Ancestry Results using ThruLines

 I first received my ethnic results from Ancestry. On its site for the last five generations technically I show up all white. it does not offer deep ancestry reports. However DNA results confirmed my theory that my paternal revolutionary war veteran Isaac Beman married Lydia Wix whose father Zephaniah had Native American ancestry. He was from Southern Connecticut. I was very surprised and pleased by these results.

Also on this side we finally know the Bakers were German. Gggreat-grandfather Daniel Baker's father was Rudolph Baker from Shenandoah Co, Virginia. The ancestor immigrated to Philadelphia before the revolution. 

Gggreat-grandfather Albert Galatine Gatton was the biological son of Galentine Gatton. No one researching the family thought he was. He was the eldest son and no documents have been found. It took me many years to find another man in my families, who just missed being entered into the 1880 and 1900 federal census records.

There were no matches for ggreat-grandmother Sarah Livingston. I know there are a few thousand Livingston trees on Ancestry. I wonder how many tested their DNA. Maybe they felt they didn't need to because the family is very well known in the area.

I am still in the dark about my great-great-grandfather Alexander M. Thatcher born in 1818. In Pennsylvania or Massachusetts? I still don't know. 

My maternal Wilson ancestor was different. The male line led to Fairfield, Connecticut and then Massachusetts. The biological father for Nathaniel Wilson born 1742 was Richard Wilson born 1715, not the Nathaniel many people thought it was. The immigrant ancestor arrived in Salem, MA, in 1638. That was very unexpected, but considering the very common surname, even duplicate first names Nathaniel and William, that's not unexpected. It was a big surprise to my maternal family because everyone thought we were Scottish. The Wilson trail led to Normanby le Wold, Lincolnshire, Britain. Thanks to a confusion in duplicate first names in Lincolnshire, this time Thomas and William, I don't know if the family came from Yorkshire or Fife, Scotland. At least I know Hamon Wilson is my ancestor.

On the same side I found out a distant cousin was correct about the father for my ancestor Joseph Peavler. His father was Christian Bibler. The original family name was Büehler. The family immigrated to the Germanna Colony in Virginia in the early eighteenth century. 

My ancestry was given as 31 percent German. I had no idea I had that much ancestry when I took the language in college. From my ancestry I could be related to my German professor Waltraut Deinert! She was from Hessen.

Those were the major corrections. There were a few additional parents added to trees, but I didn't get far researching them. All the other five generations of information were correct. There were a few additional parents added to trees, but I didn't get far researching them. All in all that is a pretty good confirmation of my research started before the use of records on-line. 

Catching Up in Genealogy

 I am finally catching up with genealogy developments.  Recently I had my DNA tested.  I have enjoyed genealogy over the past couple of decades and it was a natural extension of skills and my curiosity.  When DNA testing was first marketed, I couldn't afford it and I knew if I waited the technology would develop further and I would get more results.

My mother participated before I did, many years ago. She joined the National Geographic's Genome Project.. It confirmed she had deep ancestry from western and northern Europe, around the Mediterranean, Arabia, the Fertile Crescent, northern Asia, and southern Indian.  At that time any Native American DNA would show up as Asian. Her MtDNA led to a Ukrainian Jewish woman.  I am still very puzzled about that.  I haven't documented any Jewish people on either side of the family.

I came to the point that I was mostly interested in my brick walls in research. A distant cousin gave me an Ancestry autosomal DNA test.  After being laid off, my personal interests helped me reinvigorate myself. It was time to tackle the brick walls. 

Time Team Member

 

I am thrilled to say I am a member of Time Team. It started thirty years ago in Britain as an reality archaeology, based on the premise that the usual archaelogical survery takes three days.  The reason i became interested was a little bizarre.

I have lived in upstate New York all my life. I had already started researching my family in 1994 and knew I had a diverse European background. In August 2014 my mother broke her hip. She had to go to a rehabilitation center.  One beautiful day in September she wanted to go outside.  I took her out in her wheelchair.  I wonder if all wheelchairs are so cumbersome to move and manuveur. I strained my right shoulder badly.  I just gotten a job that required using a computer all day.  The only thing I did at night after that little incident was eat a frozen dinner and ice my shoulder.  I needed some entertainment.  I got a subscription to the Britbox streaming service and that's where I found Time Team.  The service had a very limited number of episodes it turned out.  I wondered if there were more.  There were, 20 years and 62 specials!

It was an easy and entertaining way to learn about my British ancestors.  There were episodes in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well.  It seemed like a lot of the people knew each other and it wasn't unusual for people to give each other a good-natured hard time.  At that time I never knew where the team would be in the next episode or what they would find.  Sometimes they found what they were looking for.  Sometimes they found something else entirely.  One time they found "absolutely nothing." Each episode featured at least one specialist and as the years went on, usually multiple.  I've watched them countless times since then.  It's sort of like attending a really good party, at least for me.

