Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
So I’ve been playing about with a new tool for analysing your family tree and it’s worth telling you about now. It’s been around a few months and I’ve been a guinea pig user for the developer while they tweak and add new features. Gedminer is free to use. You upload a gedcom file. It…
The Secrets of our DNA – how genetics has changed the world is a new book by Professor Turi King. She is best known for leading the identification of Richard III’s skeleton in Leicester. She also presented the show DNA Family Secrets on BBC with Stacey Dooley. I also know Turi a little and we’ve…
In my DNA work, I often need to trace living members of families to ask them to take target tests. So when Cheri Hudson Passey’s new book Genealogy in Reverse: Finding the Living, A practical guide for all genealogists appeared in my letterbox, I was interested. Genealogical Publishing sent me this book for free and…
Readers of my blog will know that I often review relevant books for Irish genealogy, history and DNA research. This review is a little bit different. I haven’t been a regular computer gamer since my teens. I used to play Monkey Island and other investigative computer games on pc with my late Dad. It was…
As part of an ongoing series for Family Tree Magazine, I’ve reviewed RootsMagic10. It’s one of the market leading softwares for family history. I was completely new to it so was able to offer a fresh perspective. My article is in the edition on sale right now, online and in shops. There’s also an online…
Well, last week was a whirlwind. I flew to Salt Lake City on Tuesday, arriving mid-evening. Wednesday saw me catching up with various friends new & old, doing a tech-check and attending the speakers dinner, followed by fun with DNA friends. Far too much fun for photos but you know who you are! Thursday we…
As a young genealogist, Megan Smolenyak was one of the first “famous” genealogists I ever heard of. She was involved with the discovery of former US President Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry (now commemorated in that most Irish of ways by a motorway service station!) and the discovery of the real identity of Annie Moore, the…
Sometimes it’s a risk to watch a show that features a topic you know a lot about. You might find yourself nodding along but you also can be quickly shouting at the screen “that would never happen”. Police procedurals sometimes commit the crime of saying things like “we checked the 1991 census and here are…
If you’d like to consume your hobby in a new format, have you considered documentaries? I’ve got two to recommend. First up, Found is a feature-length documentary about three Chinese-American adoptees (Sadie, Chloe & Lily) who discover they are related to each other through 23andMe DNA tests and then, supported by their families, decide to…
Genealogy social media has been awash in the past couple of weeks about Ancestry.com’s newly launched Pro Tools. Initially, it seemed only to be available in the USA but I was able to buy it a couple of days ago. It was a few different prices but now seems to be fixed. Here’s my review.…