DNA: Genetic Genealogy

In 1922, the Irish Civil War led to the destruction of the Public Record Office in Dublin. The records of generations were lost forever, leaving no hope for most of us with ancestors from Ireland of ever finding a documentary trail back to our ancestors. So many of us have turned to DNA testing to find our family history.

While I have tested at all three of the major sites (Family Tree DNA, Ancestry, 23andMe) and uploaded my autosomal DNA results to the fourth (MyHeritage), I find the project/communities/groups for Family Tree DNA to be far superior to the others. So if you have to choose just one, I recommend Family Tree DNA, since in addition to the projects FTDNA is the only company doing Y-DNA and full mtDNA testing as well as autosomal DNA testing -- which is the only test that all the other companies do. I highly recommend that everyone interested in family history does as many of the DNA tests as they can afford.

• My public trees - While all of my trees inherently relate to DNA, one of my trees aims directly at identifying DNA descendants for possible testing.
  • Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township (Ontario): This is on Ancestry as my Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township tree. The web site is a publicly accessible site with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic Ancestry tree. The goal is to see if these families are related. Since the Dublin Public Record Office was destroyed in the 1922 Irish civil war, the records of most if not all of these are lost forever. So this tree is also for the purpose of identifying living direct-Johnston-male-line descendants who might do the y-DNA test to see if we are all related.

• DNA Estimates of Ethnic Origins - Commercial advertising makes much of using your genealogical DNA results to estimate your ethnic origins. Be very cautious about treating DNA ethnic origin estimates as facts and not estimates. Click here for more information.

• Quantum Genetic Genealogy Applications - Quantum computing can do things classical computers can never do. They are no longer 10-20 years off. Quantum computers are here, and small ones are publicly accessible. What does this mean for genetic genealogy? Click here to see my web page about this question.

• Y-DNA
  Y-chromosome DNA passes intact, except for occasional mutations, from father to son. So it is an excellent tool for finding relationships both in recent and ancient times. The estimated date at which you and a match share a Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) can be calculated fairly well. My Johnston y-DNA is from Scotland via Ireland; my closest DNA match is from the Shanaghan Townland in County Down in Northern Ireland. I am in y-DNA haplogroup I-CTS2392. Y-DNA tests are done for different numbers of markers: 37, 67 and 111. (There used to be 12 and 25 marker tests, but these were mostly useless and a waste of money.) I very much recommend that you test at as a high a level as you can afford; the more markers you test the more solid your results will be. FTDNA allows you to start at one level and buy an upgrade to a higher level later, without having to submit another sample.
  • I administer the Butson Y-DNA Project, the Johnstons of North Ireland Y-DNA Project and the Lake-Eastlake: R-FT272260 Y-DNA Project, co-administer the Johnson Y-DNA Project and am very active in the Johnstons of Annadale project and the Lake Family DNA Project.
  • STRs
    • Cousin Cliff Johnston has done an excellent job of connecting about 90 of us in this haplogroup, some of whom are now in the Johnstons of Annadale project on Family Tree DNA. He has used Bill Howard's phylogenetic trees, which have given significant insight into our very specific (determined by a single SNP) group of Johnstons.
    • I want to include here the formula for Bill Howard's RCC (Revised Correlation Coefficient), which generates a single number from the comparison of the STR results of two men's Y-DNA tests. The RCC is a transformation of the Correlation Coefficient, used to generate phylogenetic trees: RCC = ((1/CC)-1)*10000.
      • Click here to see my web page of Bill Howard's papers and presentations, as well as the Python code to generate phylogenetic trees from Y-STR results.
    • While Bill Howard's RCC metric is very useful for those cases where people have not upgraded beyond the STR tests, it does require running a python program and data preparation. I am actually now use Rob Spencer's tool "Cluster Y-DNA STR or mtDNA data to produce Distance Dendrograms" most of the time for STR charting since it allows a quick copy and paste from an FTDNA project page of Y-STR results and also handles different levels of tests in the same run. (Instead of the default circular chart, I prefer to use the Options to make it a linear chart. It does not estimate dates but does roughly estimate number of generations to MRCA.
    • I developed a Y-STR Clustered Heatmap, inspired by GEDmatch's clustered heatmap Generations Matrix, both to see how kits compare with each other and to predict terminal SNP from STRs. This has limited usefulness, as predicting SNPs from STRs has limited ability, but it is helpful -- with a lot of work.
    • Colin Ferguson's version of Dean McGee's Y-Utility: While it has many functions, I use it primarily to generate a Genetic Distance matrix from the raw STR results of multiple kits.
    • "Surname Simultations, DNA, and Large-Descent Families" - by Dr. John S. Plant and Prof Richard E. Plant - Journal of One-Name Studies, July-September 2015 (MEGA tool) -- also valuable observation about parallel STR mutations in already-separated branches as a potential for flawed assumptions
  • SNPs and STRs
    • "I-L38 Median Networks (2) - SNPs & STRs": - by Stephen Prata in June 2015 (Fluxus tool)
    • "Estes Big Y DNA Results": - by Robert Estes in March 2015
    • David Vance's SAPP - Integrating STRs, SNPs, and Genealogies
    • As noted above in the STR section, my Y-STR Clustered Heatmap allows us to predict a very good ballpark terminal-SNP from 111-marker STR results. We will always have kits that tested only STRs, so that we will also always have the need to figure out where they would fit if they had upgraded to the Big Y-700 test.

• mtDNA Mitochondrial DNA passes intact, except for very rare mutations, from a mother to all of her children. So your mtDNA came from your mother, who received it from her mother, etc. My mtDNA is Czech, as far back as can be documented. I am in mtDNA haplogroup J1. mtDNA is the weakest form of DNA for relationships. It is useful for excluding relationships. It is also useful for ancient connections. The problem with an mtDNA match is that your common ancestor could be 4 generations ago or 400; there is no way to tell from the DNA alone if you match exactly.
  • Josefina Mercedes Elizalde's Mitochondrial DNA - Analysis of her mtDNA has gone further than anyone else in our family, thanks indirectly to a 2012 research paper published by Spanish and Mexican researchers.

