DNA in My Family Genealogy

So I have always been told there is two types of genealogy/family history research.  There is the common type where you have proof, ie census records, death certificate, marriage licence.  Then there is the type that you have no source documents and they call that mythology.  Just recently there is a new type of research that has finally become cost efficient for the genealogy community to partake in, genetic research.  This is the real scientific proof of your ancestors and we all carry it around with us in our DNA.  While this new type of research can tell you the where, its still up to you to know the who and when.

My first attempt with this was with Family Tree DNA.  I paid some money and got the mid-level 37 marker Y-chromosome DNA test.  I'm not going to get into the science behind the test, but the Y-DNA test is used to figure out your male ancestry.  It was a simple cheek swab and off in the mail it went, almost 6 months later I started getting results.  First my 12 markers then 25 and 37 a few weeks later.  While the results didn't conclude that I have an exact match with the Stitt ancestral line, and I didn't get any matches to my 25 or 37 markers, I did get 37 matches with my 12 marker.  What that means: If you find that you are an exact (12 for 12) match to another individual. This tells you that there is about a 50% chance that the two of you share a common ancestor within 7 generations, and a 95% chance that the common ancestor is within 23 generations.  .

This test also tells me my Haplogroup which is where your family is from based on your dna's molecular evolution.  My results came back as  R1b1a2 (R-M269) which is Western Europe

My second test was actually an offer from AncestryDNA to participate in their Beta test when they first acquired the DNA labs.  This totally come out of the blue but who would pass up a DNA test for the price of shipping.  The test in this kit was a vile of saliva  several months later, I am sure the long wait was the huge number of people they asked to start this program and that its all still beta testing as they figure out how they want to run this new branch of the company.  So to explain this test, where the Family Tree DNA was just 37 markers and only did the direct paternal lineage, this AncestryDNA test is more of a Family Finder test where they look at 700,000+ markers on all branches of your tree.  Spring of last year AncestryDNA started posting the beginning results of my test.

The first results they posted was my Genetic Ethnicity, this was at first quite a shock, I have alway researched the family coming from the British Isles   So with results of Central European, Scandinavian, and Uncertain was not what I expected.

That wasn't the end of it, some time later they started posting results of cousin matches, people who you are related two based on the science.  These were all broken down to by generations ie 1st-3rd cousins 4th-6th cousins and so on with this note: 'Distant cousin' matches (5th cousins or greater) have a lower degree of certainty compared to 3rd and 4th cousins. Even though there is a 50% (or less) chance that you are related, these matches are still good leads. Each of these cousins you can click on and if the cousin has posted their tree with public permissions you would see their tree and a list of matching surnames between you and their tree.  As the months have gone by I have tried to find matches with these trees but it is a tough job.  While they give you a list of matching surnames, like they noted earlier is just a lead, and some of the time these surnames are from both sides of my family tree and as far as I have been able to research my paternal and maternal sides did not cross until me.  Months and months go by and I get more of these cousins, and I should mention I don't have any that are closer than 4th-6th cousins, which means they are cousins with a common ancestor going to about the civil war or later, but more results are always coming in and I sit with 3500 matches now.  Again I want to mention that they are still Beta testing, how to run this new program.  One of the new features that came out is Hints "the shaky leaf".  These are matches where they have looked at your tree and the cousin's tree and found the common ancestor.  When you click on these you get to see a relationship chart showing how you too are related, this takes all the guesswork out of the list of matching surnames.  Out of a total 3500 genetic cousins 9 have the shaky leaf hint of how we are related. Below is how those are hints are related to me.  The superscript is the number of generation for that surname, the subscript is the birth year of that common ancestor. 

I haven't started contacting these cousins as I am trying to clean up and making sure my mythology has some source documents behind it.  I have been contacted by some of those 3500 other matches but I haven't had any success making new discoveries within those 3500.  

I will leave you with that for now.  I am sure I will blog in the future as I make new connections and discoveries.  Hope you all enjoyed and if you decide to adventure into the DNA side of genealogy feel free to ask me questions and check with me I may know of some current discounts. 

Learning New Tricks

First before I get to the title, let me apologize for not posting the last two weeks.  Sorry!  Now to the title "Learning New Tricks" I have spent the last two weekends going to genealogy conferences.

The first was one put on by the Midwest Genealogy Library and Ancestry.com called Ancestry Day.  While the conference was a few days long I was only able to attend Saturday.   I was very glad I attended this conference.  The main focus of the gathering as I saw it was two things; one how to use Ancestry.com, and two how to use the Midwest Genealogy Center.  This was great, while I consider myself a Digital Genealogist, genealogy didn't evolve as fast a technology has and I often have to go "old school" and visit the library.  Truthfully this is usually very intimidating as there is huge amount of information at the MGC.  That's is where the conference really started making my light go off.  Their wonderful staff and volunteers gave presentations that helped create new idea's and guidance of where to look and find new discoveries that I hope to share with you all down the road.

