Tracing Your Family Tree

Blogger's Note: Last month, I began writing a column entitled "Tracing Your Roots," for my local newspaper.  Beginning here today, and continuing each Monday, I will be posting a copy of the article as it appeared in the newspaper on the previous Friday.

Interest in genealogy research, or tracing one’s family tree, is a hot topic these days. Once viewed by many as simply a hobby, genealogy has become one of the world’s newest industries.  In case you haven’t heard, family history research is the subject of two very popular television series, NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?” which airs on Friday evenings at 7 p.m.,  and the Sunday evening PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by Harvard professor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. If you haven’t watched either of these shows, I encourage you to do so.  

The current interest in family research and the fast growing number of resources available for conducting that research have made it easier than ever to search for one’s family roots.  But if you are like most individuals who want to begin the journey down the family history trail, you may be asking yourself the question “Where do I begin?”  And that’s what I want to discuss here today.

Family history research is like a puzzle - one piece is added to another, and another, and another, until the entire picture is visible.  Often the puzzle’s picture tells a story.  And the search for our ancestors sometimes begins with just one piece of information - the name of a known ancestor. Luckily for most of us, we know the names of our grandparents, possibly the names of our great-grandparents, and more often than not, we also know where they lived.  Armed with just a single name, one can successfully search literally dozens of online databases that contain bits of data about our ancestors.  

One of the best sources of genealogical information out there are census records, and thanks to www.familysearch.org, a website maintained by the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Church, the information there is free. This same website also contains information gleaned from birth, marriage, and death records. Probably the most widely publicized source of online family history information is www.ancestry.com, which requires a subscription to access the millions of records contained in this huge database.  According to its website, the company “has spent more than a decade building the world’s largest family history resource” that includes birth, marriage, divorce, death, military and census record information.

Some of the least known but best sources of free information for beginning family history researchers are genea-blogs. When I first began blogging in 2008, there were only a few hundred of us who were writing blogs about our family history. Now there are over two thousand genea-bloggers who hail from around the world, and many have become leaders in the genealogy community. Thomas MacEntee, well-known as one of those leaders in the genealogy world and a blogger himself, maintains the www.geneabloggers.com website, where links can be found to each member’s blog.  This site also features a search function where anyone can search a family name contained in the many blogs listed there.  

An important source of free information for online researchers is the website known as www.findagrave.com, a site that contains information and photos of millions of cemeteries and gravestones throughout the world.  Founded by Jim Tipson, the website was originally maintained as a place for posting photographs of the celebrity graves he visited, a hobby of his. However, the site no longer contains just photos of celebrity grave stones - it contains over 80 million grave records, including photos of gravestones posted by its 800,000+ volunteers.  According to statistics available on the website, more than 11 million pages were viewed today by its visitors.

The resources mentioned in this article are but a few of the thousands of databases, repositories, and publications available to family researchers.  But if you are ready to start the search for your own roots, they are excellent places to begin.
   

Surname Saturday

Surnames I am researching, along with geographic areas of interest, are the following:
Baldridge - Ireland>PA>NC>SC>TN>MS
Branch - VA>NC>TN>MS
Coggins - NC>SC>GA>AL>MC
Fenner - RI>NC>GA>AL>MS
Gibson - VA>NC>SC>TN>MS
Merriwether (Meriwether/Merriweather) - VA>KY>SC>GA>AL>TN>MS
Motte - Dublin, Ireland>West Indies>SC>AL>MS Territory
Netherland (Neatherlin/Netherlin/Neatherland) - VA>KY>TN>GA>AL>MS
Pettus - VA>KY>TN>GA>AL>MS
Porter - PA>VA>NC>SC>AL>MS
If your ancestors share these surnames, I would love to hear from you.  Who knows...we may be cousins!

Fortner-Porter Cemetery, Hinds County, Mississippi

It all started in February 2011 when I contacted an individual named Carol Hughes about her post on an Ancestry.com message board.  According to the post, Carol and I were researching the same individual, Anastacia Porter Lawson Porter. Known as "Gracy" to family members, Anastacia was the second wife of William Porter, who died in Hinds County, Mississippi in the 1800s. According to most accounts, William Porter was the son of Landlot Porter and Winnie Palmer Porter. More about the Porter family of Hinds County, Mississippi can be read here. 


Shortly before reading Carol's post on the message board, I had read about a small family cemetery near Raymond, Mississippi that allegedly contained the graves of Gracy, her husband, William, his father, Landlot Porter, and other Porter and Fortner family members. I shared this information in an email to Carol, and was struck with amazement when I received her reply telling me that she lived within a few miles of the cemetery's  location.  Although she had no previous knowledge of the cemetery's existence, Carol readily volunteered to locate it and kindly offered to photograph whatever headstones she might find. As most of us know, family obligations, weather, and life in general often take precedence over family research activities, and almost a year went by before Carol was able to make the trip to the cemetery. Although Carol had actually located the cemetery this past January, she discovered it was located on private property and permission to access the property was needed from the owner. 



But Carol was persistent, and on February 20, 2011, her visit to the cemetery became a reality, albeit a bittersweet one. Although the cemetery is located on privately owned property, it has been vandalized and some of the heavier stones and monuments have been toppled.  Gracy Porter's stone was one of those that had been overturned. Landlot Porter's grave marker is still standing, and with Carol's permission, I have posted a photo of it here today.  

