DNA Category
Changes in Genealogical DNA Testing
Posted on November 5, 2025 Leave a Comment
Back in 2005, Francis Collins in his book The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine predicted that DNA testing for health was on the horizon within 10 years and that your doctor would routinely order DNA tests for you. That hasn’t happened as quickly as he thought, but companies like 23andme […]
Celtic Origins
Posted on September 1, 2025 Leave a Comment
Apologies to my faithful readers. I took a break after the death of my best genealogy friend, Jean to process what her life and loss means to me. I have found that I cannot be creative on demand, and must wait for inspiration and the imperative juices to flow. Sometimes all that it takes is […]
The Three Brothers Story, Retold: Johan Martin MOSER
Posted on January 5, 2024 8 Comments
The “Three Brothers Story” is so prevalent in Family History Circles that it is often recounted smugly by experienced genealogists as a sign of family mythology. Some of you know my contrarian nature causes me to poke holes in establishment edicts. Nowhere is that more fun than with my own “Three Brothers Story.” More on […]
Mind The Gap: Making the Connection to the Royal STEWARTs of Scotland
Posted on August 17, 2023 12 Comments
Sometimes you can prove a connection without being able to flesh out the in-between. Thus like the announcements at the train station “Mind the Gap.” Sometimes people grasp at anything to make the connection and falsify the record in doing so. This is part of a cautionary tale to be careful even when evaluating something […]
How My Forty Year Old Brick Wall Was Broken: The Benevolence of Strangers and the Problem with Names
Posted on July 13, 2023 7 Comments
This is a brick wall that my Aunt Dorothy and I began working on in the 1970’s and it took Forty Years to solve! Sadly it was solved 17 years after my aunt passed. And it happened over ten years ago! I have written several drafts but I am hoping to properly thank those genealogists […]
How Do We Know What the Y-DNA is Telling Us?
Posted on April 21, 2023 3 Comments
NOTE this was written to the SHELDON DNA project but the information is relevant to other surnames I received an inquiry : “Someone was recently asking me how I knew I was related to John 13 [John of Kingstown], since we obviously don’t have the DNA of an ancestor from hundreds of years ago. I […]
Family History or Family Fiction?: Exposing Secrets
Posted on January 22, 2023 6 Comments
Paul Chiddicks is my muse. Paul publishes popular articles in the UK version of Family Tree Magazine and also authors the Blog The Chiddicks Family Tree. He often writes something that is the impetus for my own blog posts. Such was the case this morning when I read his post Ethical Dilemmas and How To […]
Self Healing Concrete and Knowledge Lost
Posted on January 14, 2023 2 Comments
This blog post grows out of number of things. An article on Self Healing Concrete, a conversation with my 98 year old neighbor, Mary and another conversation with my friend Jean. How lost knowledge is such a remarkable, but common place event. So many secrets are waiting to be rediscovered. We have been here before. […]
Who were the Celts and why are they so Mysterious?
Posted on December 21, 2022 12 Comments
Winter Solstice 2022. A time of year where I am keenly aware of the changing patterns of light and dark. The Celtic origin myths and the lives of the Celts were much more attune with the natural world than we are now. How they lived and even their imprint upon the earth is very different […]
Science as Religion
Posted on December 2, 2022 2 Comments
This may meander a bit but there is a point. This post was provoked in response to a Letter from the Society for American Archaeology and a recent article in The Smithsonian Magazine. I will return to those later. This post is dedicated to the memory of Marija Gimbutas who was a Lithuanian archaeologist who back in […]
Wheaton Wood 