Photo : Virgil Lee Wright (b. July 6, 1894)

This is a photo of my maternal great-grandfather, Virgil Lee Wright, from a collection of photos that mom has.  Someone has written on the backside his name and date of birth - July 6, 1894.  He was born in Orestes, Madison County, Indiana.

In those days, infants of both sexes were photographed in what were dresses to aid in toilet training.  Wikipedia has a good article on breeching.  I'm glad that this photograph was identified, or I'd never figure out who it was.

Virgil was the son of John William and Ellen (King) Wright, the oldest of two sons born to them.

Parentage of Johnathan Collins (b. 1706 Bucks Co. PA)

Received an email from a fellow descendant of Jonathan Collins (b. 1706 Bucks Co. PA) through his son Mahlon, curious as to why I had noted on an earlier blog post that Jonathan's parents were not John Collins and Mary Meachum.

Back in 2008, I had been contacted by another researcher who advised me that Jonathan's parents were not John and Mary (Meachum) Collins.  Lacking any evidence to support my claim, I detached them as his parents.  Right now I cannot locate the email or other correspondence regarding this line.

Jonathan Collins was born October 8, 1706 in Bucks County, Pennyslvania and Ann ____ in 1731 in Hardwick, Warren County, New Jersey.  Their daughter, Deborah, who married Samuel Willson, was my ancestress.

A cursory glance online shows that John Collins and Mary Meachum were from Connecticut.  It is likely that someone has confused two families online and that was where I picked up the data originally.

I am hopeful that this new correspondence can shed some light on the parentage of Jonathan and also break down some other early NJ brickwalls on this part of the family.

AncestryDNA Results Came In : Ethnicity Estimates

My AncestryDNA results came in last week, and above are the graphics for the ethnicity estimates.  Although I know that these should be taken with a grain of salt, and are only as good as the database they are comparing me to, I find it interested to compare the differences from my results at 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA.

AncestryDNA picked up traces of Native American and West Asian, for example, that 23andMe didn't show.   I've had my results run at GEDMATCH in the various ethnicity calculators and have found similar results.  So way back in time there is a bit of a mystery to solve.

These regions are hard to pinpoint and are very vague such as Europe West or Scandinavia - but again based on the paper trail I'm not too surprised by the results.  

The trace regions in West Asia - the Caucasus region of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, etc. is interesting.  But then again, I have quite a bit of ancestry that remains unknown due to my mystery maternal 2nd great-grandfather.

I've posted on these various topics before under my DNA Genealogy tab.