Early 52 ancestor Blog and the Genetic Genealogy Day in Toronto at Toronto Branch of OGS

I posted my 52 Ancestors Blog today instead of tomorrow as I am very curious if I might get any comments on my research on Jean/Jane Durnford whom I now suggested could be Jane O'Ford baptized at Milton Abbas. Especially when one notes that Charles Butt (son of Jane) married Hannah Arnold whose father was born at Milton Abbas. I find the evidence collected to be rather overwhelmingly in favour of my thoughts on the ancestry of Jane O'Ford (called Durnford on her marriage registration).

We spent Saturday in Toronto (arrived on Friday afternoon) at the Genetic Genealogy Day sponsored at the North York Public Library by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. It was an excellent set of lectures and in particular I had wanted to listen to the lectures of Maurice Gleeson (known to me from the Guild of One Name Studies as he is researching one of his surnames there) and David Pike (I work with him on the T_FGS haplogroup study, I am behind putting people into their relevant subgroups at the study but will be working on that shortly).

Maurice's ancestors are Irish and I knew he would be talking about Irish records. I am especially keen these days to learn more about Irish research methods. I have been working on the Galway Blake family in order to learn as much about them, collect as many of them on the census that are available and put them into the Galway Family Tree that I have created from Martin Joseph Blake's books on his Galway Blake family. I am doing this in order to be able to separate out the other Blake families in Ireland - a number of them I am aware of and have a limited amount of material on but I want to see if there were any linked Blake families or were they all independent in their various areas in Ireland. Maurice's talk more than fulfilled my desire to learn about Irish records and I found his methodology on working on the DNA of his study of his families to be refreshing and will look again at the Blake yDNA study with some of those thoughts in mind. I also queried him about contacting some of the members of the study who are Irish and he gave me a couple of hints which will be helpful.

David Pike studies the Pike family of Newfoundland in great detail and along with that he discusses phasing of ancestors for whom you do not have DNA samples. I would like to put together my parent's DNA and with six siblings (one deceased but he has a daughter) I wondered at my accuracy in such a venture. David's talk was excellent. It was unfortunately marred by people insisting on asking questions even after they were asked not to do so. When a lecture is marked Advanced then I think people should expect to just behave as in any other lecture and save the queries to the end. It did cause him to not be able to spend the amount of time he would have liked to on particular areas. However, I did achieve my goal in understanding phasing and proceeding with the results that I have at hand. His lecture was excellent and I found a lot of other useful material in it. He also told us that he had given virtually the same lecture at ISOGG and this lecture is online so I may purchase that just to refresh my memory if I feel the need to do so.

I was also present at Maurice's talk on DNA and one name studies and he did request queries in order to better direct his talk which I can understand. This is a more specialized type of research and you can vary around the landscape on subjects you might cover. It wasn't a teaching session but rather a look at single surname research and was most interesting. He had a lot of good ideas on using some of the tools that are provided by FT DNA for studies.

We did not stay for the last lecture as we needed to head home and wanted to be there by 9:00 ish. The traffic coming out of Toronto on Saturday flowed very well and we were home in just over 4.5 hours of driving. The trip down was horrendous as we arrived at Toronto about 5:00 pm having left home at 10:00 a.m. We did do a few stops but we were nearly an hour progressing from Oshawa to our hotel near the North York Public Library (same mall actually).

Thanks again to Toronto Branch for organizing such a fantastic day.  These days we tend to do most trips like this spontaneously rather than plan ahead.