Getting Conference Ready

In just a week I will be jetting off to Rootstech in Salt Lake City. I will return home for one short night to ditch my cold weather clothes and grab some more suited for Sydney's pleasant March weather where I will attend Congress_2018. In 2018 I am once again an Ambassador for Rootstech, Congress_2018 does not have any formal Ambassadors so I am trying to do my bit by hosting the Genimates at #Congress_2018 Facebook Group.

Genies at Congress 2015 in Adelaide

The last time I was subjected to this geneaoverload (thanks for that new word Hilary Gadsby) was in 2015 when I was both an Ambassador for Rootstech and Congress 2015. At that time I wrote a series of posts under the banner Getting Conference Ready.  Some of the info in these may be outdated but there are still quite a few tips and links for those attending.

FYI I am posting the links below.

• Getting Conference Ready - Time to get covered
• Getting Conference Ready - Attend to your blogs
• Getting Conference Ready - Pockets and Purses
• Getting Conference Ready - Pills and Potions
• Getting Conference Ready - Badges, Beads and Bling
• Getting Conference Ready - Tips from Amy Smith
• Getting Conference Ready - Business Cards
• Getting Conference Ready - Directionless

DNA Progress

I feel that I should reflect on my progress (or lack thereof) periodically.

This post is an evaluative exercise for me. There are just not enough hours in the day to do justice to the amount of $$$ I have invested in DNA research.  So how am I going?

To date I have tested several family members:

Myself at Ancestry, FTDNA (autosomal and mtDNA) and MyHeritage and uploaded to Gedmatch
My mother at FTDNA and uploaded to MyHeritage and Gedmatch
My daughter at Ancestry and uploaded to FTDNA (Must upload to MyHeritage)
My grandson at FTDNA and uploaded to Gedmatch. (Must upload to MyHeritage)
My granddaughter at FTDNA (Waiting on results)
My double first cousin at FTDNA and uploaded to Gedmatch
My paternal first cousin at FTDNA and uploaded to Gedmatch
My mother's second cousin at FTDNA.
My husband at FTDNA and uploaded to Gedmatch
My husband's first cousin at FTDNA
My son-in-law at FTDNA (waiting on results - tested because granddaughter wants to know about both sides of her tree).

As an only child with no living aunts and uncles my options for testing close family members are limited but I do have some more distant cousins on my radar. I take kits in my handbag when I visit potential victims.

So far I have confirmed just 65 matches to myself, 53 of these are via Ancestry the remainder from FTDNA, Gedmatch and MyHeritage. Of the matches from people unknown to me I have 1 second cousin, a few second cousin's once removed and the majority are in the 3rd and 4th cousin range. It is interesting to note that I have only had 4 new matches at FTDNA in 2018. I had 84 new matches in my top 2000 on Gedmatch in the past month. There were so many more on Ancestry.

Testing my mother, first cousins and Mum's second cousin has lead me to other distant cousins who do not match my tests but match theirs so I am committed to having others test.

I have been lax with my husband's side but aside from his first cousins and our descendants I have confirmed only a handful of matches for him.

I record my communications with and details of matches in spreadsheets (one for my side and one for my husband). I will start up one for my granddaughters' paternal side when those results come in. I am happy with this method. I also make notes in the notes section of Ancestry and FTDNA matches).

After attending umpteen lectures, reading loads of articles and joining online DNA groups I feel I have a good basic understanding of DNA and could even give an introductory talk on DNA.

I am still dabbling with tools to help me investigate chromosome matches. I just need to hide in a padded cell for a day or two to concentrate and learn. I have had a little play with DNA Painter and think I can handle that. Shelley Crawford's Visualing Ancestry DNA matches enabled me to identify more Ancestry matches but I did find the setup challenging even though Shelley's instructions were excellent. I must redo that as I have many new matches.

I try to keep up with new matches.  but find it easier to do with Ancestry's Android app than by firing up my PC. I am aware that I can check the MyHeritage results on their app so will start doing that as well. It's so easy to pull out the phone and check a few new DNA results when I am waiting for the doctor, dentist or plane or train. Revving up the computer takes longer.

