Genie tips from The Patient Genie

This week I messaged a DNA match at My Heritage - they are the largest shared cM match I have on my father's paternal line. I had tried to work out their ancestors by first checking Free BMD - one of my favourite index sites to look for birth, death and marriage info for my English connections. Unusually I couldn't find enough pointers from this site to gather more clues, so messaging was my only option. When messaging somone for the first time there are a few key points to keep in mind: the person may not be actively researching their family - they may have tested out of curiousity they may have just started researching their family and not have a lot of information they may be a descendant of unknown parentage and hoping to find their biological family they may not like to share information with total strangers So my I aim to make first messages: Friendly Short and sweet only ask one question, usually about grandparents rather than currently living peo...

Tips 🌳    Read the help 🌳    Search creatively for -   spelling variations -  transcription errors or omissions -  address info via keyword 🌳    Search all sites carrying the record set Help It's important to know what information you might find for any one particular census year. So you are not searching on a field that wasn't collected at that time AND so you can be more creative with your keywords. eg: f irst name Richard keyword Baddow or Lower Green or Galleywood. The various location descriptions for Richard Saveall - who was found indexed at Ancestry as Sareall  and at Findmypast as Sarcott . The information about what was collected for any given UK Census record set is available at both Ancestry and Findmypast.  Ancestry SCROLL DOWN past the search query information when looking at any one particular census year eg: 1851 UK  Keep scrolling down to see the " known pro...

Adding a DNA match to your tree You might like to enter your DNA matches into your trees, I prefer to use Ancestry’s online tree service, in addition it synchronizes with my off-line software (FamilyTreeMaker 2019). Most of my matches are there - but I can add info from the other testing companies and link it back to a matches profile in the Ancestry Tree. You can build a tree for free at Ancestry, MyHeritage (limited to 250 entries) and FTDNA. There are some assumptions to be acknowledged, before adding information from a DNA match. that the person testing has attached their DNA to the correct place in the tree and that the information for the closest deceased person/s in the tree is correct. It pays to verify what you can before adding information to you DNA research tree, do note that sometimes you cannot verify this information by usual genealogy means due to privacy restrictions. To limit transcription errors, it is best to save information directly from a match...