William McBee (Mackbey) with Louisa Smith, and at bottom, their daughter Martha Jane, with other relatives. ✪ Why is 1850 so important in US research? Because this is the first year each person in the US Census was named, and both age and birthplace  usually  noted. From 1790 through 1840, the US Census named only free heads of household, usually (but not always) the oldest man. The rest are divided by age groups and assigned tick marks. Before 1870, enslaved and some other non-White persons were also noted separately. Good News! Is this a terrible obstacle? Fortunately not, because as we travel up the tree from the present to the past, clues are found in many records which can lead to finding the parents, even when men married multiple women with the same name. Fortunately, most of us are already using the best strategy to find more distant ancestors, but we will need to focus on details to get the most out of our work.  There is an excellent talk by Julia Anderson...

Courtesy OpenClipArt,  CC0 1.0 Universal The introduction of DNA testing for genealogy was revolutionary. The Sorensen Foundation, NatGeo and other non-profit efforts, along with scientific research yielded books such as Bryan Sykes'  The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry   back in 2001.  But until Family Tree DNA began offering Y and mitochondrial (mt) DNA kits for sale, there was only the crudest information available.  Thanks to Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA, who persisted in finding a way for this important data to be available to genealogists, we now have these wonderful record sets. He and other citizen scientists have persisted; the more we test, the more we know about shared relatives and our deep ancestral history.  The  Human Genome Project helped immensely and scientists of all types continue to deepen our knowledge of not just Y and mitochondrial (mt) DNA, but also autosomal and the more-rare...