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Monthly Archives: December 2009

passages — Bruno

Bruno, a cat, departed this life 31st December 2009, early in the morning, aged 14 years. He had struggled in recent years with obesity, and all his life with a certain simple-mindedness and avoidance of people. Back in 2005 he spent six days inside a wall. He leaves a twin sister, Oda, and a human […]

of gateways and gravestones: Mary (Lawrence) Burnham

Hey! Martin Hollick over at the Slovak Yankee has a photo of a gateway ancestor we share. (A gateway ancestor is an ancestor who gives descendants a treaceable path back to a new ancestral population—most commonly, in US usage, an early colonial immigrant providing traceable ancestry among medieval nobility and royalty.) She is Mary Lawrence, […]

Taylor article out in TAG

Well, to leave aside DNA for a moment and get back to real, paper genealogy, an e-mail last night told me that the first half of my article on the beginnings of our Taylor family is now out in the new issue of The American Genealogist — even though my copy hasn’t yet shown up […]

yet more Taylor Y-DNA results

The last time I blogged this we had just received preliminary data from a fourth member of our family to be tested, a cousin whose data pushes the ‘common ancestor’ back to Simon2 Taylor, who died in 1729. Now more of this cousin’s data are available, yielding the following data table: This raises some interesting […]

quite a shack, ain’t it? James Wesley Taylor

Just the other day I uploaded a new revised version of my book on the Taylors — see here for the download page — and thought I’d signal it with one of the new included photos. This is James Wesley Taylor (1853-1896) of Tama County, Iowa, and Meade County, South Dakota, with his wife Mary […]

fortis non ferox

This morning I gave an exam to three students in the ‘Pavilion Room’, a formal dining room or parlor added to the Victorian house at Brown University which now houses the History Department. And I brought my camera to photograph the wood coat of arms, on the amazing scallop-shiplapped chimney hood: More or less argent […]

Taylor DNA update

Good news! Following work begun in the summer and already blogged here, and here, we now have another matching DNA sample from another branch of our Taylor family, which pushes the ‘most recent common ancestor’ of all test subjects back another generation, to Simon2 Taylor. The chart shows the new addition, test subject no. 166642, […]

and it still runs: great-great-grandmother’s watch

Ph. Schillinger To his Beloved Wife Phillip Schillinger (1831-1888) and Katherine Jenne Schillinger (1832-1918) were my father’s mother’s mother’s parents, German bourgeoisie in Louisville, Kentucky, whence they had immigrated in 1854 and 1855 from the small town of Kippenheim in the kingdom of Baden-Württemberg. Schillinger was a brewer, and this hideous-toothed beer-drinker from an ad […]