• aDNA Autosomal DNA is all the other 22 chromosomes, plus the x-chromosome. Family Tree DNA calls this their "Family Finder" test. You receive roughly half of your DNA from each parent, who received half from each of their parents. So aDNA is useful for finding matches with relatives back to about 6th cousins -- though I have seen a rare case where the documented MRCA was born in the 1670's. Since the DNA you receive is not exactly the same as the DNA your siblings received (unless you are identical twins), then it is entirely possible for your MRCA's DNA to have passed down to you and your matching cousin but for your brother or sister not to show a match with that cousin.
  • I have uploaded my aDNA to GEDMatch, which allows people who tested on any of the three major sites to compare results with each other. I have found some very significant matches via atDNA: even though documentation cannot be found to prove it, the DNA proves it.
  • Too Many DNA Matches. This web page identifies known and newly-discovered excess IBD regions which are regions of shared DNA from an old population that are widely shared and not indicative of a recent common ancestor even though they show up in triangulations. I found the ISOGG Wiki web page on this to be cumbersome for quickly checking whether a region is a known excess IBD region. And I have subsequently added several newly-detected regions.
  • Here is a link to my web page on "Stumbling My Way in Genome Mate Pro". I am now trying to keep track of the matches of 28 members of our extended family who have DNA-tested, and it is especially overwhelming with the massive amount of data associated with aDNA (e.g. this segment triangulates to inheritance from my Dutch 3rd great grandmother via these matches). So I am very much hoping that GMP will help (A LOT) with this. But it definitely has a learning curve.

• DNA Identification of the World War II Unknowns As the Historian for the US 7th Armored Division Association, I have been very much involved in the efforts to finally bring to bear modern DNA technology and bring home to their families the 8,600 WWII dead buried as Unknowns in our overseas US Military Cemeteries. The families have waited 70 years and deserve closure, deserve to know that "No man left behind" is reality and not just an empty slogan, a hollow promise.

Genealogical Graphing

• Surname Connection Graphs - This was my first venture into graphing in 2014. I needed a graphing tool to show the marital connections of the surnames in my St. Blazey Families project. I chose yEd.
• Graphs for Genealogists - In 2022, I began working with Dr. David Stumpf's Graphs for Genealogists. I have definitely not mastered it but see considerable potential.
• Using GEPHI to Create a Network Graph from a Generations Matrix - In 2024, I figured out how to use GEPHI to import a GEDmatch Generations Matrix and convert it into a graph.

Canadian Ancestors

• My public trees The web sites are a publicly accessible sites with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic master version of each tree on Ancestry. The web pages below provide additional information. So don't just look at the links to the trees; look at the other links below as well.
  • Wesley Johnston's Celtic Roots Tree: This is on Ancestry as my Gray-Gibson-Johnston-Butson tree.
    • I administer the Butson y-DNA Project. If you are a direct male line Butson descendant, please join the project and do a Y-DNA test with Family Tree DNA.
    • I also administer the Butson One-Name Study.
    • I also administer the Butson Family History and Y-DNA page on Facebook. This is a closed group. Click the "Join group" button to request to join, but be sure to answer all of the questions or you will not be approved.
  • Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township (Ontario): This is on Ancestry as my Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township tree. The web site is a publicly accessible site with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic Ancestry tree. The goal is to see if these families are related. Since the Dublin Public Record Office was destroyed in the 1922 Irish civil war, the records of most if not all of these are lost forever. So this tree is also for the purpose of identifying living direct-Johnston-male-line descendants who might do the y-DNA test to see if we are all related.
  • English Corners Project / Columbus (Ontario) Families: This is on Ancestry as my Columbus (Ontario) Families tree.
    • The Saint Blazey Families Project: This is on Ancestry as my St Blazey Families tree. Many of them came to Canada to Oshawa, Whitby and English Corners.

• Johnston-Butson-Keam-Gibson Canadian History 1800's Timeline: my attempt to understand how the world looked to my Canadian ancestors as they participated in the birth of a nation (related Canadian surnames in the timeline: Wilson, Cook, Fitchett)
• "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario
• "Gibson and Johnston Families of NE Pickering Township": Begun in 2022,this page contains some of the records I have found on these families.
• Descendants of Christopher and John Gibson and of Thomas Johnston - Northern Ireland to Pickering, Ontario 1840's: Begun in June 2009, this page contains my attempt to trace all the descendants and find all the living descendants of these three related men.
• Pre-Confederation Canada Johnstons: Begun in August 2018, this page seeks to compile the Johnston (and spouse) information about every Johnston family that was in Canada by Confederation in 1867.
• The English Corners Project: Columbus, Ontario 1830-1860 Families : Begun in August 2009, to connect all the 1830-1860 families of the Columbus area that had family connections. both in Cornwall and in Canada.
  • St. Blazey Families - I am gradually working my way through the 1813-1835 (plus or minus a few years) parish registers of St. Blazey, Cornwall, putting them into a database/tree. See the Cornwall section below for the status or click the link to go to the web page about the project. Many of these same families also appear in my English Corners Project (see above).
• Ernestown Loyalists: roughly 1785-1840 from Hastings, Lennox and Addington, and Frontenac Counties but originating in early settlement of Ernestown Township in Lennox and Addington County

