Family history progress in 2024
Accentuate the Positive Geneameme
It’s become a tradition over the past few years that at the end of the year blogger Jill Ball, who blogs as GeniAus, encourages her fellow family historians inviting us to review their year in genealogy and Accentuate the Positive.
Here is what I did this year to latch on to the affirmative.
In 2024 I published 72 family history posts and have now published more than 800 posts since I started my blog in 2012. I participated in my eleventh Blogging from A to Z April challenge (this year I blogged about Whitmore in Staffordshire).
I continued to add to my material on Wikitree. I see it as a public repository of my research.
In 2022 I had 313 ancestors recorded on Wikitree of the 1,023 individuals of the previous ten generations of our ancestors, 31% of the possible maximum. I now have 338 ancestors recorded on Wikitree and know the names of 57 more (but without sufficient details to add profiles to Wikitree): this is 39% of the 1,023 individuals of the previous ten generations of our ancestors. When I started looking in May 2018 at how many forebears I could name it was 319; we now know 82 more names. There is more research to be done of course, but I can certainly see the progress I’ve made.
Six degrees of separation
Six degrees of separation refers to the fact that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of “friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule. Mathematically it means that a person shaking hands with 30 people, and then those 30 shaking hands with 30 other people, would after repeating this 6 times allow every person in a population as large as the United States to have shaken hands (7 times for the whole world). The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others.
It is part of WikiTree’s single family tree mission to show how we’re all connected: how a web of family relationships connects everyone in the world. Through shared ancestors we are all distant cousins of each other. Over the last couple of years Wikitree has been counting Connections within 7 degrees. In the language of Wikitree, “Connections” are family relationships, including relationships through marriage.”Degrees” measure the distance of relationships. Nuclear relatives (parents, siblings, spouses, and children) are one degree away. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, in-laws, and grandchildren are two degrees, i.e. they are connected through two relationship steps.
My connection count includes the family relationships of my husband.
The statistics were first recorded in June 2022. My count then was 932. My count, now 2204, has increased in part because I have now filled in the details of siblings and children of some of my ancestors, information previously unknown to me.
Looking back over the year, some questions:
Jill suggested several questions to look back on the year, my answers to some of these:
Google provided an answer to transcribing documents from images: Confessions of a lazy typist: transcribing with Google docs
I was the recipient of generosity from a friend who drew my attention to a Portrait of Edwin Mainwaring 1801-1823
This headstone gave me some extra information: Graves, cenotaphs, and monuments at Find a Grave: Remembering Leslie Leister died 1916
A useful record I discovered was the Baptism of Sophia Henrietta Duff in Quebec
DNA helped me to make progress in identifying the father of my mother-in-law’s cousin
I was pleased I upgraded to my ancestry.com to include PRO Tools as I find it very useful to see how much DNA my matches share with each other.
I dipped a toe into Substack: A stack of things to do. I have enjoyed reading new family history writers.
I connected with the Coolamon & District History Group on Facebook. Coolamon is a town in the Riverina region of south-west New South Wales, 40 kilometres north-west of Wagga Wagga. The society has been digitising and sharing photographs taken by Charles James Norman Chauncy (1888 – 1941), a second cousin three times removed. Chauncy was a farmer and a keen amateur photographer. I have been enjoying his photographs of the farm and the district.
I had a look at the ChatGPT AI to get feedback on a Family History Narrative
I gave presentations to the All About That Place event convened by the Society for One Place studies: All about those places: Whitmore and Homebush
I look forward to another year of doing and sharing my family history research.
Looking back in previous years
This post was first published at https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/family-history-progress-in-2024/
Congratulations on a successful year!