Philip Weiss

The Sorensons, found

One of the first branches of the family that I worked on was that of my grandmother, Lillian Solle. My aunts Sue and Jane put together a book of mementos about the Weiss, Solle and Sorenson families and gave it to me in 2004. Prior to that I knew nothing about my grandmother. She and my grandfather divorced in 1966. After that, according to my mother, Lillian would have nothing to do with the family.

I took the information in the memory book about Lillian and her parents and their parents, and started gathering what I could find. Lillian’s mother was Flora Sorenson, the 4th of Nels Hansen Sorenson and Katherine Hansen’s living children. Nels and Katherine emigrated to the U.S. in July of 1883, and settled in Madison, Wisconsin. They built a house at 1118 E. Gorham St., and lived there until they died. They were both from Langeland, Denmark, an island about 2/3 the size of Whidbey Island.

I’ve documented a number of other descendants of Nels and Katherine, some of whom make for a really good story. But I was kind of stuck at finding more information on their parents. I assumed the church in Denmark kept pretty good records, like the church in Sweden did. But I didn’t know how to obtain them and, being swamped with other branches, hadn’t pursued it yet. (I’m not kidding about being swamped. Click the thumbnail to the right to see my Windows desktop filled with icons of newspaper articles I’ve saved in the last few days and that I haven’t yet cataloged.)

All I’d found from Denmark was a record on the Sorensons in the Danish Emigration Archives that showed when they left. It’s just an index, and I haven’t yet purchased a copy of the actual records.

A couple of days ago, I came across a profile on Ancestry.com that looked very much like it matched up with the Sorenson family as of the time they left Denmark. It was entered by a woman in Denmark. I wrote to her, then sat on pins and needles hoping for a reply. I get replies about half the time when I write to relatives I find. One in Sweden wrote back once, and then didn’t reply after that when he realized I wasn’t going to pay him. Like a few genealogy people, he’d turned his hobby into a business and was looking only to sell what he knew about the family. I have living relatives in Sweden who will correspond without payment, so I didn’t bother. I was hoping this woman wasn’t one of that group, because she’s the only person in Denmark I’ve found so far who is connected to the family.

I got a reply this morning! She traces her ancestry to Rasmus Jensen Jørgensen. He married Nels’ mother Marthe Kirstine Nielsen after she had Nels by someone else. So we aren’t related by blood, but do have some of our trees in common.

I had found Niels’ marriage and the birth of his two sons and then suddenly I could not find him anywhere. I should have guess that he emmigrated. Two of his halfsisters did.

So now I have a bunch of information to add. A lot.

Taqwacores

I had lunch at Louisa’s today, and grabbed a Stranger rather than read my book. The Stranger Suggests for tonight was The Taqwacores, based on a book I read 2 or 3 years ago that I loved. So I headed up to the Northwest Film Forum tonight to see it (last night showing).

It’s hard to be as good as the book, because they can’t just fit everything in. There was less punk in it than the book. So some of it was more like Muslim deadbeats living together rather than Muslim punks. And it was choppy; the character progression wasn’t smooth. Both issues really attributable to being able to fit less story in. But they kept all the main characters, and the best scenes. The acting was really superb, particularly the “straight-edge” Muslim punk who you could just see the anger at having to live with less devout Muslims steaming off him. And the overall effect was just as good as the book: outcasts trying to reconcile their heritage they don’t want to give up with their rebellion which rejects a lot of that heritage.

Also, I swear the roof of the building they lived in coulda been the same roof as in Clerks. There’s just not a hell of a lot of difference between tarred roofs of brick buildings.

Magic Fields proportional image resizing bug

I’m posting this in the hope that it becomes sufficiently Google ranked that other folks who have had the problem can find the answer explain, as the sources of this information were buried in a Google Group and were not complete answers.

I am attempting to build a new book review blog. I want to have book cover images attached to posts, as well as a lot of other meta-data. My current plan is to use the Magic Fields WordPress plugin.

I created a new MF custom panel called ‘Review’ and added a field called ‘Cover’ with the type of ‘Image (Upload Media)’. Then I used get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150’) to retrieve the image in my theme. This seems to do a ‘zoom-crop’, which is a term I haven’t heard before (call me clueless). What I got was an image that where the smallest dimension (in this case, the width) was reduced to 150, and the extra from the other dimension is just cropped off. What I want is for both height and width to be reduced until both are below 150.

