Hello again. It hasn’t been 3 years since my last post. Just one. What a year though. It’s been a rough one. Here I am again, checking in with whoever is out there. I hope everyone is doing well.
Have you done genealogy research lately?
Yes, yes I have. I’m currently in the process of sorting through quite a few things. Mostly I’m trying to re-acquaint myself with my family tree. I want to go through and update on some past entries so I thought it would be good to have a little idea what I’m typing about when I do. I had done the Genealogy Do-Over before, which I chronicled quite a lot on the blog. Just looking back now, it seems my last do-over post was in 2017. Wowzers.
To say there have been some break-throughs since then would be an understatement. Nobody get too excited, nothing for the Mays or Taylor family yet. 😂 I think I will need many more years of preparation and learning before I’m able to break through there.
Website Work
If you’ve been to the main domain of the website lately, you’ve noticed some changes. I have taken a lot of the website down and I’m working to integrate the blog and database website. It’s a funny story really. I was in search of some malfunctioning code and broke the whole thing. 😂 So down it went, while I try and re-invent the site once again.
Logic tells me that I have way too many big goals and I’ll need to start small here. That means I’m off to pick a random post to update everyone on. Hopefully it takes less than a year to write!
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Well, that was another three years gone. As anyone still reading here can tell. I have stopped updating my genealogy blog. For awhile it was because I just could not find the time to write about all my adventures. Then life hit. You know how it is. You are going along, working, living. Then a bunch of things happen all at once. Before you know it, you haven’t opened your genealogy for 2 years and you haven’t posted on your blog in even longer.
About the Comments section
I had to close it down to put it as simply as possible. If you are also a regular here, you know I never keep things simple and I like to ramble a bit. So here we go. I never intended to be away for so long. I never intended to close the comment section down. The comments section is a happy surprise somedays. It’s someone finding my posts through a random google search and making a connection. It’s someone hoping for a connection with my family, but finding a connection in the comments instead. Interacting with others researching these family lines is my sole purpose for everything on this website.
However, the bots have won for now. There were over 1000 bot spam messages to deal with today. Yikes! Yes I know how to fix the problem. Sadly it involves funds that I just can’t allocate right now. Holding onto my website is not free, and I never ask for donations and never will. It’s my happy side project. Most anti-spam software these days costs real money, as it should by the way. I would never suggest anyone not get paid for their work. Its just right now, for a website I’m not actively updating and working on. I can’t spare the expense right now. This could change in 1 week, 1 month or 1 year.
Are you still doing genealogy?
The short answer is Yes. The long answer is more complicated. It used to be, I logged into Ancestry and my email multiple times a day. That is not the case now. Sometimes it is over a week before I do either. I’m not sure what is going on with me. I just haven’t had the mental energy to deal with it. I feel like I should have been more active with all of this during the pandemic and lockdowns but I found myself going further from it instead of closer. I lost many family members during this time. Many of whom I used to discuss my genealogy with daily. So I suspect it has something to do with that.
Anyway, one of the same reasons that I can’t allocate funds to anti-spam software is even truer for genealogy expenses. I am currently only paying for genealogy as I’m in the mood to research it. So for now I have an Ancestry subscription, but come January. It will be gone again. Then I will get it back once I have the funds and the mental capacity to research again. We all know I’ve never shied away from free methods either but it’s mainly that for some reason I am genealogy blocked right now when it comes to actively researching.
Will this website stay?
Yes. As long as I keep paying the hosting bill and my brother doesn’t forget to renew my domain name. This website isn’t going anywhere. Whether the comment section is open or not. I’ve had some form of this website since the domain was first purchased in 2003!!!! 2003. That’s coming up on 20 years. I can’t believe something I started as a genealogy obsessed teenager has stuck around this long.
I’m sure at some point I will even come back and redesign it all again and make huge updates on the progress I’ve made. In fact I think I’m close to a breakthrough on finding my Irish town of origin for the Moores. It’s really exciting. Sadly, the person I always discussed my Moore research with has now passed. My Aunt Lori was my biggest genealogy buddy and I miss her so very much. It’s really a bittersweet find. So exciting to make such a discovery, yet sad that the one I most want to tell is no longer here.
What’s next if we can’t comment?
I’m going to slowly, and we all know how slow I can be since my last post was 3 years ago, work on posts answering questions in my comments section. That’s the easiest way I can think of to get some answers out there and maybe bring a toe back into writing again. I do miss writing.
Once my comments are answered, or maybe even concurrently. I will update what I can on old entries. If there is something particular you would like updated or answered, feel free to mail me at leeny.genealogy [at] gmail.com . When I turned off comments, it turned them off for posts older than 14 days. So if you find this post in the next 14 days. You probably can still make it in! I also turned on approval before publishing comments. So don’t be worried if there is a delay in your comment appearing.
Final Thoughts
Thanks so much for all your support, knowledge, help and generosity over the years. I didn’t realize until I was writing this how much I missed you all.
