Speaker:  Mike Noble

 

Description: I’m part of a group of 30 or so people with the same last name, Noble, who discovered that we were all related via DNA.  We began communicating with one another via e-mail and soon discovered that we were unable to identify a common ancestor.  Several of us knew our trees contained matches with one or more others, but most did not, so we decided to merge their resources and search for the elusive MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor).  One project recently undertaken is family tree matching, whereby the ancestors named Noble in each person’s family tree are compared with everyone else’s family trees to identify commonalities, or matches.  This is being accomplished by using a family tree program called Reunion to merge GEDCOM files provided by each person in the group.  To date, we have completed comparing 12 family trees for a total of 2314 unique Nobles, with some showing as many as 5 matches and some none and, so far, 4 trees showing no matches with any of the other 8.  My presentation will cover how we are doing this matching process, what the results show, and how we are presenting the results.

 

Speaker Biography:  Mike has been an active member of HCGS since 2014 and is responsible for Society Communications.
 

Background:  My first exposure to family history was in 1976 when my grandmother Noble died and my father gave me the family bible.  It is vintage 1857 and over the years relatives had written in the names and birth, marriage and death dates for many family members.  The first entry records the wedding of my great-great grandfather, Alexander C. Noble, to Matilda Messner in 1862.  From that, I got interested in finding out more about the people listed in the bible and their descendants and how they all were related to me.  By this time (1980s), all but one of my grandparents had died, so I questioned my parents and aunts and uncles for what family information they could remember.  It was pretty slow progress until the early 2000s when the Internet became available and enabled access to many records. 

The most surprising (and exciting) discovery was our family’s Irish heritage.  I found that my great-great grandfather Alexander had emigrated from Ireland when he was 13 and the family had a long history there.  Since then, I’ve traced my Noble line back to 1654 in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, my Schneider line (grandmother) back to the early 1700s in Prussia (now Germany), my Tompkins line (maternal grandfather) back to 1227 in Cornwall, England, and my Strother line (grandmother) back to the mid-1600s in the Rappahannock River area in Virginia.  However, the research never stops! 

 

Speaker:  Gary Petranek

 

Description: The 1950 census is to be released by NARA in April 2022.  The census will eventually be indexed by various groups but this will take some time.  Meanwhile, you will be able to browse the images online organized in Enumeration District and Election District groups.  As the population has increased since the 1940 census, many of the district boundaries will have changed.  Gary will tell us how you might locate and identify the new districts in advance to begin your search soon after the release.

 

Speaker Biography:  Gary retired from IBM after 41 years. He has been the Co-Director of the Washington DC Family History Center in Kensington, MD for the past 15 years. He has been doing genealogy research for 20+ years and has been an avid photographer “my whole life.” Gary hosts a RootsMagic user group once a month through the Family History Center.