2003-May+June:

While googling one day, I stumbled across some online cemetary records for Meade KS, where one of my great-grandfathers is buried.  This led to email correspondence with Carol Friesen of Tulsa OK, an avid genealogist who does a lot of genealogical data entry.  She asked if I could send any updates for "my" family ... 

Here is the Peter R Reimer family-tree, based on the book "Peter R Reimer 1845-1915 Family Book" by Abe R Reimer of Blumenort MB, and on updates and corrections to the Klaas P L Reimer descendants collected by my father Peter K Reimer, all of which has been entered by Carol Friesen of Tulsa OK.  That webpage resides on her website, and was mechanically converted to HTML by her.  In 2003-June, she submitted that data (in Gedcom form) to the GRANDMA project of calmenno.org (CMHS), for inclusion in their next release.  (The linked webpage becomes obsolete once the data is so included.) 

And here is the Klaas P L Reimer family-tree, a subset of the above, which resides on this website.  This copy contains further corrections, which still need to be submitted to the GRANDMA project, namely:
- gender of Jewel Lynn Faith Reimer, b.  Jul 10 1969
- gender of Jessie Reimer, b.  Jun 6 1957
- gender of Dawn Allyson Reimer, b.  May 12 1962. 

With a lot of help from my sister Iris, we also compiled a list of corrections needed in the family-tree of Peter R Penner, our maternal grandfather.  I have the list of corrections, and the before-corrections tree, but did not end up with a corrected tree, in this case.  However, I understand Carol Friesen has submitted these also to Grandma.

2006-March:

I finally got around to ordering a copy of the Grandma database, now at version 4.23.  I briefly tried the Gramps program on this data, but gave up on it, as its performance is unbearably slow on a database of this size.  It wasn't really all that brief, as it took 3 days to try it - 48 hours just to convert the Gedcom file to its database format.  This database is 183MB in Gedcom form;  in the Gramps (grdb) form it becomes 2.2GB, which strikes me as roughly 2 gigabytes too much.  Gramps has several problems, the most serious one is taking 3.5 hours just to "open" the grdb-form of the database, and during those 3.5 hours my computer is pretty much unusable for doing anything else.  And, echoing Churchill, up with that I will not put! 

Next I tried the genealogy program called LifeLines.  With it, the conversion from Gedcom took even longer - 57 hours - but after that everything I've tried has been instantaneous.  Even restarting it.  This is more like it! 

For anyone needing to work with a large genealogical database, I can recommend LifeLines;  you'll need to put up with its old-fashioned non-GUI user-interface, but it performs very well indeed, its database form is perfectly reasonable in size, and it comes with a wealth of reporting tools.  (The people at calmenno.org, who distribute the Grandma data, recommend BrothersKeeper, but as it's not available for Linux, nor for Macs, who would want it?)  The LifeLines FAQ#40 recommends using the rbtrees option, for improved performance on large databases.  I am curious about how much time this will shave off such a 57-hour import, but have yet to try it. 

The Grandma database knows a good deal about my ancestors: 
here is an Ahnentafel report;
here is an End-of-Line report; and
here is a By-Generation Count report;
each produced by the LifeLines program, from the Grandma data.  Various researchers have managed to trace some lines back to the 1500's, in one case to 1480, and yet most of these lines currently encounter a dead-end in the 1700's in Prussia.  For a reader not familiar with Ahnentafeln:  Ahnentafel is a German word for a numbered ancestor report, where the parents of person N are always 2N and 2N+1;  for example, the parents of person 7 are persons 14 and 15.

