What if I told you that you could have a professor of genetic genealogy create a personalized video explaining exactly how your Ancestry DNA matches work. This article will show you how to set this up using a free Google AI tool called NotebookLM. Unlike ChatGPT, which pulls from general information, NotebookLM only uses the … Read more
You’ve tested your DNA with Ancestry.com and you’re trying to interpret your ancestral estimates mean. Multiple world regions, different percentages, what do they mean? Understanding your DNA ethnicity results can be challenging. Ancestry has scientific papers explaining the background, but these are long and complex. But what if you could upload your results to a … Read more
If you know some basic SQL and you have a family tree, this tutorial will show you how to: All you need is some free software and a Windows or Mac computer. Don’t worry if you’re a SQL beginner. We’ll show you how to create and combine simple queries to make a complex list. And … Read more
When you’re building your family tree, the rarer surnames are often the easiest to research. My grandmother was a Smith which makes that ancestral line a challenge to explore. My early research focused on marriages in the Smith line to people with less common last names. This tutorial shows you how to use a spreadsheet … Read more
If your family tree is on Ancestry.com or another online website, there’s no simple way to export a list of surnames. This article shows you several different methods to get a full list of people from your family tree into a spreadsheet. We then show you how to turn that into a distinct list of … Read more
There are several different ways to get a list of names from your family tree. Some methods use desktop software or require a little technical knowledge. But if your tree is online on Ancestry, there is one simple way to get a list of people into a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming with larger trees but it … Read more
Have you got a long list of people’s names in Excel and you’re not sure how to sort or filter them by surname? The challenge occurs when the first and last name are in a single cell. You may also have middle names jammed in there. And worse, there may be a prefix (Mrs.) or … Read more
Are you looking for a comprehensive list of last names beginning with “M”? We’ve used the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census to compile over six hundred surnames that start with the letter M and had at least five thousand people with the name In the table below, you’ll see the total number of bearers for … Read more
This tutorial takes you step-by-step through creating a four-generation family tree in Google Sheets. A four-generation tree goes back to eight great-grandparents. This tutorial builds a tree that prints on a single landscape page. If you’re too busy for the twelve steps in this tutorial, jump down to the end to grab our “done for you” Google Sheets template bundle. … Read more
A word cloud is a visual representation of text. The size of each word in the cloud is proportional to its frequency. When we use word clouds to represent our family tree, we are usually making one from either: In this tutorial, I show two ways to make a word cloud based on last names … Read more