Twitter, Facebook, and Sanders Family Genealogy

Yes, it's true.   You can now follow me on Facebook and Twitter.   I recently setup accounts to allow everyone to track my updates, making it even easier by a factor of 42.  

If you are familiar with social media accounts, then you know what to do - click and enjoy, please.  I welcome your dialogue as I move through the netverse with social media.  


If you are not familiar with Twitter or Facebook, then please read on. 

Note: To encourage people to follow me on twitter and Facebook, I will be running an awesome promotion where one lucky person will get their family tree researched for FREE!   This will go for 30 days and whoever is following me on Twitter and Facebook has the chance to win (details and condition to be posted soon).    Follow me now, before its too late!  

Get to know your Family Stories

If I asked you to tell me a story about your family, what story would you extol and who would be the center of that story?   Your parents, grandparents, or someone else?

Henry and Clara Sanders Family

The challenge with family stories is like fables and myths, they merge into the fabric of the past generations.  Over time, the story becomes filtered and tend to ameliorate the plot line and unfortunately, many stories get "lost", so we end up telling fewer of them.   

A story doesn't have to be moralistic or have a valiant outcome.   Today, we are all more hurried in our actions, work, eat, family time, sleep, repeat.   Our ancestors didn't have the same technology we do, so their family time was spent telling stories. 

How I got started in Family Genealogy

I am usually asked how I got started doing family genealogy and my quick answer is "I caught the genealogy bug".   This bug has been fairly virulent and hard to get rid of.  

As a child, I was a little bit different growing up (according to some sources, with questionable intent).  I had loving parents and grandparents and 2 younger brothers.  

How exactly I caught this "bug", can be traced back to about 1975, when I was 10-11 years old.    Fortunately, I was held back in kindergarten, because I couldn't color within the lines so in the fall of 1975, I was starting 5th grade.   At that time, we were living in North Dakota, which is VERY close to the north pole than most would think!

Like most 5th graders, my interests were diverse:  I liked riding motorcycles & snowmobiles, building forts, watching cartoons on Saturday, playing sports, astronomy, archeology, math and the general sciences.

My curiosity about my origins was also somewhat skewed, probably because my folks sometimes joked I was adopted, simply because I had blonde hair, and the rest of my family had dark hair.  Well I have no doubt I am my father and mothers son, but this might have had something to do with why I wanted to know more about "who I was". 


In the spring of 1976, we moved to Kentucky, where I finished 5th grade and started growing more interested in collections, like coins, stamps, and books.  We lived in Kentucky for more than a year and in the summer of 1977, we moved to Colorado.   

My "bug" was becoming more infectious, as I started interviewing my grandparents about my history.   I would write down questions, about each ancestor, and then do a regular interview with a living family member, while recording the interview.  Even today, the digital recorder is by far an invaluable tool to collecting stories about my past, and it helps when you are on the move, to have it on, because memories can often be triggered by something indirectly that you might miss.

By 1977, before personal computers, I had amassed a good deal of information on my families past, and was considering how to best put this into a format that would help people see it.  That same year, Roots came out: a TV mini-series about Alex Haley's family history and I was enthralled with the story and how he was able to trace his family back so far.   I had only traced my line back to the mid 1800's and the details about those grandparents were very sketchy at best.  

In the fall of 1977, I started 7th grade in Colorado and likely because of the Roots TV mini-series, one of my teachers had all of us do a family tree.   I couldn't wait to get started and worked on it for several days.  My "family tree" was hand written on butcher block paper showing all the connections, that ended up being 16 feet long, by 3 feet wide (and wider still with an extension in the middle).  I had over 300 names, going back 5 generations, with over 33 hand written double sided 8x11" biographies of each person.  I still have this family tree coiled up in my archives.  Needless to say, I was fully infected by the "bug" at this point.

Today, I still have that same passion to pursue my family roots.  It is very rewarding and certainly helps me understand more about who I am.  I also find a lot of my family through the wonders of technology, when they happen onto my website, at SandersFamilia.com.   In fact, I have made connections with 5th and 6th cousins through facebook even!

