My longest standing brick wall has been DISSOLVED, thanks to lectures by Alexis Hacker Scholz on using probate and Carol Friedel using LucidChart for genealogy. I'm also advocating getting enough sleep and awakening slowly, and just thinking, before springing out of bed. 💤 That is where my inspiration arose, on my pillow.  If we've met and talked about genealogy, you have heard about my McBees and the mystery William McBee, known only as a name on his son Samuel B's death certificate. After Alexis' probate lecture, the gears were turning about how to look for probate files - but where to look? When I heard Carol thinking aloud, and saw her charting out a mystery DNA match, something clicked. The descendancies she was charting look like the Ancestry.com Thrulines®, so why not mine those and see if William's purported father, George Henry McBee and Martha 'Patsey' Willis, could be proven to be his parents? Not just by DNA matches, but by records. Thrulines® ...

Why Use Multiple Sites? The most effective research advice is to focus your efforts by asking a question, and creating a plan to find the information you need to answer that question. No one site has all the sources, information, matches, or cousins. I'm going to quote here from Wikipedia : The Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) is a guideline for establishing the reliability ("proof") of a genealogical conclusion with reasonable certainty. It is important within the genealogical community for clearly communicating the quality of research performed, such as by a professional genealogist. It is also useful for helping new genealogists understand what is needed to do high-quality research. It has five elements: reasonably exhaustive research; complete and accurate source citations; analysis and correlation of the collected information; resolution of any conflicting evidence; and a soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.    - summarizing Board for Cert...

If you use Ancestry, and have done a DNA test there, you've heard about the shortcomings and the value of Thrulines. Recently I've been doing a drive to get all my Baysinger DNA matches actually onto my Ancestry tree, and properly tag them as DNA matches, and also tag each of their connections to our most recent common ancestor (MRCA). The match gets a DNA Match  tree tag, each connecting ancestor gets a DNA Connection tag, up to the MRCA(s) which get a Common DNA Ancestor tag. When one does this on enough lines, in the pedigree view of the tree: Valorie Cowan Zimmerman's 6-generaton DNA-proved pedigree See all the DNA symbols? Isn't that cool!? The part that doesn't show here is the work of "building down" some or all of these lines. I'm happy to say that I've finished building down all lines from Elias Henry Baysinger, my two times great-grandfather, at least until the new DNA matches hit the database in January and February! I may have ...

Why I Use FamilyTreeDNA  (FTdna) and You Should Too .... But only if you have family mysteries you have been unable to solve!  Don't we all have such mysteries? Years ago, my father's family had done some family history, then I did some research, and got my dad's Cowan line back to the Borders of Scotland and the tiny village of Yarrow Feus in Selkirshire where they lived before emigrating to Ontario, Canada in 1832.  However, the records before 1700 are scarce, and so the question remained - did the Cowans always live in the Scottlsh Borders? Were they always sheep herders? Y DNA testing When FTdna first introduced Y-DNA testing, I got a kit for my Dad for Father's Day one year. It was thrilling to see matches come in. He had an identical good match at 35 markers, which was what was available at the time. His match Chris Cowan and I compared notes, but his bunch came from Ireland and mine from Scotland. My dad and he both paid for more markers, and they w...