There’s a zoom crop option, that can be forced off. I tried that: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’). The result is the upper left corner of the cover.

The solution as reported by Brandon Sorg is to replace part of the code of of the Magic Field file MF_thumb.php. Lines 118 to 174 of the original file get replaced with this much smaller piece of code:

	        // don't crop, just resize using $dest_w x $dest_h as a maximum bounding box 
	        $crop_w = $orig_w; 
	        $crop_h = $orig_h; 
	        $s_x = 0; 
	        $s_y = 0; 
	        list( $new_w, $new_h ) = wp_constrain_dimensions( $orig_w, $orig_h, $dest_w, $dest_h ); 
        }

MF_thumb.txt is the complete file (with .php replaced with .txt). Download, rename to MF_thumb.php and copy over the file in your plugins/magic-fields directory. Please check the contents of the file and verify them yourself, as I take no responsibility if it does not work as intended.

After that, the zc=0 in get_image must still be used: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’)

The next time you upgrade Magic Fields to a new version, your changes will be overwritten. Hopefully they’ll have fixed the problem by then. If not, you’ll need to re-do the changes. Which is why I hate hate hate fixing bugs by hacking around someone’s original code. I do not like forking.

WordPress as a CMS? Not so much.

Over the last year or so, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic (his company), and a coterie of bloggers who develop the WordPress platform have been claiming WordPress is a content management system.

I gotta call bullshit on that.

What they’ve done is build a back end (if you use the right plugins) that can be used to create content.

What WordPress can’t do right now, so far as I can tell, is deliver the content. So far, I’ve seen only one plugin that lets you do layout, Carrington Build ($499). I’ve seen no plugins that let you display generic meta-data. Lots and lots that let you create generic meta-data. But every single one that I’ve seen requires that user modify code in a theme to display the information.

To illustrate: let’s say I want to build a book review web site in WordPress. Now let’s say I want to have an index of reviews where all reviews of a certain author are displayed, sorted by author using a standard name sort (surname, given name). Really not easily done without writing code.

I have any number of plugins that allow me to add that author information. None so far for displaying it. Not without writing code.

And I’m pretty sure that moving the created data from one plugin to another would be a complete pain in the ass, because there’s no standard format for storing that.

I so wish the Drupal user interface were comprehensible. (Maybe it is now, I haven’t looked at it in a year plus.)

Magic Fields

I haven’t posted on my goals in a while. Still actually working on them, though not as hard. This is an update to my goal of getting my blog moved to the new domain with new features by January’s end. It didn’t happen.

I did get the author reading event list moved over to it’s new web site. What that entailed was:

figuring out which event listing plugin to use. I ended up sticking with Events Manager. Marcus Sykes has taken over development for David Benini and done some good work with it. He appears to have fixed some of the problems with the old plugin. I’d had to hack around them and upgrading the plugin meant losing my hacks. Looks like I won’t need the hacks anymore.
Moving the events listing to the main page of the site. That part was pretty easy.
Create a new page for displaying blog posts there. If you don’t have it on the home page, you gotta have it somewhere else (or not have it). It wasn’t hard, but it does require a bit of code hacking. The problem will be if I change my theme. I will lose the code hack I did. I don’t know why there isn’t a built in way to do that.
Create an event submission page. The old page just listed an email address. The submission page lets me add fields like “event start time” and “location” that some omitted when they emailed me.
Add events. Have to do this normally. No big deal.
Write the first blog posts. Basically this is just a weekly post of the upcoming week’s events so anyone who wants to get new events can read them via RSS rather than having to remember to visit the site.

After taking that live, I decided to let everything sit for a bit. See how it worked out. I didn’t want to be in the middle of moving the rest of the site to its domain and have the readings site go south. I have a few ideas for additional items for the readings site that may or may not happen. Stuff like email subscriptions, reviews of readings, recordings of readings, ads, promotional author stuff (interviews, guest blogs, etc.), and a few other smaller technical items. But they will all wait to see how it goes and definitely won’t happen until after I get the rest of the book site to its new domain.

