Now the time has come to focus on the future: Kindo has become read-only, which means that you can’t do any changes to your family tree on kindo.com anymore. But no worries, all the changes that you have done on Kindo in the last couple of months will be there on your MyHeritage account as well. Our development team has exported your trees and reimported them to your new home on myheritage.com.

So please help us guiding you and your family over to the new site with it’s many new features, different design but its familiar faces… those of your relatives. Enjoy your MyHeritage family site, the birthday reminders via SMS, the Smart Matching to find new relatives and obviously your family tree, who looks very similar to what you were used to on Kindo.

Let us know if you have any questions, feedback, suggestions for improvement or other wishes. We will still have an open ear.

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

As you see from the smiles in the picture below, this is a happy day for us here in the Putney Offices.

Nils and the Kindo family

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This years Swedish Genealogy Days the yearly conference of the Swedish Federation of Genealogical Societies was held in the city of Malmö in the province of Skåne in southern Sweden. Over 100 exibitors crowded in the convention center at Europaporten in Malmö. Everything from genealogical societies, archives to companies offering original sources online.

Erik Gustavson from the Kinship Center in Karlstad in the province of Värmland spoke about EMIWEB a new project launched by the Kinship Center the Swedish Emigrant Institute. Göteborgs Emigranten and some others.

EMIWEB is a webb-place aimed at housing some of the databases containing Swedish emigrants to USA and other countries for example databases of Swedish emigrants taken from Swedish church records and also members of Swedish-American societies.In time the databases should be searchable over the web for a subscription fee. I was lucky to get an interview with Erik Gustavson which I hope to use in a later podcast episode.

Among the exibitors was the Swedish Emigrant Institute from Växjö. They were friendly to let me go with them in their car.
Here we can see archivist Kristina Persson and Bo Björklund study some of the Institutes databases containing Swedish emigrants to USA and other places.

The second day of the Genealogy Days provided many intresting lectures. Since the theme of the conference was the
Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 when the provinces of Skåne Halland and Blekinge became Swedish (they had belonged to Denmark before that) and how that and following events impacted the people of the provinces as well as Denmark and Sweden.

Many of the lectures of the conference was on this theme. I attended one about “The terrible Swedes” given by Charlotte S H Jensen (in the middle of the picture to the left). Despite this fact she and several other friendly Danes had come as representatives of Samenslutningen af Slaegthistoriske foreninger(Danish Genealogical Societies) to give help and answer questions from people with Danish roots. For those interested in Danish genealogy here is a link to a thew web-page of Arkivalieronline (Danish archives online). I even got an interview with Charlotte which I will use in a later podcast episode.

The members Malmö Genealogical Society who organised the conference surely had a lot to do. As seen on the picture beside. they had their hands full of showing people around. Unfortunately I could not get an interview with any of them.

Peter Wallenskog former C E O of Genline
spoke of the companys goal to provide still more Swedish church records online. s well as the companys new websites familjeband.se and bygdeband.se. Familjeband (family ties) is a webased site were it should be possible to put up ones family three online. it seems interesting however it is still in BETA face. they seam to have problems with importing gedcom files.
and I do not think the site really will will take of until they have solved that problem.

Bygdeband (ties to places) is a similar website but aimed at local historical societies so they will be able to but up their materials about different locations for example photos and descriptions. It should then be possible to tie persons from Familjeband.se to places in Bygdeband.se I got an interview with Peter Wallenskog this year too which I will use in a later podcast episode.

The most far away participants I could find was Lorna Nelson and Lenora Lynam from the Mc Pherson County Old Mill Museum in Lindsborg Kansas. Linsborg was founded by swedes in the late 1860-ties and still a great part of the population has their ancestors in Sweden. It seems like the Old Mill museum has some cooperation with Genline sinc ethey were standing in the Genline conference booth.
it was very nice speaking to them and I also got an interview with Lorna.

A popular feature at the Genealogy Days was “Släktsök” (Search your family) A place in the exibition hall with a lot of computers. there any visitor to the conference could search their ancestors or relatives in genealogy databases CD-Roms or sites with scnanned images online for free (and even get a little help fom experienced genealogists). All to get a little taste if Family History was something for them.

As a whole thew Genealogy Days was very worth visiting. The entrance fee for visitors was relatively modest 40 Swedish kronor for each Day (a little over 6 American dollar).so you cold visit both conference day for about 12-13 dollar no preregistration was needed for visitors (only for exibitors). Around 3000 people attended and there were around 110 exibitors. The Swedish Federation of Genealogical societies also elected a new chairman Barbro Stålheim who succeded Ted Rosvall. Next years genealogy Days will be in the city of Falköping in the province of Västergötland!

In the meanwhile, you can still work on your profiles and upload the photos from the weekend’s family reunion.

Update: Now everything is fixed! It was the database acting a bit weird but Stephen has done a great job to fix it. (Let’s buy him a lunch now!) Thanks everyone for the patience!

One example from Flickr

photo credit: S Migol

Most archives have land records, and many have an online way to search the index and then order a copy of the record you want for a small fee. Just as an example, you could use these sites in Great Britain.

• For English and Welsh records see Public Record Office Leaflet: Tithe Records in the Public Record Office. Scottish records are held at the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh.
• Legal Terms in Land Records is a useful glossary of obscure terms which occur in property deeds.
• Robin Alston’s Country House Database “represents a first attempt at listing country houses in the British Isles from the late medieval period to ca. 1850, together with an index to all the families so far traced as having occupied them”.
• Estate Records held by Kings College, Cambridge.

