I’m a bit surprised ancestry.com doesn’t draw this correctly.

It’s a functional pedigree chart, at least. The vertical family-tree view is completely busted, with two copies of Rachel and her parents.

Cousin marriage isn’t particularly rare, so you think they’d at least mark the duplicate family members with a little icon:

Ambrose R. French enters the record at age 35 in 1870, working as a plasterer in Auglaize Township, Paulding County, OH. No parents, no siblings, allegedly born in Ohio.

15-year-old Nellie Sarah Snyder appears out of nowhere in 1872 when she weds Ambrose. No parents, no siblings, allegedly born in Ohio.

Their son Harrison Rice, born in 1873, is thoroughly documented: birth, baptism, census, draft card, city directories, Social Security, etc. Daughter Hattie A., on the other hand, exists only as a line on the 1880 census setting her age at 4.

Harry’s wife, Lula Forest Peters, can be traced back to early-1700s New England on both sides, but Harry’s tree ends at Ambrose and Nellie.

Four years before her death in 1924, Nellie’s last appearance in the census lists her father’s birthplace as “unknown” and her mother’s as “no way to find out”.

This is all based on scanned documents; if there’s someone who’s done actual legwork on this family, I haven’t been able to find it online. I’m hoping that filling in siblings and spouses will eventually lead to a DNA match that includes their parents.

Of course, those tests only work on human DNA…

Funny thing about living 20 minutes from the Pacific Ocean: there’s no evidence of an eclipse-in-progress, thanks to the heavy overcast this time of year. I might see some sunshine around 1pm. Maybe.

Jean-François Draime (b 1795) married Marie Madeleine Lallemand (b 1800) and had ten children with her that we know of. Marie died at the beginning of 1835, and younger sister Mary Catherine (b 1809) helped him through this difficult time. So effective was her help that she was about three months pregnant when he married her on February 24th, given that the first of their six children together was born on September 2nd.

(some trees have a wife before Marie, but then again, they have Mary’s second kid being born in Ohio two months before their ship reached America; it looks like the 1835 kid didn’t live to make the trip, and likely the 9-year-old and 5-year-old sons (scribble and Albert) listed in the ship’s log died young as well, since they’re not in anyone’s trees)

In 1837, the family moved from Belgium to Ohio, settling in Frenchtown. A year and a half later, daughter Marie Christine became the (possibly second) wife of Jean-Pierre Bergé. They allegedly had 22 children, but since Marie Christine would have been in her fifties for the last four, I suspect data-quality issues.

mumble years ago, my mother actually went to Frenchtown and got a copy of the Barger/Barga/Bergé family book, but it got boxed up in a move and hasn’t resurfaced yet. Fortunately, by combining DNA matches with family trees, ancestry.com has provided pretty decent confirmation that Jean-François and Marie Madeleine were my fourth-great grandparents. Five of my great-great grandparents are still dead ends (Switalski, Nowak, Michalek, French, and Snyder), so eventually someone will have to do some actual field work. And learn Polish.

(a lot of the online family trees get pretty iffy before around 1850, with mismatches, duplicates, mis-merges, and impossible parentages (pro tip: when both parents died years before a child was born, something ain’t right), but the DNA testing provides a nice sanity check)

Well, according to ancestry.com’s DNA tests, my mother and sister are my mother and sister, so that’s nice. The claim that we had Shawnee heritage has been shot to hell, though, and now we’re trying to figure out who the Scandinavians are in the family tree. Especially since I can go back to around 1800 up several branches and still be in Ohio.

Things that are not surprises: 24% Great Britain, 19% Ireland, 17% Western Europe, 17% Eastern Europe.

Surprises: 14% Scandinavia, 6% Iberian Peninsula, 2% Italy/Greece, 1% Finland/Northwestern Russia.

With apologies to anyone who gets the Brady Bunch theme stuck in their heads…

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Here’s the story of Nancy Heath Daniels
Who with husband Marques cranked out five healthy girls.
Mary, Eva, Eliza and Becca,
And youngest Susan B.

