Family Tree/Genealogy Project

tl;dr

The software I'm using allows one to push the family tree to the web in a "view-only" state. The details of living people are hidden by default for privacy reasons. I also have it behind a password: shaking-the-tree

Is it risky to share that here? A little. That's why I have you login to this site with your Google ID. The archived family photos are available here too.

The editable version is accessible in several ways, but all require an Apple Account ID. The developers of MacFamilyTree set it up that way. You can browse and edit in a web browser, on an iPhone, iPad, or on a Macintosh computer. The web browser way is free, but the Mac, iPhone, and iPad ways require a software purchase. If that's of interest to you, I'll send you an "invitation link" to it.

Background

Mom (Mary Young Morgan) loved talking about family history. She knew her own side well, but to her credit, she knew a LOT about Dad's side of the family and could talk grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, cousins-once-removed, twice-removed until your head was spinning. It instilled in us an appreciation of where we came from whether it was Germany (Dad's mother's side), Ireland (Mom's mother's side) or France* (Mom's father's side).

Then most recently we've all been talking about the really wonderful, not-so-great, okay horrible genes they passed down to us. We're forked up like the Habsburgs. I reformatted a genogram from cousin Fran Young to map out some of the heritable genetic diseases as we're tested. 

Evolving from that is a more concerted effort, building on work started by my sister Jan Morgan Owen as a digital family tree—with a big tip o' the hat to Dorothy Lickteig (as Mom would then append, "Walt's Dorothy", because there's about 15 Dorothy Lickteigs in the Greeley area) because she put together a BOOK in the 1980s or so of the Lickteig family tree going back to Germany. I have scans of it for comparison but not digitized much further.

In addition to that, I found a hand-drawn tree from the Young side in a box of my old high school papers (thank you Mom for being a hoarder) that shows that side going back France (ahem, Germany) with branches I'd forgotten. There's Youngs, Yungs, and Jungs. Evidently, I wrote a junior English research paper in 1987-88 on Young side of the family with a bit of creative license in the form of imagined journal entries. (No. You can't read it.) 

Shaking the Tree

When we get it closer to something useful, I'll share a login and password (see above) to a secure website for viewing it. It is a macOS app for heavy editing with an iPhone/iPad app for lighter editing and browsing. There's a cloud version for editing in a browser too, so we can bring in more editors if someone wants to help.

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Last week I fell down a rabbit hole and traced the Morgan side of the family all the way back to the 1500s in Wales. I also had available to me the Lickteig side back to Germany in the 1640s. I struggled a bit to prove (to myself, at least) the Swains and Murphys back to Ireland, but did find and document it. You'd be surprised how many Bridget and Mary Murphys there were in southeast Kansas in the late 1880s, but thankfully one in the US Census records where a Bridget and Mary Murphy were sisters with a mother named Mary with the right birth years. Interestingly Bridget and Mary Murphy died the same day in the same hospital in Pittsburg, KS and had a co-funeral. (Bridget Murphy was "Grandma Swain" to Mom, Margaret and Joe; i.e. Mary Jane (Swain) Young's mother, or my great grandmother.)

The Young/Jungs are interesting because of their history of living in the region of Alsace France that got swapped with Germany during various wars. *The name Jung is German, but the census records have them claiming French birth throughout.