Commentary on the Michelle Obama story by Tony Burroughs...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/10/14/burroughs.obama.genealogy/index.html

Also, about the importance of preserving records, the importance of honing genealogical "detective" skills in order to track down and find the information that might be available but unorganized, uncatalogued, or unindexed, the advances constantly being made in preserving documents, and the growing amount of resources available to people tracing African-American and African ancestors.

The guy who wrote it, Tony Burroughs, spoke at a genealogy conference I went to in March 2008 for the Genealogy Federation of Long Island on "becoming a better genealogist" and I thought he was an excellent speaker. Well-spoken, knowledgeable, and knows how to make the topic interesting.

Read it!

Oh, the stories our lives weave...

This is an extremely interesting New York Times story about Michelle Obama's family tree, including her slave ancestors and her mixed-race ancestry. Also lists many of the sources used to find out that info, which I love - interesting *and* informative.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/us/politics/08genealogy.html

Quirks in common - the ice chewing connection

I chew ice.

It drives my brother, who inherited super hearing from somebody, up a wall. He can hear me from another room. The way other people chew gum (and, for the record, I also chew a lot of gum), I chew ice. Where other people might fill a glass with water and add an ice cube or two, I fill my glass up with ice cubes and sometimes add some water, if there's room. I find it refreshing. And soothing. My friends, like my brother, find it annoying. My best friend has been making fun of me for this quirk for more than 20 years now.

For awhile, I tried to break the habit, but my brother and friends will be disappointed to know that it's become something I kinda cherish, as it turns out my ice chewing quirk is something I have in common with my grandmother, Helen Stutzmann Gorry.

I never knew she did it, but I was chewing a glass full of ice in front of my father one day, when he turned to me and said, "Are you chewing that ice?" Expecting to be lectured, I nonetheless told him that yes, I was, to which he replied, "My mother used to do that."

I have since discovered that this is a quirk I also share with two of my cousins on that same side of the family. And it reminded me of another quirk of mine, sleeping with one leg hanging off the side of the bed, which my father said is something somebody in his family used to do (and reminds me that I should ask him if he remembers who that person is).

I think we all want to be unique. We don't want to be just like everybody else. But I think we all want to feel connected to other people, too. Just like my physical features or the photos I have in my album, personality traits connect us to the people in our families. Whenever I chew ice, I think about my grandmother, who died 7 years ago, and I think about who in her family tree she might have been like with that particular quirk, and I make sure I write this connection down, so that someday it won't just be a connection to past generations, but will be a connection to future generations as well.

They're somewhere out there: The Alien Files

In today's New York Times, page A12, "A Treasure on Paper Goes Public: U.S. Bares 'Alien Files' Kept on Immigrants."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12archives.html

As most of my family was here by the turn of the (last) century, I wasn't even aware these files existed, but they sound like, for those who have more recent immigrant ancestors, a possible wealth of primary sourcei information. That's half the fun of the research, even just the possibility of that elusive treasure trove of information. While apparently you can access these files now through the Freedom of Information Act, it might be worth the wait (and lack of aggravation) to request them from the National Archives - I had no problem getting Charles Haase's military records from them four years ago.

You find out something new and exciting all the time. The downside to the burst in genealogy's popularity is the loads of misinformation passed around as fact, but the upside is people having the interest and power in preserving these valuable documents.

Losing (or finding) my religion

Religion has always been an interesting component of my family tree research, I think because, if religions were like nationalities, I would only be half-Catholic. I think it started when I realized when I was very young that my mother's father wasn't Catholic. I was raised Catholic, as were both my parents, and my grandfather, whenever he would visit, would come to church with us, but when it was time for Communion, he would stay seated. We had an old photo from my grandparents wedding reception in 1946 and I remember asking my mother why Grandma wasn't wearing a wedding dress and she explained to me that because Grandpa wasn't Catholic, they had to get married in the rectory, and if she couldn't get married in the church, she didn't want to wear a wedding dress.

