This weeks spot light is on the Amanda Varner Rarick & Levi Rarick family

This past week I have begun working on Daniel Grant Varner's (Sr) children.  I'm currently working on the the family of Amanda Varner Rarick & Levi Rarick.  Their children were Curtis, Pearl, Raymond, Ralph and Mina.

I have found some first cousins 1x removed, second and third cousins.  Added seventeen new people to the family tree so far.

The Ancestry web hints are proving invaluable and the Rootsmagic "Tree Share" is working great.  As I'm going through them I am also adding to or updating the Family Search people and matching them to Rootsmagic.  I will turn on the Familysearch and My Heritage web hints after I've made it through all the Ancestry hints.

I hope to make it through the rest of this branch this week.

Restarting direct line descendant research and Rootsmagic TreeShare

I have finished my work on the John Washington Varner line for now.  It is not nearly complete but I will turn it over to cousin Kim for further documentation.

I am ready to spend a little time on a mini genealogy redo project.  Working my Varner line I will start at the end of the line and begin cleaning up my source documentation on direct line descendants.  At the same time I will work through all of the webhints I have in RootsMagic.  These will be from Ancestry, FamilySearch and MyHeritage.  At this time I have turned off the webhints for FindMyPast.  In addition to webhints I also plan to check on Fold3 for any military records.  I have found that the webhints fairly well cover, census records, SSDI, social security applications, most vital records and Find A Grave.

Now that RootsMagic has the new Treeshare option for Ancestry it is fairly easy to keep my Ancestry tree up to date and make better use of their shaky leaves.  That along with the integration with FamilySearch makes catching the low hanging fruit so much easier.

Peter L Varner on FamilySearch Family Tree

I have spent the last few days trying to fix the Peter L Varner family on the FamilySearch Family Tree.  Peter was married three times. Peter and his first wife Rebecca Righter had seven children.  Peter and his second wife Hannah Razer had two children.  Peter and his third wife Louise Lair had two children.

There were three records to be merged for Peter, two for Rebecca and two for Louise.  Some of the children had duplicates as well.  Many were assigned to the wrong parents.  Overall it was a complete disaster.

I spent an entire afternoon just trying to put together everything that was already in FamilySearch. The next day after reviewing everything again and determining what was there I then set about trying  to merge all of the children's records first.  Then I merged the duplicate parents.  Once I was down to a single record for each person I could then change the parental linkages to match the children to the correct set of parents.

Because of the complexity of the cleanup process I worked only in FamilySearch, it was simply too confusing to try to work it through RootsMagic.  I still have to go back and rematch my RootsMagic person to the merged FamilySearch person.  Once that is done I can begin sharing the data and sources between the two.

This was an interesting project but I don't think I want to tackle another family for awhile.  I need to get back to working on the source documentation.

Ancestry DNA results received and taking a break

It's been several weeks since I've written anything but I've not been completely idle.  Just not spending much time on research at the moment.

About two weeks ago I received my Ancestry DNA results.  The results seemed to confirm the research I have so far uncovered.

Europe 99%  as follows:

Europe West  42%

Primarily located in: Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein

Also found in: England, Denmark, Italy, Slovenia, Czech Republic

Great Britain  36 %

Primarily located in: England, Scotland, Wales

Also found in: Ireland, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Italy

Ireland  6 %

In addition to the above Ancestry matched my DNA with others on Ancestry.com who have taken the DNA test.  Two third cousins were identified and numerous fourth cousins.  I have been in contact with one of the fourth cousin already and we are comparing our family trees trying to find the common ancestor we share.

I had mentioned in an earlier post that I had started Indexing on family search again.  I enjoyed working on the 1940 census and some draft registrations but hadn't done anything for quite awhile.  To make a long story short I started indexing the Obituary projects.  Well I'm hooked again.  Not only am I indexing records again but I've now became an arbitrator as well.  I've spent almost all of my free time working on the German immigrant obituary project for the last several weeks.

I really need to make some time and contact some more of the cousins that showed up with my DNA match and I need to set aside some time for some researching as well.