Since My Last Post

 

Carl Anderson (rt), his son Axel (lt), his grandson Gilbert (standing), and great-grandson.

Since my last post, I've spent a good deal of my genealogy time transcribing an interview that my great-uncle, Axel Anderson, recorded with my great-grandfather, Carl Johan Anderson, in 1955.

For some reason, a post about the information from the recording just would not come together, but it is the 19th of the month, I really want to stick to a minimum of two posts per month, so I thought I would write about what I've been up to.

One of the challenges posed by the Anderson recording was language. Carl was born in Sweden and there were some words and phrases, mostly names and place names, that I could not make out. There is also a thirty second exchange between Axel and Carl in Swedish. The Genealogical Translations group on Facebook really delivered for me here. A volunteer provided the missing words and names for me and also transcribed the Swedish segment with a translation, all within about 24-hours of my post.

In the past, I have also received translation help from one of the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness groups on Facebook, but that was for a quick translation of a headstone. This was a little more complicated, so I wanted to go to a group just for translations. I could see after I was accepted to this private group that all of the posts were asking for help with written translations, so I wanted to make my request as easy as possible. The recording was about an hour and fifteen minutes in two files, and I surely wasn't going to ask anyone to listen to the whole recording. I went through my transcription and made sure that each point where I had questions was notated with a I or II depending on which file the audio was on, and placed a time stamp. I then made the text bold and red for English words and blue for Swedish words. After checking the document one last time, I uploaded it to a new Dropbox folder and moved the .mp3 files into that folder, and then I created a link to the folder which I included in my request in the group. Since I was new to the group, I checked the group's rules before making my post and made sure to follow them. And again, in about 24 hours, I had my translations. It was a great experience.

I also had some questions about some of the content of the interview and I took those to the Swedish Culture & Traditions group. The specifics will be a blog post of their own once I do some additional reading, but I'll just say that this group was again very helpful; I had at least a dozen people offering information very quickly.

As for my Hobbs-Merritt line, I've finally stopped procrastinating on making a locality guide for Somerset County, England. It's such an important tool when you start research in a new area, but I have to admit, I find it a bit tedious to put together. And then there's the temptation to jump down rabbit holes when I find a new resource! But, I am making good progress. And thank goodness I have a template to follow; I haven't made a new guide in a while and I'd be lost without it.

I was only able to catch a few sessions live from RootsTech. I did attend a webinar a few nights ago from Amy Johnson Crow about the new full-text searching feature from FamilySearch. That is a very exciting development! I'm looking forward to more record sets in the future.

And finally, I've been playing around more with my mother's DNA matches on Ancestry since sending in my kit and Donald's kit. I was a little worried about Donald not getting results because he had a little trouble that day working up enough saliva, even with all the little tricks, but all was well. It was my DNA that Ancestry couldn't extract!! Hopefully I'm only a few days away from getting my results from my new sample. Thank goodness the second test was free. In the meantime, I've uploaded Donald's data to MyHeritage and Family Tree DNA and I'll start looking at their tools as soon as I can.

Although I feel like I missed something, I think that's all since my last post. I hope I can find material for another post by the end of the month.