Cherry Tree Genealogy

10/14/2025

Getting all set up for my lecture for the Fearrington Village Genealogy group - happy Family History month! 🌳

09/19/2025

You might be a genealogist if... one day you're finding folks in the records from rural Mississippi, and the next you're digging through DNA matches from 19th century Italy!

09/07/2025

Examples like this are why I'm VERY hesitant to use AI in my genealogy work. 😬 When used correctly, AI *can* be useful, but it isn't always!

After seeing Paul K. Graham, Genealogist post an image of a map from AI, I decided to give it a try on Google Gemini. All I can say is wow.

I use AI for a few tasks (not writing and most certainly not map creation), but this was something else. It's so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.

--Michael

08/04/2025

Why hire a professional? Because the hint system on a genealogy website isn't going to visit an archive and review primary sources to find your great-great-grandmother for you 😉

07/17/2025

😂😂😂

06/29/2025

Yup 😂

100%!!!

06/26/2025

Yes! Knowing about the lives our family elders led can give us so much perspective, and unless we hear them, record them in some way, and pass them along to the next generation, those stories will fade away along with our ancestors.

You might think you already know your family’s stories pretty well, Elizabeth Keating wrote in 2022. But do you really know as much as you think? https://theatln.tc/wDvF4Mat

As an anthropology professor, Keating has always been fascinated by the stories that families tell, and a few years ago, she started researching the tales that are passed down from generation to generation. “Our elders may share some familiar anecdotes over and over again, but still, many of us have no broader sense of the world they lived in, and especially what it was like before we came along. The people I interviewed knew so little about their grandparents’ or parents’ early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people,” Keating explained. “Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children. Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.”

As Keating interviewed more people, she developed a set of questions designed to get a person talking about the past in a way they never had before. Some of the questions are basic background information, such as where someone was born, but some are more abstract inquiries, such as how someone conceives of their identity, what they believe in, and what they’ve noticed about the passage of time. Specificity is key, so after asking a relative about the home they grew up in, follow up with requests for details: What did their windows look out onto? What did they hear when they woke up in the morning? When you ask for descriptions of an elder’s childhood home and the neighborhoods they roamed around, you’ll hear stories that place you in a rich sensory world you’ve known little about. So ask what family dinners were like and what your relatives were taught about expressing emotion. Ask about their worst first dates and where they bought their clothes. And remember that the most important questions can also be the plainest. One of Keating’s favorites is just “What do you wish people knew about you?”

05/29/2025

In the past two weeks alone, I've researched families in New York City, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, California's Central Valley, and the Deep South. Every one of them is unique, and I love rediscovering their stories!

04/25/2025

It's DNA day! If you're looking for a sale, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, Living DNA, and 23andMe are where to find them (Ancestry does not have discounted kits today, but IS offering a 3-month membership for only $1 with the purchase of a DNA kit).

04/14/2025

It's official - Ireland has the best grave markers! Several included the deceased individual's street address. Many listed other members of the family (even if they weren't buried there). Some even named the cause the death. How fortunate to have access to all that information by simply walking into a cemetery! ☘️

03/29/2025

As many of us have heard by now, 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy and may be sold. The announcement has been received by the public with both panic (some have called for all users to delete their DNA profiles immediately) and reassurance (the company's legally-binding privacy policy must remain intact, even in the case of a sale, until a new company owner replaces it with a new one, which users would be notified about and asked to accept or opt out of at that time). I'm not going to advise one way or another, because we all have different comfort levels and everyone has the right to control their own DNA samples as they see fit. But I will share a blog post by Roberta Estes that helps explain the facts about what's happening, and directions on how to download your data if you'd like to. So don't panic, but do stay informed!

I dreaded this day, but 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy protection from their creditors. 23andMe announced this turn of events publicly with an open letter to their customers, here, and the attorn…

03/14/2025

Do you have Irish roots? MyHeritage is providing temporary free access to Irish records in honor of St. Patrick's Day! 🍀

☘️ Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with FREE access to 35 million Irish records! ☘️
Learn more: https://brnw.ch/21wRkvx