Musings on Genealogy, Genetics, and Gardening
I never thought of my Jewish great grandmother Lotte (Charlotte) Thannhauser as a holocaust victim. I thought she had just died, long widowed, of old age at 70 (which now seems young to me!). It turns out that she probably lost interest in living after her beloved only child, son Siegfried, was put on leave [ ]
Twelve years ago I wrote a post here thanking this country for taking my mother and her parents in (click here to read it). Today on the 250th, I want to honor my hard-working Norwegian ancestors, who came in the late 1800s. Below are some excerpts from letters my Norwegian grandfather, born in Christiansand, wrote many years later [ ]
My cousin Corinne tantalized me by showing me some of the interesting new features at 23andme, so I bought the currently discounted upgrade and soon sent in a new vial of spit. As the email I got pointed out, my test used an older chip and more information is available on the newer one. Father s [ ]
A recent 2nd cousin DNA match (click here for that story) inspired me to explore German records from Bavaria. So I decided to try AI to read the handwriting and translate it. First however, I did some more work on my Norwegians. There is more than one free AI out there, so I ran an [ ]
My past process to get a translation of what a Norwegian farm book says about my ancestors and their farm was somewhat laborious. First I made a good scan of the page, then I used a Norwegian OCR program to get the text extracted, and finally I asked google to translate that resulting text. Often [ ]