• Lake Family - Loyalists from New York and New Jersey
  Both an incomplete documentary trail and an autosomal DNA match have pointed me back to my ancestor Mary Ward, daughter of Sarah Lake, who was born in Canada - probably at Ernestown - about 1801 or 1802. Mary Ward married Robert Harrison, and she was the mother of my 3rd great grandmother, Sarah (Harrison) Butson. We know these two generations (Sarah Harrison and Mary Ward) only through DNA and some circumstantial records. There are no documents that definitively prove these connections, but the DNA does. The Lake family were Loyalists who came to Ernestown from New York after the Revolutionary War.
  • main page for all of my Loyalist Lake family information.
  • Two Undocumented Connections Established via DNA: Mother and Daughter
    • The Search for Sarah, Wife of Henry Butson: Finding Sarah (Harrison) Butson's maiden name and family was one of the two toughest nuts that I had yet to crack in my family history research. This web page summarized what I know about her and what records I had researched in 2010. The page does not yet include the information that I found in 2012 that confirmed her maiden name and parents, Robert Harrison and Mary Ward. THIS WEB PAGE IS SERIOUSLY OUT OF DATE, LAST UPDATED IN 2010, AND INCLUDES NOTHING ABOUT THE MANY SUBSEQUENT DNA CONFIRMATIONS.
    • Initially, when I thought Mary (Ward) Harrison's maiden name was Lake, I set up a web page abou the search for her family connections. We will probably never find a definitive document that provides a clear statement that Mary Ward was the daughter of James Ward and Sarah Lake, but there are indirect documents, and the DNA evidence is very solid. So, in 2020, I created Mary Ward, Daughter of James Ward and Sarah Lake to document what we know about Mary and the indirect documentary and DNA evidence for her being the child of James Ward and Sarah Lake, as well as the wife of Robert Harrison. THIS PAGE IS NOT COMPLETE AND MAY HAVE SOME OLD ERRONEOUS INFORMATION.
  • Ernestown Loyalists: roughly 1785-1840 from Hastings, Lennox and Addington, and Frontenac Counties but originating in early settlement of Ernestown Township in Lennox and Addington County

• Canada Record Search Instructions
  I created these web pages that give detailed instructions for how to find images of important early Upper Canada records.
  • How to Find Online Images of Land Petitions
  • How to Find Online Images of Upper Canada Sundries, 1766-1841
  • How to Find Online Images of Ontario Land Records on the FamilySearch Web Site - preferred method for Ontario land searches
  • How to Find Online Images on the OnLand (Ontario Land) Web Site

The following allow direct search of Ontario online sources.

Cornish and English Ancestors

• My public trees The web sites are a publicly accessible sites with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic master version of each tree on Ancestry. The web pages below provide additional information. So don't just look at the links to the trees; look at the other links below as well.
  • Wesley Johnston's Celtic Roots Tree: This is on Ancestry as my Gray-Gibson-Johnston-Butson tree.
    • I administer the Butson y-DNA Project. If you are a direct male line Butson descendant, please join the project and do a Y-DNA test with Family Tree DNA.
    • I also administer the Butson One-Name Study.
    • I also administer the Butson Family History and Y-DNA page on Facebook. This is a closed group. Click the "Join group" button to request to join, but be sure to answer all of the questions or you will not be approved.
  • The Saint Blazey Families Project: This is on Ancestry as my St Blazey Families tree. Many of them came to Canada.
  • English Corners Project / Columbus (Ontario) Families: This is on Ancestry as my Columbus (Ontario) Families tree. Many of them came from Cornwall and Devon.

• Cornish-Gen Google Group Information
  Click here for information about joining the discussions on the Cornish-Gen Google Group that replaces the defunct (as of 2 Mar 2020) Rootsweb Cornish-Gen e-mail list.

• "From Cornwall to Canada in 1841": Begun in January 2006, this page contains the text of a 1903 account of the 1841 migration of 600 people from Cornwall to Canada, focusing on the sailing of the "Clio" from Padstow and the journey that led the Pedlar family to Oshawa, Ontario
• The English Corners Project: Columbus, Ontario 1830-1860 Families : Begun in August 2009, to connect all the 1830-1860 families of the Columbus area that had family connections. both in Cornwall and in Canada.
• St. Blazey Families - I am gradually working my way through the 1813-1835 (plus or minus a few years) parish registers of St. Blazey, Cornwall, putting them into a database/tree. The baptisms book (3 Jan 1813 - 1 Dec 1829) and marriage book (12 Apr 1813 - 25 Oct 1834) are now completed. The burial book is completed for 1813-1830 and still in progress. There are thus far 4,701 people in 1,141 families. Many of these same families also appear in my English Corners Project (see above).
• Cornwall to Canada YouTube video of my July 2021 presentation to the 19th Gathering of the Cornish-American Heritage Society

• Cornwall Parish Online Record Images One-Stop Shop
  I have created separate web pages for some Cornwall parishes to place links to all online images of records of that parish in a single place: parish registers, bishop transcripts, parish chest, etc.

• BUTSONiana
  • Early Butson Research -- The link is to the introductory page. These are a group of web pages that combine the research of John Butson and Wesley Johnston on early Butson family history. (Begun 16 April 2011.)
  • I no longer do the Butson Family Newsletter and am pleased that David Butson in Texas is now carrying it forward on the Butson.net web pages.
  • I administer the Butson y-DNA Project. If you are a direct male line Butson descendant, please join the project and do a Y-DNA test with Family Tree DNA.
  • I also administer the Butson One-Name Study.
  • I also administer the Butson Family History and Y-DNA page on Facebook. This is a closed group. Click the "Join group" button to request to join, but be sure to answer all of the questions or you will not be approved.
  • The Eden Project Quarries: The Bodelva Pit and the Carvear Clay Works. I have found almost nothing online about the history of the quarries that now house the Eden Project. My 4th great grandfather worked there, apparently from the start of the Carvear Works about 1827 until emigrating to Canada in 1840. This web page holds what I have learned about the quarries.
  • My 5th cousin, once removed, John Butson wrote a "Song of Solomon" about my ancestor Solomon Butson (brother of John's 4th great grandfather). John dedicated the song both to Solomon Butson and to me. Click here for a video of John (with wife Carol playing the banjo off-camera) performing the song. (120MB MOD file) - NOTE: John took some poetic license with the sailing date in his song. Solomon Butson's family did NOT sail from Cornwall in 1841. They sailed either in 1840 (based on Cornish records) or 1839 (what the two surviving sons gave as their arrival date in the 1901 Canada census). But the 1841 date fit the rhyming pattern for the song, so that John used that date, which was the actual date on which 600 Cornishfolk did sail for Canada in 1841, coming to join the Butsons who were by then already in Canada.