There are five important things for living a successful and fulfilling life: never stop dreaming, never stop believing, never give up, never stop trying, and never stop learning.
First, sorry for my long absence. I never meant to just disappear for the 863874th time. That’s not why I’m writing now though, I’m writing to apologize if anyone who is subscribed to this blog is sent 1,293 blog posts in their feed reader or email. I don’t know how that whole subscribe thing works. Which I’m going to fix by subscribing myself, which I should have done in the first place.
To explain, I have been cleaning out my old domain names on my webhost. I’ve done a lot of behind the scenes changes over the years and zero cleaning out. Since I’ve been doing this website thing for over 15 years, that means I’ve built up some clutter. This afternoon when I hit delete on an old test blog, I actually hit delete on this blog. Luckily I had a backup of my posts that I had done just last night. Go me for the forward thinking? Anyway, I was able to import my posts right back into this spot, but I’m unsure if it sent notice to anyone. Also, all my plugins are gone, so who knows if anyone is even still subscribed? Oy vey, what did I do?
To make up for my blunder, here is a picture of some parrots sitting on Great-Grandpa William L. Moore. I mean it cheered me right up!
Alert: This is a Long Post!
For the record, this is not my actual “first impression” of Find My Past. I have used it for British research a few times over the last few years. I have not used it on a regular basis. I have received no compensation for this post and expect no compensation. This is my honest opinion.
Being Realistic
In order to give Find My Past an honest look, I will be using mostly English ancestors to test it out. I’m going to give the American records a shot, but then I will move on to what I know they excel at… British Records!
Well… I guess I’m just going to eat crow in the very first example. I went into this entry thinking I was going to jump straight to the British records.
Instead, the hints feature in both my software and their online family tree found the birth and death index entries for my Grandma. Through a basic search on the website I was also able to find the 1930 and 1940 Census images for her family.
Here is my favorite!
Her marriage records! Images! Okay, so I had found these through browsing digital folders on FamilySearch. They weren’t indexed at the time. Obviously Find My Past must have an arrangement with FamilySearch to provide indexes to these collections. I’m excited to see which records I haven’t found that are living in Find My Past’s searches. This is a huge deal since a majority of my Mom’s side of the family is from Ohio and Kentucky. Meaning this could save me tons of time in searching manually through a lot of records.
Exhibit B: My Biggest Pet Peeve
I’m not going to be stuck on this for too long but this was really annoying to me. With such large families, having to scroll and scroll and scroll to navigate through the tree was bad. Luckily for me, they do have a pedigree view and a family group view.
Of the two, the family group view would be the most useful to me. Pedigree is nice to jump back generations, but for those of us who research collateral lines, something to navigate easily through those is vital.
This view was so much better for me! Bigger families do require the dreaded scrolling. I know it’s tough, but I think all the family tree companies could really do with trying to make large families easier to navigate. The best one I’ve seen yet is from Legacy Family Tree software.
Exhibit C: British Records (William Malthouse)
Find My Past has all the hallmarks of research, the UK Census (1841-1911), England & Wales Birth Index (1837-2006), England & Wales Death Index (1837-2007), and England & Wales Marriage Index (1837-2005). One of my favorite things about Find My Past is that they have a lot of church records for England. There are certain counties that are exclusive to Ancestry and certain ones that are exclusive to Find My Past. It helps to know which ones you need and where to find them.
The Search Function
The Search function at Find My Past is definitely one of the better ones. I don’t find myself needing it often, but the include name variants options is very good!
A lot of the records I end up finding is because of using parents names as my main search parameter. Another feature I love is being able to restrict to certain databases. Most genealogy websites do have this feature, but its an important one to have so it’s helpful to mention that it is there.
This is the end for now
I’m not going to drag this out too much more. In conclusion I was surprised that I was able to find so many records for my American ancestors in Kentucky and Ohio. It’s one of those things that’s usually got me running back to Ancestry all the time. This is quite a big deal for me!
I’ve let this entry wait too long so I’m just going to go ahead and publish it now so I can move forward!
Alright folks here’s the deal. Over the last year, I’ve been getting automatically generated emails from my web host company that I’m exceeding my memory. I’ve optimized all my databases regularly, I’ve set up caching on the blog. I’ve done all the things they say to do except move from a shared hosting plan to a virtual private server.
This is most likely why I’ve been getting the random 404 error messages. It’s why I keep breaking the website when I try to update and it errors out. I think it’s just time. I’m ready to go and move servers. I’m just not sure if the site will go down or for how long. My hosting was due to renew next week anyway, so this is a good time to try something new! In a perfect world this would be a great time for spring cleaning amongst my domains. Now isn’t the time for that though since my old hosting plan is due to run out. I’m hoping it all can be finished before renewal.
I hope to see everyone on the other side of this switch. Hopefully it’s quick and painless!
