My parents were in Argentina for a group trip earlier this month and this is the best photo from the batch my mom sent:

Doesn't that look amazing? It's almost looks computer generated.

I've been extremely busy these last few weeks but I decided to try out Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Fun challenge to find out who's number 21 in my Ahnentafel Report and came up with Hanna Minka (Unknown) Smorgonski.

I know absolutely nothing about her other than the fact that she was my 2nd great-grandmother and she was married to Shlomo Smorgonski. I only know this from a Page of Testimony I found on the Yad-Vashem website that was filled out by my grand-uncle Shlomo Shamgar about his father (she is listed as his mother). I'm not even sure where I got her middle name from and have no idea what her surname was. I doubt if I will ever find out much more about her.

I have been reading the book "The Lost" and have been thinking about my Jewish-Polish ancestry a lot lately. I think I will put up a series of posts about what I know and how much is missing. But just to give you a taste, when my parents where here for a short visit at the begining of the month I realized that my father had never known his grandparents. They were all long gone by the time he was born. His parents rarely spoke about them. On my mother's side she had only known her mother's parents. And had only seen them about 2-3 times in her entire life.

75% of my great-grandparents perished in the holocaust. Nobody in my family knows anything about them because their children barely said anything about what happened before or during these terrible times.

I have been trying to write more, but it seems time is the most scarce and valuable commodity right now. So here are a few short notes (that hopefully I will turn into full posts in the near future):

1) Fulton County Court Records: My first trip in search of some real records was extremely fruitful. I found wills of my wife's grandfather, Lawrence William Brannon, and grand-aunt, Leila Elizabeth Brannon Pendergrass, as well as lots of supporting documents including a copy of a death certificate and names of several descendants. And this is just from looking into two estate records. There were several others that have been archived that I would need to order. And I haven't even touched the marriage records yet.

2) Fundraiser: My daughter's school held it's annual fundraiser, with my wife being one of the co-chairs for the second year in a row. It was a huge success and a lot of fun. Since the theme was the 'Tree of Life' I was able to get some very generous donations from a couple of 'Family Tree' companies. I will definitely write more about this.

3) Cousins, cousins, everywhere: People are popping up everywhere and joining our huge Geni tree. Distant Auth and Brannon family members have made contact and started updating their side of the family. One Brannon that went to school with Cynthia turned out to be a 5th cousin. While at school they were sure they were not related but I was quickly able to prove otherwise.

4) Newspaper clippings: I was able to find an obituary for my wife's grandmother, Emily Anne Brannon, from 2002 as well as an article detailing her wedding in 1931 to Lawrence J. Brannon. The wedding has a lot of details about guests and is full of useful information.

5) The Battle Book: While looking through HeritageQuest Online through my Cobb County Library subscription I ran across a 780-page book detailing the Battle family history. It was printed in 1930 and has hundreds of pages of information about the family. Here's a quick nugget:



It reads:

6. Jesse Battle — b. Hertford Co., N. C., July 8, 1738; d. Hancock Co., Ga., Aug. 25, 1805 (See will, Chap. V); reared by grandfather, William Battle, in Nansemond Co., Va.; Revolutionary soldier (See Chap. XII); removed 1777 to Swift Creek, Edgecombe Co., N. C., and thence, Feb. 20, 1787, to Greene (now Hancock) Co., Ga.; Baptist; m. Nansemond Co., Va., 1756, Susanna Faucette (b. France, Oct. 7, 17381; d. Hancock C0., Ga., May 8, 1819, a French Huguenot who escaped from France hidden in bales of silk). Children:

Jesse Battle and Susanna Faucette were my wife's 6th-great-grandparents. I love the part about the escape "from France hidden in bales of silk." With this book I have now been able to trace one of my daughter's lines back 13 generations, to her 10th-great-grandparents. Pretty incredible.

I really hope to post about all these topics in more detail. This is truly fascinating stuff!

Warning: This is a long post with lots of screenshots. Just thought you should know.

I was able to square away my account with MyHeritage and indeed, when you sign up for a Premium or PremiumPlus account you get access to the Premium features of the new FTB3. So let's go check them out together, shall we?

First off, the most important feature in my book, is SmartMatching. I will use Milton B. Tuggle, my wife's 2nd-Great-Grandfather for this example. When a SmartMatch is found for someone in your tree you will see a little green circle under their name. If you place your mouse over the green circle a little pop-up window will tell you how many matches were found. It says to double-click, but a single-click works too:



When you get the matches page you see your entry at the top and all matches below, sorted by order of quality of match (we'll get to that in a second). Hover over any detail on the screen and you will get a pop-up with more details:



You can also see whether or not you confirmed the match, the tree name and site owner where the match was found. When you hover over Quality you get a pop-up that shows details for the quality of the match, specifically names, dates, ancestors, siblings and descendants:



Not much is new so far, but when you go to the actual match you find the new 'Merge' button in the middle-left of the screen. But first you can see that there is a tree comparison between your tree on top and the other tree on the bottom. On the right hand side are the person's details and as you click through these partial trees (they only show three generations) the matching person in the other tree is automatically selected). So let's click on the 'Merge' button because this is where the fun begins:



So when you start merging you get a list of everyone related to the person in question and whether or not they have any new information to add. You can select to auto-merge the person, which means you don't have to do anything and the software will merge all information intelligently and automatically. Or you can go step-by-step which is what I recommend you do:



When you start the merging process you go one person at a time through the list and decide who you want to merge the information to or whether or not you want to skip that person altogether. You can also add new people, chose to do an auto-merge or just copy all the information. You get a summary of the details from both trees as well:



My biggest issue with this process is that you don't see whether or not this information is properly sourced and cited. But you will see later that any information you add from a SmartMatch merge is deemed secondary evidence in the citation confidence field.