As a Catholic, I'll be honest that I'm both fascinated and confounded by how easily people seem to be able to move between Protestant denominations. My grandfather was technically Baptist, but his Raynor (Protestant English) and Berg (Protestant German) roots were both Methodist and Episcopalian. All of my first cousins are Catholic, but all of my second cousins on Grandpa Raynor's side of the family are of one Protestant denomination or another. If you go out one branch further, to my third cousins, it gets really interesting, where several of my grandfather's cousins' families are Biblebelt born-again, evangelical Christians. I have more than a few cousins who are evangelical ministers, and several third cousins who were home-schooled and don't believe in dating but rather, in courting...it's all extremely fascinating. A branch further out, I have a line of cousins about three generations long at this point who are Mormons. A few of them attended BYU and several of them have been or are currently on missions.

My dad's side doesn't miss out on all this religious fun, either. I think his mother was Catholic, but her parents were not - her German ancestors were stand-up, Catholic-hating Lutherans. My father recently told me that my grandmother used to have to sneak out to see my Irish Catholic grandfather, but I'm not sure if it was her father or her grandparents that she was hiding it from.

The thing is, with Lutheran, Mormon, evangelical, and Methodist cousins, and a whole family line back through the years that's half Catholic and half not (with a possible Dutch Muslim thrown into the mix for added fun way back when), I don't understand how people can hate each other for their religious beliefs. My Mormon cousins and I might disagree on points of theology, but from their social networking Web sites, I know that we all have an artistic streak and that we like the same movies. And if anybody traces their family back far enough, all Christians were Catholics, all Muslims were Christians, all Christians were Jewish, and all humans are family.

Carbon copies and the odd man out

I'm always fascinated by how families can look like, or not look like, each other. Obviously, our physical features are passed to us by the combination of genes that came down to us from our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents, and everyone before. So when both my parents have dark hair, I wonder how my sister turned out a strawberry blond? Someone somewhere along the line had to have been a redhead. I actually have three redheaded cousins, although two of them got it from their father, who I am not related to. We are half Irish, so having redheads in the family is not a total surprise, although an interesting fact (to me, anyway...I'm not sure I've ever found anyone who agrees with the assertion of "interesting") is that red hair was introduced to Ireland through the Scandinavian Viking invaders, so while other people call my sister Irish, I call her the Viking in the family...

Anyway, I am a brunette, like my parents. My brothers are both blond. By hair alone, people usually aren't surprised that my sisters and brother are related. They usually call me the odd man out.

Then there's my parents. When people see me with my father, they say I look like him. When they would see me with my mother, they'd say i looked like her. The older I get, the more I think I am turning into a carbon copy of my mother. At the same time, I have a cousin on my dad's side of the family who has always looked exactly like me, except I'm half a foot taller than she is. (I call her my Mini-Me). But I'm fascinated how I can look exactly like my mom and also exactly like my paternal cousin.

When my grandmother was talking to me and my cousin the other day, she told us about a trip to Ireland that she took with my Aunt Ellen several years ago to go find the village where her father was born. They got lost in the vicinity and ended up at a business called Cronin's, which is her maiden name. The man who owned the shop, she said, was the spitting image of her father. She didn't know how they were related but it was obvious that somehow, they must be.

My cousin Keith, as he got older, was definitely turning into my dad's doppelganger. One of my favorites is my cousin Christina and our grandmother's sister Faith. There's a photo of Faith when she was about 12 years old where she looks so much like Christina that it could've easily been a photo of Christina. But three generations and a branch removed from each other, how were they identical? Christina's genes had input from my grandfather and from her mother, people Faith wasn't blood-related to, yet except for the age difference, they could've been twins. It makes me wonder who of my relatives from way back when I might look exactly like. For people like my sister, whose hair makes her the odd man out, it's actually a connection to an unknown someone from generations past. But for both her and for those, like Christina and Faith, who have family carbon copies, whether we know who we look like or not, the way we look is a tangible connection to someone and someplace we came from.

Latter-Day Saints: genealogical phenoms

For anyone doing genealogy research, one of the best places to start is with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons are genealogical phenoms. I imagine the basis for that is two-fold: one reason being that when plural marriage was the norm for them, there was a very real need to keep family ties straight, to know who was related to whom by marriage or by blood - when someone can end up being their own stepgrandmother, things can get confusing if records aren't kept. The other reason is that the Mormons seem to be just generally very family-oriented. Members of the LDS are sealed to their families for all of eternity, so it's probably important to them to know who their family is.

