T_FGS mtDNA study group

I spent most of the day sorting the T_FGS study group at FT DNA. We published our paper  and now we are in the process of looking at geographic information for our study members. The first step was to place them into their subgroupings for a couple of reasons - certainly to attract new members who might also be interested in looking at the "resting spot" for their mutations. I have randomly coloured this chart but want to go through and systematically colour the majour groupings so that the descent can be clearly seen in each of the subgroupings.

Although this is not my mtDNA haplogroup personally, it belongs to a family member and we have found it quite interesting in that there are four perfect matches. One of the perfect matches still resides in England with no history of emigration. The furtherest back ancestress in this line is Margaret Carr who was born in 1654 at Newport Rhode Island. Going to the other side of the ocean has proven to be difficult primarily because the name of the mother of Margaret Carr (wife of Robert Carr) is not precisely known although Hannah Hale is generally considered to be her name. No proof has yet been found for this assertion.

Interestingly the family lore for the English match states that they are of Dutch descent  and when I trace this line back I find that they were located in East Anglia in the late 1600s early 1700s. More research will be needed although we continue to hope for more matches to see if we can triangulate a "resting spot" for these mutations.

Fourty three people have joined the project since we published so I am finishing up now by sorting them into their respective subgroupings. Then I shall tackle the colours and add the description for each of the subgroups.

As the H11 haplogroup project grows I look forward to doing the same there actually. But it will be a while yet I suspect.

DNA Case Studies - Presentation

I decided to work on my Presentation yesterday and today. I have 58 slides prepared. I will need to update them just prior to the presentation with any changes but they are basically ready to go in terms of format. I need to write an Abstract and Bio for the Conference Booklet.

Initially I wondered what cases I would use but when I finally settled into it my cover page just appeared suddenly to me and then I decided to introduce my case studies briefly as part of the introduction. That flowed very well and then I started into the five case studies that I will present. They are all my own family lines except I will discuss the T haplogroup/T2 haplogroup studies and end with Mary Polly Case. Mary Polly has always appealed to me out of all of Ed's ancestors - she is his 3x great grandmother and was orphaned. She was born in Dublin but sent to Halifax to live where she married at the age of 18 years. Although her father is likely John Casey very very little is known about her family life in Ireland.

Other than that my day passed quickly as most of it was spent on the presentation.

Tomorrow I shall work on the transcription plus I will have Jackson over to babysit.

T haplogroup study

I decided that I really needed to enter the GenBank data into my spreadsheet and that ended up taking most of the day yesterday. Plus I needed to go and buy my daughter some presents for her birthday (already one day late!) but she hadn't given me hints. I ended up buying some "household" items and hope that she likes them.

Very warm weather finally here and the cold chills of the winter are finally disappearing. It is very cold here and it isn't until the really warm days of summer come that I can feel that dreadful minus 30 feeling slipping away from me. It takes about two or three weeks of really hot weather (i.e. over 35 celsius) for me to feel that it is really very very warm. Mind you we do have central air conditioning so is perhaps unfair of me to say that it takes time to get too much hot weather since I am always comfortable indoors.

I need to get back to my transcriptions and I am perhaps dreading that a little as both of the sets that I am transcribing in concert are very very difficult. It would be nice to see them both though and that will eventually inspire me to return. My portable continues its sterling recovery. I do not use it a lot (for Skype to talk to my daughters on occasion) although with both my husband and I now having laptops it makes going to repositories much much easier. Of course my interest in genealogy stems only from 2003 although I have certainly put a lot of time into it since then. It occupied all of my non-working hours for about four years whilst I was doing all the course work at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. I also want to work on my CG next winter just to bring myself to that level of genealogical research. I purchased the application way back at FGS in Boston which seems so long ago now but as I did more and more research on my own I realized that I wasn't ready to put CG after my name although I am using my postnomials from the National Institute, PLCGS (Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Studies).

Other than that we are gardening and that is growing quickly. We had our usual "battles" with the wild bunnies as to whom was going to eat various crops but wire cages solved that problem and we let the clover grow a little longer to give them lots of greens until everything is big enough that we can all share :)

Tomorrow I will get back to my transcriptions I rather think.