This is a complicated question to just sum up in a little paragraph. Basically the General Data Protection Regulation is a new set of regulations for European Union countries.
You aren’t in the European Union though.
That is right, I am not. However, the internet knows no boundaries and I do have visitors from those countries. Plus, I don’t find it out of line to make sure that everything having to do with your data and my data is on the up and up.
Why are you just talking about this now?
Well, there are a few reasons for that. One, I was trying to figure out what I needed to do to make things in compliance with the laws. As an American blogger who has no links to companies I didn’t think it would be too much.
The other reason was I was waiting until it was all done, so I could say this is what I did and now none of us have to worry!
There must have been an oops in the road, there is always an oops in the road with you.
Of course there was an oops in the road. That is the Moore family motto, “Oops, let’s try that again.” Most times that was immediately following us throwing instruction booklets to the side. “Who needs instructions?”
That was not the case this time. I was trying really hard to do everything right and on time. It just didn’t happen. First of all, I have a paying website gig. Even though it is my uncle, his website had to come first. Once I thought his was ready, I started on mine.
It wasn’t until I started mine that I realized that something is happening with my website. Whether it be my host was overloaded the past week and a half, or the internet itself was, I can’t say. I just know every time I tried to do something, it would error out.
Well, what is going on.
I still don’t know. This site still seems sluggish to me. It still errors out every so often when I try to click a page. The great news is, updating my software and plugins today did not trigger any more *your site has been deleted apocalypses*
Excuse me, what?
Sorry, that was my dramatic emotions coming out. There were times this week that both my websites broke and said that there was nothing there. All while trying to update plugins, post pages, anything really. That
Enough! You’ve rambled, where are we now?
Okay, I’ve made a spiffy new Privacy Policy page. A warning, the page does use most of the suggested language of WordPress right now because I wanted to have something on the site to protect us.
I also added a Cookie notice plugin. So coming to my website the first time should trigger one, hopefully? I don’t know because I clicked accept and now I don’t see it anymore. That’s how cookies work.
The only thing is my plugins. I know that they are an important part of this whole process. They are what is actually collecting data if any. So they need to be dealt with. I’m also thinking that once I deal with them, the sluggish website might take care of itself. So that’s what I will be doing this weekend. Hopefully getting the website back to how I love it.
Oy vey.
Yeah, I hear you. So… Long time no talk! How are you guys? Aren’t we all ready for genealogy ramblings again. I know I am and I have plenty to talk about!
I’ve always had a favorite number. That number is the number eight. I don’t know why that is but it just is. Most of my favorite athletes have worn the number eight jersey. Important dates in my life and that of my family usually happen with an eight in them. Or all this could just be that I only notice eights and not the other numbers.
It doesn’t really matter though because this eight is an important one!
Blogging
I have been blogging for eight years today. For some reason eight years ago, I started rambling about my family history and I’ve barely stopped since. I haven’t really put my blog out there anywhere the last few years. I just wanted to stay in my own little bubble. I’m not a good socializer I guess. I’m really proud of what I’ve done here. I’m proud that all my ramblings are still here. I have no idea if they make sense most times, but they are here.
The Future
I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t even know what next week holds but I do want to say a huge thank you to all the wonderful people who read my blog. You guys have stayed with me through all my breaks, and all my weird ramblings. You never let me down and I’m so appreciative of the support.
My web hosting company will be planning some server upgrades one week from now (around October 31st). This is an upgrade that should only take about 45 minutes. My website might be unavailable for a short time while this upgrade takes place!
Never fear, I’m still working on things! I haven’t disappeared from the internet. I had some trips to take this summer. One was a family reunion in Upstate New York and then I made a quick trip to Southern Florida to visit my brother and his family. Now I’m back for a little while. I do have another quick trip planned in August but hopefully I can get a post up before then. I’m also hoping to start updating my database section in the near future too, it’s been awhile!
Computer Problems are Happening
I am having a slight computer problem. I’m working on troubleshooting it, and I think I have it figured out. Leaving my computer on for my times away probably wasn’t the best idea, but I liked having access to some of my stuff. Learned my lesson and won’t be doing that anymore! It’s anything major from what I can tell but it’s enough to have caused quite a few headaches since I got home Thursday night.
I hope everyone out there in cyber space is doing well!
Hello everyone! I am back in Maryland after two months in Florida with my adorable niece and nephew. I’m starting to finally get some energy back after a rough few days, but I plan on getting back in the swing of things soon, because I have plenty to share!
I know you’ve missed my vague subheadings
I’m going to share how my work flow … worked in Florida, on my laptop!
There are new changes I made to my Excel log before leaving and I’ll detail those to you.
How on earth did I keep up with my Do-Over while traveling and helping to care for newborn twins? I’ll tell you soon!
It’s great to be home at my genealogy command center, and I can’t wait to dive back into the insanity. 🙂 Talk to you guys soon!