In any case, the LDS emphasis on genealogical records extends beyond the Mormon church. They have made huge contributions to recording and preserving all things genealogy. The very first death certificates my father found for his side of the family came from research he did at a LDS Family History Center. There are dozens of these centers scattered around the country, with a huge selection of microfilmed records or access to said microfilmed records. The family tree program I use on my computer is the free one provided by the LDS. And their Web site, www.familysearch.org, has been extremely helpful to me in finding available family records, such as Edward Haase's and Eva Meinberg's birth certificates, and John Ricklefs and Meta Tiedemann's marriage certificate. There is some user-generated content on the Web site that is inaccurate, but if you know which databases are trustworthy, Familysearch can provide you with a wealth of genealogical information, or at least a place to start.

So this is a thank you to the Mormons, who fostered my father's interest in genealogy, who provided me with some important inroads in my own research, and who realize that whether we love them or hate them, and whether we know them or are separated from them by hundreds of years, that family, who we're tied to forever, is the most important thing.

Daughters of the American Revolution: Loyalist Edition

On my maternal grandfather's branch of the family tree, many of my ancestors' arrival to this country pre-dates the American Revolution...by about 150 years. By the time Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the like all decided they no longer wanted to be British, my family had been American-born for several generations. They were well-entrenched on Long Island. So it's not odd to assume that it should be a breeze to get membership into the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). I personally have never had much interest in pursuing that opportunity, but I have a cousin who has recently decided that she would, and so my grandmother volunteered my services to try to find a connection that would open that door for her.

But ah, those Raynors...even after 150 years on the other side of the pond, they were still very happily British...


In my Loyalist family's defense, the entire Hempstead area of Long Island was apparently a hotbed of British support. I have long been aware of the stories of the Raynors being Tories, so I figured I'd take a look at some of the other long-standing families they married into - the Seamans, the Ackerlys, the Storys, the Spragues. Ancestry.com has a lot of military records in their database, which is how I first discovered my Civil War veteran ancestor, Charles Haase, but for the Revolution, I was turning up big fat nothings...till Zachariah Story, turned up a couple of hits in a book entitled "Loyalists in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War Volume III." He had military service in the Revolution, all right...fighting for the British.

If you look up St. George's Episcopal Church in Hempstead, where many of my ancestors were baptized and married, on the Web, you find out that after the Battle of Long Island, British soldiers used the church as a headquarters. By the 1770s, not all Americans were descended from British immigrants, but in Hempstead, they were, and for whatever reason, they felt no need to make any changes. what is interesting is that I have several branches of my family based in Canada - when you trace their migration pattern, it comes back to people who lived on Long Island who either chose to leave the country as the Revolution was brewing and spilling over because they were loyal to England, or who were forced to leave in the years following the end of the war because they were loyal to England.

Which brings me to my point that I'm not sure I'll be successful in helping my cousin with her DAR ambitions. Besides the fact that the generation who would have fought in the war is where my actual hard evidence of relation starts to break down, I just don't think the "yay America" attitude was there. I did go to the DAR website to see what they took into consideration for membership and was interested to learn that it doesn't necessarily have to be a veteran ancestor - it could be anybody who supported the independence movement, such as a doctor or nurse who tended to American soldiers or someone who served in a pro-America governmental role. So there's still the slim possibility of finding that elusive relative, but I really think I'll probably just end up suggesting that my cousin look into whether or not there is a Loyalist version of the DAR that she could join instead.

The Casey connection: Talking with Grandma, Part Tres

While my cousin Cliff was trying to paint a broad but detailed picture of my grandmother's life three-quarters of a century ago, I had one specific question for her - what did she know about her grandfather, Peter Casey?