Mocavo Plus - A Review

Several weeks ago, I was contacted by Katelyn Lazor, Marketing Associate for Mocavo.com.  As part of her community outreach efforts to promote the site, Katelyn offered me a subscription in exchange for writing a review on this blog about my experience in using Mocavo Plus. Although it has taken me a few weeks to write this review, I was not a total stranger to the site before Katelyn and I communicated.  I began following Mocavo on Twitter almost a year ago and had visited the site a number of times during its early development.   My recent visits to the site do allow me to make a positive observation that Mocavo Plus is an excellent place for linking researchers and for sharing information. And it is free. But the Advanced Search function, which seems to be the hallmark of Mocavo Plus, is limited in that a researcher must know the exact date of the life event(s) entered. While my own use of the Advanced Search feature was successful, the resulting information consisted primarily of links to my own blog posts. Overall, the site is a great resource for novice family researchers.  But more experienced researchers who need actual documentation, whether it is census record information or birth, marriage, military or death records, likely will use the site as simply a stepping stone on their genealogical journey. 

Y-DNA Testing - Halotype Results and Unanswered Questions

Well, the DNA testing results are in.  Actually, the results have been available since late December, but I am just now getting around to writing about what the findings.  The test kit itself was uncomplicated, but the results were delayed twice.  The delays were good, though, since each one represented the lab's dedicated efforts to ensure reliable results.  If I may backtrack for a moment here, DNA testing seemed to be the last resort for me in determining the name of my fourth paternal grandfather, Samuel Porter's father. There were too many Porter men in South Carolina and in Mississippi during the late 1700s and early 1800s to make a definitive match.  So, I joined  the World Family Tree's Porter Surname Project and enlisted the help of a Porter male family member in providing a cheek swab sample for a Y-DNA test.  I chose the test that would yield 37 markers and provide halotype information. If you are unfamiliar with genealogical DNA testing and are wondering what is a "marker" and why one would be interested in 37 (and testing more more than 37 is available), an explanation can be found here.  Now if you are also wanting to know what "halotype" means and why this information is important to genealogical DNA research, an explanation is provided here. 

The individual who provided the DNA sample for my Porter research was a first cousin, twice removed, and the only living male child or grandchild of my paternal great-grandfather, John James Porter, his father, James M. Porter, and his father, Samuel Porter.  Samuel Porter was born circa 1799 in South Carolina and came to the Mississippi Territory in the early 1800s.  In early 1825, Samuel Porter married Mary Middleton in Franklin County, Mississippi, before moving a few years later to Madison and Attala Counties after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek opened up land there in 1832.  According to a copy of their marriage certificate, parents' names for neither Samuel nor Mary appear on the document. Although DNA testing has determined that my Samuel Porter is related to John Porter, who lived in the early 1600s in Virginia and to his descendants, Edward Sanders Porter, Elisha Jeter Porter, Hancock Porter, and Stark(s) Porter, I still do not know the name of Samuel's father. There were other male Porter family members living in Franklin County, Mississippi in the early 1800s, including John, Landlot, and James, but I have been unable to find Samuel's direct connection to any of these three men. 

Although Y-DNA testing did not yield the initial results I sought, it did produce a finding that confirms some questions about my paternal grandmother's family that I have had since I was very young.  My father's male family members share the J1 Halotype, indicating they have ancestry that links them to countries in and around the Fertile Crescent . My questions began when I was a young student studying geography and history.  Wanting to know where my own family originated, I asked my grandmother about her heritage and her family's origins.  I remember her reply when she said that "Mama's people were Black Dutch and Papa's people were Moors from South Carolina."  As I grew older, I often recalled her words and wanted to know more about her Porter family's heritage.  There was something unusual about these male Porter family members - besides the fact that most of them were quite tall, they exhibited very distinct facial features, and their skin color was what some might call "swarthy."  When I was older, I wondered even more about the Porter family's ethnicity, as I compared the looks of my own father, and my brothers as they grew older, to his mother's relatives. As I matured and learned more about various cultural, religious, and ethnic traditions, I often wondered if my grandmother's insistence that my siblings and I not drink milk when we ate fish might indicate that we had a Jewish ancestry. Now, thanks to Y-DNA testing results that show a J1 Halotype finding, my questions have been answered. 

For more information about Halotypes, including the J1 Halotype, read here.

Genealogy and DNA Testing

DNA testing is one of many tools in the family researcher's toolbox today, and it is absolutely a hot topic of conversation within the genealogy community. Thanks to a plethora of crime shows on television, most of us know how DNA works.  But genealogy testing goes beyond what is done on tissue and body fluid samples during a crime scene investigation. DNA results obtained from one tiny cheek swab can assist a researcher in finding a connection to an individual's ancestor as well as the part of the world in which the family originated.  Sounds so easy, doesn't it?  Although the test itself is a simple one, the results are much more complicated.  More about DNA testing, the process and the results, can be found here. Several months ago, after searching for years for some of my own paternal ancestors, I decided to join one of the surname projects sponsored by WorldFamilies.net.  Watch here for more posts that chronicle a quest for the name of a paternal ancestor that began with a simple cheek swab sample from a male relative and the Y-DNA results from a lab in Houston, Texas.

Back to Blogging

I've been away from blogging for the past few months, but next week I plan to resume posting here.  Although I haven't written posts for some time, I have not stopped researching. So watch for information about results of some recent Porter DNA testing and all about contacts from new cousins.