WIKITREE Sources

So over the past couple days I have been in a discussion about WIKITREE sources.

I love WIKITREE because the goal is to have 1 person per record. We can all work on those records, together, and all of our research is contained in one place.

Recently, however, I have come under fire because I have been adding information without proving the information was correct.

The information I have been adding did not conflict with any information that was already there, it was based on research that someone else did, and was at least marginally supported by DNA evidence.

I was told on multiple occasions to cease and desist, but I am not willing to give up.

I have posted a couple of links to my discussions there. Your input would be appreciated.  I really believe I am right on this topic and am frustrated that I cannot see the other side.  I chalk it up to me being a computer geek and the others being scientific genealogists.  I embrace open source and they embrace control.

http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/198440/are-bad-sources-hunches-and-incorrect-information-to-banned?show=198459#c198459

http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/198347/dna-from-ancestry-site-for-source

DNA Success

So this week has been a wonderful success for me. Even though I did not find anything new about my past, I did help someone identify their grandparents.

Last year I got a close match on myself and my father's cousin.  When we started discussing our past, it turns out she was trying to find her birth mother's parents. Her birth mother was adopted at birth in Oregon and the only information we knew was that her name was Dolly.

Well I have been doing this a while, and I had a pretty good handle on my Oregon based families, so I thought I would help.    Plus,  I will say it again, that Facebook is an amazing tool for genealogists. (I just wish they would make it easier to post old photos and label them with peoples names, dates and locations. )

Anyway,  recently she had her father tested. Because she shared her DNA results with me,  I was able to begin looking at her matches in earnest.  One of her close matches that did not match her father,  did not match any of my relatives.  I knew this person would be my best bet.  Looking at the persons tree, I noticed a surname that was familiar to me.  My great grandmother's sister had married into that family.

Following my great grandmother's sister's husband up one generation, I was able to find the MRCA between the adoptee and the match that didn't match me.

This was very strong evidence that the adoptee was a product of the marriage of my great grandmother's sister.

After a little research I noticed that I had stopped researching my great grandmother's siblings descendants. I have found that finding living descendants from my ancestors on Facebook has provided enormous insight. Also, there is so much more you can get from speaking to people on the phone, that you will ever get just searching online.

After some search we were able to get some more descendants of this marriage online, but alas, no real insight. It seems the family splintered and really did not keep in contact.

As I searched each of my grandparents siblings,  I noted that I had actually spoken to Betty, one of the wives of the family a few years ago on the phone. I decided to give her a call and pose the question to her just to see.  I asked her a couple side questions I had, then popped the big one. "Have you ever heard of an adoption in the family?"

"Well that would have been Dolly" she said.

Wow. Talk about excitement. Confirmation, by name. Turns out Dolly had a couple marriages and three more children she was able to raise. I got phone numbers and gave them to the cousin who was looking.

Betty said, "You know I never said anything before because some people like to keep that sort of thing hidden. I am not even sure her children know of that baby. It is only because you asked, that I told you."

Betty is 90 years old. We have yet to talk to the surviving children, I am going to leave that up to the adoptee, but the fact is, had we never gotten spoken to Betty, and the surviving children don't know about the child, it might have been a long time before the mother was actually identified.

Lessons learned and reinforced, research and contact all of the descendants and speak to the elders.

Generational matrix

This is a generational matrix from GEDMATCH which shows that we all, in likelihood share a common ancestor.

I hope to find it. This Ray Buie looks very promising.

paquet758@aol.com rfcommagere@gmail.com pedra.ane@gmail.com ermoye2@hotmail.com Peggy McClinton <peggymcclinton@yahoo.com> plt883@gmail.com

Matlock Medlock is promising through Buie and JS?

Commagere is a mixed bag as this match is both paternal and paternal to him

MTDNA

So today I had a little moment of Zen.

23andAncestry provides you with an MTDNA haplogroup when you sign up with them to have your DNA done. The MTDNA is DNA that is passed down from mother to her children only.  Like the YDNA haplogroup, this is useful for finding deep history.

I have been lucky enough to have been blessed with a pretty rare MTDNA Haplogroup.

This help me because my GGG Grandmother, Mary Matilda Robertson is a member of the Haplogroup as well.  And so was her mother, and her maternal grandmother.