The reason I asked was because I had connected with someone on Ancestry.com who had a family tree posted that seemed to match up. I had an approximate birth date for Peter based on census records (1858-1863), I had a possible origin (Longford, Ireland) based on hearsay from my grandmother, I had the names of his parents (Thomas Casey and Margaret McCarthy) based on his death certificate, and I had the names of two, possibly three brothers (Edward, John, possibly Thomas) from other people's research. I found a guy on Ancestry from County Longford, now residing in Boston, who was researching his Casey ancestors and inadvertantly researched the wrong Casey family - wrong for him, but quite possibly right for me. Because he had grown up in the town where these Caseys lived 150 years ago, he had access to cemeteries and baptismal records that would take me much time and much money to find on my own. Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways... Anyway, in this family he had researched that was not his but was quite possibly mine, there was a Thomas Casey married to Margaret McCarthy, and of their several children listed, there was an Edward, a John, a Thomas, and a Peter, born about 1856. Several other siblings included a Kate, a Francis, and an Elizabeth.

So that July afternoon in my grandmother's kitchen, I asked her to tell me everything she knew about Peter Casey. She only had one personal story to tell, one that included her brother almost getting a beating from him because Peter's wife, Mary Enright, dared Dan to pour water on his grandfather's head. She knew other things, like he was uneducated - he couldn't read or write and he couldn't count - so he depended on his wife and children to help him with his carting business. He apparently also was quite impatient, cutting the legs off a piano he was supposed to be moving because it was taking too long to get it where it needed to go. But she didn't know when he was born or the name of the town where he came from, and she only knew about his parents because I had passed along that information to her. But she did know about some of her mother's Casey aunts and uncles, like Uncle Edward. And an Aunt Lizzie. And her mother's godfather, Uncle Frank, whose birth name was Francis.

Like Nancy Drew, I don't believe in coincidences. And when it comes to genealogy, I get a Spidey-sense that tingles down my spine when I don't have 100 percent verifiable proof that one and one equals two, but when I'm pretty sure that everything adds up. And usually down the line when I do get proof, everything does, in fact, add up. I get that feeling with my Caseys and the Caseys researched by Sean of Boston, formerly of County Longford. Unfortunately, his research also goes no further back that Thomas Casey and Margaret McCarthy, but siblings and dates and the name of the town may be helpful in tracing the Casey line to other descendents, descendents doing their own Casey research with documents and records and stories I don't have, which they'll be willing to share with me once I find them.

For the record: Talking with Grandma, Part Deux

So, my cousin Cliff Raynor and I sat down with my grandmother, Mary Cronin Raynor, on Sunday July 19th to talk about genealogy. My cousin, who is just beginning to get sucked into the genealogy vortex, had a lot of questions for my grandmother about what it was like growing up during the Depression, how she and my grandfather met, what Freeport was like when she was a little girl, etc. etc. Some stories I already knew, some I was hearing for the first time. I knew that my grandparents weren't married till my grandmother was 31 (I used to think that was way old, and back then it probably was, but now that I'm almost 30, it seems almost too young, ha ha...), but I didn't know she had a bunch of boyfriends before my grandfather. In fact, apparently, at one point she was dating three of them at the same time, going on all sorts of dates to the city. My grandmother, playing the field!

The conversation wasn't just for our own edification, though; yes, we were curious, but we are also, apparently, genealogists, so before we sat down and talked with Grandma, I told her I was going to record it. Memories can be tricky, and I didn't trust that I would remember everything she said if I went back and wrote it down later. I thought a video camera might have been a little much - I didn't want her to be nervous or self-conscious, but I had a voice recorder, and I was able to record much of the conversation. That will now become another record in my ever expanding collection of records, and one day when I show my children photos of their great-grandmother, I'll also be able to let them hear what she sounded like.

Talking with Grandma

My grandmother is the person who got me started on the genealogy road, so for anyone who ever gets annoyed when I suddenly get excited by something you find mundane at best, like finding a family headstone, blame her. (While true, this strategy deflects annoyance from me to my grandmother, and my grandmother is adorable, so how can anyone stay annoyed with her?)

My cousin recently started getting into genealogy, starting his mother's side and catching up on his father's (my mother's brother's) side, and knowing I do a lot of research, he had a lot of questions that I couldn't answer (he's my kind of genealogist - he doesn't just want to know the facts. He wants to be able to place a person in a place in a time and know the details about that person's life but also how it fits into the larger world historically. Time consuming, to be sure, but fascinating. Obviously, nerdiness runs in the family...) Anyway, there were questions like, when did Grandma move to Freeport? What did Grandpa do when he was in the Navy during World War II? How did they meet? So instead of guessing, I decided to set up a meeting so we could get it straight from the horse's mouth.

