Cleo Byron Peake - Lost at Sea

While going thru Ancestry Hints for my Wells line, I found an intriguing military record for a distant cousin, Byron Peake (Cleo Byron Peake). The records said he was reported missing in action on 28 April 1944. ("World War II and Korean Conflict Veterans Interred Overseas." Database. Ancestry.com. www.ancestry.com : 2018.)

DNA Puzzle - Crawford Line

When I spit in a test tube for my first DNA test, I had high hopes of proving a relationship to another Crawford line and ultimately breaking through our brick wall in early Kentucky. Those hopes were greatly diminished when I wasn't a match to a known descendant of the James and Martha (Knight) Crawford line.

However, I had matches to descendants of William N. Crawford of Washington and Isaac and Nancy (Miller) Crawford of Kentucky. Those matches have revived hopes of figuring out how my Crawford line fits into the greater Crawford genealogy.

Since I have those matches 'painted' on DNA painter, I decided to experiment to see how they overlapped with DNA from my 2nd cousins.

Down a 'Rabbit Hole' with Deeds

Thanks to a marriage record for Mary Crawford and Alexander Moore in 1793 in Madison County, I've been able to learn more about Mary Crawford.

Mary Crawford is shown on the tax lists for Madison County, Kentucky in 1787, 1789 and 1791. According to the document, "Tax Lists (1792-1840): An Overlooked Resource for Kentucky History and Land Title" by Kandie Adkinson, Land Office, Ky. Secretary of State, "women are included on the tax lists if they are the head of household." Thus, I've long assumed that Mary was a widow living in early Kentucky.

Mary Crawford - Wife of Alexander Moore

For a long time, the Mary Crawford of early Madison County has been a puzzle! Mary appears on the 1787 tax list for Madison County.(1)  She is also listed on the tax lists for 1789, 1791 and 1792 -- all in Madison County, Kentucky.(2)

In 1791, Mary purchases 100 acres of land on Sugar Creek from Richard Cave.(3)

Ancestry Hints: Public vs Private Tree

I'm writing in response to Russ Worthington's comment on the Genea-Musing's blog post,

When Did Ancestry.com Last Index Ancestry Member Trees? In the comment, Russ brings up the issue of hints not showing. Since I haven't noticed an issue with 'missing' hints on my un-indexed tree, Russ's post made me question whether I was indeed missing hints. However, I did notice one difference between my tree and Russ's experiment. I work with a public tree and Russ' test was with a private tree.

Thus, I wanted to know whether public trees produced hints when the tree lacked Ancestry sources. Thus, I needed a public tree (small) without Ancestry sources. Since I've been searching for Judson Crawford to see if my tree was indexed, I decided to create a small public tree on Ancestry for Judson Crawford, his wife, children and parents. 

My first attempt at creating the tree was to drag Judson and his family into a new tree. When I tried to use TreeShare with this new tree, I did not get the option to upload the tree. Instead this small tree was connecting to my large tree on Ancestry.

For my second attempt, I created a Gedcom for Judson and his family. I then imported that gedcom into a new RootsMagic file. Again, I couldn't use TreeShare to upload this tree to Ancestry. 

On the third try, I uploaded the previously created Gedcom to Ancestry. I then used TreeShare to download that tree into RootsMagic. [JudsonTrial2]

Lightbulbs started appearing in the RootsMagic tree shortly after the download completed.

On Ancestry, those same individuals with light bulbs in RootsMagic had hints in Ancestry.

Based on this experience, I would conclude that there might be a difference between private and public trees in the way hints are populated. Unfortunately, the public/private tree status was not the only variable in our two experiments. Russ uploaded his data from his software to Ancestry and I downloaded my experimental tree from Ancestry to my software. In addition, I'm using RootsMagic while Russ is using FamilyTree Maker. 

Narrative Report Success!

Thanks to the help of users on the RootsMagic Discussion Forum, I have figured out some of my issues with my narrative report and learned a formatting trick.

One of my issues was with the first letter of a few sentences not being capitalized. When I looked at the sentence structure for these facts, I discovered that the 'person' field wasn't capitalized in the template:

[person] lived< [PlaceDetails:Plain]>< [Place]>< [Date]>.

When I capitalized the 'Person' field, then the sentence began with a capital letter in the narrative report.

According to the forum discussion, the capitalization of the 'person' field should not affect the sentences. Thus, I didn't go thru my various fact types and change all of the [person] fields to [Person]. I'm guessing that I did something to the sentence structure for these few sentences that kept them from formatting correctly. Since my 'work-around' (capitalizing the 'person' field in the template) is working, I'm not going to worry about the 'why' for now.

Another of my issues was spacing between sentences. In most cases, the report was putting one space between the superscripted footnote number and the start of the next sentence. However, in some cases, it was putting two spaces. I verified this inconsistency by opening the report in Word and using the OPTION to DISPLAY the formatting marks (spaces, paragraph returns, etc.). Once I verified the existence of the extra space, I was able to look at the sentence structure for that particular fact. I discovered that in the process of customizing the sentence structure, I had inadvertantly put in a blank space at the beginning of the sentence.


The formatting trick that I learned involved the creation of paragraphs. I played around with adding carriage returns to the beginning of a sentence where I wanted a new paragraph. This method worked but when there are a lot of facts, it would be difficult to figure out where these returns were without studying a narrative report.

Thus, I decided to try using the Paragraph fact type. I created a new fact type called Paragraph. For now, I have only selected to use this fact in Gedcom and Narrative Reports.

Once I had the fact type created, I just had to create Paragraph facts with sort dates to place the paragraph return where desired in the list of facts.

For me, the addition of blank space in my list of facts is a visual reminder of where the paragraphs are breaking. After inserting the paragraph facts, I was able to print a narrative report, save it as an RTF file, open in Word, copy and paste into my Family Tales Blog.

Eugene David Crawford

Narrative Report Questions

As a former user of The Master Genealogist, I expect my current genealogy software to take the sentences created by each event and build a narration for an individual's life. Unfortunately, I still have a lot to learn about the way RootsMagic builds the narrative report.

Thanks to information posted in the RootsMagic Community Forum, I did figure out how to create paragraphs (i.e. some white space). I elected to customize the sentence where I wanted a new paragraph by adding two carriage returns at the beginning of the sentence. Those two carriage returns create a blank line before the sentence.

Now, I need to figure out how to resolve several other issues:

• The first letter is not capitalized for some sentences (see second paragraph above)
• In many cases, there doesn't appear to be a space between the superscript at the end of one sentence and the first letter of the next sentence.

Hopefully, the forum will help me figure out how to resolve these issues.