Everything seems stable enough so I’m actively working on that. Hence the title. My current task is to figure out how to integrate meta-information about the books and other stuff I read.

before, I’ve just posted it in the text of the review. That has some drawbacks though, such as being unable to extract it in a meaningful way (index of authors, put it in the sidebar), and also requires that I have post templates to cut and paste from. The latter is a problem, because the best plugin for that hasn’t been updated in a while. The author decided to go commercial with the plugin, and his commercial sense isn’t so great. I paid for the commercial version even, but if he’s since done new versions he hasn’t notified me and his site forums are now filled with spam. And some more minor features of it stopped working with WordPress 3.0.

Supposedly WordPress 3.0 has support for custom post types (i.e., things like reviews), but it doesn’t have any UI for them. You are supposed to use a plugin for it. Which there are a billiondy of, and none of them seem to be very well documented. I’m currently testing out one called Magic Fields, which doesn’t even appear to use custom post types. It might do what I want though. I have to hack the theme though to display the meta-information. I’d rather not do that, though since I’m using Carrington Framework, I only have to write overrides for very small parts of the theme.

Anyway, WordPress as a CMS has a lot of work left to do in its usability and documentation.

Vodka sauce

Yesterday I made a pasta sauce not from a jar for the first time ever. I’d planned on making it on Monday, but what with my thumb getting partially removed and the last dish lasting longer than I expected…

Since my basic cookbooks don’t have a vodka sauce recipe in them, I turned to the internet. AllRecipes.com had a vodka sauce recipe, and that’s what I started with. Steps below are how I made it, which is not exactly what was in the linked recipe.

1 cup vodka
2 tablespoons olive oil
¾ pound prosciutto
3 heaping teaspoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
One 28 ounce can diced tomatoes
One 15 ounce can no salt added tomato sauce
1 cup heavy cream

chop prosciutto
chop parsley
chop basil
heat olive oil in a large pan
sauté prosciutto, garlic, parsley, and basil until prosciutto is evenly brown
add vodka
simmer 10 minutes
add diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and 1 cup water
simmer 15 minutes
add cream
cook 2 minutes

I’m guessing it’ll make six servings. Four so far, and it looks like about two are left.

The sauce was thinner than I expected. Next time I’ll just omit the cup of water. And drop the prosciutto down to a quarter or half pound at most. Normally I’d have used no salt added diced tomatoes too, but when I was poor last month, Deirdre was kind enough to donate a can of diced tomatoes to me. This kind would actually qualify as low-sodium under F.D.A. rules, but when you add it all up it’s still quite a lot.

Salt content:

Prosciutto: 7680 mg
Diced tomatoes: 1540 mg
No salt added tomato sauce: 70 mg
Cream: 160 mg

Total sodium: 9450 mg
Per serving: 1575 mg

That does not include the pasta. Definitely up there in salt. Cutting down the prosciutto will cut a lot from that. Not sure if there are lower salt prosciuttos out there.

Stephen Parker is insane, and paths crossing

So here’s an interesting one. My third great uncle was one Stephen Parker (me → George R. Weiss, my father → George A. Weiss, his father → Frances Ryan, his mother → Mary Parker, her mother → Stephen Parker, her brother). Like all the Parker kids he was born in Canada. His birth was likely in Ramsay Township near Perth about 1937. Father Patrick Parker and mother Mary Murphy took the kids to America sometime shortly before 1860. The family shows up in Glen Haven, Wisconsin in 1860, and in nearby Patch Grove in 1870. However, Stephen isn’t with the family in 1870. He enlisted with the Union Army on 16 May 1862.

US Army Register of Enlistments 1798-1914 Record for Stephen Parker — Stephen Parker's enlistment record

In that record, you’ll see that he enlisted with his brother Patrick. But Stephen was discharged not even 3 months later on 2 August because of injury. He shows up in the 1870 U.S. Census in Clarion, Iowa as a single man, farming. By 1880, he’s married to Margaret Burk, and they have two daughters, Mary and Agnes. But he’s no longer listed as the head of the family and the column for insane is marked!

1880 United States Federal Census Record for Stephen Parker — Stephen Parker marked as insane

By 1895, he’s been committed to the Independence State Hospital for the Insane and is not longer living with the family. I haven’t been able to dig up anything that shows what his symptoms of insanity were. I thought perhaps alcoholism, but that doesn’t seem to fit with this news report filed shortly after his death, that appeared in the Waterloo (Iowa) Courier on 16 Jun 1897.

