Thursday, December 31, 2009
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, […]
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
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 […]
Saturday, December 26, 2009
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 […]
Monday, December 21, 2009
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 […]
Thursday, December 17, 2009
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, […]
Thursday, December 17, 2009
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 […]
Well, apparently I don’t know how to scrape the inside of my cheeks properly, since the lab took extra long to culture my Y-chromosome DNA. But I finally have a complete 37-marker Y-chromosome DNA test back, so now our Taylor family has three datapoints from which to triangulate a historical haplotype for our common ancestor, […]
Monday, September 28, 2009
I’d been meaning to get into this for a while but had put it off. I’ve tracked my extended male family — on paper — for 17 years now (see my book). But what if DNA testing showed I didn’t belong? Not that I fear skeletons in my closet (or my ancestors’ closets), but I […]
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
A propos the last post. A fine obelisk with leaves and flowers in deep relief. Photo from late fall of 2000.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Browsing somewhere online the other day, my eye jumped to a newly-published regimental history of the 10th Kentucky Infantry in the Civil War. This was the regiment of my great-great-grandfather Samuel Matlack (1815-1881), regimental quartermaster, then lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Brig. General Speed S. Fry, at Camp Nelson, Kentucky. Samuel and Mildred […]