My grandmother is 94 years old. On my mom's side of the family, she's the last of her generation, both of the Raynors and the Cronins. She might live to be 100, but she might be gone tomorrow. If we were going to get her stories, now was the time to do it.

The great thing about my grandmother is she's very with it for a 94 year old. She goes out with her friends and she still drives. She can't hear very well and she can be forgetful, but ask her about the family tree, and she knows the answer, or if she doesn't know it, she's written it down somewhere. And sometimes I'll be chatting with her about one thing - something normal like, say, work - and she'll suddenly be off on a tangent about her days working at the telephone company as a young woman. Or we'll be talking about my brother taking up skydiving, and she'll suddenly start telling me a story about how she remembers when the thrill was actually just going up in an airplane (because they were so new), and how if you had the money, you could buy a ride out at Mitchel Field.

So I knew she had stories. Which was good, because my cousin had a lot of questions. A lot of it, I already knew - like how Grandma grew up across the street from Grandpa, and Grandma's brother Dan and Grandpa grew up as best friends. But there were lots of things I'd never heard, things that might not ever be genealogically significant but that humanized people I mostly knew as names and dates, like how my grandmother's father, Timothy Cronin, came to New York and went back to Ireland several times because he got into too much trouble and his older sisters here couldn't handle taking care of him, or how Grandma's mother, Ellen Casey Cronin, would take the train back to Brooklyn every now and then because she missed living in the city. Grandma's the only one left who actually knew these people. And, for example, I only have one photo of my great-great grandparents, but now thanks to my grandmother, I have a bit of a clearer mental picture of them and what they were like.

Fun in cemeteries...

...didn't think that was possible, did ya?

Yes, I enjoy the actual visiting of cemeteries for family tree research purposes. I find the tranquility of cemeteries very calming and at certain cemeteries, like Greenfield in Uniondale, where most of the names on the headstones are the same names I've seen time and again while poring over Long Island census records, I actually feel quite at home, like I'm finally getting to meet some very old and dear friends.

Anyway, enough of my weirdness. I spent all day yesterday in cemeteries. It was a beautiful, gorgeous, sunny day, a real rarity during this month of non-stop rain, so I decided to drive out to Patchogue, about 40 minutes east of where I live. I had recently connected with a not too distant cousin on my Ricklefs branch in an attempt to track down any info on John Ricklefs and his wife, Meta Tiedemann, after the 1930 census, which had them living on a farm out in Patchogue. I am descended from their daughter, Meta, and this woman I found is descended from their daughter, Olga. Olga's son, this woman's father, and his wife had vague memories that John and Meta might be buried in one of the tiny cemeteries dotting Patchogue. I never made it past Lakeview - a somewhat old, somewhat small cemetery off of Waverly Avenue filled with many old Long Island names, many drowned sailors, and an apparently somewhat famous couple, Seba Smith and his activist-poetess wife, Elizabeth Oakes Smith. After spending more than an hour checking every headstone in the hot sun, I came up empty-handed, and didn't have the energy to check the other two cemeteries or visit the village clerk to ask about death certificates that may have been filed (which would have been problematic anyway, seeing as I don't have a year of death for either John or Meta and a 15-20 year window in which they might have died).

Lakeview was interesting however. The cemetery is rundown, and the land around it is being developed (as all open land must be - heavy on the sarcasm), but apparently the Patchogue Historical Society has a cemetery restoration project that they're trying to raise money for, and some newer headstones and grave markers and monuments make it look like they've had some success with this project. And these smaller, older cemeteries depend on projects like this one - these are important historical and genealogical resources and many headstones are worn flat, broken, or completely gone, and that important information and the people that info helps us remember, is being lost and forgotten.