An autopsy over the body of Stephen Parker at the Independence hospital has explained the cause of insanity in what physicians pronounced one of the most remarkable cases ever brought to the asylum here. Parker was insane for years, all attempts to account for the malady failed. The autopsy showed that during the war he suffered a fracture of the skull, from which minute particles of bone pierced the brain. Around these osseous matter formed, which affected the sufferer’s mind and caused his death. During the many years of his confinement in the asylum, the existence of the fracture was unsuspected. Had it been a simple operation would have restored him to sanity and perfect health.

So far this is the only madness I’ve found in my family tree, but there’s plenty more people to check out.

The Stephen Parker family story doesn’t quite end there though. Margaret Parker and her two daughters moved to Seattle in 1906 where they became employed by the Seattle School District. I love it when they live in Seattle, because I have so many more tools to find them. The Seattle Times used to list who was teaching where every year. Margaret died in 1924. Mary taught elementary, mostly at Longfellow School, which I believe was across the street from what’s now Miller Playfield. She died in 1932, at 615 Bellevue Ave. According to King County, it’s the same building there now.

Obituary for Mary Parker (Seattle Times, 11 Nov 1932)

Agnes taught high school mostly. She first taught at T.T. Minor. For several decades she taught at the Broadway School which used to be where the Broadway Performance Hall is now. But in the 1942 school year, she taught history at Ballard High School. Unfortunately, the paths between the Weiss side of my family and the Hathaway side did not cross; my grandfather graduate in the spring of 1942 and joined the merchant marine in May for the war.

Agnes Parker retired in 1947. She was very involved as a supporter of the Seattle Art Museum throughout her time in Seattle. In addition to listing the teachers every year, the Time also listed who bought season passes for S.A.M. every year. And you think you give up privacy with Facebook! Agnes became friendly with the Considine family, local vaudeville and theater promoters until they moved to the burgeoning entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles. It was on a visit to Hollywood producer John Considine Jr, that Agnes died.

Obituary for Agnes Parker (Seattle Times, 12 Jan 1949)

Neither Mary nor Agnes had any children, so that branch of my family is not running around locally. I had hoped at first though, when I first found them in Seattle.

Agnes Troeller leads to Celia Weiss Klindt

I wrote about tracking down Clara Weiss, my second great aunt, in Upland California. I didn’t really know what had happened to her sister, Cecilia Celia. Turns out she was just down the road.

Finding a girl through the census records is hard, because they usually changed surnames when they got married. Celia shows up in 1860, 1870, and 1880. Then she disappears. She got married and doesn’t show up anywhere. Ancestry.com tells me the most likely entries are: Cecilia Garthwaite, Cecilia Lindsey, Cecilia McCready, etc. All of them born about 1858 in Wisconsin. Ancestry seems to rank them in terms of how close they are to Celia’s birthplace of Cassville, Wisconsin. In fact, Celia doesn’t show up at all in the first five pages of possibilities for censuses after 1900. I checked a lot of them, and most didn’t match up. Some could have been Celia, but I had no way to know via the census records.

So I kind of sat on that for a bit and pursued other Weisses. I got to Clara. She appeared only in 1900, and later I figured out why she wasn’t in 1910. Before I’d done that though, I started looking for her children. Her third child, Agnes Marie showed up in 1910, but not with Clara or Clara’s husband Conrad. She was part of the Henry J. and Anna C. Klindt household in Ontario, California. Her relationship to Henry was listed as niece.

1910 United States Federal Census Record for Henry J Klindt

Agnes is listed as the niece of Henry Klindt. So either Conrad Troeller is the brother of Henry or Anna, or Clara was the sister of Anna. There were no daughters of Anton Weiss listed as Anna in the 1860 through 1880 censuses. However, it was possible that Cecilia was a middle name. Among my grandparent’s family, George Archibald went by Arch, Florence Marie went by Marie, Richard Glenn went by Glenn and Laura Ann Francis goes by Francis. Perhaps that was common in their parent’s family as well, and Anna C. is Anna Cecilia.