This means I can go to 23andMe or GEDMATCH and pull out all my matches that are also this rare haplogroup.

Then I can contact all of the people and see if anyone can give me any insight - this will mean they will have had to have done some serious maternal research.

However, if nothing turns up I am not done. I will then cross compare their matches with people that match me. Those crossover matches may not have direct maternal lines to our MCRA, but they still could be related to us both, even if I do not know their MTDNA haplogroup.  That is because once there is a father son relationship, the MTDNA haplogroup is lost. For example, Mary Matilda, had a daughter,  Arvilla Fenters. She was the same haplo group. She married James Davis. That means her son, Charles Davis was her haplogroup. However, none of Charles children will inherit that Haplogroup, they will instead get his wife's MTDNA.

Making generational charts of all of these matches might point me in the direction of getting rid of this brick wall.

More 23anMe nonsense. Again, I cannot stress how terrible their site is.

Just how backward is 23andMe? I had an aunt tested there but unfortunately her test did not give any results. So now I get a banner across my page every time I log in saying... the test failed, request a refund. I did that and received the refund a couple months ago. But the banner persists. I asked 23andme to remove the bad test from my account.. This is the response:

Becca, Sep 10, 8:20 AM:

Hello Lance,

Thank you for your reply. This ticket has been escalated to me for review. Our records show the sample for ******* is registered to your account under the email address *****. Unfortunately, we are unable to remove her profile from your account without closing the entire account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

You have two options for how to proceed. Your first option is to simply ignore the profile for *********.

If you would prefer not to see ***** profile, your second option is to transfer ****** profile to a different 23andMe account. Please note this would require that you set up a new 23andMe account. After completing the profile transfer, if you email us from the email address associated with the new account we can then close the whole account. If you would like to proceed with this option please refer to the instructions included in our previous message for how to complete a profile transfer.

Please let us know how you would like to proceed.

Best Regards,

Becca
The 23andMe Team

DNA Ancestry VS. 23andMe

YIPPEE..  So I got my results back for my aunt. She tried 23andMe two times. I decided to try her one more time with Ancestry. Bingo, before 23andME would have even acknowledged they had her sample, I had the results.

This is very exciting. Now why did 23andME find it so hard to get results?  One difference I note is that Ancestry uses a "stabilizer". A fluid that is added to the test results. Perhaps that is why. Also, since Ancestry seems to get to analyze the sample more quickly, it seems that 23andME might also want to think about adding a stabilizer.

Another idea, perhaps 23andME is more stringent with their results. I ran into a small hiccup uploading the sample to GEDMATCH. I needed to analyze the DNA results file from Ancestry and found that there is an unusually high number of "no calls" in the sample. (roughly 2.1% compared to my sample which was 1.8%) Not really sure what all that means, perhaps the DNA was not intact and the information could not be obtained, but the result, according to GEDMATCH is that I will have an unusually high number of false matches in the new test. Well, that really is not a problem to me. If valid matches are confirmed by a few of the known ancestors, I am fine with her just being the added hint to solve a mystery.

GUIDER ROBINSON REVEAL

Got a new hint today. I do not know why I hadn't thought of doing this before, or maybe I have and this is a new test, but here is what happened.

So on GEDMATCH I have identified a woman that is related to the same MRCA as my and my cousin Vicki. This MRCA couple are both brick walls to me.

I researched this woman (GERALDINE REVEAL FRUMP) and was unable to find anything. I searched my surnames on Ancestry for REVEAL to now avail. Geraldine was actually illegitimate. Her mother's maiden name was REVEAL and her father's name was BROWN.

Well BROWN gets high hits on my 23andME test. (If you don't know, on 23andME they do this surname search where they compare listed surnames in your matches against the occurrence of those names in the general population and then give you a weighted average of the top 20 or so names. The idea being, the names at the top of the list probably occur in your tree.)  Brown, though a common name, has a high probability of being significant in my tree according to 23andME. Because of this, I searched up the BROWN line for Geraldine. Unfortunately, nothing panned out.

Now today, I decided to go into Vicki's test. She has kindly shared her DNA results with me on Ancestry. This means I can look at her results as if they were my own. When I typed in REVEAL for a surname search in her tree, I was pleased to find a match. And as I researched this match a little further found that her REVEALS also crossed into the REVEAL ancestors of Geraldine.  Also they are all from OHIO which is exactly the right location for my brick walls.   Also the REVEAL in the matches tree, was married to an Emmaline BROWN. Hmm... Looks very promising.

