Ancestry and DNA
Since January of 2011, I have had an off-and-on relationship with Ancestry. After the first year, I let my membership lapse. I had initially thought I'd be able to find some trail of my family roots, but instead I found only dead-ends. It wasn't until my brother, Ron, started doing more active research on our mother's side (Allen) of the family that I became interested again. Ron is retired and has more time and mobility than I do at the moment - yay retirement! He has visited the Salt Lake City Family History Library once or twice, grave sites in Arizona and Texas, and uncountable city records hither and yon in search of records regarding the Allen family history. Ron has been so thorough and successful that his efforts have inspired me to look more deeply into my father's family history - the Hellers.
Last year we decided to purchase test kits from Ancestry DNA. What a game changer for us. Let me digress a bit to explain what Ancestry DNA is all about. Simply put, they currently have the largest ethnicity database in the world to make ethnicity estimates and identifies potential DNA matches within their database. Their DNA database grows daily as more and more people get their DNA analyzed. When Ron and I submitted our samples for analysis, there were under a million samples represented. I haven't been able to identify their collection size today. They may be guarding that information now, who knows?
Through DNA, many relationships, both near and distant cousins have come to light. Recently I was contacted by Jane Baier who recently had her DNA analyzed. It turns out she is the grand-daughter of my grand-aunt Annie Heller-Schwartz (the paternal half-sister of my grand-father) - of whom I had never known a thing! How 'bout that? Jane has given me permission to use her name here, and we have been working together to discover more information about the Hellers. She has told me that my grandfather, Charles (Haim) Heller had two half-siblings, Annie (Hannah?) and her brother, Morris. Charles' father's pre-deceased him by five months. I had no idea my grandfather had any siblings! This opens up more avenues of research in the Heller line.
In an effort to do my part in aiding general Romanian research, I am helping a project to extract entries from the Bacau, Romania National Archive. This is to extract the Jewish entries from the thousands of digital Birth, Marriage and Deaths from 1863 to 1905 from the city of Bacau, the records are hand written in old Romanian. The samples of the records I've seen look identical in form to my own grandfather's records, so it shouldn't be too hard to pick out the names and dates from the Romanian text. It helps that I have an English translation I was able obtain in the 1980's, so it shouldn't be hard to do, just time consuming. I should be receiving some photo-copy records soon to go through and document the names, dates and places. Looking forward to this!
Last year we decided to purchase test kits from Ancestry DNA. What a game changer for us. Let me digress a bit to explain what Ancestry DNA is all about. Simply put, they currently have the largest ethnicity database in the world to make ethnicity estimates and identifies potential DNA matches within their database. Their DNA database grows daily as more and more people get their DNA analyzed. When Ron and I submitted our samples for analysis, there were under a million samples represented. I haven't been able to identify their collection size today. They may be guarding that information now, who knows?
Through DNA, many relationships, both near and distant cousins have come to light. Recently I was contacted by Jane Baier who recently had her DNA analyzed. It turns out she is the grand-daughter of my grand-aunt Annie Heller-Schwartz (the paternal half-sister of my grand-father) - of whom I had never known a thing! How 'bout that? Jane has given me permission to use her name here, and we have been working together to discover more information about the Hellers. She has told me that my grandfather, Charles (Haim) Heller had two half-siblings, Annie (Hannah?) and her brother, Morris. Charles' father's pre-deceased him by five months. I had no idea my grandfather had any siblings! This opens up more avenues of research in the Heller line.
In an effort to do my part in aiding general Romanian research, I am helping a project to extract entries from the Bacau, Romania National Archive. This is to extract the Jewish entries from the thousands of digital Birth, Marriage and Deaths from 1863 to 1905 from the city of Bacau, the records are hand written in old Romanian. The samples of the records I've seen look identical in form to my own grandfather's records, so it shouldn't be too hard to pick out the names and dates from the Romanian text. It helps that I have an English translation I was able obtain in the 1980's, so it shouldn't be hard to do, just time consuming. I should be receiving some photo-copy records soon to go through and document the names, dates and places. Looking forward to this!
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