Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your 2016 Dear Genea-Santa Letter

Christmas is coming soon, so it must be time for Randy Seaver to suggest that his readers write to Santa for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Come on, everybody, join in, accept the mission, and execute it with precision. Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him your Christmas genealogy-oriented wish list:

(1) Write your Genea-Santa letter.  Have you been a good genealogy girl or boy?  What genealogy-oriented items are on your Christmas wish list?  They could be family history items, technology items, or things that you want to pursue in your ancestral quest. 

(2) Tell us about them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook status or Google Stream post. 


Here are my wishes:

I've tried hard to be a good genealogy girl again this year.  I'm still doing lots of volunteer work for a number of genealogical organizations, including serving on three boards and editing four different publications (one went away, but I added a new one).  Somehow I have been able to maintain my blog schedule, posting regularly between two to four times a week.  I had my 1,000th post a little while ago!  I've continued a robust educational program, attending four conferences, three all-day seminars, many in-person classes, and another 50 or so Webinars, in addition to teaching 30 classes myself.  Plus I've done more research on my family and helped other people with their research.  I am a genealogy geek indeed!

I'm very grateful for the gifts I received this past year.  I found a cousin willing to take a Y-DNA test and determined that my grandfather's biological father was not Mr. Sellers.  I'm now in contact with someone from a Y-DNA line that matches my father well, and I have a strong lead for my great-grandfather (this guy seems to have been somewhat of a ladies' man).  Some cousins from my mother's side of the family coordinated a small family reunion and invited me to attend, so I met more relatives and now have scans of more than 250 photographs from their branch, along with additional information for the family tree.  And an article about my Cuban cousins and the research I've done on them was published this summer.

But people always want more, don't they?  And I do have some wishes for next year.  These are things I would love to see in 2017 (and I'm dreaming big again):

• My top priority is still that I want to help my now 91-year-old aunt find and make contact with Raymond Lawrence Sellers, the son she gave up for adoption 71 years ago.  We haven't made much progress since last year.  She did a DNA test through Family Tree DNA, the results of which I've uploaded to GEDMatch.  (Unfortunately, she wasn't able to manufacture enough saliva for a successful AncestryDNA test, so we aren't able to search directly in that pool.)  The bad news is that she doesn't show any close matches besides her siblings, her son, and me (i.e., family members we already knew had tested).  It's possible that her son didn't have any descendants, or that absolutely none of them has decided to try the whole DNA thing.  It is so important for her to find him, so I'm really hoping for this one.  It's the number one item on my list.

• Last year's plan for my brother and me to join a Ukrainian research project didn't end up happening.  It would be great if another project were to start this year, and maybe we can find actual records from the Kamenets Podolsky area on our Gorodetsky family (and even the Kardishes).

• I keep hoping for a treasure trove of heretofore unknown surviving Jewish records from the former Grodno gubernia to be unearthed.  If some of my relatives were mentioned in them, so much the better.

• I'm still waiting for optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of old newspapers to become more accurate and reliable.  I thought I had heard that someone had come up with a way for computers to assess poor-quality spots on newspaper pages (torn, ink blobs, type dropped out) and try logical infilling, rather than merely scanning them as is and having something that looks like a bunch of control characters come out as the search text, but I haven't seen anything more about it.

• I agree with Randy in wishing that Ancestry.com give subscribers access to their raw DNA data and permit chromosome browsing, rather than relying on the twitching, dancing leaves to do everyone's research for them.  (I gave up years ago on Ancestry correcting indexing mistakes; those corrections won't add to the bottom line, so Ancestry has no interest in putting out money for them.  I'm happy it shares the "alternative readings" that people submit.)

I don't think I'm being greedy, Genea-Santa.  Most of my wishes are for things that other people will benefit from.  If you'd really like cookies this year, I promise to get some for you.  And last year's offer of brandy or wine instead of milk is still good.  Or maybe you like a good Port?