I’ve been doing a lot of family history lately. One of my third cousins messaged my mom on Ancestry a couple months ago, one thing led to another, and now I have dozens upon dozens of Italian cousins on my Napoleon line that I had no idea existed. It’s been great getting to know them.

I did the Ancestry DNA test recently and have been making contact with more of my relatives who match. (It can be harder to find the common ancestor than I expected, though.) I also apparently have a Scandinavian line on my dad’s side, which was news to me — I’m fairly familiar with my family tree but haven’t ever seen anything Scandinavian.

I realized that it’s fairly easy to keep Ancestry and FamilySearch trees in sync, and it’s nice to have a personal tree in case people make unwanted changes to FamilySearch, so I created an Ancestry tree and have started copying everything over. Ancestry’s nicer than I realized.

Contacting my cousins has led to my doing more research on my Napoleon line. This past weekend I pushed the main line back two generations, and I’ve also started fleshing out some of the collateral lines.

One of my side projects as part of all this is building a nice, relatively easy way to generate clean family charts from JSON data, so that I can easily generate PDFs and share them with my cousins who aren’t on Ancestry or FamilySearch. More to come.

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