Haldimand County Obituary Margaret Mary Pharo 1913

 In Dunnville August 24, 1913, Margaret Mary, infant daughter of Mrs. Walter Pharo late of Surrey England, age x months and 10 days. Interment Riverside Cemetery

Her death registration found on Ancestry indicates she died of Marasmus which is a form of malnutrition.

She was born in Welland on 14 June 1913 so was only 2 months old. Her parents according to  Ancestry were Walter Pharo and Ann Hardy.

Oldest house in Britain discovered to be 11,500 years old

A Typical Archeology Dig

This is fascinating. Archeologists  uncovered a  circular structure near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, which dates back to the Stone Age 8,500 years BC. It was found next to a former lake and predates the dwelling previously thought to be Britain's oldest, at Howick, Northumberland, by at least 500 years.

The team said they are also excavating a large wooden platform made of timbers which have been split and hewn. It is thought to be the earliest evidence of carpentry in Europe.

It's fun to think about the possibility that one of your ancestors lived in this house! If you have ancestors from Scarborough Yorkshire this is certainly a possibility. My daughter-in-law has roots that go back to that area so it's interesting to speculate.

Have you researched the history of your house? Two years ago I researched the land where we built our home 16 years ago and that was fun. It used to be a large farm piece of property which was severed over the past 100 years. It was fun to look up the previous owners in census records.  Next I want to research the old homes I lived in when I was in town, especially the house that was haunted!

Read more at Oldest house in Britain discovered to be 11,500 years old

Prosapia Genetics - Worth the Money?

Yesterday I decided to check out a website that has the genealogy community buzzing. The Examiner called it a "Groundbreaking GPS tool [that] finds your ancestors, genealogy, family tree and history" 

Basically it is being touted as a Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, created by Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences and Dr Tatiana Tatarinova from the University of Southern California, which can locate your actual ancestor's home from 1,000 years ago.

According to the creators "What we have discovered here at the University of Sheffield is a way to find not where you were born – as you have that information on your passport – but where your DNA was formed up to 1,000 years ago by modeling these admixture processes."

That sounded fascinating but I was somewhat sceptical. How can a GPS tool (or any tool for that matter) take all your ancestral lines as shown by your DNA, and come up with ONE "ancestral village" of origin? As my good friend Jennifer Zinck mentioned, that's akin to taking the average of all your ancestors instead of the sum.

Prosapia Genetics Website

To help people find their roots, the researchers  developed a site called  Prosapia Genetics to make this DNA tracking available to the public. They claim that “Anyone who has had their DNA genotyped (an estimated one million people in the USA) can upload their results and use GPS to find their ancestral home."

The site indicates that it is as "easy as 1, 2, 3" Basically you either purchase their DNA kit or you pay for a GPS map and upload your raw data file from a DNA company where you have already tested. Then you view a GPS map showing your ancestral home.

I had to try it. It looked like fun and I was curious as to whether or not my skepticism was well-founded or I was being too critical.  I decided to go with my brother's DNA instead of mine. Once you decided to upload your DNA you pay for the GPS map. There are 3 choices ranging from $29.99 (U.S.) to $42.99. I decided to go with the Super Test at $42.99 because it used the most reference populations. According to the online FAQ, the more reference populations used, the more accurate the result (which is only common sense).

The Map of My Ancestral Home?

After uploading my DNA data it only took about an hour before I got an email from Prosapia Genetics stating his map was ready. To my surprise all it showed was one red marker in a wooded area in Yorkshire England near Driffield. This was supposedly his "ancestral home". 

My mother's lineage is solidly British from Kent England until the 1600s except for one family - the Stead family, who left Yorkshire in the mid 1700s for Kent. Okay at least we do have a known Yorkshire connection. But it's only ONE family out of hundreds of other ancestors.

My father's lineage is Ireland, Holland, Germany, Native American, a bit of French, a smattering of England from Cheshire and Suffolk. I have researched these lines back to the 1600s and there is not a trace of any ancestor from Yorkshire.

