maltsoda
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Citation Templates
Remember Mad Libs? Teachers liked them because they were a fun way to review the parts of speech, and kids liked them because they could try to be as vulgar as possible and make their friends laugh. The (noun) went to (place). The (noun) was (adjective). Citations are a lot like Mad Libs, just not…
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Waypoints and Other Layering Issues
In my last post I talked about citation basics. I had more to say but it was already getting to be a long post so I’m going to put the rest here. The first thing I want to talk about is waypoints. Back in the day, URLs were not stable. Here today, gone tomorrow. Incidentally,…
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Citation Basics
I talked about why citations are important in this blog post. Today I’m going to talk about citation basics, to make it easier to understand how the components of a citation fit together. Let’s start with the very basic of basic citations: a book. Tom Jones, Mastering Genealogical Documentation (Arlington, Virginia : National Genealogical Society,…
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Pick a Number, Any Number
In The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, he introduces a pattern: 2,4,6. He says that you need to find out what the pattern is, but that he cannot tell you if you’re correct about the pattern, but he will tell you if you give him a pattern if that pattern matches…
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Slow is fast
“Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal (1) is one of my favourite sci-fi series. It takes place in an alternate past, where the space race becomes a matter life and death for humanity. The mantra for the astronauts is “slow is fast.” Wearing their big, bulky spacesuits in low to no gravity makes…
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Draw.io
I’ve talked about Scapple (1) and LucidChart (2) before, and now I’m going to talk about yet another charting tool, Draw.io (3). It looks a lot like LucidChart, but it’s free. You can connect it to your Google Drive account, and although I haven’t tried collaborating with anyone, given how easy it is to collaborate…
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LucidChart
I finally figured out lines in LucidChart! You’ll remember that in my post on Scapple (1) I said that I preferred Scapple to LucidChart because it was so much simpler (not to mention the one time fee vs. a subscription). However, I’ve since discovered that sometimes simpler can mean limited, and LucidChart does produce some…
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Identifying Unknown DNA
Whether you’re talking about unknown parentage, Unidentified Human Remains (UHRs), or Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG), the steps to use DNA to solve them are pretty similar. I’m sure there’s as many processes as there are people, but I like to think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Every DNA match is a piece of…
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WATO for beginners
The What Are The Odds (WATO) (1) tool is an extension of the SharedcM (2) tool I talked about in my post Centimorgans and Segments (3). You need to have a grasp of the concept of centimorgans and the relationships that are possible based on the amount of shared centimorgans to understand why WATO is…
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Not the Mama! Inferred Chromosome Painting
I previously talked about chromosome painting (1) and how you can paint DNA matches you know to assign your DNA to your ancestors. Let’s review the basics of recombination before we jump to talking about inferred chromosome painting. My mom has two chromosomes, one from her mom and one from her dad, and those two…
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