Interactive Family Tree: Places of Birth

This article follows up a previous discussion of a family tree tool by Bradford F Lyon, available (free) at his site.

Places of birth is a new display option.  You can display flags of countries (for a screen shot see my blog post about ethnic calculations based on DNA) or more specific locations, such as states of the United States.

The idea is similar to My Colorful Ancestry created in an Excel spreadsheet.  The bonus of the Lyons tool is that the result is interactive.  You can choose to highlight a specific place, which then blinks to draw your attention to ancestors from that location.

Interactive places of birth family tree
Courtesy of Bradford F Lyon

Ancestors of David Lutter
Highlighting those born in Connecticut.
His ancestors were concentrated in New Jersey and New York.

Zeroing in on a place of birth can help visualize migration paths.  If you are planning a research trip, you can see at a glance which branches were in your intended destination so you can look for their records.

And for the DNA pursuits, you can quickly find an ancestor or branch that was in a specific geographic location.  Surnames, matching or not, is not enough.  You need an intersection of geography and time.

Another new feature is selecting an ancestor and then displaying the direct line of descent to the home person.

Interactive family tree to display direct line of descent
Courtesy of Bradford F Lyon

In the above screenshots, I chose my father's eighth great grandmother, Mary Chittenden (1645-1712), from Connecticut.  From there, you can display these eleven generations all the way to today, ending with the home person, my father.  The information includes their lifespan.

Genetic Communities by AncestryDNA

Genetic Communities is Ancestry.com's newest feature for DNA testers.

This is not the same as an ethnicity estimate.  Please see The DNA Geek's more elaborate explanation and discussion of Genetic Communities.

Ancestry.com's DNA test estimates my ethnicity as 56% Irish with no further breakdown.  [Living DNA provided a regional breakdown within England, but not Ireland.]

The Genetic Communities tool detects a heavy link among my DNA matches to people with roots in northern Ireland, or Ulster Irish.  The Irish is from my mother's side.  I have not determined a place of origin for most of her ancestors, but her great grandfather, Patrick Francis ODonnell (1856-1931) was from County Donegal, which is part of the region encompassed by Ulster on Ancestry's map.

The other Genetic Community was a pleasant surprise because we are out of Europe and exactly where most of my father's ancestors were in the 1700s:  New York and New Jersey.  Early Settlers of New York tended to hail from certain areas of Europe, which is reflected in my father's ethnicity estimates.  Until the Genetic Community tool, there was no DNA-based connection to New York.

When trying to find the most recent common ancestor of a DNA match, you need a geographic connection.  In the match's family tree, the focus falls on branches who lived in the the New York area.  This New York Genetic Community provides support for this approach.

Marriage Record from Estate Sale

This is a wonderful estate sale find.

It is a marriage record dated August 9, 1905 from Saint Joseph's Church in Washington, Warren County, New Jersey for Thomas Lawrence Murphy and Alice Margaret Senior.

(Note: There are several places in New Jersey named "Washington."  Be mindful when searching for a location bearing this name.)

This family heirloom was behind a painting and was discovered when the painting was brought in for re-framing.  The marriage record was placed in its own glass frame and is so firmly situated that I did not free it for the photographs, hence the reflections in these images.

The writing is fading, but readable.  Seals from the church are still raised.

The officiant was Reverend Joseph A Rigney.  According to the website of Saint Joseph's Parish, Father James Rigney served in the years 1898-1906.

Witnesses were John P Brennan and Elizabeth C Senior.

In the 1910 federal census, Thomas and Alice are living in Phillipsburg, Warren County, New Jersey with two children, Elizabeth, age 4, and Joseph, age 1.  They are enumerated twice, once with Alice's mother, Margaret, and once without her.  Note that one entry lists Thomas' father's place of birth as Massachusetts, while the other lists Ireland.


Find A Grave has entries for the burials of Thomas (died 1945), Alice (died 1953), and their daughter, Elizabeth Ward (died 1988), in Saint Joseph's Catholic Cemetery in Washington.

If someone from the Murphy and/or Senior families would like this document, please let me know.