On the Death of Cheryl

Everybody’s existence depends on the actions, interactions and decision trees of the people who came before them. That isn’t unique. What I think is unique is the perspective on existence available to the family historian. My aunt Cheryl died at the end of August. Her visitation (she didn’t want a funeral) was on the 8th …

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Seelye Ancestors

I may have sent you here because you’ve had genetic testing at 23 and me, FTDNA or AncestryDNA and overlap and match on a segment with a known relative of Lloyd Seelye or his parents. It’s also possible that you find yourself on this page because you are in some as yet, unknown way, related …

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Autosomal DNA Mile Marker

Now that I have many maternal and paternal segments worked out I thought it would be good to put up some graphics of the general map. Again using Kitty Munson Cooper’s segment mapper utility to get great visual representations of the segments using my dad as the base person. To be clear, this won’t represent …

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Dark Side of the Moon

For reference here is a nice visual from ancestry.com of my paternal tree. This constitutes my “Thompson family” really starting with my grandparents Charles and Elizabeth Thompson. I like this view because it shows the two “halves” of my dad’s family and gives you the idea of what we’re talking about with the two halves …

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Ancestors by Cousinship

At 23 and me, you’ll often get an idea of Cousinship with a match request. It will say something like “estimated 4th cousin with a range of 3rd to 5th cousin” or “5th to distant cousin”. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to gather one second cousin 1x removed  and one 4th cousin 1x removed …

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Defining Boundaries…or the Blind Men and the Elephant

To date, I’ve learned much more through regular paper channels about my family. Getting documentation is actually helping me solidify DNA testing, not the other way around. It’s probably because it’s so early in this game, there just aren’t enough people who know enough about their trees to make any educated guesses. When I contact …

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