• Cornish Estate Files
  While the links are called "wills", many of the estate files do not have a will in them. They can contain wills, bonds and inventories, but they may contain only some of these.
  • KEAM (and variants) Cornwall Wills, 1601-1857
  • HARPER (and variants) Cornwall Wills, 1601-1857
  • 1601-1857 Cornwall Will Seaching on FamilySearch - Instructions for how to do the search (does NOT include the 2022 index by John Evans)

Czech Ancestors

My immigrant Czech ancestors were named Koutecky, Marek, Nevole, Subert, and Wolf. Before that I have Czech ancestors named Franče, Malypeter, Liebzeit / Librcajt, Wolf, Hildman and more. All came from central Bohemia.

• My Public Trees
  These are frozen snapshots of the master versions that I keep on Ancestry. I have many other web pages, listed below, which give further information or examine additional aspects. The public trees are simply the lineage-linked families. So do look at the additional links below.
  • Koutecky Families in America (includes a link to Bohuslav Koutecky's very important Czech-language Koutecky site)
  • Subert-Nevole
  • Chicago's Grand Crossing Czech Community / Marek-Wolf
  • Pre-1900 Czech Marek Families in Chicago
• Koutecky - Mine came from Modřejovice (Slabce municipaliry, Rakovník district) but there is much more here.
  • Koutecky Families in America: This page gives a condensed overview, with two very significant maps and a great deal of information, of the Koutecky families of the United States and Canada.
  • Descendants of Peter Koutecky (Petr Kouteck ): Follow this link to see his 10 children and his grandchildren. (Generations after that are omitted for privacy reasons, but he has at least 3 more generations of descendants now.) Peter's descendants are spread all across the U. S., originating from Chicago, where Peter settled and is buried. This site is out of date, and I am no longer updating it, since all the information is now included in my Koutecky Families in America public tree (see link above). But it does have a different perspective and is worth a look at the old site.
  • Slabce Records
    I have gathered information from several registers in and near the municipality of Slabce, since while these are online they are not indexed.
    • Slabce and Rousínov (Rakovník) parish registers
    • Autobiographies of Slabce municipality school teachers
  • Kladno and Motyčín Records
    Since another Koutecky family came to Chicago from Motyčín, I have gathered information from registers in and near Motyčín and Kladno.
    • Koutecký Births in Kladno Index Register 1861-1886
• Nevole - Mine came from Čáslav - see my Subert-Nevole public tree at the link above
  • Nevole Families in America: This page gives a condensed overview of the Neovle families of the United States.
  • Nevole Families of Čáslav, Bohemia My Nevole ancestors and their relatives -- includes link to page of other Čáslav area families that came to America
  • Čáslav to America - an incomplete list of links to other immigrants to the US who came from Čáslav
  • Researching Čáslav Families - a web page to help others who are researching Čáslav families
  • The Nevole Families from Čáslav to Chotěboř - There are so many Nevole families at and south of Čáslav that this has really a localized one-name study. This web page provides the overview for all that I have gathered and managed to post so far.
• Marek and Wolf - Marek origin Mezouň - Wolf from Lužce (5 miles from Karlštejn castle) - see my Chicago's Grand Crossing Czech Community / Marek-Wolf public tree at the link above and also my Pre-1900 Czech Marek Families in Chicago public tree
  • Josef Marek & Marie Wolf Origins - They were from southwest of Prague, near Karlštejn Castle. Marie was born in Lužce. Josef's family was from Vysoký Újezd and earlier from Mezouň. This page compiles what I have found about them and their children in Bohemia.
  • The Very Black Sheep of our Marek Family - Josef Marek's namesake grandson, the first child of his son Emil, viciously and brutally beat and tortured 78-year-old Joseph Osborne to death on October 20, 1915, at 78th and Woodlawn. And the younger Joseph was only 16 when he did this.
  • Pre-1900 Czech Marek families of Chicago - I am descended from Josef Marek (c 1820-30 Dec 1890) and Marie Wolf (c 1826-27 Apr 1896). There were many Marek families in Chicago before 1900, and this page is an attempt to find the connections that may have existed between them.
• Subrt/Subert, Wolf, Librcajt, Malypetr - My Šubrt ancestors came from Třebíz to Hřešice (where a Šubrt man married a Wolf woman) to Mšecké Žehrovice
  • See my Subert-Nevole public tree at the link above
  • Hřešice Records
    I have gathered information from several parish registers that hold records for Hřešice, plus cadastral maps and other links.
    • Hřešice records
• Chicago Czechs - see my Chicago's Grand Crossing Czech Community / Marek-Wolf public tree at the link above and also my Pre-1900 Czech Marek Families in Chicago public tree
  • Chicago's Grand Crossing Czech Community - This is a reconstruction (in slow progress in intermittent spurts) of the Czech community in Chicago's Grand Crossing neighborhood (key cross streets were 79th and Cottage Grove) that began in the 1890's. Work is still in the early stages, but there is much of value already.
  • The Bohemians in Chicago: A Sketch by Alice G. Masaryk - In 1904, Alice Masaryk (daughter of the future first president of Czechoslovakia) wrote about the Bohemians of Chicago, identifying "about nine colonies besides Pilsen". Carol Jean Smetana found these Chicago Czech communities listed in the 1915 "Adresár a Almanach ceského obyvatelstva v Chicagu". The tenth would be the Praha neighborhood, the oldest one, which in 1904 when Alice Masaryk wrote probably was still a Czech community. So, here are all 10 communities:
    1. Praha
    2. Česká Plzeň
    3. Česká Kalifornie
    4. Lawndale
    5. Crawford
    6. Novy´ Tábor
    7. Town of Lake (includes Back of the Yards)
    8. Západní Englewood (around May St from 51st to 63rd),
    9. Grand Crossing
    10. Osada u Národního hŕbitova (around Crawford and Foster Avenue on the north side).
  • Chicago "Duch Času" - Volume 5 - 21 Aug 1881 - 20 Aug 1882 - 150 dot-per-inch PDF file of the complete volume. - This was a weekly newspaper, with no advertising, published by the "Svornost" newspaper company, edited by August Geringer. The title means "Spirit of the Time", the same as the German word "Zeitgeist". Based on the subject matter, it raised the reader's awareness of the leading thinkers of the period, regardless of country of origin. There are some Chicago-specific articles, but I do not know enough Czech to tell whether there is anything of local or family history information for Czech-Chicago.
  • Chicago Czech Midwives in 1900 - with all for the entire city and with the south side neighborhood midwives identified
• Czech Record Research Aids
  • My web page on where and how to find Czech (and Moravian) church records on the web.
  • Researching Čáslav Families - a web page to help others who are researching Čáslav families
• Czech Parish Register Indexes by House (and some names)
  While many Czech records are now online, there are no online computer-searchable indexes yet, although some records do have hand-written indexes in the volumes. When searching a parish's records, it is sometimes very hard to decipher the names. But if you can find even one of your names that you can read, then you can see in which house number the event took place and then search for other events in that house far more rapidly than you could by trying to read the names. Of course, this is an imperfect partial solution to searching the register, but when you want to find at least some of your family records, it can be extremely helpful and fast. I have laboriously gone through some of the parish registers in the following towns and made house indexes, some of which contain some names that I have been able to decipher.
  • Modřejovice - All Houses and People
  • Slabce and Rousínov (Rakovník)

