Are These Two Signatures From The Same Person?

In late Sept. 2011 I received an unsolicited email from Footnote.com promoting their new War of Independence and War of 1812 docs. So I clicked over to see what they had to offer and I did a search on Samuel Weeks. There was only one result and it was a declaration (my choice of words) of a Samuel Weeks in Maine stating that he was in the War of 1812 and deserved (again my choice of words) to pension compensation. Then I saw the signature of this Samuel Weeks and the lights in my head were in over load.

This Samuel Weeks signature seems very similar to the Samuel C. Weeks signature in Weeks bible. Are these two signatures from the same person? If they are from the same person there are a lot of questions to be answered. For example:

Is the 1814 signature from Samuel C. Weeks father who is in Main? We show Samuel C. being born in 1804 in MD. Plus all of the census data for Samuel C. show him in MD and OH. Maybe we haven't found Samuel C's parents because we've been searching in the wrong state all these years. Maine has never been on our radar.

If the signatures are the same then Samuel C's father must have given him the bible and made the first few entries.

Any hand writing experts out there? Are these two signatures from the same person?

The War of 1812 doc referenced above is at www.footnote.com/image/271395053

Pages from the Samuel C. Weeks Bible

Samuel C. Weeks and Jane Cunningham

After all these years of chasing data I now have a face to match the data. I'm really pleased that I now have pictures of all my paternal grandparents all the way back to 1804, nice!

Plus I have copies of five pages from the Samuel C. Weeks personal bible. Again bring data to life. The bible has yielded other children that we never knew about along with personal information on birth dates. Simple comments like such and such was born “on Sunday morning at 4 AM”. It doesn't get more personal than that!  The bible pages are on another post.

Here's what I have:

Samuel C. Weeks B: 29 Nov 1804 in Baltimore, MD D: 26 July 1870 Caledonia, OH. 

  Jane Cunningham B: 1805 Pennsylvania D: 19 May 1867 Caledona, OH.

Mary Jane Weeks their daughter.



Thank You Devereaux Weeks

Devereaux is the person who gave me copies of pages from the Samuel C. Weeks bible. The story of how we teamed up is interesting and may motivate you to try to team up with other family researchers.

I've been working on my families genealogy for close to ten years now. Over that time frame I have made contact with other cousins researching the Weeks family. Most if not all of these cousins were “found” on ancestry.com or on various genealogy message boards. Of the 10 or so “lost cousins” I've made contact with there is one cousin in particular, Jeff Weeks, that I have been sharing information with since early 2011.

In one of my message board sessions a fellow researcher asked me if I might be related to a Devereaux Weeks. I didn't have Devereaux in my database so I decided I'd check it out. I soon found out that Devereaux lived in Austin, TX. Since I live in south TX I thought it would be fun to have a cousin so close to my home. I did a little more research on Devereaux but still had no contact information.

Then a few months ago Jeff surprised me with a mailing address for a Devereaux Weeks in GA. Seems Devereaux is in Jeff's family tree. So I sent a letter to Devereaux and two weeks later I received a small package from him. The package included a short note with an email address and a marked up copy of the Samuel C. Weeks Descendents Report I included with my letter. There were red marks all over the report and comments like “wrong birth date for this person, you left out these children and on and on”. I'm looking at all these corrections with a smile on my face while thinking with all these errors this guy must think I'm an idiot.

A few email exchanges later I asked Devereaux how he got all this wonderful Weeks information? He simply replied with, “I have the Samuel C. Weeks bible”.

I guess the the moral of this story is “I'll take luck over skill any day of the week”.

YDNA Errrrrrr

DNA genealogy, a classic good news / bad news scenario. The good news is that YDNA is past down from father to son so every direct male ancestor of mine would have the same YDNA as me, kinda. Nothing is perfect. There are certain YDNA makers that are known as fast mutating markers. So what does that mean? It means that you can be off by a few markers and still be related. Which means it's very difficult to get an exact match with anyone.

For example, I first took a 46 marker YDNA test through ancestor.com. I was so excited when my results came back. Finally I was going to find my direct ancestors. On my first database search I had over 500 matches. Then there is this statical time period thing that estimates how many generations back you are related to a specific match. I love it, the feed back shows that you and this other YDNA person have a 99% probability of having a common ancestor in the past 50 generations. That's cool except 50 generations ago was way before we were using surnames. So what good id the match?

Then there are websites that have surname groups but you must take your YDNA from that site in order to join in the surname group. So off I go and spend another $100+ for a 37 marker test so I can join the group. Guess what? The results from this new test don't match my results from the first test. The 37 marker test was off by 2 markers from the 46 marker test. Which means that I have a high probability of being related to me in the past 5 generations. Hint: remember those fast mutating markers. On two of those markers my two tests were off by 1 on two known fast mutating markers.

So I join this surname group to find out that I'm not matching up with anyone in the group. But if I mess around with the mutating markers I find I'm matching a lot of the members. OK, what does messing around mean? It means that if I “assumed” that if a mutating marker was only off by one point then I counted it as a match. After all my two miss matched markers were only off by one marker each and I know I'm related to me. Then I decided what happens if I don't count mutating markers at all?

Good news is that after playing some games with mutating markers I came up with a handful of high matches. Bad news is all I know about the matching people is their kit number. Why would someone pay to get their YDNA, then post it for the world to see but not give you anyway to contact them to see if you are truly related.

No problem, the web site for the surname group has a message stating contact your surname group administrator for assistance. They should have mention that the administrator may or may not reply to your email. Mine didn't

I could go on and on but the bottom line is that the various types of DNA have the potential of being a great tool for genealogy. I think the science is good and getting better all the time. My grip focuses on the process involved in the interpretation of your results.

Man, it feels good to have said all this even if I'm only saying it to the other me. (joke)

Research Journal

I've been researching my Weeks Family roots for about 8 years now. I'm retired and I'm a Windsurfer. I moved to South Padre Island, Texas in 2003. I'm fortunate enough to have my health (thank you Lord), and to be able to enjoy my three most favorite things: Windsurfing, Genealogy and a good action adventure book. Mornings for genealogy and afternoons for windsurfing. Every now and then there is a chore that gets in the way but that's life.

Regarding genealogy, when I first started researching my family everything was new and thrilling. So much information to read through, so much “stuff” to collect and store. You know the drill, “this piece is interesting, I need to save it, I might need it some time......” I guess that logic is what leads to mountains papers to be stored, extra hard drives and a indexing systems that ensures you'll never find what your looking for and reams of paper and more printer cartridges than you can imagine.

But best of all, looking at a piece a paper thinking that you'll never need it but you need to file it anyway. Then years later you come across that piece of paper only to find that it's information helps you solve a problem you've been chasing for years. But why wasn't that obvious the first time you read that doc? Then you start second guessing yourself, what other treasures do I have buried, What did I do with this and that...., and on it goes.

Part of my problem in researching is time. Not like I don't have the time it's more like the need for instant gratification. I spend 35+ years in the high tech business and in that industry you had milliseconds to solve a problem and the life of that solution had even a shorter life span. Well, not really but it sure felt that way. But genealogy is just the opposite. Genealogy moves at the speed of a glacier. Talk about stopping to smell the roses, with genealogy you have time to plant the seed and watch the darn rose grow old and then fall away.

But the happy ending to this story is this blog. This blog gives me a place to write about my frustrations and to organize my research results. The process of writing something out and then posting it, even if I'm the only person who will ever read it, give me the feeling of accomplishing something.