But the day wasn't over yet! After driving home and taking a bathroom break, I headed over to Greenfield Cemetery, spur of the moment. I hadn't been there in a good 10-15 years, even though I have tons of family members, including my great-grandparents, who are buried there. What an amazing place. I got there an hour before the gates closed, but I could've spent all day there and will have to go back. I had copied from my grandmother's files the location of the Dauch and Berg plot, so I was able to visit that for the first time, and while I was there, saying hello to all my relatives, I remembered coming to the cemetery with my mother to visit her grandparents, Monroe Raynor and Amelia Berg Raynor. I had no idea where that plot was, but it suddenly came to me that whenever I came with her, we always looked for the group of pine trees, and that's where it would be. Well, there are huge sections of Greenfield that are treeless. But there are huge sections that are covered in trees, too. I had some time, so I drove along slowly, looking at all these names I know so well - Smith, Pearsall, Mott, Raynor - (many of these plots were transferred from other cemeteries, like the one in Freeport where the junior high was later built...), when I saw a group of pines. I got out and walked the section, but the Raynors weren't there. I was very disappointed. That would've been huge, if I could've found them based on a 15-year old memory of just "pine trees." I got back into my car and drove probably no more than 20 feet, across the road to the very beginning of the next section. And there, right next to that group of pines but just a little further than I had expected, was the Raynor plot - my great-grandparents, Monroe and Amelia; their daughter Dorothy Saas; Monroe's sister Lidie and brother William; their parents Joseph J. and Annie D. Raynor; and Joseph's parents Hiram Horatio and Ann Raynor. My great-grandmother Amelia was the only one I've ever met, but seeing all of those names, I felt very much at home (and on top of that, many of their headstones had dates I didn't have in my files!).

I have many more relatives buried at Greenfield, so I'm going to try to go back again soon to see what else I can find.

For any one reading this who might be looking for this particular Raynor plot, it's in section 6, opposite the section with the group of pines. The Dauch-Berg plot (Thomas Dauch, Barbara Dauch, Theodore Berg, Delia Dauch Berg, Eva Dauch, amongst others) is in section 3, plots 160-161.

La famille Gorry?

My sister received a Facebook friend request over the weekend from someone she didn't know but perhaps should, a girl named Alice Gorry. I know there are other Gorrys out there, but the name is no Smith or Jones - I have never met a Gorry I'm not related to. The more intriguing thing to me, besides the fact this 15 year old girl probably did a friend search for people with the name "Gorry," which is a brilliant idea, is that she is French. She lives in France. What?!? I've heard of American Gorrys and Australian Gorrys and Scottish Gorrys, but never French Gorrys. So now I'm wondering what kind of possible question there could be. Does this girl know where her grandparents or even great-grandparents are from? My sister laughed and said that requesting her as a friend was probably one of the dumbest things this girl has ever done, because now she's going to have me badgering her with genealogical questions. My sister is definitely not wrong...

Random genealogy search engine frustration

Sometimes the easiest way to find genealogical information is to go to Google or some other search engine and just type in the name of the person you're looking for. I've found obituaries, newspaper articles, and other research being done by amateur genealogists from around the world. But I always hit two roadblocks in my searches.

If I type in "Gorry genealogy," I get a ton of hits. Not one of them has to do with my family tree. There is a professional genealogist out there, Paul Gorry, and websites about him and his work will always turn up. And he's not researching his family tree. He's always doing somebody elses.

I also can't type in "Rudolph Stutzmann." Well, I can, and of the ton of hits I get, one or two of them will be about his contributions to the Ridgewood area or his German roots, but 99 percent of them are obituaries for other people, in which he and his funeral home did the funeral arrangements. Apparently his funeral home was very successful and very popular, much to my genealogical researching chagrin.

Haplogroup T

I knew my results would come last night. The lab received my sample the day after my dad's, so I had a feeling I would get my results the day after he got his. Hoped, anyway.

Reconfirmed that I am, indeed, part of mtDNA haplogroup T. Second-most popular group to belong to among people of European descent (I think the number is between 10-20 percent). So, while I might have more fun looking for possible ancestral paths for my dad's group, K, I will probably have more luck finding people who are an exact match for me.

