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Fall Maple tree

Since returning from my trip to Germany and Switzerland I have been spending a significant amount of time labeling my more than 2,000 photos and going through the various books, papers and DVDs provided to me by the wonderful hosts in my hometowns. I am so grateful that I sent emails home almost daily, documenting my adventures and including photos. Between the emails and my blog posts I have been able to identify most of the photos. Remembering the food in the photos would have been a big challenge without this help.

Rolf in Switzerland sent me a gedcom file of all of the Kubler names and dates he has found so far. (A gedcom file is basically a universal file format that allows you to share genealogical data between different genealogy software programs.) Theoretically, anyway. I was unable to get my software, Family Treemaker, to open the gedcom file, so I downloaded a free software program called Family Tree Builder. I think that is the software that Rolf was using, but I am not positive about that. With this free software I was able to open and import the file Rolf sent to me. The file contains 300 names, and probably more than 275 of those were new to me. The new names I then had to type into Family Treemaker so that all my tree would be in one place.

In placing all these new leaves on my family tree I was able to see the relationship between me and the cousins that I met while there. For example Josef and Susanne Kubler, who graciously had dinner with me twice while I was in Busserach, are my sixth cousins, once removed. How fun is that?

I am still working my way through the data provided to me in Insheim, Germany. I hope to finish up with that side of the family this weekend. Then I will concentrate on uploading my photos to shutterfly.com so that I can put together a book about my trip while the memories are still fresh. It will be a joy to relive the trip through my photo book.

For several years I have been seeing advertisements by Family Tree Tours to travel to the country of your ancestors for the purpose of doing genealogical research and also to see the areas where they lived. It seems that the trips are normally to Germany, though I do think they went to Ireland last year. What makes these tours unique is that the tour director will try to line up an English speaking person in the town you want to visit, and will help you get to the town for a visit to hopefully learn about your family. Since I don't speak one lick of German, this would be of great benefit to me.

The reason I began to think seriously about going this year is the fact that we have a copy of the travel journal that Elsie Metz kept back in 1912. My Metz family is from the Rhineland Pfalz area of Germany, and that happens to be one of the tours in 2013. As I looked at the map I realized that the last town the tour will be visiting is only a thirty minute drive from Insheim, where my Metz family lived. Additionally one of my Metz cousins has introduced me through Facebook to a Metz relative who still lives in Insheim, so the possibility exists that I could meet her as well.

Unfortunately after looking at all of the German ancestors on both my side and Jim's side of the family, the Metz family is the only one from this region of Germany. So I would not be able to try and find any additional families on this trip. As part of the tour price, they will arrange for you to visit up to three ancestral towns so I would lose out there.

After reviewing the tour as a whole and all the wonderful places it will be visiting, I decided to go ahead and sign up for the trip. I mailed my deposit off yesterday. I know there are a couple people from the St. Louis Genealogical Society who have also committed to the trip, so I am hoping that we might be able to coordinate our travel plans so that I am not flying that distance alone. But if not, I will survive. What an adventure this will be! I can follow Elsie's lead and keep a travel journal. I will definitely be thinking of her on the trip.

This afternoon I received an email notifying me that my AncestryDNA test results were in. All I needed to do was click on Go To Results. I hesitated for a moment before hitting the button. What would I find? Would the results be so diluted as to not provide much information at all? What I found was certainly a surprise to me! The opposite of being too diluted, the results were almost too specific. Here is my chart:

AncestryDNA results

As I have looked at the charts of other people who have been posting their results, I have never seen one that is this narrow or limited in ethnicity. What is more puzzling, though, is the fact that my dad's paternal line came from northern Switzerland and my mom's maternal line came from central Germany. Where are my European roots? I was provided with a list of Ancestry.com members who purportedly match my DNA and also have British Isles ancestry. The next step is to go to their family trees to see if and where our families overlap.

Crusham Family

On my Write Formation blog I have been writing about the fact that I am participating in the February Family History Writing Challenge again this year. For last year's challenge I was writing about one of the branches on my mom's tree - the Crusham family. I would love to do a book about the family particularly since I have traveled to where they lived in Ireland, and I thought the challenge would give me the push I needed to get on with the project. I was able to keep up with the daily writing word count I had established for myself, but I realized there is still a lot I don't know about the family. So I have continued to research them and the towns they lived in. For this year's challenge I decided to write my own story, and it has been much easier to come up with things I want to say. I think I will probably just keep going with it once the challenge is done the end of February.