Just as the squirrels and different kinds of birds collect nuts and seeds, someone in the Kindo office seems to be doing some really solid forward planning.

Judging from this picture - it’s going to be a looong winter.

The NOT is very important to genealogists searching for surnames that are also common words: BROWN, FOX, BANKS, & WEEKS are just some examples.  To find genealogy pages for these surnames in Yahoo now, be sure to put a minus-sign directly in front of a term that you want excluded from search result (meaning that Yahoo! will exclude pages that has that term in their text) and a plus sign in front of terms you must have. So to get hits for pages with genealogy and Banks surname, instead of

BANKS AND GENEALOGY NOT FINANCE NOT RIVER

you would formulate it as

+BANKS +GENEALOGY -FINANCE -RIVER

The OR operator still works, and the AND is assumed if you use no operators, but nesting with parentheses doesn’t as in

+(BANKS AND GENEALOGY) - (FINANCE OR RIVER)

Advanced Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator, which really helps with common surnames, but Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.

For more details on how to do the Boolean Boogie for genealogy, read Genealogy Online 8th Edition.

Most beginners to genealogy are fuzzy about cousinship. For example, while many understand first cousins are people with common grandparents, many folks confuse first cousin once removed and second cousin.

Then, there are families like mine: My mother’s siblings were born from 1911 to 1932. That means her youngest brother “Mike” went to school with the oldest sister’s oldest child, his niece “Karen”. As it turned out, Uncle “Mike” and niece “Karen” married two people who were siblings, “Michelle”  and “Kevin”, making their children both first cousins and first cousins once removed.

Confused yet? Okay. The number of cousinship is how many generations back the connection is, and the removed part shows the connection is more generations back for one person than another. “Mike” and “Michelle” ’s kids have common grandparents with “Kevin” and “Karen’s”, ergo, first cousins. But on the other side, “Mike” and “Michelle’s” kids have an aunt who is grandmother to “Karen’s” and “Kevin’s” children, ergo, first cousins removed by one generation.

“Mike” and “Michelle’s” grandkids are second cousins to my mother’s grandkids, i. e. my children. “Mike” and “Michelle’s” children are my first cousins. “Kevin” and “Karen’s” children are my first cousins once removed, because “Karen” and I are first cousins.

Another way to look at it: Determine the latest common ancestor, and then the number of “G”s you share.  That is the number of cousins you are. Any difference in “G”s is the number “Removed”. So, people who have the same great-grand-parents (2G) are second cousins (2C). If the great-grand-parents (2G) of one person are the great-great-grand-parents (3G) of another person, then those two people are second cousins, once removed (2C1R). They share 2Gs with a difference of 1G (3-2=1).

Here are some links to charts that might make it easier to see:

• A Chart for Figuring Relationships
• A Chart for Figuring Relationships
• A Chart of Consanguinity
• Consanguinity Chart
  Showing degrees of relationship by blood.
• Cousin Calculator
• Cousin Chart
  From Wikipedia.

“Using DNA is one of the newest and latest tools of tracing your genealogy, and it’s remarkable,” said Wells, who represented Family Tree DNA.”You can see if they migrated, you can find out more about your great-aunt and maybe she acted strangely, but that was because she had a baby die at childbirth … you just never know what secrets the past will reveal,” Wells said.

We all know that because of paper trails for genealogical lines usually stopping in the late 1700s or early 1800s, because of spelling changes and fires in courthouses or libraries… it is hard to find relatives. But DNA helps discover previously unknown kinships, identify errors in paper form and as a result makes research easier.

How does it work? After obtaining samples and finding a reliable testing company, it takes between almost a month and a half to get the results, it means a string of numbers that you’ll have to read and compare. Some group of administrator also exist to help you analyze results.

However, it’s worth shedding light on some shortcomings:

-First it does not replace paper documentation since it does not name common ancestors, it is more a tool to prove lineage. Several companies, like Family Tree DNA, can assist you to confirm your family tree or allow you to determine whether two people are related if you give them DNA of someone.

- It’s less reffective for females to use DNA than for males because thanks to Y-DNA, we can determine paternal and maternal lines, whereas for females it is just maternal.

It’s back to school time, and maybe you’re thinking you need to know more about genealogy techniques and methods. One way to learn about genealogy is to take an online  course. Here are a few suggestions to get you started: Introduction to Genealogy from National Genealogical Society (U.S.) Most genealogists take this course first. It is very American-centric, but the techniques can be applied to any country’s vital statistics. There are more advance courses for specific regions and resources (e.g. wills). Introduction to Genealogy is an online course for those who have done little, if any, research on their families. It is open to anyone who wishes to enroll. Members of the National Genealogical Society (NGS) receive a tuition discount. Family History Personal Enrichment Classes Learn from Brigham Young University about research in the United States, France and Germany. These are non-credit courses, so there are no exams! Certificate in Genealogical Studies The National Institute for Genealogical Studies has joined forces with the Professional Learning Centre, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto to provide web-based courses for both family historians and professional genealogists. Canadian-based. GenClass Online classes in a variety of genealogical topics are conducted online by qualified, experienced instructors. Each four-week class includes a detailed course curriculum and online class meetings for $29.95. A more comprehensive listing, along with seminars, workshops and classes, can be found in my book.