Saturday, October 23, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Same birthday as yours?



1)  Is there a person in your genealogy database that has the same birth date that you do?  If so, tell us about him or her - what do you know, and how is s/he related to you?

2)  For bonus points, how did you determine this?  What feature or process did you use in your software to work this problem out?  I think the Calendar feature probably does it, but perhaps you have a trick to make this work outside of the calendar function.

Above is Randy Seaver’s challenge for this week.  I have accepted that  challenge and it exposed me to new ways to use my genealogy software.  I did the work using both Family Tree Maker and Roots Magic using the calendar option.  I also used the index of individuals in Legacy and moved the date of birth field to the first column and just scanned through the list.
Using the calendar option in both programs I found five individuals  in my data base that share my  October 6th birthday.  Only one of those individuals is a blood relative.  She is Katherine Josephine Spiller and a 4th cousin once removed.  Katherine is a descendant, as I am, of the Burbach family of Oberselters, Hesse-Nassau, Germany.  She was both born and died in Austin, Travis, Texas.    Both on our immigrant ancestors came th the United States in the 1850s.  Her ancestors went to Texas and mine to Wisconsin.  The others sharing my birthday are ancestors of my husband. 
The challenge was probably faster using the calendar report, but it was a totally new report for me and I use the index of individuals on a regular basis to go to who I am working on.