Friday, January 01, 2016

New Year, New Hope

Today is the start of the new year and for many, the start of new resolutions for the coming year.  For those doing genealogy, the start of the new year always brings hope of finding new ancestors and making new discoveries about the family.

For my part, yesterday i spent my Christmas money (thank you - mother in law!) on two items that I hope will add to my knowledge of family. One was a book, the other was a DNA test kit.

The book was from the Seventh Day Baptist organization, entitled "Newport Seventh Day Baptist Trilogy" by Don and Ilou Sanford.  Many of my ancestors were founders and members of this church and denomination, and i'm interested in finding out what the book has to say about the early days of the church and my ancestors.  The price was right and the description seems interesting:


 Part I “Entering Into Covenant” is a documented history of the church including its founding, its meeting house, and the impact of some its its members in colonial history. Part II lists the members of the church from its founding in 1671 until its closing in 1884. Part III is a genealogical study of the descendents of Samuel and Tacy Hubbard through their three daughters, 24 grandchildren and two successive generation beyond.

The other item I purchased yesterday was a DNA test kit from Ancestry.com.  The sale price was too good to pass up and the number of people who have tested their continues to grow.  Once I complete this test, I will have tested at all three of the major providers : 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Ancestry.  I am eager to see what new connections I will make.  I'll admit that I had held off on testing there before because of the lack of a chromosome browser, but with third party tools such as GEDMatch I'm sure I can work through it.

Last week I was also able to send off two DNA test kits to my first cousins who are going to complete FamilyTreeDNA kits.  I continue to save my pennies and add them to my DNA funds so I can sponsor kits for cousins that will be wiling to test.

In other items, I do have plans to try to post more family information to this blog and share some more pictures that I recently came across.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Travis,

Thank you for the DNA kit. I'll send it in on Monday.

Regarding the book, are the ancestors on your maternal or paternal side? Sounds like an interesting book.

Keep up the good work.

Jim

Travis LeMaster said...

Hi Jim -

The book is on dad's side. Really an interesting story to know that I had relatives that started a denomination! They became convinced that the Sabbath should be held on the Seventh Day, started meeting in their homes, were persecuted by the authorities, etc. For several generations on dad's side there were ministers in the Seventh Day Baptist Church. The denomination is now headquartered in Janesville, Wisconsin.

Travis

Unknown said...

Thanks Travis for the information. I knew that Seventh Day Baptists existed, but I didn't know their history. I am sure they are a small group. Interesting fact. Thanks for the research. The DNA kit went out this morning. Looking forward to the results.