User:DataAnalyst

  Featured Page: Week of November 11, 2013

My name is Janet Bjorndahl and I live in Saskatchewan.

I am retired from a 40-year career in IT, most recently as an IT Data Analyst. I'm keen on data quality, as it was a significant focus in my career. I like the idea of an integrated tree based on collaboration. Once I finished loading my own records, I joined other volunteers to improve the quality of WeRelate records - first by working on data uploaded in the early days of WeRelate, and more recently by deleting pages for living individuals, while adding dates for deceased people (mostly 20th century).

Languages en This user is a native speaker of English. This user is a WeRelate administrator (verify)

Feb 2017: Captain Thomas Ensor

Skills I can share

I've done a fair bit of work digging through Norwegian parish registers (digitized images available free online, at Digitalarkivet), and can provide a limited amount of support in this area.

I have split apart an integrated database of about 20,000 individuals into trees small enough to load into WeRelate, and could probably use the same technique to help others with this. See my talk page for statistics on this task.

My daughter’s ancestors

My ancestors include:

• United Empire Loyalists (people who chose to move to what is now Canada after the American Revolution) – this is the branch of my family that extends into early New England. Names include Edwards, Love, Kilborn, Benedict, Griswold and Ketchum.
• Scots-Irish-Canadian folk named Stewart and Willis.
• English people named Berry, Bibby, Lord, Walker, Humphreys and Wright. My grandmother was born in England and married my Canadian grandfather and moved to Canada after the first World War.
• German Mennonites who originated in the Netherlands and emigrated first to Prussia (now Poland), then to the Ukraine, and finally to Manitoba, Canada. Their names include Fehr, Peters, Sawatzky, Neufeld, Wiebe, Klassen, Harder, Wiens and other German Mennonite names common in western Canada. This tree has about 750 individuals and stretches back as far as the 1500s.

My husband’s ancestors include:

• Settlers of western Canada from Norway via the United States. Family names are not relevant, as patronymics were used until they immigrated to the U.S. These ancestors were not Vikings, but farmers in mostly inland areas, mostly in south-eastern Norway. This tree has about 2000 individuals and stretches back mostly to the 1500s and 1600s, but in one case back to the 1100s.
• Hungarians named Stroheber, Bartok and Panak, relatively late immigrants to North America. This tree has about 75 individuals.
• Swiss and German Mennonites named Reiff, Meyer, Shantz, Erb, and Bechtel, who immigrated first to Pennsylvania and later to Ontario, Canada.
• Germans named Habermehl, Ringler, Wildfong, Zinn, and Herner, who arrived in North America between the mid-1700s and the mid-1800s.
• People of mostly English descent, with roots in early New England, and names such as Snyder, Howard, Allard, Etheridge, Ormsbee, Carpenter, Franklin, Griswold, Cleveland, Tracy, Battles, Kempton, Abbe, Hammond, Badcock, Horton, White, Darling, Pratt, Chantrell, Bliss, Judkins, Mellowes, Bulkeley and Grosvenor. Through Elizabeth Grosvenor (mother of Rev. Edward Bulkeley), and assuming no errors in the genealogy, my husband is descended from an illegitimate son of King Henry II of England – the only English royal line I am aware of in our combined ancestry.

In total, my database of ancestors and their children and their children’s spouses numbers about 8000 individuals.

My approach to research

I became interested in genealogy as a teenager, gathering information from my grandfather (some of which I discovered many years later was not quite accurate). My interest lapsed for a while, but then was engaged again when my daughter was born, and I have been busy with it ever since.

My early records were poorly sourced (as I expect most people’s records are when they first start), but once I got more serious, I bought a great software package and started keeping better track. When I had hit dead ends in all my branches, I checked out RootsWeb WorldConnect and was excited to find a branch of my husband’s tree that extended into early New England. Later, I found a branch of my own tree that did the same, and discovered that we are 11th cousins twice removed.

Before too long, I discovered that not all family trees are created equal, and became much more cautious about picking up information from other amateurs like myself. As a result, I decided to invest in a few books and some online subscriptions, and have done considerable checking of official records and published works (recognizing that some of these are better than others). I include the source text most of the time (although I admit I rarely do this when cleaning up other people's trees), so that it is possible for others to see what information I picked up from the source, and what I have inferred (or possibly misinterpreted).

Like most people, I am disappointed in myself when I realize I've made an error. But I take comfort in the following saying from a potholder my husband and I picked up on our travels a few decades ago:

Wer wenig arbeitet macht wenig Fehler

Wer viel arbeitet macht viele Fehler

Wer keine Fehler macht ist ein fauler Hund

Rough translation:

Whoever works a bit makes a few mistakes

Whoever works a lot makes a lot of mistakes

Whoever doesn't make mistakes is a lazy dog

My scope

I have chosen to trace my ancestors rather than focus on descendants with any particular family name. However, I am the “official” keeper of the family tree of the descendants of one set of grandparents – this tree (which I do not publish online, but bring updated to every family reunion) numbers over 400 people.

When I realized a few years ago that I had inadvertently picked up some bad data from RootsWeb WorldConnect (and spent some time researching and documenting a line that was not mine), I decided to make it easier for others to judge the quality of my data. One aspect of this was to include siblings of my ancestors whenever possible, as I realized that seeing a person in the context of an entire family made it easier to spot errors (such as children born in widely distant places for no obvious reason, or children born too close together).

In many cases, I have also included spouses of siblings – mostly because I suspected that I might be the only one who had that information for several of my great-aunts and uncles. With the way that the WeRelate GEDCOM upload matches on couples (rather than individuals), I am glad that I chose to include spouses – it helps me to avoid creating duplicates.

Other contributions to WeRelate

Since my husband has an English royal line, I got into medieval records on WeRelate and did quite a bit of cleanup for about 6 months before deciding to focus on other research. I found an extremely well-sourced website (Charles Cawley's Medieval Lands) and used it as my main source to correct the mess that used to exist on WeRelate – but still felt like I barely scratched the surface. Others have picked up the task, using Medieval Lands and other sources.

I sometimes dabble in merging duplicates in WeRelate, and have cleaned up families that were only marginally related to my own ancestry. I spent some time improving trees that were uploaded in the early days of WeRelate - adding dates, correcting names, and removing living persons. My current project is to find and delete pages for living individuals - and add dates to pages for deceased people that I come across in the process.

I also support WeRelate by coding enhancements to the software for Dallan to implement.