Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:
(1) Are there persons in your genealogy database who have the same exact birth date that you do? If so, tell us about them — what do you know, and how are they related to you?
(2) Are there persons in your database who are your ancestors and share your birthday (but not the year)? How many, and who are they?
(3) Are there other persons in your database who share your birthday (but not the year)? How many, and who are they?
(4) 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.
(5) Share your answers on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+. Be sure to leave a link in Comments to your post.
So here's my little data dump.
(1) No one in my database has the exact same birthday that I do, April 9, 1962 (my birthday was a week ago Sunday). Like Randy, I didn't really expect to find anyone.
(2) None of my ancestors for whom I have complete birthdates was born on April 9.
(3) Of the people in my database for whom I have complete birthdates (I don't know how many that is), only six persons were also born on April 9, and they're all in the 20th century.
• April 9, 1907, George Wendel Votaw, 4th cousin twice removed
• April 9, 1917, Anna Marie Stayton, grand-aunt-in-law
• April 9, 1945, Cecelia Keselman, ex-4th cousin-in-law
• April 9, 1980, Patricia Marie Gauntt, 2nd cousin
• April 9, 1995, Jacob Berkowitz, 3rd cousin
• April 9, 1996, Yoni Monat, 3rd cousin
The only one I remembered beforehand is my cousin Yoni. I do have several people with only the month of April and no specific day, so it's possible there are a few more. I so need to have time to work on my own family research.
(4) This did not work as well as it should have. I use Family Tree Maker v. 16, which does have a calendar function. Unfortunately, when I ran it, it gave me 57 copies of each month, and every single one was empty, even though I double-checked to make sure it was supposed to be searching through the entire database. So I had to do a manual search in the birthdate field. For my search term I used "April 9." Also unfortunately, this too did not work as well as I had hoped. It picked up all birthdates that started with "about", "before", and "between" and anything with just a year. Altogether, I paged through 1,806 entries to come up with my list of six people. You could say I'm a little . . . disappointed in FTM's performance.
My database, by the way, has only 7,956 individuals in it, as compared to Randy's 47,500 (which I am just astounded at!). Randy had .14% of the people in his database with the same birthdate but a different year. For me the figure was .07% of my database with the same birthdate. Pretty small numbers there for both of us.
It sounds like FTM really made you work for this one. Nice job of sticking with it!
ReplyDeleteI have to admit, some of Randy's challenges have really made FTM look less than adequate, but it does most of what I want so well!
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