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)