It's a Small World After All: Genealogy in Puerto Vallarta When I retired and moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, I never imagined that my genealogical research would keep finding its way into my everyday life. But family history has a way of surprising you, sometimes through a name, sometimes through years of research, and sometimes through a DNA match that leads somewhere you never expected. On my father's side of the family, two of those surprises involved people I came to know in Puerto Vallarta. I met Don Duncan in my condominium community, which has only 30 units. Since Duncan was one of my family names, I initially wondered whether we might be related through that branch. Instead, my research led me to the Rader family. Don's mother was Cora Rader, and tracing her ancestry brought me to Rebecca Rader, my second great-grandmother. My connection with Steven Coe came about differently. Steven lives in a nearby neighborhood, and I already knew him through my work resea...
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James Weddle Taggart (1824–1908): Soldier, Oregon pioneer, miner, and California settler
James Weddle Taggart is my father's second great grandfather on my fathers paternal grandmother's side. James Weddle Taggart was not simply an early Oregon settler who later fought in the Indian wars. He belonged to a family with a remarkable military history, and his own life connected the Mexican-American War, the settlement of southern Oregon, the mining frontier, and the early communities of Southern and Northern California. The most striking discovery is that James appears in the historical record as a participant in the Mexican-American War alongside his father, Captain James Taggart Jr. , who was killed at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. A detailed history of Brown County, Indiana , describes the father's military service and death, while a separate roster of the Brown County volunteers includes James W. Taggart among the soldiers. 1. A young man from a military family James Weddle Taggart was born on April 17, 1824, in Nashville, Brown County, India...
Pearl’s Father: A Family Mystery, a DNA Discovery, and Four Devine Brothers
This story is about Pearl Miller . She was the sister of my maternal grandmother. Some family stories begin with a name in a family tree. Others begin with a question that refuses to go away. Pearl’s story involves both. She was born into a family whose public history identified Sherman Andrew Miller as her father. But as the years passed, questions arose about her biological origins. Who was her father? Why had her mother married Sherman when she did? And how much could we ever know about the circumstances surrounding Pearl’s birth? Research eventually led to the Devine family. DNA evidence confirmed the connection—but it did not solve every part of the mystery. A marriage surrounded by questions Pearl was born on September 30, 1906 in San Francisco. Her mother, Zua , had married Sherman Andrew Miller on April 7 of that same year. Zua was only 19, and Pearl’s birth came less than six months after the wedding. The timing tells us that Zua was already pregnant when she marri...
The Guider Mystery: A 23-Year Search for a Lost Family
The Guider Mystery: A 23-Year Search for a Lost Family How a few misplaced names, a handful of DNA matches, and one overlooked census record helped uncover the family behind three Indiana children. Three Children, Two Surnames, and a Mystery In the records of nineteenth-century Indiana, three children seemed to have lost their way. James Guider and his sister Elizabeth were living in Benton, Indiana, as young children, but not with a family bearing their surname. Years later, while researching James and Elizabeth, we found another child nearby: Susanna Guyder , whose surname was spelled slightly differently. She, too, appeared to be living with a family other than her own. Who were these children? Why were they living apart from the family whose name they carried? And where were their parents? It would take me more than 23 years to piece together the answers. A Message on the Early Internet In August 2000, I came across a message posted by a woman looking for information about my gr...
DNA Reconstruction: Mathematics Segments and AI
My buddy is a techie who is helping me with this project. He is sharpening his AI skills with this. I am not sure it was as easy as I initially thought and I am confident AI will have an answer one day. Until then I have changed my goal to segment isolation and prediction. This means finding triangulated DNA segments, assigning them to ancestors and extrapolating what their inheritance means for all the other ancestors and descendants. Definition of a segment. A segment is a string of DNA codes inherited from an ancestor. A person inherits 23 Segments from their mother and 23 from their father. A shared segment is an identical segment inherited by more than one descendent. Sibling shared segments With siblings there is a special relationship. We can be fully identical, half identical or non matching. Fully identical is when we inherit the exact same DNA from both our parents at a specific location on a chromosome. Half identica...
Progress and Regressions
Honestly, genealogy is never done. During COVID I have had a lot of time to spend on my family. I have also been volunteering for a group called Search Angels (www.Searchangels.org). I have been applying techniques I have developed helping others to help myself. One of the most unexpected things that has happened is that I have found more of my Miller tree. Sherman, my great grandfather, had some brothers. I knew that there were some descendants, but I never thought any were living. I now have found descendants of 2 of them. Their DNA has led me to believe my suspicions about the Swafford connection. Using the tool at DNA painter, however, it always comes out more likely that Sherman is not a half brother to his siblings at all but rather a full brother. The confidence level at the tool is not as good as it could be though because the distance of the relatives.
DNA Reconstruction
I am currently working on a project to reassemble my parents DNA and the DNA of some ancestors before that. I am refreshing some of my old skills from my programming days and using SQL to analazye DNA raw files to create the composites. Luckily I have quite a lot of DNA files to work with and I am confident I can reassemble the DNA for both my father and mother. The benefit to reassembling DNA is that these files can be uploaded to some sights to get relationship estimates that are better than what I get from my test alone. Testers that show as 4-6 cousins now would be more accurately predicted because instead of working with 50% of my parents DNA, I can work with 100%. I can use this same idea, going back generations. I had to put this on hold.