So here's an example of merging options for Milton's father. As you can see the first name doesn't match because of a spelling discrepancy. I spell it Pinckney while the other site spells it Pinkney. I can chose to merge the names, which in this case would just keep my name but in other cases will actually add the other name as a middle name. I can keep my name or take the name from the other site:



The next fact is a little more interesting. I am unsure of the exact marriage date of Milton's parents, but since I have no idea what the source is for the date on the other site, I can add it to my data, but instead of replacing my data I can just choose to add it as a new marriage fact:



The next step is to confirm the match and add a citation for the new information. You can also reject the match or leave it as undetermined:



And finally, you get a summary of the planned merge. You can still cancel at this point if you like or go back and make changes:



So that was very straight forward and simple for anyone to follow. This is in line with FTB3 and MyHeritage's concept of easy-to-use tools.

I wanted to see what happened with that marriage fact that I added. So I went to Pinckney's family information page and checked the facts tab. You can see that there are two marriage facts - one is my original fact with a date range and the other is the alternate marriage fact I just added during the merge process:



You can also check out the details page for Pinckney and under citations you will find the source for this new information - Source, Page, Date as well as Confidence automatically entered as 'Secondary evidence' and a tect comment about this information 'Added by confirming a Smart Match'. All this was added without my intervention:



So to summarize this feature - I think it's great! I only wish there was some way to see the source details before merging new or potentially conflicting data. Hopefully this might be something that will be added in the future.

In future posts I will detail some of the other new features. Any requests?

It's funny. Since I started this new genealogy hobby I seem to be getting more and more history related e-mail. You might remember the last one I wrote about: Prohibition Poster - Fact or Fiction?.

This time I got an oldie but a goodie: The Real Spin - Makes you wonder about your family tree:

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogy researcher here in southern California , was doing some personal work on her own family tree. She discovered that Harry Reid's great-great uncle, Remus Reid, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889. Both Judy and Harry Reid share this common ancestor.

The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows in Montana territory:



On the back of the picture Judy obtained during her research is this inscription: 'Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.'

So Judy recently e-mailed Congressman Harry Reid for information about their great-great uncle.

Believe it or not, Harry Reid's staff sent back the following biographical sketch for her genealogy research:

'Remus Reid was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory . His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.'

NOW THAT is how it's done folks! That's real SPIN.

So the first thing you do when you get one of these is check Snopes.com and of course this story is false. It's been running around since 2000 and has been applied to whoever is a recent newsworthy politician: Remus Rodham, Gunther Gore, Robert Dion (for you canucks), Remus Stevens and finally Remus Reid.

According to Snopes:

This item is merely a very old bit of humor (dressed up with an accompanying photograph of train-robbing outlaw Tom "Black Jack" Ketchum) which has been adapted into a "one-size-fits-all" political jibe - all one need do is simply alter the text by changing the surname to match that of the disfavored politician du jour, then send it winging around the Internet yet again.

The Ketchum page linked in the Snopes article is very interesting and has several other photos.

By the way, does anyone know if Judy Wallman is an actual person and a professional genealogist?

In an effort to extend my reach and get more visibility for those searching for people in my family tree I have created a public page on Rootsweb:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~amirdekel

I privatized all "Living" people, but there are still a total of about 9700 people in this tree to search through.

Comments are welcome!

I don't usually get all political on this blog, but I guess I am frustrated enough to put together some rambling uber-post about the best place on earth... the Middle-God-Damned-East!

So after about eight years of having rockets fired on them daily, the Israelis have had enough and being the superior military power they are, decided to drop a few thousand pounds of armament on Gaza lately. Result: hundreds of dead and thousands wounded. Fair? Not really. Inevitable? Maybe. Sad and troubling? You Betcha!

There are so many people spewing vile, hateful verbiage in both directions and the propaganda machines are humming along wonderfully, so I am not about to join that mess. I will just give my views as I see them and add some points from what I've been hearing (that I like or dislike). Here goes:

1) Fact: There will never be peace in the Middle-East. Sorry. Face it, people. There has never been peace in that awful part of the planet and there never will be. Keep reading to find out why.

2) Fact: The goal of Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Iran, Iraq and every other terrorist organization in the region is to destroy Israel and in the process try to kill all the people living there.

3) Fact: The Israelis don't want to kill anyone. Seriously. The only reason they do what they do is because they have no other choice.