Dutch Ancestors: The more family history I do, the more Dutch I become. I first thought I had only 6 Dutch immigrant ancestors -- two families, in which both parents and their child who was my ancestor came to Michigan -- Holland and Grand Rapids. But then it turned out that one of my German immigrant ancestors (August Gelis) really descended from a Dutch ancestor (Willem Gelis) from Weert in Limburg. Later, I found that some of colonial American ancestors were Dutch from New Amsterdam. So far, that's as Dutch as I have become through my research.

• My Public Trees The web sites are a publicly accessible sites with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic master version of each tree on Ancestry. The web pages below provide additional information. So don't just look at the links to the trees; look at the other links below as well.
  • My public tree with most of my Dutch ancestors is Terug in de Tijd (Back in Time), named in memory of my Boezel-line 5th cousin Nelline Simons, who died all too young, and whose excellent "Terug in de Tijd" web site died with her. Alas, my tree does not have all that she had, so that the information she had is no longer available.
  • My public tree with my Dutch Gelis ancestors from Limburg is my German tree Zurück in der Zeit (Back in Time), also named in memory of my Boezel-line 5th cousin Nelline Simons. Willem Gelis, born at Weert in 1700, moved to Germany, so that all of his descendants are in my German tree.
  • Since the artist Vincent van Gogh was born in the same place as my Bogaerts ancestors -- but 150 years after mine had left, I have wondered if I might have some family connection to him. So I began my Vincent van Gogh Tree to see if this might be so. It appears that his parents came to the town from elsewhere, so that there is no relation so far that I know of.

• Boezel-Bogaerts family from Noord-Brabant: Here is my web page with the Dutch birth records of two ancestors, Boezel and Bogaerts, who emigrated to Holland, Michigan. The page is useful to see how to transcribe and translate Dutch records.

  Here are some links to my cousins:

  • My Bo(o)ga(e/a)rt(s) 5th cousin, 1 generation removed, Carla Roelofs is a talented artist, and her husband Hans Roelofs is a talented family historian. Here is his extensive tree on Geneanet (in Dutch), with Johannes Boogaerts (Bo(o)gaarts), the common ancestor of Carla and me.
  • I have created a web page intended to clarify the chronology of Frans Bogaerts and Pietronella Sinons, their children, grandchildren and some great grandchildren.

• Van Wijk-Feenstra family from Friesland: I have done a good deal of research, though there is still much more data, thanks to the amazing Friesland Archives online databases -- probably the best online collection anywhere of family history records.

  Here are links to my web pages:

  • Ancestors of Grietje van Wijk
  • Jannes van Wjik's Descendants in America
  • selected Culemborg records in the search for Gerrit van Wijk (born there c. 1763).

  Here are some links to my cousins:

  • Walter Groen and I are descended from the same Feenstra-de Jong line (4th cousins, 1 generation removed). He has an excellent web site (in Dutch) with photos at http://www.wazamar.org/gengroen/indexgen.html.
  • Jacobus Knol and I are descended from the same van Wijk line. We are 3rd cousins, 2 generations removed, with our common ancestor, Jannes van Wijk: I am descended from Jannes' son Gerrit Jannes van Wijk and Jacobus Knol from Jannes' son Tjittje Jannes van Wijk. Jacoubs wrote an award-winning book (in Frysk), "In Earsten Dragonder" (A First Dragoon) about our ancestor.

• Gelis Family from Limburg: My Gelis ancestors came to Chicago from Deckbergen, Germany. But as I traced them back in time, I found that they had come to Deckbergen a few generations earlier from Diepenau (church records at Lavelsloh). And then I discovered that my "German" ancestors had Dutch origins: Willem Gelis was born at Weert in what is now the Dutch province of Limburg in 1700. See the link to my German tree in the list of my public trees above for my Gelis and other ancestors in Limburg.

German Ancestors: I have 4 German immigrant ancestors and at least 2 more that I am tracing through marital relations: Hesse-Kassel, Old Schaumburg (area SW of Hannover), and Mecklenburg-Pomerania.