EMALINE BROWN   and WILLIAM IRVIN REVEAL   (1844-1933)

New Ancestry feature

So ancestry came out with a very helpful new feature. It does not do away with AncestryDNA helper, but is a great supplement.

Now you can get information from all your matches, even if they haven't logged in for years.

When you click on a match in the DNA list, you can now look at who they share in common with you.  It is the center button between pedigree/surnames and map/locations.  Very, very helpful, especially with those that do not have a tree or have not shared their DNA test with you.

REGLI CHRISTEN COPPINI and now REIDY

So, the test results for Don Coppini came back. He is a neighbor to my maternal 1C1R in Ferndale.

Through researching my DNA matches and a lot of GOOGLEing, I determined we may be related because we both shared CHRISTEN/REGLI names. He, in his actual tree, and I, because my paternal great grandmother's name was probably REGLI and CHRISTEN came up as a high probability surname on my sister's 23andME DNA test.

Well Don's test did not match anyone. Not me or my brother or sister or cousin. I thought at first it was a waste of money. However, using AncestryDNA helper for Chrome, I was able to cross tabulate a few matches. The first one that came up was someone that just had JOSEPH ANTONE REGLI in their tree. I was familiar with that name, so that was a plus. However, the next one was more exciting in that he was a close relative of Don Coppini that matched me and one sister.

This is a pretty good indication that we are related to DON just do not share any segments with him. This is more common the further back in the tree we go. At this point we are showing approximately a fourth cousin relationship.

GEDMATCH GEDCOM

Awesome tool just reopened on GEDCOM which added the ability to search your GEDMATCH DNA matches and then look at any GEDCOM's associated with them. I was able to confirm some speculative relationships with this.

If you have not uploaded your GEDCOM to GEDMATCH yet, now is the time to do it. Also if you manage multiple tests, there is a way to just use one GEDCOM.

After uploading GEDCOM use the "SEARCH ALL GEDCOMS" in the lower left corner and look yourself up.

You can then navigate though the page it pulls up to any other person that matches the tests you have recorded.  Ie, I can navigate to my cousin Ang's page, then link her test to it since I know her GEDMATCH number. Then you just put in the GEDMATCH test number to associate with the person in the record and you have linked the person into your tree. I have not tried doing this with all of my relatives, but just the test I specifically manage.

It isn't all click and add....

Sometimes people get the impression that they can sign up for Ancestry, and get all of the information they want just by using the hints that are suggested to them. It is great if the hints are correct, but a lot of times they are not.

The real fun of the research comes in when you examine the records and find something new. Or you look at records in a different way to bring about more and more hints.

Case in point is a brick wall I have been working on for a few years.  My GG grandparents James Guider and Mary Robinson have been hard couple to research. One, because on his first census James and his sister were living with guardians and Mary because Mary Robinson is such a common name.

I had a picture of a man named Geroge HULTZ I couldn't exactly make out my grandmother's writing, which stated that he was a cousin of Zua May Guider my Great Grandmother, a daughter of the brick walls. Well I was able to find a George Hultz on the census and built his tree and followed his descendants all with no luck.  I placed him on the back burner as he was not paying off after hours of research.

A few days ago, however, I was paging again through my grandmother's old address book looking at names and I saw Leva HULTY's name again. Now I have photo's of Leva with Charles DAVIS who lived in Chicago and was son to Mary's first daughter by her first husband (before GUIDER).  The DAVIS boys were only partially interesting to me because they were only related to me through one great great grandparent, Mary.  Also there was a case of the second DAVIS boy, George's will. When he died his estate was contested by some orphan girls in Michigan who claimed to be descended of Charles.  Leva, I thought, was Charles' girlfriend.  I had never really pursued her.

Well I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the DNA evidence lately, so I decided to do some old fashioned research. First, I went hunting for the address that was in my grandmother's book.  I tried to find the address on the census maps and paged though the census records for 1900, 1920 and 1930 with no luck. Then I went online to see if I could find any historical directories for Chicago. I found one from 1920 and decided to see if I could find her.  Going through the alphabetical listings, I found a Lena HULTS. Not only had I misread my grandmothers writing for the first name but also the last name.