The second conference was a wonderful idea by the new LDS church where they simulcast the Roots Tech Conference in Salt Lake City, UT with their own spin on things call Genealogy KC.  It was amazing, first and foremost I got to share my time at this conference with my Mom.  The second thing I loved was this conference was simulcast they also had classes going on at the same time with a wide variety of subjects.  The classes I attended where; Reading Cemetery Stones, the BSA Genealogy Merit Badge, Burial Customs, Analyzing Land Records, Revolutionary War Research, Cemetery Art, Blogging Family History, and the Future of Genealogy.  Each class was very intimate as most classes only had a dozen attendees.  This gave each of the speakers time to brief but also to get Q&A from the audience.

After the Genealogy KC conference I was able to talk with a Program Director and hopefully next year I will be able to participate as a Instructor at this conference.  I think with what I do with Google Earth and Genealogy,  I can help those with brick wall look from a different angle and help to inspire younger genealogist get involved in family history with this visual tool.

I can't wait to put everything I learned into action.  Thank you to all the staff and volunteers that helped put these conferences together and thanks for the opportunity to meet new friends and learn new tricks.  I look forward to see what you guys are able to put on next year.

Quaker's and I'm not talking Oats

I wanted to talk about what I learned this week. This is a starter blog on the topic of Quaker's and Religion in my Family Tree.  After getting a new Hint in my Ancestry DNA I got to looking at an older branch of the Stitt line.  The line was the Mills which joined the Stitt line back in the late 1800's. Something I had not really looked at in my family research before was their religious beliefs.  

The interesting thing wasn't the two families coming together it was how they eventually ran into each other.   From what I have researched so far was that the Stitt's came from PA to KY to OH and eventually to IA.  The Mills side came from PA to NC to TN to IA over the same approximate time frame.  Both of the families often traveled in groups when they made their big moves.  The Mills were Quakers and had a prominent impact in TN Quaker history.  Before I continue on and in case you are new to what Quakers are here was a useful piece for me.

Quakers are often confused with the Amish or with Shakers, two independent groups with whom there is no direct historical or theological connection. Despite a shared concern for peace and a historic emphasis on simplicity, Quakers are a unique body of Christians, formally called the Society of Friends.
Friends do not withdraw from the world into private celibate communities, as did the Shakers to the point of extinction. Nor do Quakers isolate themselves from the modern world, indicating their uniqueness by the wearing of unusual clothing and by rejecting technology as do the Amish. Instead, Quakers are a diverse group of Christian believers who seek to maintain a personal relationship with God while remaining active participants in the world around them.

Like I said earlier it looks like most of the family moves where with religiously like minded friends "no pun intended."  And after about a century of moving around they all showed up in IA.

I am going to leave you with that for now, however another thing I learned about the Quakers is they took good notes at their meetings keeping things like vital statistics (births, deaths, marriages, changes in membership.)  There are multiple volumes of meeting minutes from all the states involved  that I plan on checking out.  So look for future blogs with Quakers in the title and I will share new discoveries as I find them.

Serendipity

Ok, let me get a few things out before I get you my main post.   Sorry for not writing last week, I was out of town and before I knew it I had forgot.  Last thing is this blog is Genealogy by Eric.  It's just my opinion of what I have seen, heard, and found.  If you see something I have misinterpreted please feel free to comment below or you can email me personally at stitt.eric@gmail.com

Now that I've got that out of the way lets get to my post.  My blog today is about accidentally finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it, Serendipity.  My most recent serendipity moment was with my wife Kathy.  I don't do much research on Kathy's side, not that I don't want to, I just want her involved with it.  I asked her a few weeks ago to help me with some of my tree organization.  Its always easiest to talk to someone about people they know so we were in the Thompson tree.  For those who don't know, Kathy's mother, Mary is a Thompson.

So now that you know which branch I am going down let me throw this one at you.  The Thompson's weren't always Thompson's, they use to be Lennox and that's where I am going to take you.   The Thompson name in this family is only about 5 generations old and starts with John David Thompson/Lennox, Kathy's Great Great Grandfather.

Here is the story as I know it.  Sometime between 1862-1870 John's parents William and Martha Lennox died. It is thought that a Dr Thompson was the last care giver of William and Martha and by the 1870 census a Bridget Thompson was the head of house for both John and Eliza Lennox.  Ten years later John had taken the last name of Thompson as his own.  Then sometime after 1900 John dies and from what I know was lost.  From what was left of family memory he died some where north of St Joseph, MO.

Serendipity you might ask.  Well while I was talking with Kathy about my tree organization I was checking one of my favorite sites. www.findagrave.com it's one of the thing I'm trying to get a hold of is collecting and linking each family member with their find a grave memorial.  Well on that day I got a hit for John David Thompson my serendipity moment.  Thanks to a Russ C who had built a memorial for John not only did I get a death date but a location of where John's last resting pace is.  However John David Thompson are all pretty common names so I wanted to did a little deeper to verify that I found the right guy.

