Friday, February 27, 2015

Kentucky.gov site --Genealogy Gem

If you were to ask me if I had any research interest in Kentucky I would have said not very much.  Sure my Frizzells had ties there but moved back and forth from Bedford Co. TN and Calloway Co. KY and for reasons which I have never been able to find my maternal grandfather was born in Jordan, Fulton Co. KY in 1892 despite the family having lived in Dekalb Co. TN.  Beyond that there seemed to be no really lasting ties in Kentucky.  Today I found a wonderful Kentucky resource that made me think about something I'd really not considered.  Over half of my GGG grandparents came from Virginia.  Did they leave a paper trail through Kentucky?  Did some of the children or siblings settle along the way?  The Kentucky Land Office page of the Kentucky Government website has a great deal of information available online.  The section which really peaked my interest was where they had scanned copies of wills that were found in the patent files.

I would recommend that if you have Virginia ancestors who moved south into Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri or  or even Mississippi, that you check these resources and read through a few of the wills.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

March 4, 2015 --- HeritageQuest Online to be powered by Ancestry

When I logged into my library's HeritageQuest Online tonight I noticed they had an announcement.
Looks like exciting news.


Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Finding the Sisters of my Direct Lines for Clues to DNA Connections

Following my own advice and working on the daughter lines of my GGGG Grandparents.(eventually I will do this for my 5th greats)  Had so many names not in my direct line among those with a large portion of DNA matching close enough to put us as connected around the GGG or GGGG and started noticing surnames that were repeating.  So now I am going in search of those names.  Have already found where a sister of my Frizzell married into the Elliot family.  That may be the reason for several occurrences of the Elliott surname in a few of my matches files.  This is not an easy process.  DNA by itself is meaningless if you can't find the connection and back it with a paper trail.  It's not like the DNA linking someone to a crime where you have the  crime.  So now I think I have about 20 specific DNA projects I am working on to find cousins.....and then there are the other priorities in my life which come first.  I so wish I was more organized but I guess that is something for which we all strive.

Monday, February 09, 2015

Just for fun

Thought it would be fun to run my DNA kit through a few of the Admixture utilities and see how they compared to AncestryDNA"s interpretation 



This was Ancestry's Ethnic makeup guesstimate shown below






Sunday, February 08, 2015

Chromosome Mysteries and hopes for some answers....A learning process for sure.

After having gotten my DNA results almost a month ago I have been working on finding matches to help solve a few of the research issues I have had on several of my family lines.  While waiting for responses from some of those I contacted I started looking more in depth at names and groupings of people that match along each chromosome.  I have been comparing matches along the X chromosome(Chromo 23) and noticed that I have over 6 matches who have the Taylor surname listed in their user name.  Given the X inheritance pattern (paternal grandmother and maternal grandparents) it intrigues me even further because you would think that there would be a wide assortment of surnames.  I don't have a Taylor surname in my direct line that I know of though I have always suspected that my GGG Grandfather, William Taylor Hale(Warren & Van Buren Co. TN), possibly had the middle name because it was the maiden name of either his Mother or one of his Grandmothers.  Since I have not gotten his line back with proof any further than him I do not know if this is so.  Another thought as I was looking through the family tree shares of people who match my DNA --I have noticed that there are several who have the surnames Archer, Collins Martin & Scott in their trees. I checked over my new matches at AncestryDNA and found a tester's name that I recognized.  She is a 4th cousin through my Daniel Pittman & Comfort Hatfield line.  I have had known matches of Daniel & Comfort's son David & his wife Mary Adcock but to get the DNA connection back even further is exciting.  I recommended that she put her DNA data at GEDmatch so that we could compare chromosome segment matches.  Sure hope she does as it would really help to sort those lines out.  Still waiting on Mom's DNA to show up as processing.  I would expect to have the results by the end of this month which will help me to determine what matches are on her side and which were from Dad..