Bang. I plugged that name into my database and a census record popped up with George HULTS and Emma HULTS as the parents.  This was very exciting. I had fit two pieces of my puzzle together in a way I hadn't imagined before.

This whole time I had been researching the wrong George.

Armed with the knowledge of the correct George I was able to trace his records and find his parents. Since George was the cousin I was looking for, it was going to be one of his parents that was brother or sister to my brick walls.

Quickly I narrowed it down as George's father was from New York.  No one on this branch of the tree had any connection to NY as far as I knew. That left his mother Lydia. The biggest problem was that Lydia had no maiden name. If I had relied on the hints from Ancestry, I quickly would have gone off in the wrong direction. Instead I pulled up each census record I had already found, and looked closely at it. One census record for the HULTS family had the mother living with her son when she was very old. This is very common and a great way to get missing information. On this record her name had changed to HUBBARD.  After plugging in the information for this, I saw where all of the mistakes on Ancestry had come from. All of the hints were for the wrong people. The Ancestry researchers had just accepted the first clues without really delving into the logistics of it. It was a few pages down where I found the correct Lydia HUBBARD. Ancestry volunteers had mistakenly had her listed as the wife of a completely incorrect person. The correct husband was listed on the record but not near his wife. He was a hotelier in Michigan and Lydia was listed a few rows down from him as wife... but the volunteers had chose the man listed directly above her as the husband. I was able to confirm all of this, because as I looked down the guest list at the hotel, I was to discover Lydia's son was staying at the hotel, using his middle name of Oscar.  Now that I had Lydia's husband's name I could start researching them.

There were no real records of interest for Lydia Hubbard or George Hubbard.  Until I found a record again, by looking closely at each non-hint record. In one I found a wedding for Lydia Halse and George Hubbard. Birthdates and locations were on, but Halse?  Well, knowing how I had screwed up the names, of course, HULTZ and HALSE could easily be mistaken for one another.  And, something else I learned by pulling up the record and not relying on Ancestry's abstraction. Lydia had a maiden name of Phillips.

BINGO.

I still have not made the connection, but this is the type of real research that click and adder's just can't appreciate.


This was edited to change ROBERTSON to ROBINSON as I have recently discovered that ROBINSON was the last name used on the marriage certificate for Mary Matilda.

New DNA Matches with Ancestor Hints at ANCESTRY

OK. Pushed into a new family by Ancestry DNA. Now I am supposedly part of the Pleasant Howard and Abigail Wright group. They are connected to the Swafford/Lee families through the Howards, but I am not sure closely enough for the amount of DNA we share.

I was able to cross reference and found Raphael Francis Andrews and did some work with our mutual matches.

Looking at our Generational Matix got me wondering, why are there no 3rd generation people?  I have 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 but no 3's. 

I am gonna have to run some tests and see if that is significant. If there were out of wedlock children, that might make sense or very small families. I also expect that the immigrants are going to limit the number of generational matches I should get, but the families that have been in the country for hundreds of years should be pretty flush.

Identifying your AncestryDNA Matches

So the past couple of days I have been about to communicate with Sandra Fisher Woolsey. I was not getting any response on the Ancestry site, so using the power of google, I was finally able to find an email address I sent a simple inquiry to. Luckily she received it and responded.  What a great opportunity.  I was able to convince her to share her ANCESTRY DNA results with me through the Ancestry Site. Ancestry allows you to share your DNA results in a way similar to sharing your tree, in that now, I can look at all of Sandra's matches.  Using AncestryDNA helper, I was able to go through and cross tabulate her results with mine and pull out the line to concentrate on.

It seems the next few weeks will be looking at her COZART and PRIEST lines. I matched someone that shows on her list as a 1st/2nd Cousin, someone who shows as 2nd/3rd Cousin and a smattering of people further out. This is awesome in that I can really start narrowing down the search for how we are matched up. No longer do I have to search her entire tree. I can concentrate SURNAMES that all of us match together. Since COZART and PRIEST are new in my line, I would never have found the matches without her sharing her results with me.

Lets start today and see how long it takes me to find our MCRA.

Which Test would I recommend June 2015

So people have asked me which test I would recommend.

As I have used three different companies FTDNA, Ancestry and 23andME, I can say I certainly have a favorite - AncestryDNA.

Why do I like it.