If you are interested in finding your own roots, you just need to be a little curious.   Ask questions about your family from those people in your family, such as your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.  It is also important to record the stories about who your ancestors were, not just the dates, as they can help guide you.  Personally, I have many family stories that are part fact and part fiction, so it is up to you to determine the truth, but finding it is half the fun!

You may be the family genealogist in your family, and just don't know it yet.  If you have questions, don't hesitate to contact me for advice through my website.  

Until the next post. 

Your likely cousin, a few times removed.
Brian

What part am I??

I was thinking about the Math part from my previous blog, Math & Genealogy - it does a family good, and hoping I didn't put anyone off, even though it is amazing.  Still, I am going to risk it one more time...  with some more math - fractions.    YEAAAHHHH!

Considering many people always want to know "where they came from", I hope I can help you answer this question.  This fundamentally means we want to be able to trace back our roots to some geographic location and/or ethnologically unique place in time, and literally, you can do this in a few simple ways.

First, you can start filling in the blanks of your family tree, by digging into history of your past, with as much as you know, and/or talking with your relatives.

Second, you can have a Genealogist (like me), do a family tree for you (if interested, contact me).

Lastly, you can get a DNA test, and see where your genes really started, going back thousands of years.   I can tell that a DNA test is going to really tell you details that your great Aunt Ninnie can not!  


So, once you have the family tree, we just need to know the country your ancestors were born in and what generation they came from.   To keep this simple, I am going to demonstrate how this works for only 3 generations, to my great-grandparents.   Mine is actually very easy, at least to identify, since in the last 3 generations, I have only 1 great-grandparent who was born in another country, Germany.   To figure out what fraction of German I am, I simply use the 2^n formula for the generation.   When I do this, I get 1/2^3 or 1/8 German.   That's it...  I am 7/8's American and 1/8 German - WOW!   That explains why I can only speak German 1/8 as good as English ;(

Its easier to see the math in action, if you look at the table below.  GGMa is German.

Gen

Tot

%

Me

0

1

Me

Parents

1

2

0

Pa

Ma

G Parents

2

4

0

G Pa

G Ma

G Pa

G Ma

G G Parents

3

8

1/8

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

One condition I would apply is that in order to consider your "origin" and therefore, your paternal birth countries, you should at a minimum, expect the family to be living in that country for no less than 3 generations.   Therefore, for me, my great-grandmother, and her parents, and her grandparents, would need to also have been born in Germany.  To do this helps eliminate cases where grandparents were born in county A, then their children were born in country B, and their grandkids were born in yet another country C.   It makes the fractions a bit impossible, not to mention really confusing the grandkids when you get a number greater than 100%.   For example, if you do this and you get a number like 150% Swedish and 25% French, you know something didn't go right...in the number calculations!

Lets take a look at a hypothetical example, to see how easy it is.   Lets say my paternal GGPa was born in Brazil and GGMa born in Peru (and have 3 generations past).  In addition, lets say my maternal GMa was born in Germany, and my paternal GPa was born in the UK, we would have the following table.  

Gen

Tot

%

Me

0

1

Me

Parents

1

2

0

Pa

Ma

G Parents

2

4

1/4+1/4

G Pa

G Ma

G Pa

G Ma

G G Parents

3

8

1/8+1/8

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

GG Pa

GG Ma

This means I would be 1/8 Peruvian, 1/8 Brazilian, 1/4 UK,  and 1/4 German.    Notice I didn't include the maternal GGPa/Ma?    You want to count the "latest generation", in this case my maternal Gpa/Ma.

As you start looking at trees going back further, you may see that each generation gets smaller and smaller since we keep using the formula, 1/2^n.   In fact, the 4th and 5th generations are just 1/16 and 1/32, respectively.   Either way, we are still a fraction of those ancestors from hundreds and thousands of years ago and it is important to remember them and realize we wouldn't be here without them. 

As always, your cousin.

Did you say 4.3 billion people - are you sure?!?

One of my favorite movies is "Back to the Future" and one of my favorite scenes was when Doc Brown realizes the enormous power required to make the Time Machine work.   He starts getting really excited and repeating the amount of energy, or 1.21 gigawatts, while Marty asks what a gigawatt is.   

gig·a·watt/ˈgigəˌwät/ - A unit of electric power equal to one billion (109) watts.