Anna C.’s other stats matched up: born in Wisconsin around 1858, with both parents from Germany. Not enough to confirm it, but enough to start digging more. Luckily a few other things turned up. One other person had listed the wife of Henry Klindt as Anna C Weiss in their family tree. Still tenuous, but looking better. Around then I found Frank Smitha’s biography, and his page about his grandmother Clara.

My mother’s sister, Agnes, four years and three months older, was sent to live with Clarissa’s sister, Celia Klindt, whose husband, according to my mother, owned the main grocery store in Upland. Celia and husband were the family members on a path to wealth. They were putting their spare cash into buying property and in a few years, according to my mother, “Aunt Celia’s family owned flats as they called them, on Lake Street in Los Angeles. I think the property has been absorbed into McCarthur Park, as near as I can figure.”

The weight of the evidence was enough for me to put it in a confirmation column, even though some of the other facts on Smitha’s page are wrong.

The Klindt’s lived in South Dakota and Iowa for a bit, then went overseas to Germany for a couple of years. When they returned, they moved to Ontario. Henry’s passport application gave birth dates for his children as well as his intention to return in a couple of years. That’s awesome, because the census only gives approximate birth years and was generally transcribed as told to the census taker by the head of the house. The head of the house might not remember birth dates as well; the transcriber could mishear; the transcriber could miswrite it; the transcriber could have a bad sense of policies about first names vs. middle names. Some of them are really bad spellers.

I’m not sure the Klindts were wealthy, even though Smitha’s mother seemed to think they were. There were five children. Pauline, who married one Fred Jacobs. They moved back to Iowa where Fred died about 1916. Pauline moved back to California, and as best as I can tell never remarried or had more kids. Daughter Agnes married a George Bunker, then divorced him just a couple years later. She never appeared to remarry and the Bunkers had only one child George Jr. Daughter Mildred died about 1916 without marrying. Robert married Jessie Hermes around 1916, and by 1930 they had not had any children. The youngest child, Irving, married Edith Smith and they had a couple of daughters by 1930. None of the Klindts appeared to have lived in particularly wealthy neighborhoods, and I haven’t found any of them among the movers and shakers of southern California. But perhaps they were quietly wealthy. Who knows?

Neither Henry nor Celia lived to see 1930.

My thumb story

For those friends on Facebook, you already have the news. But as this is where I should be writing stuff for posterity, here’s the story.

Thursday night I decided to make sausage and beans, crock pot style. It’s a recipe I’ve done a lot, and I really like it. Basically, brown about 2 pounds of smoked sausage. Saute some shallots and garlic. Put it all in a crock pot with a couple cups of beans and chicken stock, and cook for four hours.

Where I went wrong was in chopping the shallots. Chop. Chop. Ow!

Took about an eighth of an inch of my thumb off. Basically the skin, some of the nail, and a little bit of the meat. It wasn’t quite as painful as I would have expected. At least as long as I didn’t touch the cut part that is. There was a lot of blood. I cut deep enough to sever some capillaries. Every time my heart beat, I could see a little gush of blood come out the thumb tip.

Called 911. Then realized I should just call a cab to get to the E.R. But once you’ve called, you’ve called. They called back, then sent the Fire Department down here. They bandaged me up. That was good, because I didn’t have anything to properly bandage something like this. Called a cab and went to the E.R. Turns out it wasn’t a deep enough cut to do anything with the little piece of thumb I’d removed. But the wound is too wide to stitch up. They cleaned it up, put a pressure bandage on to stop the bleeding, and gave me a tetanus shot.

Also, they gave me a couple of Vicodin for the pain. Turns out that Vicodin doesn’t seem to reduce my pain. It also doesn’t make me loopy or happy or anything like that. I do, however, get the nausea side effect. Not quite enough to upchuck, but enough to feel very queasy and want to hang out near the toilet. I decided not to fill the Vicodin prescription.

Other than pushing on the top of the dressing, I haven’t felt too much pain. The button fly on Levis has been a pain though. And I can’t left anything heavy because I can’t grip with both hands.

I changed the dressing tonight. I was supposed to change it after 48 hours, and then every 24 hours after that. Removing the dressing hurt big time. Felt like I was pulling off the skin, because it seemed to be glued onto the wound. Dunno if stuff had already started growing into the dressing, or if it was just congealed body fluids that wouldn’t soften in water. I’m not really looking forward to changing it again tomorrow. Hoping it isn’t as painful. Also, my new dressing is not as pretty as the one the nurse put on Thursday. If I had two hands free, I think I could have made it almost as good. But… well.

