An article in the May/June issue of Family Tree Magazine explores sources that can help you compile your family’s health history.
Rick Crume’s story, “Family Medicine,” lists numerous sources from which you can gather information. They include family interviews, death certificates, obituaries, funeral home files, census records and institutional records. You probably will get the most from interviews, subject to the interviewee’s memory and perhaps a cleanup of the story.
Crume lists three DNA sites with health related information: 23andMe.com, Genomelink.io and promethease.com. But these provide information on the DNA test taker’s health.
See familytreemagazine.com, and explore the site for much more information on other subjects.
Living DNA
LivingDNA.com is one of the newer DNA testing companies. I was sent a kit to take and review. The company is based in Frome, England, with presumably the majority of test takers being from the British Isles. My results gave me an analysis of my “Motherline” and my “Fatherline,” as the company styles them. And there’s a lot of background material on the history of family migrations, and then specifically to the migration of my own ancestral lines.
The “Family Networks” feature, to match you with real people who have tested, is coming soon. So far, I have not matched anyone in the Beta version, but that is understandable, since I have no recent British ancestors or kinfolk. The “SubRegions” map, once you find it, indicates the areas of the British Isles you have the strongest link to, like “South East England,” based presumably on Reference Populations.
I found the color coded elements hard to discern. The company emphasize its “Privacy Statement” quite a lot and what you agreed to when you signed up. For anyone using DNA testing to help in genealogy research, locate relatives and share family information, or develop leads in the Old Country, LivingDNA could be very useful. See LivingDNA.com.
Germanna Foundation Annual Conference
The Germanna Foundation, devoted to research and preservation around the Germanna Colony, which began in 1714 in Virginia, holds its annual conference July 18-21 in Locust Grove, Va., near Culpeper. See germanna.org for conference information. For the great research and publications from this organization, also see GermannaFamily.org.
About the Author