First, unlike FTDNA and 23andME, Ancestry automatically and easily integrates your family tree. As I am a genealogist, not a geneticist or someone trying to get insight into what role my genes may play in future health issues, this is precisely the type of integration I am looking for.

It is not perfect, as you would by reading my blog, but it certainly beats what the other companies have to offer in this respect.

FTDNA is useful, but I have found it to be very cumbersome to use and I have not found people all that responsive on the site. The good thing about Ancestry is, I have matches and trees I can get to work on immediately without having to wait for a response from someone else.

Second 23andMe is a really disorganized. It was geared to providing health feedback to its users. However, since that has all been taken away, it really doesn't know where it stand right now. I did testing for an Aunt on 23andMe and the sample turned out to be inadequate. They needed a new sample, so 23andMe told me they would send me a replacement kit or refund my money.  Also, if I retested the same individual a second time, and it was still not a usable sample, I could not receive a refund or another test. Since I do a lot of testing, I decided to simply have a replacement test sent and to order a test from Ancestry for my Aunt to try.  When I was ready to send the replacement test out to a new individual, an Uncle, I asked 23andMe how to change the information on the test. They informed me that I could not, I would have to have my money refunded to me, and then purchase a third test and have it sent to me, even though I had a valid identical test in my hand. At that point, it was confirmed for me, 23andMe just is not up to the challenge of making any of this easy and streamlined.  Using 23andMe to do genealogy research simply is not a winning option.

Ancestry, even though there is a lot of misinformation done by shoddy research on the site, it still is able to provide a great tools to work with and a good jumping off point.

Tests from any of these vendors are also able to be transferred to GEDMATCH.COM to compare with users from any one else uploading their results to GEDMATCH.   The tools GEDMATCH offers and the number of tests in their database make it a very worthwhile addition to any of the vendors alone, and it is free as well.

GEDMATCH Generational Matrix

So interestingly I was shown a report from GEDMATCH the other day by a distant cousin. Looking at it I saw some very telling details that I had not considered before.

The report is a generational matrix. Think of it like a mileage chart for cities you used to find in AAA books. The columns and rows are GEDMATCH members instead of cities. The boxes are filled with the estimated generations to a most recent common ancestor rather than the number of miles. For example my sister says 1. My first cousin says 2. My first cousin, once removed says 2.3. The more distant the relationship, the higher the number. 

What this particular chart showed me was that there are some people who I am related to through different routes some more closely than others. For example, I am related to a person named NEF59. GEDMATCH estimates our distance to be 4.7 generations. Now the distance to my cousin Jennie, who is related though their mothers to my father, is only 2.3 generations. She is also at my dads generation so her distance to our shared ancestors should be less than mine by around 1 point. This works out pretty well except for a few examples like NEF. GEDMATCH thinks that Jennie and NEF are actually at a distance of 7.5 generations. That is over 4 generations different than what I would expect.  Since NEF is reported at 4.7 for me, it should be 3.7 for Jennie.  I am thinking this means that NEF actually has someone in their tree that matches me more closely than whoever NEF is matching in Jennie's tree. It also means that just because Jennie and NEF match, I cannot assume all of NEF's segments are coming from my paternal side through Jennie and my father's mothers. It seems likely that I am actually more closely related to NEF through a completely different ancestor that is not related to Jenny at all. It is even possible that Jenny is related to NEF through her father's line and I am not related to the person that Jenny is related to either. 

I have now decided to go through and look at key individuals and do a chart for each of them to determine exactly what the generational projection is.  My matches with Vicki, the cousin with most recent common ancestors who are both brick walls GUIDER ROBERTSON/ROBINSON turned up nothing really unusual, however, it did reveal a couple of people who were cousins themselves. This helped in narrowing their tree so I could work with them and know that we were talking about her mother's mother's family rather than having to research her entire tree looking for leads. 

Bradley County Swaffords / Lee's

So I am going through all my matches again.

This time I notice another LEE family in Bradley County. This time the same city as the Millers. It wouldn't even need to be a travelling minister.

I wonder where the big breakthrough is going to come?

Anyway, this Lee family is also descended of the Swafford Lee family. This guy's name is Burrell Lee as well, though on this census record it is spelled Lea.