4) Conclusion: There will never be peace. Based on the above facts you just have to realize that there are no other options. Let's try to simplify things a bit. Here's the scenario: There are only two people in the world (literally). One is Israeli and one is Palestinian. The world is covered by water and they are both on a tiny Island, just big enough for the both of them. The Palestinian wants to kill the Israeli and accepts no other option. What should the Israeli do? He's tried everything already. He tried to live in peace - didn't work. He tried to negotiate - didn't work. He tried to carve up the island - didn't work. He moved all his stuff to one side of the island and put up a fence - didn't work. The Palestinian just keeps trying to kill him no matter what. What other choices does the Israeli have? Think about that one and see if you can come up with an answer that doesn't involve trying to kill the Palestinian or allowing him to kill the Israeli.

5) Ehud Barak makes an interesting point. He says that the US would not allow one rocket to fly out of Tijuana into San Diego. That's obviously quite extreme. South Israel is no San Diego. So let's try to find a better comparison. Let's say rockets where being fired from Monterrey, Mexico on San Diego, Texas? That's much better, right? I bet you didn't even know there was a San Diego, Texas. Here you go. Here's a map:



Hey, how about this one: What would the US do if Cuba fired a missile at Florida? Oh wait, that almost happened? Really. Jeez, I wonder what happened back then. I hope there wasn't some big global crisis because of those silly Cubans.

6) Some people are saying the Israeli response is not proportional to what the Hamas has done. Well, that may be true. But then these people actually think that some sort of response is warranted. Right? Let's try to break it down for ya'. During the war in Lebanon (was it really two years ago? Sheesh!) some US general asked on CNN what a proportional response should be to the rocket fire. Should Israel just randomly fire the same number of rockets back into Gaza? Would that be the right response? Well, Gaza is way more populated (the Jabalya refugee camp in North Gaza is the most densely populated hole on this planet) so I guess we need to factor that in somehow. So let's say for every 10 rockets fired out of Gaza, Israel fires one back in? 50-to-1? How about for every day that rockets are fired out, Israel fires a single random rocket back in? Still not good enough? Well what is the right response then?

7) I love all the maps explaining how the Israelis "robbed" the Palestinians of their land. Face it, folks. There was never an independent Palestinian state until Israel gave back the West Bank and Gaza. What people are talking about was a British controlled area that included the Kingdom of Jordan. And anyway, that was 60-freaking-years ago! And before that it was the Turks. And before that the Greeks. And before that the Romans, Babylonians, Assyrians and on and on and on. But guess what? Arabs living in Jaffa (right next door to Tel-Aviv) were not asked to leave when the UN voted to give the remaining Jewish holocaust survivors a scrap of land in Israel when they asked the Brits to skedaddle. Ask the Jaffa Arabas how their lives are these days. They are probably the most advanced Arabs living in the Middle-East today! Arabs in Haifa are the same. Arabs in Acre too. Every Israeli Arab has a pretty terrific life. They have a right to vote. They have members of parliament that they voted for looking after their rights and needs. Because they accepted the fact that they can live in peace with the Israelis and don't try to kill them every single day. Boy, it's so easy!

8) Golda Meir had a great saying about 30 years ago: There will only be peace when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate the Israelis. Think about it for a second. I don't know of a better way to say it.

9) I love how the rest of the Arab world is standing up for their Palestinian brothers these days (well maybe except for Egypt who has shut down the border so they can't escape from Gaza). But ask those supporters to accept them into their own countries and you will get some wonderful results. The Jordanians massacred them. The Egyptians, who had the opportunity to take back Gaza along with the rest of the Sinai desert during the Egypt-Israel peace process, said HELL NO! Nobody wants them except for the Libyans who allowed the PLO to get out of Lebanon when they had no other choice. Yeah, the Libyans. Model world-class citizens. On the other hand, the Israelis have no place to go. Where will they go if Hamas wins? I think it was Golda (again, was she a smart woman or what?) who said that the Arabs can fight many times but Israel can only lose once.

OK, enough of this.

So now for some full disclosure. Maybe I should have put this at the top of the post, but hey, this is my blog, so the disclosure comes right here:

20 years ago I had the displeasure of visiting Gaza and the West Bank. In uniform. With a loaded automatic rifle in my hand (which I never actually used, phew). AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN! We walked the disgusting streets of Gaza and I had no idea what we were doing there to begin with. I always said we don't belong there. So three years ago, Israel finally yanked out all the dumb Israelis living there and put up a fence border. Not good enough for Hamas. They want it all back. And they want everyone dead. They have been firing rockets at Israel for the past EIGHT YEARS almost on a daily basis. I read somewhere that the total rocket count over these eight years is over TEN THOUSAND. Would your country allow a single rocket to be fired at it? That's what I thought.

I made my choice a long time ago. I didn't want my kids (before I even had or thought or planned on having kids) growing up in a place where they were in constant danger. Hell, I myself didn't want to live in constant danger. So I left. I gave up. I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Life's too short to spend it fighting over anything. But that's not how others see it. I don't think it's going to work out for anybody. Good luck to both sides. I mourn the deaths of everyone involved. I know there will be many more in the coming days and weeks. What a waste.