My Dad would have been 93 years old on 17 January, so in honor of his birthday, I decided to update the family tree.

Frankly, I haven’t been doing much genealogy work over the last 23 months, but I got the bug again after the recent election (I may wanted a distraction).  I have included 165 new sources, many of which pertain to multiple individuals in a family.

I added an unrelated person, Bill Timmerman, who was my grandfather’s close friend and whom my mother called Uncle Bill.  We have a doll that Uncle Bill gave to my Mom upstairs.

My big focus in December was trying to resolve the connection between my great grandmother Alice Lyons and the Lyons family that lived out here in San Francisco.  My Dad and my uncle Joe both visited Nellie Lyons, and 20 years ago we went looking for (and found) her house in the Twin Peaks.  And their Aunt Alice would send money out to two priests who were sons of Nellie’s sister Katherine.  I have found a DNA connection, but so far have not found a common ancestor.

Many of the new sources help to flesh out the stories of  the Figueroa cousins on my Mom’s side, but I didn’t add many new individuals.  I continue to search for the Reinhard connection in Niedernberg, Germany but keep coming up empty.  The information I have on the Reinhards, provided to me some 20 years ago, is starting to look a little suspect, so I will have to dig in.

When I first began this family tree, I naively imported a GEDCOM file full of people that looked like they might be related.   After I got some experience, I realized I shouldn’t take anyone’s research for granted, and needed to verify everything.  So as my final step before updating the online tree, I double-checked and then deleted those (several hundred) unrelated individual.