Name:	Burrell Lee
Age:	38
Birth Year:	abt 1822
Gender:	Male
Birth Place:	Tennessee
Home in 1860:	District 10, Bradley, Tennessee
Post Office:	Cleveland
Family Number:	984
Value of real estate:	View image
Household Members:	Name Age Burrell Lee 38 Sarah E Lee 28 Robert A Lee 3 Manerva J Lee 2 Nevin Owens 17

And my Miller family

Name:	Mary A McMiller [Mary A Miller]
Age:	25
Birth Year:	abt 1835
Gender:	Female
Birth Place:	Tennessee
Home in 1860:	District 10, Bradley, Tennessee
Post Office:	Cleveland
Family Number:	938
Value of real estate:	View image
Household Members:	Name Age John McMiller 26 Mary A McMiller 25 Wm H McMiller 7 John S McMiller 5 Julius M McMiller 3 Mary McMiller 1

It makes me wonder if some of the researchers at Ancestry might have linked the wrong Burrell Lee to their tree....

Sites that bring researchers together

Ancestry is a great site for hints, online searches and documentation. However, as you will find out if you do much research there, there are a lot of newbies out there. And, as I was guilty of when I first started working on my tree, I would click and add without giving it much thought. Later, those clicks and adds would get copied to someone else's tree and then in effect be given much more weight than either of us had intended.

On Ancestry it is not uncommon to find glaring mistakes of parents being 90 years older than their kids. I have found census records of african americans with the same name linked to white folks. All in all,  the trees there are not dependable.

On the other side of the spectrum are Wikitree, Findagrave and Family Search. All three are great places to work with others on your trees. The least popular so far is Wikitree. It is a cumbersome interface and they have a lot of rules about posting information on the site. However, what all three sites share, is that there should be only one record for each person in history. Findagrave uses as its source point, the burial record or headstone.  This generally gives one a great meeting point. Findagrave can attract descendants from all over, looking at the site. There is one grave, hence one record. I have yet to run across someone posting incorrect father's mother's siblings etc.. on this site though I guess it could happen. I have found a couple duplicates for information, but all in all, I have used it to find some excellent researchers who are managing pages for my ancestors and have gotten some great history from it.

Familysearch is another awesome site. In the past year or so they have instituted a system where you can actually tag a name in a census document and attach it to your family tree. If someone later comes along and tries to tag that same record, the person in your tree will be suggested. This is great because theoretically on each census there should be one and only one record for each individual. When there is a conflict you can discuss right there on the record who's research is better.  Once you find your ancestor and you clean everything on their page up to your liking, you can also tag their record. Anytime anyone visits or makes changes to it, you will get a notification. That way, you  will see whatever additional information they have added. Also if you believe that information to be false, you will have a place to note that, change it back and/or contact the person that made the change.

These are all built-in features that work much better than Ancestry's limited tracking system.

Martinucci DNA saga

So some excellent results from my brother Todd's DNA test. He matches someone with ancestors from a town called Villa De Chiavenna, Italy. I had already identified this town as a possible origination point for my Martin(ucci) surname.

I also revisited an older site http://photohistory-sussex.co.uk/BTN-Lombardi.htm which points to a photographer named Eugenio Lombardi Martinucci (1849-1920). He is also for Chiavenna and bears a striking resemblance to my father.

I contacted the owner of that site, and he said he would try and reach the Martinucci descendants for me.

I was able to contact the Maraffio from Chiavenna.  He did not know much about genealogy, but his sister in law is a Mormon and is supposedly working on the family tree. I am also trying to conatct her.

I also tried running a search on my matches for people born in Chiavenna, and I was able to pull up one family from there Panzeri. This match was also a match to my cousin, who is descended from my Italian Grandfather. This is a good lead.

It sounds like a trip to Chiavenna is in order in the coming years. It is nearby to Andermatt and my mother's grandmother's home so I can do research there as well on the REGLI family.

This adds more surnames to my search including PANZERI, GINI, NYE, DOLLIMORE,  and TAYLOR, MARAFFIO,

I have been busy entering this information into familysearch and wikitree.org and I am actually going to write a little about those sites and findagrave right now.

