Bureaucratic Redundancy

A second unrestricted copy of my mother's application for a Social Security Number came in the mail last week.  A redacted version was received in June.  After appealing, the unrestricted version arrived in August.  For some odd reason, another copy was sent in October.

You can search the Social Security Death Index for free at Family Search.  A copy of the application costs between $16 to $29 (US Dollars).

Ancestry.com Improves DNA Services

Ancestry has improved its DNA services by allowing you to see how much DNA you share with a DNA cousin.  To view, go to your list of matches and click on the username, then click on the tiny "i" icon.  This button is very easy to miss.

Below are the top matches for a woman who is adopted.  (I wrote in the amount of shared DNA from the screen shot.)  The "second cousin" and "third cousin" share almost the same amount of DNA with her, so the designations may be misleading.  In the "fourth cousin" category, we have someone who shares 64 cM, which is workable in an adoption case.  The next top match shares only 28 cM over two segments, which really is not useful when we have no family tree.

Seeing the actual amount of shared DNA lets us know which matches will be more helpful as we try to construct this woman's family tree.

The "third cousin" also participates at 23andMe.

Ancestry still needs to reveal WHERE the shared segments are located.  You can view this information at 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA.  (See this blog post for examples and why we need this information.)

Brookdale Reformed Churchyard

The Autumn tour of cemeteries continues.

For the first time I visited a graveyard by Brookdale Park in Bloomfield [Essex County, New Jersey, USA], currently bearing the name Brookdale Reformed Churchyard.  The trees were lovely and the stones old.  Several burials dated from the early 1800s.  I am recognizing the same family names as I travel to local cemeteries:  Garrabrant, Post, Sigler, VanGiesen, VanWinkle.

The stone for Leah, wife of John Egbertson (1772-1830), is so faded that I could barely read it.  The year is not legible any more.

A member of the church kindly showed me around and explained some of the work done over the years.  The church was originally called Stone House Plains and was Dutch Reformed.  Some records exist at the Bloomfield Public Library.

I took a close-up of what remains of the etching on Leah's stone to virtually preserve it for the foreseeable future.  Please read Amy Johnson Crow's article, Five Photos You Should Take at the Cemetery.  Digital photos are so easy to take on our phones.  Your pictures of close, near, and far will aid future researchers in reading the stones and locating the stones later.

Researching this cemetery at home, with great delight I found digitized, online copies of records for this cemetery through the Bloomfield Public Library's Special Collections.  Included is a map and a compilation of gravestone inscriptions by Herbert A Fisher, Jr.

Many other records pertaining to Bloomfield are also in this online collection, so if you are researching this area of the world, this is worth a look.  City directories as early as 1870 are here.