• My Public Trees The web sites are a publicly accessible sites with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic master version of each tree on Ancestry. The web pages below provide additional information. So don't just look at the links to the trees; look at the other links below as well.
  • My Family Trees
    • Zurück in der Zeit (Back in Time) - These are my own German ancestral lines. This tree also contains the untangling of the Chicago Consoer/Konsoer families.
    • Faupel-Schultz - These are my step-father's ancestral lines (Schultz) and those of his first wife (Faupel). The Faupel line actually includes many non-German lines, including some who came on the Mayflower.
  • Possibly Related Families - There are many Chicago families that have the same surnames as mine but which I have not yet been able to determine whether they are connected to mine. Even if they are not, I need to be able to untagle them from mine, so that I need to know who they all are, so that I know which records belong to which families.
    • Chicago Civil War Staack/Staak
    • Karl & Bertha Staack (buried in Lansing, IL)
    • Henry Gelis-Caroline Lipke (widow Thomas)
    • Maria J D Gelis-Henry L Standes
    • Staack Families in Rock Island County, Illinois: These are from Schleswig-Holstein, and mine are from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, so that they are probably not related. But I do need to keep track of their records, since they show up in the same places as mine.

• Hesse-Kassel to Hannover: My immigrant ancestor Adam Schaumburg was born at Großenenglis in 1846. During World War II, his grandson went within 12 miles of Großenenglis in 1945 -- 99 years later -- as a member of the U.S. 7th Armored Division and was a member of the first American squad to walk on the Edersee Dam. My immigrant ancestor August Gelis came from Deckbergen, and his wife Dorothee Hasemann came from Beckedorf. Their daughter Wilhelmina Gelis was born in Chicago in 1846 and married there with Adam Schaumburg.
  • The Archion.de Kirchenbuchportal has the Großenenglis baptisms for 1879-1911 (although labeled 1879-1999). Although Adam Schaumburg had already left by then, he had two sisters (Elise and Caroline Schaumburg) whose children and related families appear in these baptisms. Click here for a spreadsheet in which I list all of the relatives who I have thus far identified in the baptism book images. (main surnames: Schaumburg, Martin, Most, Griesel)

  • Here is my page on our Faupel / Vaupel and Schaumburg families, who came to America from towns only 38 miles apart in Hesse-Kassel, Germany (Grossenenglis and Niederjossa). The page also has information on ancestors from Old Schaumburg in Niedersachsen: Gelis of Deckbergen and Hasemann, Pape, Wulf, Meyer, Heine, Wilkening, Bartels, Hartman, Tielking, Auhagen, Ebeling from Beckedorf, Luedersfeld, and the surrounding area. NOTE: In the Großenenglis 1879-1911 Evangelisch baptisms (see prior bullet), there were two Vaupel children baptized.

• Old Schaumburg: Here is a downloadable 93K ZIP file of Haseman and related Beckedorf/Luedersfeld family groups (that unzips to 1M file "Karen GF 015.gd3"). I created the file, using GreatFamily to create a graphical tree that separates out the various families and shows their multiple inter-relationships. The bulk of the information in this file comes from Karen Rowe and her outstanding web site on this region. Someday I hope to do a similar tree with the Probsthagen families from Kurt Hitzemann's outstanding web page of the Probsthegen records, since some of the families in Beckedorf/Luedersfeld came from nearby Probsthagen/Vornhagen. It turns out that the 419 people are in 8 so-far-unrelated groups, with a few stray individuals also. I have been trying to find some means of graphically showing the complex inter-relationships of these families that lived in the same area for centuries and are thus related to each other in many different ways. So far GreatFamily is the best thing I have found. You can download GreatFamily for free and then unzip this file and open it with GreatFamily to see and navigate the trees. It is not a lot of work to do, and it is worth the effort once you see the families laid out visually. FYI, GreatFamily does a fairly good default layout, but I find that it takes a couple of hours to properly untangle all the lines into a nice visual separation. So with my health limitations right now, I am not going to be doing these very often -- but the charts are worth the work, once you can see things so niceley.
  • Probsthagen: Kurt Hitzeman (we are 9th cousins) in Illinois has done a heroic job of transcribing and pulling together into families all of the Probsthagen church vital records from 1600 to 1870, a huge job that took him years of work. The most up-to-date version on the web is his text version (click here), and he also has a GEDCOM database (click here) based on an earlier version. It took me 7 years, but in 2008 I finally completed the up-to-date database of all families in Probsthagen and the surrounding towns within that parish ... and this is the "easy" work, so that you can imagine how much effort Kurt put in to do what he has done. I did this in Legacy, which I highly recommend. But the entire database is now downloadable as a GEDCOM file which can be imported into any family history software. Click here for the web page on the Families in Probsthagen GEDCOM database.

    I eventually plan to attempt to try to undertand the complex inter-relationships of the families over the centuries. I expect to use at least these different tools to do this: My own non-blood relationship search software (click here) and Legacy Family Tree's new non-blood relationship calculator (click here for Legacy) Legacy's Relationship Report (click here for Legacy) -- NOW DONE: See immediately below Great Family's complex graphical ancestral trees (click here for Great Family and see "Old Schaumburg" below) Blood-related spouses (requires that I write a visual basic program to do the analysis) #2 - Legacy's Relationship Report The Legacy Relationship Report shows everyone in the database who has a blood relationship to or is the spouse/co-parent of a blood relative of my 4th Great Grandfather, Johann Heinrich Hasemann (1782-1861). I have placed this Probsthagen Relationship Report in a PDF file (click here to see it -- you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it). Note that in the PDF file, "wife" and "husband" include unmarried co-parents as well as married husbands and wives. The results are astonishing. My 4th Great Grandfather, Johann Heinrich Hasemann (1782-1861), is blood-related to 1,696 people, 22.3% of the 7.609 people in the database. If first-order non-blood relationships (wife or husband of blood relative) are included, then 2,272 (29.9%) are related to Johann Hinrich HASEMANN. I had expected a great deal of inter-relationship, but the reality is even greater than I had expected. Once I include the non-blood relationships (#1 on my list above), I would not be surprised to find that any one person is related to at least half of the others, on average. But that will have to wait.

