After I knock down that infamous 1870 brick wall with a formerly enslaved ancestor, my search is not over. I am always looking for additional documentation to add to the body of knowledge about an ancestor. The more documentation I find, the fuller the picture in ascertaining their lives and experiences. I documented my paternal …
Continue reading Exploring Guardianship Records with Enslaved Ancestral Research
Picture Source Everyone has 23 pairs of chromosomes. One chromosome in each pair was inherited from the mother and the other chromosome was inherited from the father. Below is a snapshot of my mother’s paternal chromosome 2 in DNAPainter.com, a web-based tool for chromosome mapping – the process of labeling/assigning your chromosome segments to specific …
Continue reading Chromosome Data Matters: Exploring Ewe Connections from Ghana
Image Source: Mike Polston Recently, I observed that several Dockery DNA cousins, with roots from Columbia and Nevada County, Arkansas, were paternal DNA matches to my mother, aunt, uncle, and their paternal first cousin. Shared DNA matches in AncestryDNA included several descendants of their paternal great-grandfather Pleasant Barr’s sister, Sue Barr Beckley. Therefore, I ascertained …
In 1845, Robert F. Bridgforth of Mecklenburg County, Virginia sold his land, purchased 2,800 acres of land in Yazoo County, Mississippi, and moved his family and over 40 enslaved people to the Vaughan area. One of them was a young man named Jacob. I have concluded with great certainty that Jacob was my father’s maternal …
Continue reading Climbing Jacob’s Ladder with Genealogy and Genetics
After my recent webinar, How Three Types of DNA and Genealogy Uncovered the Long-Lost Father, a family member basically asked, “Your father’s paternal grandfather, Albert Kennedy, and Albert’s sisters, Martha and Adaline, had all married three full Ealy siblings, Martha, Bob Jr., and Paul Ealy, respectively, so how were you able to tell that a …
After over 150 years, his name is known and is finally being called again! And what better day to do so – Father’s Day and Juneteenth 2022. It took me 28 years to find him. Who was Grandpa Albert Kennedy’s father? Albert & Martha Ealy Kennedy’s third son, Hulen Kennedy of Leake County, Mississippi, was …
Have you ever wondered if some of your research findings are purely coincidental? You know, when the people, places, and times seem to add up, but you still wonder if some findings are just a coincidence? I hope that the approach to these research findings will be a great help to others. Genealogical ideas and …
John Hector Davis (1871-1935) and Hector Davis (1842-1925) A common conversation in the genealogy community is how often emancipated African Americans retained the surname of their last enslavers. Varying statistics suggest that most did not, while many did. For many (or a large majority of) researchers who have ancestors who chose a different surname during …
Genealogist Paul Heinegg and I at the 2019 Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) Conference, Univ. of Maryland When I started actively researching my family history in 1993, I quickly learned of genealogist Paul Heinegg’s wonderful publication, “Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to about 1820,” which …
(Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. (1902). Mayor and Councilmen of Hobson City, Ala., Retrieved from here.) When genealogist Tierra Cotton-Kellow advised her friend to take the AncestryDNA test and to also test her uncle, she inadvertently opened a door for …
Roots Revealed 