Of note: mtDNA mutations change so slowly that if you're not an exact match to someone, you're not related. That doesn't mean you are closely related to someone who is an exact match, but you definitely are not if there are any differences. Not through that branch, anyway. So, so far there are about 20 people on Ancestry who match up to me exactly. And my dad so far is SOL, thanks to his one extra mutation that nobody else in K seems to have. What a mutant! Ha ha...no, seriously. My next line of thought for this genetics journey when it comes to T is to find people who are tracing an Irish T line, since that's where my T comes from (Limerick, to be exact, as far back as I can tell, which isn't that far - 1820s, maybe). You have to start somewhere, so I figure you go from one thing being in common (haplogroup T) to something else you might have in common (Irish ancestors).

Another note: about belonging to haplogroups, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around. My dad asked me last night if I'm a K since he's a K. Genetically speaking, no. Genetically, my mutations make me a T. But genealogically, yes. Genealogically, I am a T. I am a K. I am a y-DNA haplogroup R1b. I am whatever my Raynor line turns out to be. I carry the genetic markers of a specific haplogroup, but I am here and who I am because of all the people I am descended from who belong to all these different haplogroups. Humans seem to have a need to define and categorize and organize things. And by "humans," I mean "me." Life is messy. Genealogy is messy. Haplogroups help trace the human journey - literally. The human migration. Genetically, I am a T. But genetically, I am also related to my dad. So I would like to think that if the Ks all got together and threw an awesome party, that I would get an invitation because even though I'm not one of them, I am of one of them.

Yeah, trying to wrap my head around this is starting to hurt...

DNA a potential aid in solving Raynor mystery?

I was just thinking about it now as I was sitting here looking at my family tree. As with all small founding communities, there was a lot of intermarriage among just a few families in early Hempstead, so I have no less than three generations on my family tree where there is a Raynor marrying a Raynor. About 8 generations back, though, on one branch it comes down to a single couple, Jacob Raynor, and his wife, Rebecca Raynor. Jacob's parents are disputed at best, unknown at worst. It is through his wife, Rebecca, that I connect myself to the larger Raynor family tree on that branch. But it is to Jacob and his father and grandfather that a y-DNA test would connect the Raynor men in my family - my mother's brothers and their sons (my cousins). I can connect myself to the larger tree through other male Raynors, but they are the fathers of daughters on my line. Jacob is the mystery, and an exact match to someone else would guarantee with 95 percent accuracy that you are related within 11 generations, which means if my cousin matched exactly to another Raynor who could trace his paternal genealogy that far back (and lucky for me, most of the Raynors can), then at best, we might be able to narrow down which of a few individuals might be Jacob's father. At worst, we could definitely connect Jacob to one of Freeport founder Edward's sons, which would be proof at least that Jacob is part of this interwoven tree.

On that note, my male Raynor cousin has offered to take the y-DNA test. He has his own Ancestry.com family tree up now. It seems he has gotten the genealogy bug from his father. I'm starting to become convinced that an interest in genealogy is either genetic or its contagious.

The interesting thing about genetic genealogy...

...is actually something I will probably never experience. As someone of entirely Western European descent (could my ancestry *be* anymore boring? Thank God for Peter Berg of Denmark for mixing it up just the tiniest bit!), there's really nothing...exotic? unique?...that I expect my DNA ancestry to reveal. Having my dad return as a K and not the uber-popular H was a pleasant surprise, but all that really tells me as of right now is that he belongs to a somewhat common Western European group, not a super common one.

I'm thinking in terms of people of mixed ancestry, or who don't know specifics but who have family stories that their great-great-great grandmother might've been a slave or that somewhere along the line, a Native American married into their family tree. Or for people who don't know anything about their genealogy. Maybe you're of Asian descent. Maybe you're of Jewish.

That's where I think, right now, this genetic genealogy is most interesting. Finding out something like that, about your theoretical, far-reaching family tree, could give a starting point and fuel an interest in researching your tangible, much closer family tree. That's what I think anyway. But I'm already hooked, so what do I know?

mtDNA Haplogroup K

This is all going much quicker than I thought it would. Well, I guess it is my DNA nd the DNA of my family...it should be aware of how impatient I am!

Last night I got an e-mail saying my father's mtDNA results were in. These results follow his mother's mother's mother's line, and turns out he (and I by extension) belongs to haplogroup K. What does this tell me? Not much so far. I just started sifting through the information. It does tell me that this is another line where I don't belong to the most popular Western European haplogroup of H. Awesome. I have a serious need to be different. Of course, this will make it more difficult to connect with DNA family. Oh well. I love a good challenge.