  • Lindhorst: After completing the Probsthagen database, I am now working on a many-year project to enter Kurt Hitzeman's "Families in Lindhorst" records into a family history database, once again using Legacy, which I highly recommend. I hope that this project will not take me until 2015, but it very well might. So I am putting interim versions of the incomplete database (exported to a GEDCOM file) which can be downloaded and imported into any family history software. Click here for the web page on the Families in Lindhorst GEDCOM database.

  • Beckedorf: On January 1, 2009, I began the effort to create a rudimentary "Families in Beckedorf" list and family history database, once again using Legacy, which I highly recommend. There are significant limitationx to this project, but at least it has begun. Click here for the web page on the Families in Beckedorf list and GEDCOM database.

• Mecklenburg-Pommerania
  • STAACK - The 10 siblings from Spantekow and Rebelow to Chicago and area Click here for my entry on the Ancestry.com STAACK board about my ancestor Fred Staack and his nine siblings. All were baptized at the parish church at Spantekow, in what is now the far northeast corner of Germany. I have traced almost all of them to Chicago and to Iroquois County, south of Chicago. And I was very surprised to find that the last two, my Fred and his sister Bertha, were brought to Chicago by their widowed mother, who I had not previously known had come to Chicago (I still don't know anything about her life and death in Chicago). I may eventually have my own web page on them, but for now I am using Ancestry's board. Be sure to read the updates and not just the original message, since I found more information after posting the original message.
  • STAACK Immigrants Spreadsheet The National Archives' Access to Archival Databases (AAD) web site has a pair of connected searchable online databases called "Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, created, ca. 1977 - 2002, documenting the period 1850 - 1897". You have to search the names in one database and then use the manifest numbers found in that search to find the voyage in the other database. I have searched all of the STAACK / STAAK / STACK passengers and put them into a spreadsheet and then added the voyage information to each passenger, so that all of the information is in one place. Since it is a spreadsheet, it can easily be searched or sorted. So I made a worksheet in manifest number order and another worksheet in order of date of arrival. In both cases, I added a computed field to give the estimated birth year, and I also used horizontal borders to more easily distinguish the specific voyages (on the manifest) list and year of arrival (on the arrival date list). Click here to view and/or download the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, STAACK surnames are on white background, STACK on magenta and STAAK on yellow.
  • Kreis Anklam Church Record Images This is a web page that grew out of my own research trip to Greifswald and out of the Kreis Anklam Cousins Yahoo! Group, as a way of pooling the images that we have of records from Kreis Anklam churches.
  • Spantekow and Rebelow Videos On June 29, 2011, I visited Rebelow and Spantekow and made three videos. Click on the links below to see them (MP4 files). These are all large files, as indicated.
    • Driving through Rebelow (677MB): It was like going back in a time machine. The town does not seem to have changed much since they left in the 1880's.
    • Rebelow Cemetery Grave Stones (532MB): I am not sure when Rebelow came to have its own church, maybe about 1900. It is my understanding that they all went to the church in Spantekow. Rather than take still photos of each stone, it was faster to just walk through the cemetery with my flip video camera, though some stones may be harder to read. It was a balance of time and completeness and accuracy.
    • Spantekow Cemetery Grave Stones (1.2GB): The Spantekow cemetery is much larger than the Rebelow cemetery. (We were also able to go into the church, where there are three burial slabs in the aisle floor. I have still photos of those which I will eventually post.
  • Untangling the Chicago KONSOER / CONSOER families I am NOT a descendant of the Konsoer families of Chicago. But the immigrant mother of one of the families was Wilhelmine Caroline STAACK, sister of my ancestor Fred STAACK. They were two of ten siblings, of whom at least six came from Spantekow to Chicago. There were at least two KONSOER families in Chicago -- and they had an inter-marriage to complicate things further. So this web page is intended to present my findings on untangling these two different Chicago Konsoer families.

• Chicago German Records
  • In September 2012 and October 2013, I digitized about 43,000 images (actually about 45,000 but about 2,000 had to be redone) of Chicago German church and cemetery records. Click here to see the web page where all these images can be seen.

• Some Websites I Have Found Useful for German Research
  • Write your name in Suetterlin - This site lets you enter letters and see how they would be written in Suetterlin font. It is a very helpful tool for reading German records.
  • Meyers Gazeteer - Find locations in the Meyer's Gazeteer with clear English-language explanations of the full original German-language entry.

• Wesley Johnston's Celtic Roots Tree: This is on Ancestry as my Gray-Gibson-Johnston-Butson tree. The web site is a publicly accessible site with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic Ancestry tree.
• Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township (Ontario): This is on Ancestry as my Johns(t)on(e)s of 1852 Pickering Township tree. The web site is a publicly accessible site with a frozen snapshot taken every so often of the dynamic Ancestry tree. The goal is to see if these families are related. Since the Dublin Public Record Office was destroyed in the 1922 Irish civil war, the records of most if not all of these are lost forever. So this tree is also for the purpose of identifying living direct-Johnston-male-line descendants who might do the y-DNA test to see if we are all related.
• Johnstons of Shannaghan, County Down, Northern Ireland
• Johnston-e-Memorial-Inscriptions-in-Dumfriesshire.pdf: This is a 379 page PDF file of a document annotated by Cliff Johnston. The legend for the color highlights is:
  • Yellow: Died on Scottish soil
  • Blue: Died other than on Scottish soil
  • Green: Something of interest
  • Grey: Died in war

Chicago

The above sections contain signficant links to Chicago information specific to particular nationalities. This section has Chicago resources not specific to a particular nationality or family. There are Chicago record links in several of the other sections on this web page, such as the extensive Chicago German Church and Cemetery records images.

• Searching Chicago Street Maps: links to the online maps I have found most useful for finding specific high resolution maps of a Chicago house
• Hyde Park (now Chicago) Burial Stubs 1884-1886

Mexican Relatives' Ancestry

The Mexican records that I have seen are among the best in the world for genealogical research, for example baptisms giving not only the mother's maiden name but the grandparents' names, including the grandmothers' maiden names. The country was stable for a very long time, so that many records survive back to the 1500's.