So there’s the story. I have pictures. I’ll get them on Flickr at some point, but I don’t plan on posting them here.

Geni

I know you’re thinking, why hasn’t Phil written about that genealogy stuff in two weeks? So I give you this to sate your desire.

Last spring, when I first started poking around this, Sharon recommended I take a look at Geni. It has a nice and easy graphical user interface. Just click on add node, fill in a few details, and you can start building a family tree.

Geni Data Entry - Basics — Basic Geni data entry dialog

I plugged in a bunch of people from Hathaways of America to get used to what it can and can’t do. It’s designed to be super easy to use.

What’s the major feature for Geni? Collaboration. Geni is constantly attempting to match the data I entered with thousands of other users. If a profile closely matches what someone else entered for one of their ancestors, Geni proposes a merge. If both users agree, the two users trees will share a profile for a single historical person, and their trees will be connected. Anything the other user enters affects my tree. The connected trees are no longer separate trees. They are one family tree.

I only had to enter the Hathaways up to my third great grandfather, Abner Hathaway. He’d already been entered by someone else, Geni proposed the merge, and now I share a family tree with the person who entered Abner.

This is very powerful. If someone else is able to document something for one of my ancestors, I don’t have to. I don’t even have to copy their information. It’s already there.

Geni has a number of these connected trees. Most of their users are connected to what they call The Big Tree. This has allowed me to find and chat with relatives that I didn’t know I had. The fellow who had also entered Abner Hathaway is Chad Bouldin. Abner is his wife’s fourth great uncle. I’ve found a 4th cousin in Sweden, and my grandfather’s cousin.

Geni has a fair number of celebrity profile entered. Because Geni has a big tree, I can tell you how I am related to a number of them. One of the Hathaway wives was descended from English royalty, so there’s a lot of documented connections. Through that, I can tell you that I am Eminem’s 22nd cousin, twice removed. That’s if people have the connections correct.

Which brings me to the first of a large number of problems with Geni, and ultimately why I don’t use it except to find these connections. The first is that there’s lots of bad and speculative information there. If I want to draw up my own family tree based on a family legend that grandpa Patrick (not my real grandfather) was Elvis’ illegitimate brother, I can do that. When you do it on Geni, everyone is now affected. And there are lots of people who insist on putting in very bad and incorrect information. Kings who were the sons of giants in mythology, for instance. I am not the 44th great grandson (it says 50th great grandson now) of Jesus Christ. But since a gnostic gospel says Christ fathered so-and-so, and there’s a large contingent of biblical and mythological literalists on Geni, there’s no changing it.

The second big problem is with data entry. There’s lots of events in a person’s life that genealogists care about and want to record. My great grandfather Johan Oman came to the U.S. in 1909. There’s no good way to record immigration in Geni. Birth, death, baptism, marriage and burial (and their locations) are the pieces of data that Geni records well. As for relationships, it records parent-child and husband-wife relationships. Geni cannot record adoptions.

A third major fail is with recording sources. Ancestry.com is the king of handling sources for genealogy. Geni lets a user upload documents and associate which facts are documented in each. But the user interface is clunky and weird and it’s difficult to share sources.

The fourth major lack is with data portability. I can only import data the first time I sign up. Afterward, it has to be entered manually. The export options are awful. Export of data is fairly complete. But Geni limits the set of profiles I can export. I can do ancestors, descendants, blood relatives, and forest. There’s no option to export data for all people I’ve entered. If I enter the wife of a second cousin, that person is not a blood relative, ancestor, descendant or even a blood relative. I can’t export it easily. The forest option allows this, but that exports everyone I’m connected to, and that’s a 50 Mb file containing 100,000 people that is too large for most genealogy programs. And you have to pay for that export too.

I realized most of this in June, but I’d already entered a fair amount of information. I was locked in to some degree. But problems #2 and #4 got to be annoying enough that in August I decided I would make something else my primary genealogy data storage. Geni is still useful for connecting up with other trees. Very very useful. But not a good base to store everything I want to know.