 

Just like Doc Brown, I was really a bit concerned when I determined in my last post that I have nearly 4.3 billion ancestors, starting from 100 AD..  That just sounds a bit large, so I started looking closer at the numbers and the assumptions.  I kept getting the same number, and even better, the Population Reference Bureau, determined that around 100AD, the earths population was about 300 million.    Further still, the total number of people who have ever lived since the beginning of time, is only estimated to be about 108 billion!

So how is this so far off?    

Well, if we start with the assumed total of 300 million around 100 AD, that means we get about 28 generations.   But even that seems a bit small, since that means each generation is about 70 years, and that is a huge stretch and for now, I am going to look into this further, as something is off.


In showing this analysis, I hope the point hasn't been lost in the math.   While researching your family line, it is important to make assumptions about the story being told, but to be clear and document it in detail, for you to later review and or others to follow.   It is a good practice, to always annotate your sources, state your assumptions and keep clear notes for reference.   This helps others in the future, as well, and they can either confirm or refute what you published.   .
 
I hope my example was helpful and beneficial.  Stay tuned for more about the mystery of the "overpopulated" world in 100 AD.

Your cousin, Brian

Math & Genealogy - it does a family good!

If you were born on this planet, in the last 80,000 +/- a few years, you may not know it, but we are all pretty much the same.   In fact, we are 99.5% genetically the same..  And rather than bore you about the birds and bees, and genetics, let's talk about something really neat - math!   A subject we can all "relate" to in terms of genealogy and families.

The LIFE of EDGAR and JENNIE Foy - by Margie Wood

I am pleased to announce that after many years of preparation, The LIFE of EDGAR and JENNIE FOY is available in paperback, through LULU.com.

This is a biography about my great-grandparents, Edgar and Jennie Foy, told from the view of my grandmother, Margie Wood. They were Irish and German immigrants, who settled in the Midwest during the 1800's. It's compelling and rich in detail about the trials and tribulations, the successes and most importantly, the family.

What's in a name?

As we turn over another decade, we will see census recorders canvassing the corners of our country to ensure we have a complete and accurate count of the number of people living in the USA. The task will not be easy considering the projected number of people living in the USA, but in 2010, it is more a matter of verification than recording. Early census takers had to write down all the information and since most people were not able to read or write, it was up to the census taker to interpret how to spell names. This is one reason why you will find names in the census records with several variations.

As a quick test, try to respell your name phonetically or write it out with your opposite writing hand. Chances are you will have several variations. For example, my last name is Sanders. The original spelling was apparently "Alexander", which over time and through different linguistic cultural influences, the ALE became silent and Xander, became Sanders.

Recently, one of my ancestors was stricken with a misspelling in a different record type, but has the same effect. Either way, I didn't know it at first. Her name was May Ellis, my paternal great-great grandmother who lived from 1863-1950. It is always important to consider the sources and potential pitfalls of vital records, even if they are very legible.

The record I am referring to for May Ellis was a death certificate from Oklahoma. This document was typed and as you may know, death records contain birth dates, birth locations, parent names, burial location, cause of death, maiden name and more. For many years I did not know May's lineage, but with this one record, I saw for the first time her maiden name - Horner. Since it was typed, I was pretty sure how to spell it and started looking for more details on the family. This was an exciting find for me to say the least!

However, after many hours of searching on Ancestry.com, I was unable to confirm any familial connection. Then I happened to find another researcher who listed May Ellis but with a different maiden name - Hamar. So I tried that maiden name and my other sources confirmed this to be a true match. What likely happened is that the typist of the death certificate misread a hand written name and in turn created a transcription error. If you imagine the spelling of Hamar in cursive with a poorly written "a" and a smudged or broken "m", you can get Horner.

There is a lot to be said for how your name is spelled as it denotes origin, even if it is spelled differently. Therefore, for those of you doing research on your family tree, be sure to check your spellings (twice) and always confirm with two or more reference sources, so that our future generations don't end up calling us by a different surname!