I was very quickly able to trace back so many lines so far that it became overwhelming in such a short time. I have a great deal in two trees on Ancestry.com but have yet to figure out the best way to present it here. So for now, here are the links to the two Ancestry.com trees for those of you who have Ancestry accounts. These families converged in Chicago in the 1940's.

• Josie Elizalde Ancestry
  • Public Site which is a frozen snapshot of the master version on Ancestry.com - subscription required (primarily Jalisco and Zacatecas)
  • Josefina Mercedes Elizalde's Mitochondrial DNA
• Manuel de Leon Ancestry: Public Site which is a frozen snapshot of the master version on Ancestry.com - subscription required (primarily Coahuila and Chihuahua)

South Chicago Mexican Community in the 1900s: This web page is very much incomplete - a gradual accumulation of different records of the community in its earliest years, starting with the 1917-1918 World War I draft registrations

Colotlan-Tlaltenango Earliest Baptisms Map: When you find that a baptism, marriage or burial happened before the earliest record in the church where you have been finding the family records, you want to know which church in the area has earlier records. People moved back and forth from Colotlan to Tlaltenango and other nearby places, making the research more of a challenge since these are in two different states -- which have very erratic borders. So I created a map of the area, showing the earliest baptism year for each parish, taken from the FamilySearch record collection titles for that church. Click on the thumbnail map for the full size map.

Colotlan Marquez Baptisms 1800-1825: No reliable complete index exists of the Colotlan baptisms of the early 1800's -- not on Ancestry, not on FamilySearch, not in the church books themselves. I discovered this when I found records in the church books that I then tried to find using Ancestry and FamilySearch indexes, and many of them were not in any index. While we have a great many names in Colotlan, the immediate need was for Marquez baptisms in the early 1800's, which will be followed by the need for baptisms a generation earlier. So I realized that the only way to find all the Colotlan Marquez baptisms was to go page by page and record by record through the hundreds of pages of church books and make a spreadsheet of all the baptisms of children of a Marquez parent. That spreadsheet is now available here. Be sure to read the "About this spreadsheet" worksheet. Click here to view or download the spreadsheet as of 8 May 2019.

The 1704-1713 Tlaltenango Marriages Omitted from the published book: In his otherwise outstanding 2010 book "Familias Antiguas de Tlaltenango", Arturo Ramos Pinedo transcribes all of the Tlaltenango (Zacatecas) marriage records from 1626 to 1723 -- except for marriages from 1704 to 1713. My web page The 1704-1713 Tlaltenango de Sanchez Roman Marriage Records Missing from "Familias Antiguas de Tlaltenango" lists those missing 1704-1713 marriages (as many as I have done thus far -- it is a work in slow progress).

La Isla Espa ola 1500s Research Sources: Some of the ancestors came from Spain to the island of Espa ola (now Hispaniola, home of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the 1500s for a generation before coming to Mexico. This web gathers sources I have found for trying to make the documented connection through Espa ola back to Spain -- thus far without success.

Lebanese Relatives' Ancestry

Working in Arabic records certainly is a challenge, which has required extensive help. The Dedde Families Project has been quite challenging and yet also a reminder of just how much the people who lived in a small town lived within the richly woven fabric of generations of inter-connections, which they knew without documents. Genealogic DNA is an important part of this effort.

• Dedde Families: Public Site which is a frozen snapshot of the master version on Ancestry.com - subscription required
• George S. Zakhem has written a very important book "Men Who Dream Can Do" about his career in engineering, which includes important historical information about his and related Dedde families.

Cambodian-Laotian-Chinese Relatives' Ancestry

All of what I have been able to gather of these relatives' ancestry is relatively little, due to the death and destruction (including intentional destruction of records) in the time known to most Americans via the Academy Award-winning movie "The Killing Fields". Genealogical DNA is an important part of this effort.

• Families: What I have gathered is included in my Celtic Roots Tree, where most of the people recorded are still living and thus not shown by name in the tree.
• Mai Bunla has written a very important book "Shoulders to Freedom: A Cambodian Diaspora Memoir" about her family's escape from the Khmer Rouge, which includes important historical information about the family in Laos before coming to Cambodia.

Navajo Relatives' Ancestry

My Cornish 4th great grandmother was Jane Keam (1792-1874) from Luxulyan. Her ancestral line traces back to St. Mewan, where the line of Thomas Varker Keam (1842-1904) also traces. The St. Mewan records do not go back quite far enough to document the connection of the two lines, but if my conclusion from the current evidence is correct, Jane Keam was the 3rd cousin, 3 generations removed, of Thomas Varker Keam.

Thomas Varker Keam came to San Francisco, where in 1862 he joined the 1st Cavalry of the California Volunteers in the U. S. Civil War. The unit spent most of the war in New Mexico, which is where TVK chose to settle after the war. He eventually married a Navajo woman and established a trading post at what is now Keams Canyon, Arizona. His extensive Navajo collection at the Royal Cornwall Museum was my first awareness of him (in 1981) and of his Navajo connection. In tracing many different lines of Keam descendants, he is the most famous. And tracing his descendants has led to a significant effort in the records of the Navajo people.

• TVK's descendants: What I have gathered is included in my Celtic Roots Tree.
• Dr. Laura Graves' 1998 biography "Thomas Varker Keam: Indian Trader" is a very well researched book, which is must-reading for anyone working on his life and family. (There is also a 2015 paperback edition.)
• Click here for my web page about the Navajo research that I have done, including access to records that I have gathered and analytical compilations that I have made.

Trees for Friends

• Lucy's Tree - I created this tree for WWII veteran Earl Watson, whose mother Lucy was born in Canada. Earl and I share roots in Chicago and Canada and Ireland and Scotland. I was honored to be a pall bearer at Earl's interment.

• Artist Esperanza (Perez) Martinez - I never met Esperanza, but some of the art that she did was stunning. So I have a tree for her, which includes a link to my web page about her and her art.