Atop the all-time leaderboard

The Legal Genealogist is wrapping up a sixth year of blogging here as December winds to a close, and in that time has written nearly 2,000 posts that have been viewed, in the aggregate, roughly 10 million times by nearly one million people who’ve left nearly 40,000 comments.

We won’t even mention the 121,000 spammers…

Some of the posts on this blog over those years have been whimsical.¹

Some have been painful.²

Some have been furious.³

Some have been calls to the genealogical community for action.⁴

Some have practically broken my heart.⁵

And some have been just plain fun.⁶

These are all among my own favorites from the blog — but readers’ choices? Well, they tell a different story about the hot topics in genealogy.

And if anybody had any doubts about what those hot topics are… well, let’s just say that DNA and copyright still blow everything else away in terms of reader interest — and that doesn’t even count the posts I’m setting aside because their info is just too dated to have continuing value.⁷

So… what’s at the top of the all-time leaderboard here at The Legal Genealogist?

Let’s do the last Top 10 countdown of 2017:

At Number 10 in the all-time list:

Admixture: not soup yet (18 May 2014): “We have to keep in mind what these admixture tests do: they take the DNA of living people — us, the test takers — and they compare it to the DNA of other living people — people whose parents and grandparents and, sometimes, even great grandparents all come from one geographic area. Then they try to extrapolate backwards into time. Nobody is out there running around, digging up 500- or 1,000-year-old bones, extracting DNA for us to compare our own DNA to.”

At Number 9:

Great versus grand (25 February 2015): “The son of The Legal Genealogist’s niece is a little boy named Jack. He is my brother’s first grandson, the light of all of their lives, and a total charmer whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time this week, just in time for his first birthday. Which goes a long way towards explaining the dearth of blog posts lately. But his very existence creates a question… Is he my great nephew (or great-nephew) or my grand nephew (or grandnephew)? Answer: (Drum roll please…) Yes.”

At Number 8:

DNA: life after death (30 June 2013): “DNA testing was something that could always be done. Down the road. Someday. When there was time. And then, suddenly, there was no more time. So reader Pat Rand and her husband turned to the funeral director they had chosen for his mother’s funeral and asked for help in getting that last precious sample of DNA. And ran into a brick wall. And so, Pat asks, “Do the next of kin of a deceased person have the right to ask a funeral director to take a DNA sample after death?””

At Number 7:

Ordering the SS-5 (31 May 2013): “Getting a copy of this (SS-5) form (from the Social Security Administration) is almost always worth it. The information on the SS-5 form was usually provided by the applicant, and so is often the best source of information about what the applicant knew about his or her own birth and parentage.”

At Number 6:

Cemetery photos: permission required? (17 October 2012): “Reader Timothy Campbell in Elmira, Ontario, Canada, and a cousin of his in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have encountered some problems in taking gravestone photographs. ‘As an active genealogist I have taken part in transcribing and photographing headstones in cemeteries,’ Tim writes. ‘I was recently told that I could not photograph headstones in our municipal cemetery without permission from the municipality. … The same scenario happened to my cousin in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in May. … What law does this fall under?’ The answer to this question is really basic, but it’s one that just about every genealogist — including The Legal Genealogist — tends to forget. It’s the law of property rights.”

At Number 5:

Copyright & the newspaper article (19 March 2012): “Reader Aija Rahman has a collection of newspaper articles she’s put together. She wants to compile them into book form for her family and has copyright questions. … I want to introduce you to Peter B. Hirtle. He’s an archivist and digital information expert at Cornell University. And he’s put a ton of information about all the possible time frames for materials either being under copyright or passing into the public domain together in chart form…”

At Number 4:

DNA and the locks of hair (3 June 2012): “Reader John Henning asks: “I’ve come across some locks of hair from my great-great grandmother that were in a scrapbook of my grandmothers (and actually from several of my grandmother’s friends from the 1920s/30s). This sharing of hair apparently was a ‘thing’ back then. Anyways — is there a benefit for having ancestors’ hair tested for DNA analyses? …” It’s absolutely possible to get DNA from a sample of hair. Scientists have used hair from ancient and aboriginal remains and even from a woolly mammoth to obtain DNA for testing. But that doesn’t mean you should go ahead and test that lock of hair from your great-great grandmother, because hair poses some problems in terms of what DNA you can get.”

At Number 3:

A DNA test not to bother with (1 April 2012): “(I)f you’ve been tempted to stick your toes into the water of DNA testing with a new service called ConnectMyDNA (www.connectmydna.com), offering something called Gene Circles, save your money. … (F)rom the standpoint of genealogy, this service is about as handy as a handle on a duck’s rear end.”

At Number 2:

Copyright and the old family photo (6 March 2012): “The photograph you see … here is of my grandmother, Opal (Robertson) Cottrell. Isn’t she adorable? Offhand, I’d say she might be all of two years old in this image, so it was probably taken around 1900. … 2012 minus 1900… that photo was taken 112 years ago. I own this copy of the photo. The person depicted in it is my grandmother. Nothing to worry about in using this photo, is there?”

And the Number One all-time post, still relevant today:

Gedmatch: a DNA geek’s dream site (12 August 2012): “(L)et me introduce you to a wonderful website: GEDmatch.com, with tools for genetic genealogy research that carry a whopping big price tag of exactly zero. That’s not a typo. The site is free, though donations are gratefully accepted and anybody who uses the site really should kick in — it isn’t cheap to provide the kind of computing power Gedmatch provides.”

On to 2018…

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