There may indeed be other Yorkshire ancestors in our lineage. But Prosapia's result is NOT indicative of my "ancestral home"! That is because there is not just one ancestral home but many when we look at all our ancestors. To my mind the map should have shown me several markers in different countries - in Ireland, in Holland, in Germany, in France, and so on.  I hoped it would show me some specific locations in countries that showed on my Ethnicity results from the different DNA companies I had tested with.

I wish the creators had been more precise and accurate in their wording. The Prosapia Genetics website states "Our first tool, GPS, will tell you where your DNA was forged" but that is inacurate and misleading. It would be more accurate if it said "Our first tool, GPS, will tell you where ONE PORTION OF your DNA was forged" 

Caveat

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying this is a scam. I'm not trashing the company. I am saying that I think it's incorrect and even misleading to claim that their technology can find an individual's "ancestral home".  I am saying I paid a lot of money for very little. I'm saying I was extremely disappointed in the resulting map.

I would love to hear from any of my readers who obtained a GPS map using Prosapia Genetics. What was your opinion?

Kirby Orphaned Photo Album - Step by Step Discoveries

Last week I purchased another orphaned antique Photo Album. The owner's name was inscribed inside the front cover

          Maude M. Kirby

Of course I couldn't leave it in the antique store so it came home with me. The next day I started documenting and researching to see if I could find the family whose pictures were in this beautiful album.

It's been a challenge. There are very few names written in full, instead I found tantalizing references written on the backs of some of the photos: "Lillian and Baby Donalda", "4 Generations",  "Mother is 76 years old and growing younger every day" But no surnames! No hint of the relationship to the writer or the album owner.

After carefully removing and photographing all 120 photographs, I made a list of each one. I entered full details - photographer's name, location photo taken, any writing on reverse of photo, estimated time period of photo (based on visual clues such as clothing, hairstyles, type of photograph etc)

When I realized there were no clues re family surnames except for the inscription Maude M. Kirby in the front of the album, I decided to research Maude on Ancestry.com.  Unfortunately there are hundreds of Maude M. Kirby names, and without knowing a country of time period, I could not narrow the results to something manageable. Remember, I don't know when Maude owned this album and I don't believe she was the only owner as the photos range from early 1860s to late 1920s. I suspect more than one person owned this photo album

Also re country of the owner or the individuals in the album - some CDVs were from English photographers and one was from Brantford Ontario Canada. Since I purchased the album in Ontario, I had a hunch the album started its life in England and then came to Canada with family. Narrowing my search for Maude to England and then Canada and then Ontario did not help. There were still too many results.

One early CDV (ca 1870s) was of a minister. Written on the photo was his name "Rev. W. Mitchell". The photographer, Boak, was a Driffield studio.  A search online showed that Matthew Boak had a studio in Driffield as early as 1873.

Since many of the early CDVs were taken by photographers in Driffield, Yorkshire England I decided to find out what church Rev. Mitchell had ministered. It seemed to me that the family would hold their own minister in high enough regard to have his photo, and therefore they likely attended his church. A search of the church records might reveal a Kirby family or even Maude M. Kirby herself.

No need to go into details but that idea did not pan out. Yes I found Rev. Mitchell mentioned as minister of an Independent Church in Driffield and reference to a sermon he gave in 1863. But there was no mention of Kirby in the online Driffield church records and in fact Great Driffield records do not appear to be online at this time.

Lillian & Baby Donalda

I also searched on FamilySearch, thinking perhaps I could make an educated "guess" as to relationships, then enter the first names only. For example the photo with writing "Lillian and Baby Donalda" was a picture of a woman and a young baby. It appeared to be taken ca 1920s and my theory was that Lillian was the mother with her child. So I searched for a child Donalda born ca 1920-1930 with mother Lillian but was met with disappointment.

Continuing to search with so little information was proving fruitless so hubs and I laid the photos out on our coffee table and began studying them for clues. It is amazing what you can discover if you really study and analyze such things as the background of a photo, the architecture of a building, the vegetation in an outdoor snap.

This is not a quick or easy process and took us several days of intensive study and discussion - comparing our findings with each other, trying to confirm hunches and basically coming up with any new clues or theories that we could. I made lists of all the clues we were discovering.

