Okay it’s Sunday night and not Saturday night, but being the techie that I am, I simply could not resist exploring last night’s Genealogy Fun activity by genealogy extraordinaire – Randy Seaver. Last night’s mission was to create – “The Music of Our Ancestors” – an activity suggested to him by his facebook friend M. Diane Rogers.

So out of curiosity, I decided to accept this mission and my assignment was to:

1)  Go to www.p22.com/musicfont/ and enter a text phrase or sentence into the P22 Music Text Composition Generator.  Enter a file name, the beats per minute you want (120 is slow, 1200 is really fast), and the instrument (from the dropdown list).

2)  Play your music text composition.  Can you find a way to put it on your blog?

3)  Tell us about your musical text compositions – what did you try, what sounded great?  Have fun!”

So here goes . . .

1. I went to the website and typed in just the first 15 surnames from my pedigree chart with a space separating each surname [taylor chapple taylor newsome chapple smith taylor green newsome moten chapple blanton smith white].

2. I gave my composition the unique file name – ClaimingKin – in upper and lowercase letters with no spaces as the website directed.
3. I set the beats per minute (BPM) to 300
4. I selected the cello as my instrument. Why the cello? I like the sound of this instrument and remembered one of my nieces learning to play it while she was in Middle School.
5. I clicked “Generate your music” and this is what “The Music of My Ancestors” looked like:

I was able to download the instrumental version of this melody but this download happened to be a .midi music file instead of the popular .mp3 or .mp4 music file I wanted it to be. So for me to get this file uploaded and working properly on my blog, I had to use my WavePad Sound Editor from my old literary podcasting days to covert this .midi file into the .mp3 format that I needed. Since I self-host my own WordPress blog, I simply installed the Compact WordPress Audio/Music Play plugin, uploaded my .mp3 to my webhosting server and entered it’s location in the embed code associated with this installed player and . . . .voilà . . . this is what “The Music of My Ancestors” sounds like . . .

Music of My Ancestors:

[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.claimingkin.com/audios/ClaimingKin.mp3″%5D

Hmmmm . . . . is this music to my ears? Nope, not at all — LOL! Still, it was fun just creating this melody, converting it, and installing it on my blog. Who knows, with a few more notes and instruments this just may be a musical score that  my ancestors truly would love!

So create the music of your ancestors and let me know what you think!