The episodes ended in the early 2000s, but the interest and enthusiasm continued on.  I think the pandemic helped too.  So many interesting channels started on YouTube!  A few years ago it was announced that Time Team was reforming and would be fan-funded.  There has been at least two special digs in the last two years, and information in-between.  This past spring I thought I'd join.  This is the type of group would welcome me if I showed up one day to watch and someone would go out of their way to talk to me.  Too bad I can't. I've had a couple dreams of Time Team coming for a dig in the upper Hudson Valley.  Hint, hint.

Ephraim Warfield in the American Revolution

I haven't had much time to work on genealogy, although I've felt like getting back to it. My mother wanted me to finish my research enough to write and publish it, along with several friends.

A cousin from another branch of the Winchell family is Officer Keith A. Winchell of the NYPD, shown here during an August 2016 promotion ceremony. He is an Air Force veteran and a first responder to the World Trade Center. I have found out something very interesting about his great-grandmother Harriet Austin Winchelll's family and I'm working on documenting the information to give to him. Goals are always subject to revision.

I have hit a snag. One of his ancestors is Ephraim Warfield, born 1 Oct 1760 in Westfield, Hampden Co., Massachusetts. He served multiple times during the American Revolution on the Patriot side. I have discovered that there was also an Ephraim Warfield from Connecticut who also served in the same war. I have to sort out which man served when where. There's only one local library with Fold3 so I'll have to visit there.  The Ephraim from Connecticut applied for a pension so hopefully I'll be able to read the documentation and find out where he served.  I have a feeling it might be in Rhode Island. Fortunately there's a library near work and it'll be easy for me to go there to use Ancestry. This is a good example why a person always has to be careful about people of similar ages with the same name.

Survey

I need help determining a man's early origins. I know who he is, so I don't need anyone to guess who he is. It is very important you take the questions at face value only. Below are the clues that I have.

• He belonged to a tribal band.
• His father belonged to the same Native American tribe and gave him land rights.
• He signed a treaty as a member of his tribe.
• A Native woman signed a quit claim deed giving him land.
• His tribe gave him land.
• He married a European woman in a Christian church.
• He was baptized a Christian, but the baptismal record is missing.
• A record of his membership to any Christian church hasn't been found.
• Some of his children were baptized Christian.
• Some of his children attended a mission school.
• He operated a sawmill.
• He deeded land to his European brother-in-law.
• He had a European last name.

The question is: based on the information provided, did this man grow up in a European family? YES or NO response please.

Thank you very much for your help.

Genealogy Goals

I think it would be a good idea if I set some genealogy goals for myself.  Because work management has always been rating me and my allergies always interfere, goals don't work well in my personal life.  However, it's probably a good idea in genealogy because once your tree starts developing, you can go off any which way.

My goals:

• Document Debra Winchell's wife to Anthony (Teunis) Brazee and if she was the daughter of Eliakim Winchell Sr.  Tricky since the Town of Egremont records burned and the family weren't church goers.
• Find the parents of great-grandfather Alexander M. Thatcher. He probably did come from Chester County, Pennsylvania, or thereabouts.
• Try to link gggreat-grandmother Sarah Livingston to the Livingston family of upstate New York.

Beware FamilySearch

FamilySearch provided by the LatterDay Saints is a wonderful source of documentation. However, its Family Tree is flawed and fails to promote professional genealogy standards.

Initially I created a tree on FamilySearch (FS) because I wanted to use the relative finder.  That didn't work very well because unbeknownst to me the default settings of the page lets other people contribute to your ancestral findings.  A few people made a horrible mess of my family.  Today I've discovered some people even deleted some of my entries.  Fortunately the information was still there and I was able to reattach it.  I could see how this file was abused.  I had to post a firm message.  Since there doesn't seem to be a check and balance system, this can lead to all kinds of genealogical fallacies.  This puts in mind the Victorian desire to connect families with either royalty or biblical characters.  These are still affecting genealogy!

FS is not very intuitive to use, so I may have messed up their trees to fix mine  Sorry about that.   Since then I've figured out the correct steps. In addition, if you do use one of the resources found, it's not clear to me if you're sent back to your own entry.  I think so, but it should be made clear.  A user shouldn't have to memorize all the individual codes. 

Some FS users do not know how to research common names and it seemed that they just just blithely assumed they were correct.  I'll charitably assume that's how most of this happened.  Personally I would never go so far as to physically change anyone's information.  That used to be considered rude. If you find there is more than one person of the same name in the same age group, you must research both people until you are sure which one is correct.  There were 27 possible Adam Bakers when I was looking for my great-great-grandfather.  I knew enough to know I had to have additional information to go further. If you don't know how to do that, you better look up how to research genealogical records.

There is a setting under a user's profile to turn off contributions as FS calls it.  I could eliminate all but one.  I assume it's a corporate address.  I let that user know I didn't want any messing around with my files.  I might have to confess to accidentally messing up other people's files in reply, but at least I will be able to point out the design flaws.  Even though I'm no longer working in an information technology department, I can still break applications.