I use Family Tree Maker for my offline family tree. It syncs with Ancestry so I don’t have to do double entry and and I have a backup copy of my work. Backups are important. It has a Plugin called Family Book Creator. I use this to generate the rough drafts of my family bios. I like it because you can include an abbreviated family tree with the text. It incorporates the facts from FTM and has the ability to include citations as well. I personally do not use the citation function when I generate the bios because of the way I am assembling my final document. It gets all discombobulated with the formatting.

After I generated the rough draft for Gabriel Cox and Nancy Squires, I realized I did not have Nancy’s parents entered into the tree, and as a result, they did not show up on the chart. I also realized that I needed to at least research the DNA matches from Nancy’s parents so I could make my case for John S Cox being a child of Gabe and Nancy. So researching my matches through John Squires and Mary Gott has been this week’s research focus. I have 16 matches through John and 22 through Mary. John was much older than Mary and died a few years after their marriage. She remarried and some of my matches are from the second marriage.

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I have seven DNA matches from the lines of Nancy’s siblings–one from her full sister Margaret Squires and six from her half-sister Mary Caplinger. Interestingly enough, the match through Margaret is only 8 cM. Several of the matches from Mary are close to double that. It’s likely that there is an amplification effect from Mary’s husband, Gabriel Lemen. Gabriel’s mother was Mary Cox Lemen, an aunt to Nancy’s husband Gabriel Cox. The fact that these matches through Mary Caplinger circle back to the Cox line muddies my reasoning that John S Cox is a child of Gabriel and Nancy Cox. However, the one match through Margaret does, in fact, help the case. Such a tangled tree!

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This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5265 errors in the tree–384 possible duplicates, 4273 with no documents, 608 other errors.

• This week’s first error to correct is for an unconnected person in the tree. I cannot figure why he was added. Maybe a distant collateral family? I have removed him.
• My second error to “fix” is the mother-in-law of a 3rd cousin 6x removed. I have not attached any records to her. Since I typically do not include in-laws of distant cousins, I will remove her and her husband.
• My last person to clean up is the husband of a 5th cousin. He I will keep. I updated him and his wife (my 5th cousin). I even added a bit to that family to bring it up to date.

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This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines which will occur during the week ahead.
346 years ago – birth of Jean Baptiste Creely (8th ggf)
333 years ago – birth of Jeanne Duguay (7th ggm)
282 years ago – marriage of Anna Mohr (7th ggm) and Michael Katz (7th ggf)
133 years ago – death of Caroline Nagley Nagele (3rd ggm)
114 years ago – death of Eli T Butler (3rd ggf)
113 years ago – death of Joseph Nagele (3rd ggf)
89 years ago – death of Anna Gravel Cardinal (2nd ggm)

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Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,622 people
End of Week: 27,760 people
Change = +138 people
Tasks for coming week:

• Continue editing and footnoting the bio of Gabriel and Nancy Cox and their children.