So after one day of Serendipity on find a grave I was able to continue my luck with "The Holt County Sentinel" on the Library of Congress website.  I knew the approximate death date and location from the headstone and with help that the Library of Congress had each of the pages of the sentinel in PDF format.  This allowed me to name search each page, an hour later I found what I was looking for "A Sad Accident"  I'm not going to transcribe the accident, I want you to discover it like I did.  I will say its in the bottom right side of the paper.

Hope you enjoy my serendipity moment and I will talk to you all next week.

A Picture is worth 1000 words.

They say a Picture is worth a thousand words so I thought I would wrap up this introduction of how I got into researching my family history with photos of the tombstones have found.  I have tried to add photos of oldest tombstones found out of the main lines I have researched.  There are a few others that I've included just because I like how they look.  



Robert Moore

oldest tombstone
 of the Moore Family

Frank Short
Woodmen of the World
tombstone



 

Thomas Stitt
oldest tombstone

of the Stitt Family 

 

John Bailey
oldest tombstone
of the Bailey Family





David Hott
oldest tombstone
of the Hott Family

 

John Thompson
oldest tombstone of the
Thompson/Lennox Family





Sarg Nathaniel Sutlief
Oldest tombstone I have found period.
I haven't seen this one personally get but its on my list.

You can click on any of the photos to see a bigger copy of the images.

In The Beginning, Why I'm Even Doing This? Part II

So last time I was telling you how I got started into genealogy because of a forgotten cemetery in my neighborhood.  Over the last 4 years I am made an attempt to find and document where the last resting place is for all my family.

Below is just a small shot of what I have mapped out so far.  Each place marker is a GPS marker of where the tombstone is, with some margin of error.  I couldn't get my Google Earth Embeder to work but I will keep working on it and maybe in a future post you can see an interactive map to explore.  If anyone would like a copy of my Google Earth file, post here or email me and I will send it to you.  I have links to each FindAGrave memorial in the placemarkers.  The cool thing about that is while you might not be up for a road trip to a cemetery, you can still visit the memorial via the web.

These are just the people and cemeteries I have personally visited.  There are about 40 other cemeteries that I haven't visited that are outside of a day's drive.  Its neat seeing all of the cemeteries that I need to visit as most of them start on the east coast and end in MO.  When you look at the whole thing you can see the migration path that the family took to get here. 

I will put something out closer to Memorial Day but if there are any family members who would like a map or if you see someone who I have missed, let me know.  Please feel free to send me your pictures, it lets me see how the stones are aging.

Cousin Bait (In The Beginning, Why I'm Even Doing This?)

Guess if I am going to start blogging and especially about Genealogy I should start of with explaining my beginnings into the genealogy world.  Its all started about 4 years ago while out for a walk in the neighborhood, my wife Kathy got stopped and asked about a cemetery in the area from some random stranger.  Neither of us knew about it but just a couple of doors down there was a cemetery, the Roberts Cemetery.  We immediately went to find it.  On our way back we stopped by our neighbor who had been in the neighborhood since the houses were build back in the 1960's.  After talking with her and a few other neighbors we found out that what we had found was only about half of the original cemetery.  The builder of our neighborhood tried to buy the property but was unsuccessful because of the cemetery.  However just a few short years later a new builder came into the area who was going to build apartments for section 8 housing, the North Brighton Townhomes.  For what ever reason they where either able to skip past the red tape of buying the cemetery or just completely neglect that there was one there all together.  This lead to the cemetery being bull dowsed over, before the cemetery was completely wiped from the face of the earth the neighbors stopped the construction.  To mend their mistakes the construction company picked up and laid all the tombstones in concrete, face up.  Now after already surviving some 100 years the cemetery faced its next big struggle.  Normal tombstones are standing upright which protects a lot of the stones from the weather.  After 50 years of being in concrete the elements are greatly taking their toll.  Snow, ice, dirt and wind are slowly erasing the names, dates and last loving words.  Even if you look at the photos of the Roberts Cemetery which where taken in 2008 and then look at the stones now you can see a big difference.

This all lead me to my big question.  Where is my family?  Where are they buried?  Is anyone taking care of them or have they been bull dowsed over and forgotten?  My father's parents have already passed, but both of my mother's parents are still alive.  What do they know and what may be lost if something where to happen to them?  

Our home owners association just got reactivated and is starting to have regular meeting.  I have plans to bring up the Roberts Cemetery and hopefully get the neighborhood or a local boy scout troop to adopt the cemetery to help clean and preserve this little piece of history.  

I am going to leave you with this for now.  Next time I will try to share with you how I solved these questions and where I am going from here.  If you are ever in Kansas City ask me about the cemetery and I can take you to see it. 

Roberts Cemetery  http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&GScid=2251323&GRid=27524449&CRid=2251323&