For example, one outdoor photo was of a monument of some kind with statues of Indians. On the verso in handwriting it said "Victoria Park 1907" A Google search turned up dozens of Victoria Park references in different countries so that wasn't much help. But the Indian statues provided a clue that this photo was likely taken in North America and not England or another country.

Then we did a reverse image search using Google and there it was - the monument in the photo was of Joseph Brant and is on display in Brantford Ontario. So we had another reference to Brantford. It wasn't enough to enable us to find the family but at least it confirmed that Brantford had some connection to the family.

My journey continues and through this blog I will share the clues, the discoveries, the successes and the failures in my hunt to discover where this album belongs and what family held it so dear for over 60 years. Readers can follow along with me by using the link for Kirby Photo Archive

An Orphaned Antique Photo Album Comes Home With Me

 Yesterday I stumbled on another orphaned antique Photo Album. The owner's name was inscribed inside the front cover

          Maude M. Kirby

Of course I couldn't leave it in the antique store so it came home with me. This morning I started documenting and archiving.

It's a large album, 8 1/2x12 inches. I haven't counted the pages or the photos yet but it's 2" thick.

Archiving and documenting takes me a long time. I start with taking camera photos of every page. Then I upload them to Dropbox (cloud storage) so I have an immediate backup.

 This is the front inside cover and is representative of the photo pages inside. Not every page has such a beautiful coloured flower but there are at least 13 of them. They are all in excellent condition, brightly coloured and intact.

After I have taken pictures of all the pages as they are, I start to record each page. I do that by slowly and carefully removing the photo(s) on each page and writing down all the information found - photographer's name and location, type of photo (CDV, Cabinet Card, tintype, etc)  If there is any handwritten notation on the photo I record that too.

Then I assign a number to each photo. That goes along with whatever name I give the album, in this case, KIRBY. I shorten this to 3 letters for my inventory/naming system. So the first photo in this album will be KIR-1 and I record this lightly in pencil on the reverse of the photo.

This is another page in this lovely photo album.  I did manage to finish taking camera snaps of each page and have removed about twenty of the photos.

As an added surprise several of the photos had other photos tucked underneath. While I still have much to do on this album before the archiving and documentation is complete, I hope to find enough identifying information to research the individuals in the album.

This album appears to have been used by one family over more than one generation. Some of the Cartes de Visite are from the 1860s while other photos are dated 1920. 

After I remove all the photos from the album I take another camera picture of each one, front and verso (back). This allows me to easily and quickly zoom in on anything I wish to inspect for clues to the individuals or locations of each photo.

Then I use my wonderful Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner to create a quick but top quality scan of each photo.  I'll be documenting the album here on my Olive Tree Genealogy blog in hopes a descendant spots the names or photos and recognizes them.

 Meantime it seems many of the photos were taken in Yorkshire England but I did spot one that was from a Brantford Ontario Canada photographer. I am sure there are many more surprises to be found as I continue removing the photos and checking the backs.

Yorkshire Vital Records Online

A few days ago I discovered that Ancestry.com has Yorkshire England records online. If you have Yorkshire ancestors, you'll want to run, not walk, to search them.

My son has Yorkshire lineage through his dad (Schulze, Hill, Dewhirst, Metcalf, Scholfield, Horner and more) and using these databases on Ancestry.com I was able to find dozens of church records for ancestors I already had in my genealogy program, and learn new names to add to his family tree.

Even for the ancestors I had previously found, what a bonus these Yorkshire records are! The marriage records give the father's name and occupations of both fathers, plus the groom. Residences are listed. In one day of intensive searching I found literally dozens of new details and several new ancestors for my son's paternal line.

The new Yorkshire records that are on Ancestry.com are:


* West Yorkshire, England, Births and Baptisms, 1813-1906

* West Yorkshire, England, Marriages and Banns, 1813-1921

* West Yorkshire, England, Deaths and Burials, 1813-1985

* West Yorkshire, England, Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1512-1812

* West Yorkshire, England, Confirmations 1859-1915