In 2003, Carol sent a BrothersKeeper-report on how (her husband) Duane Friesen and I are related.  That BK report struck me as obviously incorrect, since the first relationship shown for the vonRiesen common ancestor, is NOT the closest relationship through that ancestor!  AHA, I believe I've found an explanation.  For each possible "distance" (4th+1x, 5th, 5th+1x, 5th+2x, etc), BK shows EXACTLY ONE path of that length.  Since it has already shown a length-5th+1x path for the Brandt common ancestor, it omits the one I'm expecting for the vonRiesen ancestor, which is also of length 5th+1x.  Having found an explanation, I won't call it wrong, but it is incomplete in strange and bizarre ways;  and it may lead people to think that Duane and I are related in exactly 6 ways, and that would be incorrect. 
[To my mind, a more intuitive way to "prune" the output would be to show each common ancestor just once, together with the shortest path connecting the two subjects through that ancestor.  But I would still want this to be accompanied by shorter notes on the other paths.  Summarizing relatedness by a single number indicating the extent to which two people "share DNA" is another thing I'd like to see.  Such a "Coefficient of Consanguinity" is provided by the GeneWeb genealogical software, and by LifeLines as it turns out.]

LifeLines has 4 different "how related" reports: 
here is the LifeLines-cousins-report for Duane Friesen and myself; 
here is the LifeLines-relation-report for Duane Friesen and myself; 
here is the LifeLines-relate-report for Duane Friesen and myself;  and
here is the LifeLines-cons-report for Duane Friesen and myself. 
The cousins report is even less complete than the BK version.  One positive note: it's also less likely to mislead anyone into thinking it is complete.  The relation and relate reports are interesting, but their "sister-in-law of step-brother" notion of relatedness, is not the kind of relatedness I'm interested in.  Not one of those 3 is what I want, and at 17min, 15min, 25min(est) respectively, they're not exactly instantaneous either.  Aha, the cons report is what I seek:  it seems to show all paths through all common ancestors, and it shows the consanguinity coefficient;  it does all this in mere seconds too!  Finding the output is not easy as it provides no hints, the documentation provides no hints - I had to read the source to learn where the output went (it is written to /tmp/t1).  Checking the output for correctness was rather a lot of work; our ancestors married relatives so often that we are related in 56 ways!  The description of the cons report has flaws:  it is misleading about the usefulness of a consanguinity coefficient, it fails to mention where the output goes, and it provides no hint that this report really is what the description of cousins led one to hope that it might be.  All of these flaws led me to try 3 other reports before this one, and then to very nearly give up on this one.  But instead of needing to write my own "relatedness" program, now I only feel the need to make minor enhancements to this one. 
[Some improvements I'd like:  describe each path in English as Mth cousin Nce removed;  highlight the common ancestor, perhaps using the same style as BK;  combine cases where both husband and wife are common ancestors;  fix looping & crashing for A and B unrelated, or same person;  the ordering of output is sometimes unfortunate, and here's an example.]

In browsing through my relatives, I observe that the corrections we sent in for the Peter R Penner family have made it into this version of Grandma;  my unmarried aunt Helen and cousin Norma Brandt, Mrs Sault, are no longer "merged" with different persons having similar names - both are now rid of those erroneous spouses.  Aunt Helen also got a year older in the process, and perhaps we'll manage to celebrate her next big birthday in the right year:-)  However, the larger set of additions and corrections on my paternal side, to the Peter R Reimer tree, have NOT made it into this version of Grandma.  They were sent in almost 3 years ago, but it seems they are awaiting Grandma-version-5.0.

[I expect to shorten this page, creating 2 sub-pages:  one on genealogy-software,  one on relatedness.]

2007-Jan:

Here is another example of an LL-cons report showing how Elmer (Al) Reimer and I are related.

Origin of the name Reimer: according to the Brothers Grimm, the name Reimer, also spelled as Rhymer, Reumer, Reume, Reime, Reumen, Reimen, is from an old germanic word rîm for number, and thus a Reimer is a computer, reckoner, or calculator;  see germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/dwb/wbgui?lemid=GR03660.  (Their quote from Goethe could be taken as an observation about Reimers, though he must have meant poets?)  Elsewhere one can find speculation that the surnames Rymer, Rimmer, and several others are also variants of Reimer.