Review of March

What I’ve been working on and learning:

• Building my tree on the Family Search website.  I normally focus just on Ancestry, so it took a while to adjust.  I noticed that there are lots of duplicate IDs so it’s been a challenge to make sure I try to find existing records before creating new ones.  After I’d put in a lot of descendents from my ancestors, I realised that living people are not seen.

• Cracking new discoveries in my DNA matches.  Solved a missing great-grandfather!  That has been a huge challenge, and has taken over 2 years of colour-coding DNA matches and doing “quick and dirty” trees.  But I got there and it feels amazing.

• Contacting new family members.  I took the plunge and contacted the family of my maternal grandfather, who knew nothing about me or that I was related to them.  It has gone very well so far and we’re all excited and sharing photos and information.

• Catching up on some videos from Rootstech 2025.

My genealogy toolkit:

• Aberdeen and North East Scotland Ancestry Tourism Partnership - have a great resource section

• The Scottish Genealogy Society - I joined as a member for 1 year to try out some of their webinars.

• Old Scottish - another site with lots of resources

• Deceased Online - database of UK burials and cremations. Have still to test out how useful this one will be