Knitting My Tree Together

I currently get about a hour or two hour break in the morning when the baby boy takes his nap during which I catch up on Podcasts & try to get something on my list for the week done.  Today I was listening to the pod from Family Locket :  Research Like a Pro episode 68 from Oct 28 2019 (we were just freshly home from having the boy when this came out so I'm catching up!) where they interview Dana Leeds about the Leeds Method of color clustering DNA matches. I haven't had a chance to try the Leeds Method but I think I get what it does. So when Ms Leeds mentioned Evert-Jan Blom's Genetic Affairs Auto Cluster  (record scratch sound effect) I abandoned my plan for nap time & went on a Google search hunt. The TL;DR At some point Blom partnered with MyHeritage, while Ancestry sent a cease and desist.  I ended up at the  MyHeritage DNA Tools section & ta dah!                         ...

Family Lore & Facts is a series where I will take the family stories we heard as kids and adults but were never sure of all the details, research the facts of the time, and put together a full picture.  I remember standing in the kitchen, probably around the time of the Northridge earthquake in Southern California in 1994, when Nana, my mom's mother, came downstairs for breakfast and told us the story about the time she saw the snow split straight down to the ground.  Flora Sturtevant grew up in many places in central New Hampshire and at this time they were in Ossipee, where the snow was deep that year and it was around Christmas. They had an earthquake and she recalled going out to break the ice in the water for the animals in the barn and seeing a giant crack that went all the way down into the ground in the solid snow across the field. Nana would have been about 12 years old, the 3rd child, 3rd daughter, in a family of 5 kids. In this photo from the prior winter, she's...