!?! And want to go with an open / freebie thing, well, _they_ were crucial to catching a whole bunch of serial killers recently.

ETA: Above, I said $5B didn’t sound like that much money to me (and they did not pay that — it was $4.7B). Just for reference purposes, I’m reading about the winter Texas energy event from a few months ago over at ars:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/texas-gov-knew-of-natural-gas-shortages-days-before-blackout-blamed-wind-anyway/

When the Samsung fab in Austin shut down, they lost all the wafers in production. How much did that cost?

$268M.

NXP lost $100M. And Samsung and NXP both lost a month of missed production on top of that.

$4.7B is not that big a deal.
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T. actually went around telling people that it was a half day, and people believed him, because he is just relentlessly serious all the time. People totally believed him. Pretty funny! I did not actually put him up to it, but I sort of wish I could take credit for it. But nope, other than the shared genetics, this is not mine at all!

It was kinda believable in part because all the elementary schools do have a half day.

It was Gathering Day 1 of NERGC. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to connect, because the email with the link for the hub went to spam. I kept looking at the registration page, and failing to find it, and checking the newsletters, and failing to find it. I went to twitter; nothing there. I went to FB — because of course, that’s where middle aged women hang out so that’s where the info is. Once I understood the link was in an email from someone else and likely in spam, I had no trouble.

The first session I attended was ... not awesome. The one good bit was when Skip Duett was trying to talk about thinking like an archivist, and the woman running that session kept stopping him from explaining. *sigh*

The Alec Feretti session about working around problems in indexes was amazing (I love how he just wild cards every vowel in Italian names — how perfect is that!). He went through every trick I’ve ever used and then had as many more. It was wonderful.

Crista Cowan’s update on Ancestry was useful. Jill Morelli’s presentation on using unindexed datasets online was really good, altho very FamilySearch focused. This is more of the think like an archivist theme. In some ways, I wish she had come at it from the, hey, here’s how to use a finding aid, but this is not aimed at information science / librarian types, it is for hobbyist genealogists. Her pragmatic do this do this do this amounts to the same thing just with less of an framework for doing it in other contexts. I think what I want is an overview of which occupations / businesses / activities generated files historically (business, subdivided, government, ditto, etc. — so government would be split up by level of government and activity of government: state and tax, national and military, voting records at every level, blah blah blah) _and how they usually organize files_. Because there are a lot of within-space tendencies. Alpha gets you a really long ways, geography is important to make sure you are in an appropriate set, but if you are in an appropriate set and there is no index, it would be handy to understand typical non-alpha, non-geographical arrangements. Jane Wilcox is particularly amazing at this kind of presentation (from this year’s NYGB&S), but I am thirsty for more, and for a better overview. Yes, I know, I do know how to look up each individual one — if it exists — but I lack a well-developed framework in my head. Perhaps I should invent one!

Finally, Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s description of his experience of genealogy and using it in fiction was highly enjoyable.

I walked with M.

I did a loop by myself; it was cold.
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I took T. to martial arts. I did not have my phone call with M., because she was taking her son to a Scout thing.

Last day of the genealogy conference (NYSFHC, run by NYGBS). I had planned to livestream 2 sessions, but after the previous day giving up on the Jones presentation because it belabored the obvious a bit too much even for me, and figured you know, no. But I did listen in on the Bettinger developments in genetic genealogy, and that was awesome — lots of deep dive into the implications of recent changes on Ancestry.com. Partly it was about the ethnicity estimates, and it was nice to hear that he thinks about it _roughly_ the same way I do. However, the really great part was the description of algorithm changes to reconnect accidentally broken segments, and eliminating matches based on too short lengths, and displaying segment lengths and letting you sort on them. It is great that ancestry is surfacing this stuff — before you had to download and re-upload your info to a place that would let you do that analysis and honestly, I am not that motivated and it would not help really anyway because everyone else’s info is still on ancestry. So, exciting, and I should go check it out.

While listening, I really thoroughly cleaned some doors (master bathroom, green bathroom, T.’s bedroom door on the hallway side, door to the 3rd floor on the hallway side). They really needed it.
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A. watched the live action Mulan today. She enjoyed it a lot. She had seen the animated one, but was not any kind of massive fan. We discussed it ahead of time, and she had a pretty good understanding that this was going to be quite different from the animated, and she was very open to that. I only watched parts of it, because I was also attending NYSFHC (New York State Family History Conference, all virtual this year and thus I can attend) livestreamed presentations. I really liked what I saw.

NYSFHC has so far been really good. I skipped the Mayflower DNA presentation and the evening social, but I watched I think all the rest of the livestreamed sessions (not the entire pre-open, but a lot of it). Turns out to be _very_ compatible with doing the Lego Disney Train and station kit, which is hugely fun to put together. The Jane Wilcox presentation diving into what is in the New York State Archive was really enjoyable, and so was the Skip Duett presentation on the military tract (cut short by some kind of technical difficulties). Smoothly presented and highly detailed, the kind of thing ya gotta be pretty nerdy to love, but I sure love it.

Looking forward to two more days of livestream, and then lots of on demand; glad I paid for the Complete.

ETA: I walked with M., and then it poured on and off. A. and R. went out on the tandem and came back abruptly, soaking wet.