Searching for the Swaffords

 So on my DNA test when I look at my list for Swafford relatives, the first one on the list is Jameswoolsey49. James E. Woolsey runs the account but the test is from a woman though, and with a little googling I came up with his wife, Sandra (or Samdra) Carolyn Fisher. Now Sandra is great grand daughter to Ida Mae Swafford. Her parents were Jay Fisher and Laverne Priest.  Nobody has found any records for Ida Mae except the marriage record, but I was able to find and Idea M Swofford 4 years before her marriage, in the same county Arkansas. I am 99% sure this would be the same woman.

Following the line back, even though the grandparent was born in Tennessee, I cannot connect them to the Swaffords and Lees I am looking for. I did notice a HOWARD surname as well.

I have tried to contact the Woolsey family with no luck.

UPDATE:

I did do some more work and traced these Swafford's back to our most recent common ancestor. This ancestor makes me and Sandra Fisher 7th cousins.  Ancestry tags Sandra as an EXTREMELY HIGH match at 4th-6th cousins.  Ancestry's description of the relationship is 4th cousin but could possibly vary to 5th or sixth cousin.

This means that either Ancestry is doing something very wrong in their analysis since they are citing this with their most definitive match category (the same one used for my sister), or we are somehow related more closely.

Unfortunately, until I can get the Woolsey family to upload the DNA results to GEDCOM I will not be able to look into exactly how we match. Perhaps we share more than one relative. Who knows?

More on the new Ancestry DNA feature

So I am working on Jennie Mae's tree.  Ancestry suggests she is related to Nancy Louisa Brock (1842-1896).

Now Jennie's tree is pretty clean to 1900 so it should be easy to spot this relationship.  Originally I thought the link would have to be through one of Nancy's kids if she descended from her.  However, all of Nancy's children were all born, lived and died in the same area in which they were born, Georgia.

By 1900 Jennie only had family in Oregon and Minnesota. There is no crossover.

Now chatting with a Brock researcher, it appears there is another way to interpret the Ancestry hint.

Nancy Louisa Brock and a child out of wedlock. His name was James Leander Brock. His father is unknown and not really included in Ancestry's database.

My new theory is perhaps Jennie's ancestors, the Ray's who lived in Kentucky, might have been related to the man that Nancy had a child with.  If we cut out all the generations in between, Jennie would be half cousins to this James Leander Brock. Since Ancestry would pick up on this genetic match, and the only person in the database which James Leander Brock was related to was his mother, it would show that Jennie was likely related to her as well.

This is an exciting new way of looking at things and may provide more satisfactory results with my Lee Miller family.

My Surname List

This entry is just about the surnames I am related to. I put it out there in hopes someone does a google search at sometime and comes across it and says, "hey I know that pairing. "  It is amazing how many of these names are unfamiliar to me outside of my genealogical research. To think of all the surnames I do know, that aren't here, and how many surnames went into creating those surnames, well the sheer numbers stagger the imagination. 

Last Names

 

Abbott, Abram, Adams, Anderson, Barbier, Basset, Battle, Blakemore, Blevins, Brusha (Brushka, Brusze),Bunch, Burt, Carr, Dettero (Totherow), Dickerson, Duncan, Elliot. Elwell, Van Etten, Fergus, Gard, Geersen, Gorts , Guider, Harvey, Hoffman, Howard, Huntington, Jans, Johnson, Jones, De Jong, Keener, Kittle, Kortrecht, Van Kuykendall, Van Der Laarsen (Leerse. Lerse), Lee, Lively, Lyfolly, Murdock, Martin(ucci), McDonald, McGehee, Mestemacher, Miller, Nail, Omsted, Pels, Peterson , Rader, Riley, Robertson, Robinson, Roosa, Sanders, Schlick (Sleek), Shetley, Skidmore, Smith, Sousa, Spencer, Spiller, Steinhauer, Stiles, Swafford, Taggart, Taylor, Teter, Vallet, Viemann, Vredenberg, Waggoner, Wallen (Walling), Weddel (Weddle), Westfall

 

DNA problems

Ancestry DNA gave me some nice answers. The proved I was related to my sister and my cousin. They also proved that I had a first-step-cousin I had only discovered this last year.  I will write about the whole discover later. A few other relationships were confirmed, and then there were the questions.

In my last blog, I talked about my great grandfather Sherman Andrew Miller and the possibility that he had a completely unrelated dad that I never had researched or that maybe his dad was actually someone I thought was his brother.

In this blog I want to discuss another conundrum.

