Genealogy

This book by Alondra Nelson is only tangentially about genealogy and family history and sheds no light about how to use DNA to do research. It is about how our recent knowledge of the genome has fundamentally changed how we view facts about our ancestors. The modern popularity of genealogy research began with Roots as a mini-series being televised in 1977. Before then, genealogy in the US had been mostly an upper-class pursuit, by white people. Of course, the LDS (Mormon) church had long been encouraging their members to document their ancestry -- also a mostly white project. Roots changed that, and now there are large numbers of black Americans looking for their ancestors both black and white, slave and free. And many want to go beyond the racialized labels assigned by the culture and the records and the African continent to find ancestral countries or tribal groups of origin. Research both archaeological and "coroner's method" removal of graves in the "Negro ...

I've loved the search for genealogy and my family's history since my children were young. I wanted to understand my roots, and why some of the difficulties my family endured happened, and how those events changed all those who were touched by them. I found young orphans, babies born before marriage, rape, and tragic death by fire among the more normal events. I've also found some family lines that are rather well-researched, which took away the challenge. For some years other projects took my time. Then, the yDNA tests became affordable, and I bought an Family Tree DNA kit for my dad for Father's Day. Because those "beginner kits" don't tell you much, and have far too many meaningless matches, I kept paying for upgrades, all the way up to 67 markers. This took his high-quality matches down to under 10, but as we followed up on these matches, we realized that this line of Cowans came from Stirling, in Scotland. The recorded part of the family went to t...

It took me a year to really start using 23andme. I think it was because it is hard to know what to do. Recently I got tired of waiting for something to happen, and decided to just wade in and make it happen. As of now, I have over 85 people I'm sharing with, with another 252 invitations to share. Altogether, tonight I have finished contacting all 962 matches that they report, unless I skipped someone inadvertently. The page where you can make this happen too is https://www.23andme.com/you/relfinder/ . This page links every match up to 1000, and you can sort it various ways. What I did first was sort it this way and that, randomly messaging people, with very few responses. When I got serious, instead I made a little text: We may be related according to 23&me. I've been doing genealogy research for quite awhile, and my old GEDCOM is online at Rootsweb: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~valoriez. And GEDMATCH: kit # M186808 Main surnames are Baysinger, Booth, Cowan, Disn...