Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Exploring My Ancestors with the Kinfolk Observatory

It's Saturday Night, and that means it's time for another round of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, courtesy of Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings!

This week's challenge is to select a recent genealogy-related blog post, identify the blogger and the post, and explain why it caught our attention.

Learning from Other Genealogy Bloggers

When it comes to genealogy bloggers, one of my favorites is Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings.

What I particularly appreciate about Randy is that he doesn't just share links to interesting genealogy articles and tools. He follows the work of other genealogists, tries out their ideas using his own family history, and then shares what he learned. His posts frequently introduce me to tools or techniques I might otherwise have missed.

One of his recent posts, "Steve Little's AI Agent 'Kinfolk Observatory' Provides Interesting Genealogy Charts From a GEDCOM File," caught my attention when he shared it on Facebook.

The idea of taking information from a GEDCOM file and transforming it into a variety of visualizations intrigued me. After all, I spend a great deal of time researching, documenting, and analyzing my ancestors. But how often do I step back and look at the bigger picture?

Thanks to Randy's post, I decided to give the Kinfolk Observatory a try.

Exploring Nine Generations of Ancestors

Using RootsMagic 12, I created a GEDCOM file containing nine generations of my ancestors. I then used that file to explore the visualizations available through Steve Little's Kinfolk Observatory.

The results were fascinating!

Instead of looking at individual ancestors, family groups, or pedigree charts, I could see patterns across multiple generations of my family tree.

Here are some of the visualizations I explored.

Ancestor Fan – Birth Location

This chart provides a different perspective on my pedigree by using color to represent birth locations. Rather than simply seeing names and dates, I can begin to recognize geographic patterns within my ancestral lines.

Night Sky

The Night Sky visualization offers a creative way to look at family history. It is certainly different from the traditional pedigree charts and family group sheets that genealogists are accustomed to using!

Ancestors Through Time

Looking at ancestors through time provides an opportunity to think about my family history chronologically rather than one family at a time.

By the Numbers

This was one of the more interesting views because it summarized information that I had never really considered counting.

I know a great deal about individual families in my tree, but I couldn't have told you which state accounted for the largest number of ancestral births.

Now I can!

Where They Lived

Geography plays such an important role in genealogy. Seeing locations summarized across generations provides another way to consider migration patterns and the places that shaped my family history.

What's Missing?

For a genealogist, this may be one of the most useful perspectives of all.

While it is satisfying to see what I have documented, identifying gaps in my data can be even more valuable. Those gaps may point toward future research opportunities.

A Few Surprises in My Family Tree

Although I enjoyed exploring all of these visualizations, the geographic statistics were particularly revealing.

I had no idea that more of my documented ancestors were born in New York than in any other state!

Given the amount of time I spend researching my Crawford ancestors in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, I might have expected a different result.

Another surprise was discovering that 11 of my ancestors were born in New Jersey.

At first, that number caught me off guard. I haven't spent much time researching New Jersey records.

Then I remembered my Dutch ancestors.

Some of those families migrated to New Jersey before moving on to Pennsylvania. Suddenly, that unexpected number made much more sense!

This was a wonderful reminder that even when we know the stories of individual families, we may not recognize the larger patterns hidden in our research.

Of course, these statistics reflect the information currently recorded in my genealogy database. Missing birthplaces and incomplete ancestral lines can influence the results. Still, they provide an interesting starting point for further investigation.

More Than Just Pretty Charts

What I particularly enjoyed about this experiment was that it encouraged me to look at familiar information in unfamiliar ways.

I spend so much time focused on individual ancestors, evaluating records, resolving conflicting evidence, and trying to break through brick walls that I sometimes forget to look at my family tree as a whole.

These visualizations won't solve my Crawford brick wall or identify a missing parent. However, they may help me recognize geographic patterns, identify gaps, and ask new research questions.

And sometimes, asking a different question is exactly what genealogy research needs.

Thanks for the Inspiration!

This is why I enjoy following Randy Seaver and other genealogy bloggers.

Randy learned about a tool developed by Steve Little, experimented with it using his own genealogy, and shared his experience. His post inspired me to try the same tool, which led to some unexpected discoveries about my own ancestors.

That's one of the things I appreciate most about the genealogy blogging community. We learn from one another, share our experiments, and occasionally discover something new about families we've been researching for decades.

Have you ever analyzed your family tree by birthplace or looked at your ancestors through a completely different type of chart? Were you surprised by what you discovered?

Thanks to Randy Seaver and Steve Little for inspiring this week's genealogy fun!