yDNA

[This post is about genealogy, not knitting]

My brother agreed to submit a mouth swabbed sample to Family Tree DNA last month to keep his genealogy-addicted sisters happy. We have the first set of results back and, as expected, have a 12/12 match to a fellow with the same surname who is from our home city. You wouldn't think there should be any question there, but our families hadn't had contact in several generations. What we both knew about our ancestors several generations back led us to believe our lines merged.

We can now confirm that we are the same "family" and share a Gt-gt-gt-gt-gt grandfather and all of his ancestors. Our 4-gt grandfathers were half-brothers - with different mothers.

The other family arrived in this area around 1850. My family arrived here in 1920. When I was a kid, I always wondered WHY the heck my dad's grandfather moved up here from southern MO instead of moving to Southern California. Gt. grand dad was not a farmer, so he didn't come here for the black earth. What brought him here? Did he know that he had 3rd cousins here? Did they let him know there was a new factory here needing workers? Did he get the word from common cousins back in the hills of East Tennessee?

Well, of course, I'll never get an answer to those questions. But, maybe someday I'll find answers to other burning questions, like: who was the immigrant and where did he [and his wife] come from?

How I Came to Be a Genealogy Addict

It's my Mother's fault! [Thanks, Mom!!] Back several decades ago, Mother got into genealogy for a while. She was just working on her ancestors, so I decided to work on Dad's. [He had died several years before.] I talked with several of his father's sisters and with his mother.

One aunt still kept in contact with cousins in MO. The other was, let's just say, Not Happy that I was trying to find information about the family in MO. ["When mother died, those people could have helped us, but they didn't." -- Well, she was 11 when her mother died and probably had selective memory, and didn't know what all was going on. Maybe her dad refused their help.]

Grandma was very vague about her parents, grandparents, etc. "Nobody talked about family when I was growing up." Fast forward to the 21st century. OH...NOW I know why they didn't talk about it. On her mother's side, her grandparents appear to be uncle & niece. [I'm still trying to dig up the dirt on that one.] On her father's side, in the early 1800s, three frontier-living families intermarried - a lot. For starters: her paternal grandparents were Wm. & RG. RG's mother was Wm.'s aunt. RG's father's first cousin was Wm's mother.

Con: Lots of Smith's from Long Island on the tree. Why were they all named John or William?
Pro: Hey, all of this intermarrying means that I have fewer branches to research! And that IS a good thing.

So, I dabbled in genealogy a bit several decades ago. Then about 2001, Mother came to visit me in The West and brought along a big box of photos that had been GG's & Great Gran's. Dear Great Gran. She knew who all the people where in all those photos, but she didn't think about identifying them for us.

We sat there looking through the photos & I kept asking "Who's this?" And, "How are they related [to us] [to each other]?" Mother could answer some of my questions, but for a lot of them she said, "I can't remember, but I'm sure I've got that information back home in the genealogy box under my bed."

Finally, one of us said, "Some of this stuff might be on the Internet." Yep, some of it is. Just enough to get me hooked, but not enough to make it easy. I've tried to analyze why I enjoy it so much:

• I was [and always will be] a history major
• I enjoy the challenge of the hunt
• I find it facinating to learn about the people who helped make me who I am