Here’s the story of George W. Peters
Who with Cynthia had one boy and two girls.
All four grownups shared a house together
Until Marques up and died.

Three months later George got busy with the widow.
Married her and knocked her up with Lula F.
Cynthia lived for another five years.
It’s not clear if George became a bigamist.

My family tree, on Mother’s side,
It’s not the oddest thing about this bunch.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

From the marriage license application of Helen Marie French and Howard Collins, April 6, 1929:

• That neither of said parties is an habitual drunkard, epileptic, imbecile or insane, and is not under the influence of any intoxicating liquor or narcotic drug. Said parties are not nearer of kin than second cousins, and there is no legal impediment to their marriage.

From the marriage license application of Hazel French and Homer Sexton, May 21, 1936:

• Has the female contracting party been an inmate of any county asylum or home for indigent persons within the last five years? no
• Is the female contracting party afflicted with epilepsy, tuberculosis, venereal or any other contagious or transmissible disease? no
• Is she an imbecile, feeble-minded, idiotic or insane, or is she under guardianship as a person of unsound mind? no

Now that I’ve had the Arlo Pro cameras for a few months now, what do I think?

Pros

• Setup and placement is easy, although I recommend buying better anchors for their dome mounts.

• The cameras trigger reliably and record video and audio with plenty of quality for their intended use.

• Battery life is excellent at the default settings, and they recharge at a reasonable speed.

• Notifications are usually quite quick, to the point that when I get home, the alert arrives on my phone before I can unlock the front door. I have one camera set to high sensitivity, and when it goes off in the morning, I know a cat has shown up (or the wind is strong enough to blow the bamboo in front of the camera).

• The week of cloud storage from the free base tier is sufficient for my needs.

• Viewing, managing, and downloading recorded videos is quick and easy.

Cons

• The app/website frequently reports that the cameras and base station are not reachable, and insists that they must not be connected to the Internet. Never mind that the base station is pingable at all times and I can see it sending traffic to their servers. This appears to be a problem with dropped connections at their end.

• Connecting to the camera can take a very long time even when the app/website can reach them, and often times out. For instance, just now it took me nearly ten minutes of trying to get it connect to one of my cameras, and it repeatedly claimed my base station must be “offline”.

• Even when the app does connect, I’ve never gotten the intercom functionality to work. For instance, when the neighborhood kids were playing hide-and-seek, I couldn’t tell the kid who kept setting off my cameras to go hide somewhere else.

• Since you can only configure the base station and cameras through the app/website, all administration is blocked when it claims you’re “offline”.

• When notifications don’t arrive instantly, they can show up hours later, but the app doesn’t tell you which videos are new; they’re silently sorted in with the ones that showed up on time. Basically, when you get an alert on your phone, you have no idea if something just happened or if an hours-old video finally showed up.

• The USB storage is basically useless. When I recently pulled out the drive, it had video from March and July, but nothing in between. And the only way to view what it recorded is to log into the app, hope it connects successfully, tell it to stop writing to the drive, then connect it to your PC.

Conclusion

A security camera that sometimes alerts you promptly is not terribly useful.

I suspect their servers are overloaded, and all of the problems they blame on my (rock-solid) Internet connection are on their end. I also suspect that the service would magically improve if I upgraded to a paid tier…

Bottom line, if your primary requirement is prompt, reliable notification of security events, buy something else right now. The Arlo Pro will record the event, but you might not find out about it for hours, and might not be able to get a real-time view of the scene without wasting several minutes waiting for a successful connection (which can require force-quitting the app).

If, like me, you’re mostly interested in package deliveries and wandering cats, it’s flaky but acceptable. Hopefully they’ll resolve these problems with server, client, and app updates, but right now it’s pretty Beta.

November Update

The app and website no longer show my base station and cameras constantly going offline. So, one major Con removed. I haven’t retested the notification, USB drive, or intercom issues yet, but if they got those sorted out as well, I’m much happier with the product.