What to do when you order DNA tests for your relations?  I had thought this was going to be straight up.  I would test certain relatives who were related to me through certain ancestors which would lead me further back in time by cross matching people who matches us both.

Simple on paper, but in reality there are some real problems with it. These are things you probably will want to discuss with people BEFORE you have them tested.

The biggest problem that turned up was not being related at all. That can only mean the family tree we had drawn for ourselves was incorrect and there was either infidelity, and early pregnancy or adoption involved. How do you tell your relative,  hey sorry, I think you were adopted?  Also, one of my relatives knew there was a problem with her tree, and didn't tell me until after I had ordered the test. Not a huge deal, but if I had been testing her for only one specific thing, or if she had been adopted rather than just a product of and early pregnancy by another man, I might spent money where it didn't do much good.

A confusing DNA story

AncestryDNA has a new feature that links your DNA results to family that are not included in your tree.

This is all well and good for finding your way through brickwalls, but when it affects a portion of your tree you thought you had all mapped out, it is quite upsetting.

This happened to me in the case of Burrell Russell Lee (1804-1877) and Louhaney Paralee Swafford (1800-1863).  AncestryDNA states there is a very good chance I am related to this couple.

First I thought I had a great breakthrough for one of my brick walls. Mary Matilda Robertson (1845-1901) or James Jesse Guider (1849-1909), both of which I have not been able to trace back to their parents. However, this was quickly dashed when I realized two things. The birth dates did not make sense and the location was off. 

My first task was to find out about the Lee family. I saw that they lived in Tennessee where my Miller family was. As I looked closer I saw that they did not have any unaccounted for kids, with birth dates that would link up. I looked at my Miller family and saw that Sherman Andrew Miller was born in 1865.

Digging a little deeper I noticed that the Lee family was not living in Tennessee for the period when Sherman would have been conceived, except for one son, Anderson Lee (1837-1905). He was actually living in Tennessee, and was a traveling preacher.  There is a story posted about him online, going from community to community staying at people's homes. Hmm. Was John Manson Miller away at war during 1864? I know that he was a G.A.R. solider from the same article regarding his 90th birthday.  Perhaps Anderson Lee did a visit to my great grandmother Malissa Ann Stiles (1832-1885).

This seems to make a lot of sense on the surface. Especially considering that Anderson Lee was also know as "Andrew Lee", Andrew being Sherman's middle name.

OK. So that was all a pretty good bit of detective work I thought until I did one more search. I went page by page through the 1860 Census of Bradley County to see if my family was living there at the time. I have never been able to find them on the census before, and it was suggested to me I might find them there.  So indeed, there they were, classified as McMiller.  OK Case made.

But then in cleaning up everything I thought I would go to familysearch.org and make sure that I linked the McMiller census record to my family. As I was doing that, I noticed the oldest son, William had already been linked to someone else, that, get this, had married a Swafford and had a child named Olena Miller (1879-1967).  Olena Miller married Henry S. Randolph.

What could this mean? Well to save the name of Malissa Stiles, it could mean her son, William got a girl pregnant when he was 13 years old and had Sherman Miller in addition to later marrying the Swafford and having Olena. If it is the Swafford previously mentioned, no first name was given, but a birth year of 1856 or 1857 was reported, it would make her about 9 or 10.

Then, Malissa and John would have raised Sherman as their own. This would indeed make the 90th birthday story accurate in the number of children John and Malissa had.

All of this is curious. I hope to find out the answer to it someday. I am hoping to find some of Olena's descendants.

Welcome to my blog

So I am not really sure why I have a blog at this point except maybe to draw in some help from other genealogists in my family.

My goal is to get the pages at WIKITREE set up as best as possible and to send traffic their way.

I also want to write a book.  I want to get all of the work I have put into this, into hard copy so that I, and anyone who wants it, will have actual source material to pass on to their descendants.

I am always looking for new photos and information on the family. I also have groups on Facebook for all of the branches of my tree that I have photos for and that I am researching.

I also have stored DNA test results on FamilytreeDNA, Ancestry, 23andme and GEDMATCH.

At the time of this writing, my major brickwalls are my father's grandfather Andrew Martinucci, my mothers grandmother, Maria Louisa Regli(?) and my mother great grandparents James Jesse Guider and his wife Mary Matilda Robertson.


Anyway, welcome and I hope this all works