Today, we learned that A.’s school provided device has mismatched charger (USB-C) and chargee (and HP chromebook with ... not USB-C).
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I was reading a long piece at the New Yorker about Jeanne Calment.

It contained this parenthetical remark: "(The United States didn’t have a centralized birth-registration system until 1933.)"

I have done a fair amount of genealogical work, quite a lot of which involves US records. I am here to tell you that the US does NOT have a centralized birth registration system now and has not ever. And is unlikely to ever have one. That is a State level responsibility. I do not know who Lauren Collins is, but if you are going to try to convince me that you are Up To figuring out the truth of allegations and counter-allegations about whether the Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 was actually 122 or somewhat younger, then, you cannot really be making errors of this magnitude.

In general, I am skeptical of super-centenarians (and I say this as someone with a lot of ancestors and collaterals who made it past 100). More importantly, when I realized that I have not one, but two first cousins who have birth certificates for different years from different countries, I recognized that no matter how good your BMD system is, someone is going to monkey with it. It might be difficult to monkey with it now (altho, having just read Tara Westover's _Educated_ and learned that she was able to get a delayed birth certificate in her teens, I have some questions even here), in the 1930s, it was pretty fucking straightforward to get a bunch of officials and relatives and People Who Know You to go along with a scam. A little bit of money helps. A sob story helps. Being a close relative helps.

If you feel like reading the article, here it is:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud

From my perspective, the argument about the taxes is irrelevant. Could the family have paid the taxes? Sure! But that does not matter, because any family that produces someone who marries a double second cousin is a family that has fucking machined the art of keeping assets in the family. The only argument that matters to me is the simple observation that basically, no one lives that long, and everyone who seems to get close is someone who has habits that make it even more unlikely they lived that long, and has really great documentation in an area that has holes in the documentation. People who say they are 140 but were born in a place that had no documentation are not taken seriously by people who track this shit. And once the documentation hits a certain quality level, you no longer get supercentenarians. Because all of the supercentenarians (not the 103s and 105s -- the 120s, like Calment) are probably frauds.

ETA: I got to thinking about the question Collins raises towards the end about the notary public.

Googling found me this:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/notary_fraud.html

So much about this is hilarious -- the comment about Greece, in particular. Spain really caught my eye, because they had that enormous scandal recently about events during Franco's era, in which women were told their baby had died in childbirth, and then the baby was given to a supporter of Franco to raise. (Spain caught my eye for other reasons as well. And I do always love it when people from Greece make efforts to show that their "system" for recording real estate transactions is ... not risible.)
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Nothing sinister here, I swear.

I got a message from a 3rd cousin on ancestry recently about my grandmother. Turns out both sides of the family have the same story, that she was a mail order bride. Does that count as Meet Cute? It certainly is a fascinating idea.

I also got a message on ancestry asking if I had more information in a tree that I keep private. The tree in question is for the family of someone I knew a long time ago, and have no family connection to personally. I have gotten queries about it before, and politely say that I have absolutely nothing to share, as all my information came from public records. This time, however, the person had information to share with me -- which was a real eye opener. Apparently he moved to Mexico and opened a gift shop. This seems. . . utterly charming and I am very happy for him, wherever he is.
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I knew my people had crossed the Shan mountains. But I heard it and read about it from the people who kept going. I had no idea they had left a colony along the way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/world/asia/kyrgyzstan-mennonites.html
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/golden-state-killer-dna-experiment-genetic-genealogy

Fun little experiment: use genetic genealogy tools to figure out which of your coworkers at BuzzFeed is which profile we created.

Along the way, the author learns all kinds of things about himself, his coworkers, and people’s feelings about the intersection of crime and privacy. It is an unusually awesome and nuanced article and I highly recommend it.
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There is an article in Bloomberg (paywall, maybe?) about law enforcement using FTDNA, not just GED Match, to make sense of DNA samples in a criminal investigation.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-01/major-dna-testing-company-is-sharing-genetic-data-with-the-fbi

“FamilyTreeDNA’s cooperation with the FBI more than doubles the amount of genetic data law enforcement already had access to through GEDmatch. On a case-by-case basis, the company has agreed to test DNA samples for the FBI and upload profiles to its database, allowing law enforcement to see familial matches to crime-scene samples. FamilyTreeDNA said law enforcement may not freely browse genetic data but rather has access only to the same information any user might.”

If I had a DNA sample, say, and I uploaded it to FTDNA and I said it was me and maybe filled out a bunch of information about “me”, I would get “matches”. It is not at all obvious to me how much more than this the FBI is getting. If I did this on Ancestry, and it matched me to a private tree, I’d get a little message saying, ask nicely and maybe they will share with you. Even this, normal user level of access, would be super helpful in making sense of DNA evidence in a criminal investigation.

Also, I really hope that this information can be used to resolve missing person cases and cases of unidentified bodies. Bringing resolution to victims’ loved ones is a huge accomplishment, even when one cannot identify a Bad Guy and Bring Them to Justice.

There is a lot of room in any privacy debate, never mind one involving biological samples, for well-meaning people to disagree. I, personally, am not finding this particularly concerning, because I generally feel like it is better if law enforcement gets quickly to an accurate conclusion, versus bumbling around for decades and not actually getting to anywhere useful and stressing out people of interest and causing undue distress to the victim and/or victim’s families. But I’ll also be paying attention to see what else happens.

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