I contact all promising matches, ie those that have  matches in common and I can identify a family line and those who have some sort of online tree that gives me a clue as to where our match may be. I would estimate that around 1/3 of these folk respond. I probably only receive about one enquiry email per week for all the kits I manage.

The good news is that I have confirmed matches to all of my Great-Grandparents lines, some of my 2x Great-Grandparents and a few of my 3x Great-Grandparents. It is comforting to know that my traditional research is confirmed.

Although I purchased my first kit from FTDNA in 2013 I didn't submit my sample until early 2015 so I have been on the DNA trail for three years. It's been slow progress.

Open Live Writer

As I am away from home with limited internet access I am using Open Live Writer to prepare this post offline. Once I’m done I’ll log on to the internet and complete my post.

In 2016 when genimates like Shelley from Twigs of Yore said that they used Open Live Writer  I hopped on the bandwagon and, after using it for a few posts, went back to drafting my posts using Blogger online.

I have mentioned Open Live Writer as a good free tool in my Managing Frugally presentation that I have prepared for #Congress_2018 and I wanted to brush up on my knowledge before I take to the stage at the conference.



It appears as though I have a very narrow space in which to enter my text I was able to change the font and font size in my post. I have managed to prepare a draft post and look at its preview, I’ve inserted some hyperlinks and some images – one from my computer and one from my smartphone that is attached to computer via USB. I used the text highlighter to add emphasis to some words in my text – that was nifty.

The spellcheck facility that is on the toolbar found a couple of errors for me ((I can spell) but my typing is punk.



I like the subscript and superscript buttons on the toolbar and the wordcount tool will come in handy too.

When I look at the preview of this post the text looks awfully large although I selected font size of 10 when the default was 4. I presumed this measure was in pt (point size) but maybe it is an em measurement. I guess that I’ll find out when I upload my post to Blogger.

I’ve prattled on for long enough so I’ll turn on my hotspot and upload a draft of this to GeniAus (I’m not game to post it directly from here as it may look like a dog’s breakfast.

And what did I find? The post content transferred well but there was no break between my paragraphs. This was easy to fix - I just added some html code (break) to create space between the paragraphs. There were also issues with the font - it was tiny. I was unable to fix this via the Blogger menu so it was back to the code. I'm not too good with html code but as I read through it I found lots of instances of xx-small and x-small font. I gambled and changed these to small and my post became readable. 

Once I learn where I have gone wrong I may go back to using Open Live Writer especially when I need to preserve my data.

Trove Tuesday - Each snippet adds something to the story

It's quite a while since I did some sleuthing on Trove to see if I can add to the story of my 3x Great-Grandfather, Dennis Tierney. His activities are well documented in

The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser but I wanted to see if there was anything new or that I had previously missed.

It is not my usual practice to be organised but, for this search I decided to search for posts containing the word Tierney between 1840-01-01 to 1840-12-31. I figured that there may not be many Tierneys in the colony at that time. 

The first item I came across was this article List of Unclaimed Letters FOR THE MONTH OF JULY, 1840.  It lists an unclaimed letter for  "Tierney Dennis, Carpenter". I guess whoever was writing to Dennis hadn't caught up with the news that he had moved from Sydney to Dungog.

It seemed as though Dennis did nothing in the years that I checked between between 1841 and  1846. I finally found a new result in the Sydney Chronicle (NSW : 1846 - 1848) Wednesday 23 June 1847 p 4 Advertising which told me that  Dennis Tierney was appointed to be agent for Clarence Town and Dungog for that newspaper. His name appeared in several successive editions of that paper.I did not know that Dennis had this role so my sleuthing was not in vain.

I have found many articles in Trove that mention Dennis from 1849 up until his death in 1894. He must have been shy in his younger years!

I am happy with what I found - Each snippet I find helps to fill out Dennis' story.