DNA Updated

Ancestry.com had an update recently regarding DNA finding regarding ethnicity.

This doesn’t mean that my DNA changed. DNA doesn’t change. It means that there is a bigger pool of participants so the geographic regions of ethnicity are refined.

For instance, in the past my African DNA was assigned to Sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers.

That generalization has changed to a more specific Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples.

The British Isles and northwest Europe section is greatly increased to 98%.

So what are your reasons for not taking a DNA test?

The Revolutionary War File of John Burgess

I just don’t know how there can still be a stack of stuff that needs to be scanned and added to the blog. Because the blog? Is my scrapbook.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, there is an excellent, excellent, website called revwarapps.org. Go have a look. Go now; I’ll wait. There are thousands of transcribed pension applications and/or bounty land claims plus more.

Are you back yet? Wasn’t that amazing?!

Here’s another file that I have had for what – twenty years? I don’t know. And I keep finding more things like this, even when I thought I had finished. So now the past and the present can join together. I trot out my dog-and-pony show of old pension files, and you can read a very good transcribed version on another website.

Here are the images for John Burgess. I purchased this file in the hopes that I could find a link to tie my father’s line back to the Revolution. No such luck.

Dear Patron: We regret that the enclosed photocopies are the best we were able to obtain using our normal reproduction process.

John Burgess, N.C., S9295

St. Lawrence Post Office, N.C.

Witnesses William Burgess and John Kivett, Randolph County, NC

David Campbell and Hugh McCain

Declaration of John Burgess

John Burgess (his X mark)

Thomas Ragland, Clerk of Court, May 16, 1833

 

I wrote a good bit about Revolutionary William Rawls. I can’t link him to my family.

Recently I got the results of my autosomal cousin-finder DNA test. One fellow that I matched verrrrry distantly has a certain William Rawls in his family tree as the brother of the his ancestor. Because you just can’t make this stuff up…