Having said that, I am excited to be going over to Cincinnati this weekend with my sister. We always have a lot of fun visiting the relatives and eating unique Cincinnati food, but this weekend I will be pushing forward with my Crusham research. Two of my mom's first cousins, sisters in fact, are meeting my sister and me for lunch on Saturday. My mom's two remaining sisters will join us as well. These cousins, whom I have only met briefly at funerals, used to live with my great-grandparents when they were young. I am so eager to hear the stories they will have to tell! And I am hoping they won't mind if I videotape them as well, if that is possible at a restaurant. Maybe they know why great-grandpa's dad came over from Ireland all by himself when he was only about 18 years old. And why he picked Cincinnati as a place to live. If I am lucky I will be getting some great material to add to the Crusham Chronicles!

There has been a lot pf press for several years about using DNA testing to help with researching your family tree. A couple of the earlier ones required that you test a male member of the family - preferably your father or brother. As I don't have any male relatives living near me, I kind of dismissed the idea of doing testing. Now ancestry.com, a very popular genealogy website, has come out with a test that can be taken by either males or females. It is an autosomal test, meaning it tests all 23 chromosomes. When they offered 50% off to try the test as a subscriber to their website, I decided to look into it.

Ancestry DNA kit

All the tests have pros and cons associated with them, but this test gets fairly good reviews from those who have taken it. So I bit the bullet and ordered the test, which arrived last week.Here is what is in the box.

Testing kit and return envelope

The first thing you need to do is register your kit with Ancestry so that they can track the specimen that you provide. By assigning a number, the privacy of the donor is protected. As much as anything can be protected in this day and age. You are not allowed to eat, drink or chew gum for 30 minutes prior to taking the test. At this point I was still under the assumption that you swab the inside of your cheek for the specimen. Isn't that what they always show on CSI? Wrong.This test requires you to spit in the provided plastic tube. At first when I saw the "Fill to" line, I thought I had to fill up half the tube! Then I looked closer and realized that there is a small container within the tube that captures the spit. Still, it was pretty gross. I would have rather done a swab test.

my specimen bag

ready for the mail

After you fill to the required line you snap the lid closed, which releases a solution in with the spit. Then you remove the solution cap and replace it with a screw on lid. The container is then placed into a sealed bag, eerily labeled "Biohazard". Ewww... The bag is then inserted into the provided mailer, and returned to the lab. Mine went out in Saturday's mail, and with the holiday on Monday I guess it will be mid-week before they receive it. When my results are ready (normally in 6-8 weeks) I will receive an email. The nice thing about being a subscriber to Ancestry is that if they find any matches with other people also on Ancestry we can connect. It will be interesting to see what happens with all this.

Last week I attended the National Genealogical Society's (NGS) annual conference in Cincinnati. I was quite excited that it was taking place there as that is where I was born. For once many of the conference topics would be on point for my research. The only other NGS conference I have attended took place in St. Louis many years ago. As a member of the host organization, the St. Louis Genealogical Society, I had volunteered to take care of publicity for the event. Wow - what a job that was! Any way, my sister drove over with me on Tuesday and we both spent the night at my cousin's house. Kathy then drove me to the hotel the next morning, and I checked into one of the conference hotels for three nights. Kathy stayed out at my cousins, but I wanted to be downtown so I could easily get to the meetings. Since they ran from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., I didn't want to have to deal with the long drive each way every day.

The conference was good, and I picked up some new tips and tricks. But for me the best part came on Thursday evening when they kept the library open just for conference attendees. We had the library to ourselves (all 400 of us!) from 6:30 until 11:30 p.m. It was great! I lasted until 11:00 before I headed back to my hotel. That probably wasn't one of my better decisions, since I walked back all by myself. Luckily I did not end up as a statistic in the Friday morning issue of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Tom + Chee

I was able to have dinner and drinks one evening with my cousin, Gina, and that was quite fun. Then on Thursday for lunch I met one of my third cousins for the first time. We had exchanged emails about our common Metz ancestor years ago. More recently we have been friends on Facebook. But to be able to meet him in person was wonderful. It was as if we had always been friends. We went to a place called Tom + Chee (because all they serve is tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches). The restaurant was featured on the show Man v. Food, and as a fan of the show I was excited to eat there. Since it was Cincinnati, of course I had to get the sandwich with goetta on it. Yum!

Unfortunately early in the morning on Saturday I began to feel really sick. At 8:00 I called my sister and asked her to come and pick me up. So I missed the entire last day of the conference but it could not be helped. I think I got sick from the Chinese food I had eaten Friday night. The worst part was that I did not get to go out to eat with my aunts and cousins Saturday night, which is something I was very much looking forward to doing. But I did feel well enough by Sunday that I was able to drive us back home. Happy Mother's Day to me.