My Past Week - Part A

[Genealogy content]

I have been knitting...some. But, I spent a lot of hours working on genealogy stuff. A year ago I bought a new database program and decided I wanted the data to be as "perfect" as possible. So, I started transfering each individual manually - each ancestor, ancestors' siblings, in-laws, known nieces & nephews, etc.

That works well, but takes forever. There are 2998 individuals in my old database. When I got to my paternal grandfather's line, I decided to do a data download for those individuals. That did NOT work well. I have no idea how it happened, but during the download random individuals were given burial dates ranging from 2002 and 2007. Really random. Not everyone. But, some of the people are still living. Some died in the 1700s. Some of the "notes" sections were duplicated, but not all. ARGH.

I started to clean up the records for those in my paternal grandfather's line and learned some new tricks for using this new database. And then, I decided to look at the data for every single person. I went alphabetically through the entire new database -- 1527 records -- and fixed what needed to be fixed. It was *very* time consuming, but I'm glad I did it.

Now for the remaining 1471 records -- I'm going to enter the data manually. It might take me a year, but I'll end up with a "clean" database.

yDNA Update: A few days ago I got word of a new project participant who matches our results perfectly. Our Most Recent Common Ancestor was born about 1750 in Pennsylvania. And here's another who matches very closely - but we don't have a proven connection, yet. Most likely it's several generations farther back. Now - if I could just talk a couple of my mother's male cousins into doing a yDNA test I think we might be able to prove or disprove a certain family oral tradition. The test itself is a bit pricey, but the two cousins I would ask could easily afford it.

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?