What else...Katie Couric belongs to haplogroup K, as does Oesti, the Tyrolean Iceman, which is interesting because my family's always kinda been interested in him, since he was found on the Austro-Italian border shortly before we traveled there for the first time.

Haplogroup K is also found in large numbers in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. This doesn't mean that if you're a K, you have Jewish roots. But it's an interesting angle. According to Wikipedia, it is common in non-Jews from Ireland, the Alps, and Great Britain. In my family, K belongs to a German line I'm following (Helen Stutzman, Helen Haase, Meta Ricklefs, Meta Tiedemann, Meta Buckmann, and possibly Lucia Borger. Obviously, it goes way further back than that. Bu that's he extent of my non-DNA genealogical research into my father's maternal branch.

The way mtDNA works is that certain mutations in your DNA place you into certain haplogroups. So, K members have six basic mutations - 16311C, 16519C, 73G, 263G and 315.1C. Then there are subclades, or subgroups, within the haplogroup. Ashkenazi Jews have certain markers. More than a few K subclades have the 146C and 152C mutation as well. My father has all of these. So far, though, i my limited research, he also has 2 other mutations, one, 309.1C which I think I saw someone else had, and 16153A, which I haven't been able to find in anybody else. The good thing about this is that you have to be an exact mtDNA match to be anywhere close to being related (and I'm talking close as in thousands of years, not tens of thousands of years). The bad thing is it makes the search harder.

I also realized that my father's test results were HVR 1 plus HVR 2 results, which means more markers were tested, which means you have a better chance of findng what subclade you belong to. When I tested as haplogroup T for the National Geographic Genographic project, I only got HVR 1 results, so I may actually get new information back when I get my results (of course the impatient one's results come in last!)

Relatability test

Ok, so starting to get a feel for what these DNA tests can do. Ancestry created a new account for each of the tests I bought. I didn't want to have to log into my brother's account every time I wanted to check his results, so I manually entered his results onto my page (since they belong to me, too). Now we're both in the database, so when it gives me my paternal matches, my brother comes up as an exact match. With an exact match, our most recent common ancestor (MRCA) was given as 1 generation back. Which, yes, that's true. But it turns out that it's only a 50 percent certainty. The site pretty much guarantees a 95 percent certainty of a MRCA at 11 generations. So while my brother and I are an exact match and related one generation back, anyone else I find in the database with an exact match could be anywhere between there and 275 years back for a MRCA. The database says anyone off by only 2 or 3 markers is a pretty close match, which would seem to be true, but to find someone related no more than 300 years back from you, you need an exact match. Which considering my branchless tree (at least on the Gorry end of things) is one I need to cross my fingers and knock on wood for.

Paternal genealogy

The interesting thing about my paternal genealogy line (and maybe for some of you I'm playing a little fast and loose with the word "interesting") is that with the exception of my dad's cousins by his dad's brother, I'm not entirely hopeful about finding close relatives on the Gorry line. Well, close is a relative term. At least as far back as my 3rd great grandfather, James Gorry (6 generations, born 1830 in Ireland) until my grandfather and his brother, there is only a single Gorry line to follow. James Sr. had two sons, James and Michael, but Michael never married or had kids. James Jr. had two sons, Joseph and Elmer Sr., but Joseph died three days before his 7th birthday. Elmer Sr. had two sons, Elmer Jr. (my grandfather) and Eugene (Uncle Gerard), and its here that the Gorry line has its first branches in 100 years. Uncle Gerard had three sons who each had a son, and my grandfather had two sons, of which my father had two sons. So I have my paternal second-cousins, but other than that, the closest paternal cousins (or even cousins following a maternal Gorry line for that matter as none of the daughters born in that 100 year interval had any children of their own, either...totally branchless!) I can hope to find would be if James Sr. had any siblings or if his father, Cornelius, had any siblings. Cornelius is as far back as I've traced that line. That would be a fifth or sixth cousin. But it would be interesting if I could find one, although if I had to go even further back to find a long-lost cousin, it would make me even more amazed at the persistance of the Gorry line in the face of its branch shortage...nature just can't seem to get rid of us!