Today is the first anniversary of the day my blog appeared on Geneabloggers. In reality, it's been about a year and two weeks since I started writing Becky's Bridge to the Past. I've written 65 posts and had over 7,000 pageviews. I've been contacted by a couple of cousins and gotten some encouragement from other bloggers. I can say that it's been very helpful to put my genealogical notes in narrative form and has totally been worth the hours I've spent trying to get my words and images just right.
The post that has gotten the most hits is "Genealogy on the Road: Waterloo, Alabama," about the trip my brother and I took to the town our great-grandparents lived in before they came to Oklahoma in 1894. I have a feeling that has more to do with motorcycle riders researching their rally route than with anybody trying to find out about my rather unexciting (but enjoyable) trip to Alabama. I always wonder at someone's reaction when they Google something and get my little blog as a result.
I started the year by listing what I knew about the four branches of my family--my two paternal grandparents and my two maternal grandparents and their ancestors. This is information I have collected in over 25 years of doing genealogy--first by visiting genealogical libraries in Oklahoma and then by using Ancestry.com and the free research tools I could find online. Recently, my posts have been all about using DNA to search for ancestors and some of the new cousins I have found through this medium.
In just the last month I have identified two of my DNA matches--one on each side of my family. The common ancestor of Leo Pentney Gaines and myself is our great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Simmons, which would make us 3rd cousins. Herbert Archie Miller has been my biggest match on FTDNA (aside from my brother) since I first got my results, but I finally got some help in identifying him as a Ming cousin.
We haven't been successful YET, but a number of Huff cousins have been working hard this year trying to untangle the family relationships in Jackson County, Tennessee. My new cousin Barbara and I are still related, although we now know through DNA testing that our great-great-grandmothers Elzina and Ellender Huff were not sisters. I found out that I somehow have a previously undocumented connection to the Pharris family of Jackson County. And to make things more complicated, in the last month we have discovered that we are also related to the Broyles, Wilhoite, and Blankenbaker families of the 1717 Germanna Colony of Virginia. Hopefully, the solution to that puzzle will help us find the parents of our 3rd great-grandmother, Mrs. Susannah Huff.
In the past year I have visited ancestral homelands in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama with my brother. We finally found the graves of our Castle great-great grandparents in West Liberty, KY, and saw the town in Virginia named for our ancestor, Jacob Castle.
What are my goals for the coming year? I hope to find more cousins through DNA testing and solve the Huff and Germanna puzzles. DNA has brought us closer in the last year than 20 previous years of chasing the paper trail. In the last week I have been contacted by a Smith cousin who found me through DNA testing from Ancestry.com. I so hope we can collaborate to find out more about the ancestors of our great-grandfather Stephen Albert Smith. This summer my brother and I will visit North Carolina and Virginia. I hope by the time we visit Germanna, I will know how I am connected there.
Showing posts with label Blankenbaker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blankenbaker. Show all posts
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Friday, January 17, 2014
The Germanna Colony
In the last week I've discovered a whole new group of ancestors. Not only that, but they are connected to something historic, and that's one of my favorite things about genealogy. History comes to life when you know that your ancestors were part of it.
It all started back in August when my new Huff cousin Barbara heard from one of her DNA matches and discovered that she had ties to the surname Wilhoite (spelled in various ways, including Willhoit, Wilhite, Wilheit, and even Wilhoyte.) As she began to discover that more of her previously identified Huff matches had Wilhoite connections, she even set up a separate tree on Ancestry.com since she didn't know how they connected with our Huffs.
Just before Christmas we both got a new match named Pickler. Now this seems random, but believe it or not, it's all going to come together in a minute. Barbara emailed Mr. Pickler who sent her the name of his ancestor from McNairy County, Tennessee. Tennessee sounded promising, so I looked up the ancestor's name on Ancestry.com. I found a tree posted by someone whose name I had seen as a match on Family Tree DNA. I emailed her and found out that two more of my matches were her mother and brother, and another was someone she had matched who had similar surnames. Five matches accounted for!
Using some of the tools on FTDNA and Gedmatch, I verified that all the Pickler matches indeed had DNA in common with my Huff matches. Still didn't know how, but it was definitely there. I looked at the family trees posted by my new Pickler relatives and was confused by the fact that the surname changed from Blankenbaker to Pickler in one generation. I thought it might be a mistake, until I found out that the Pickler surname was originally Blankenbuhler or Blankenbaker. Pickler apparently was a more easily pronounced translation and contraction. I came across a great explanation of how that happened, but of course, I can't find it now. And yes, Kellie Pickler is a descendant of this family.
Doing research on the Wilhoites and Picklers, it's hard not to stumble across the Germanna Colony, because those two surnames are associated with Germanna, especially what they call the Second Colony of 1717. At about the same time that I found Germanna online, Barbara heard from another Wilhoite match who told us about the many books and articles that have been written about the Germanna Colony.
I'm certainly no expert on the Germanna Colony. Heck, I'd never heard of it a month ago. What I know I've learned online on Wikipedia and websites like www.germanna.org. What I've learned is that Virginia Governor Alexander Spottswood brought 42 colonists from Germany in 1713 to create a mining industry in Virginia. He named the colony Germanna, combining "German" with the name of Queen Anne, the ruler of Britain at the time.
The so-called Second Colony arrived in 1717, and their story is truly bizarre. The ship's captain they hired to bring them to America used their fares to pay off his own debts, then sold the passengers (who thought they were headed to Germantown in Philadelphia) to Spottswood as indentured servants. The surnames of the 20 families, who came from the Palatinate region of Germany, include Wilhoite, Blankenbaker/Pickler, Clore (originally Klaar), Broyles (originally Breuel), and Yager. Once we knew to look for them, these names popped up everywhere in lists of surnames from our DNA matches. Using the Chromosome Browser feature on FTDNA, I think I have found the point at which dozens of us match on Chromosome 7 from position 86131629 to position 87246282. The colored lines below represent five of my brother's matches who have Germanna surnames. They line up exactly at these positions on Chromosome 7.
It all started back in August when my new Huff cousin Barbara heard from one of her DNA matches and discovered that she had ties to the surname Wilhoite (spelled in various ways, including Willhoit, Wilhite, Wilheit, and even Wilhoyte.) As she began to discover that more of her previously identified Huff matches had Wilhoite connections, she even set up a separate tree on Ancestry.com since she didn't know how they connected with our Huffs.
Just before Christmas we both got a new match named Pickler. Now this seems random, but believe it or not, it's all going to come together in a minute. Barbara emailed Mr. Pickler who sent her the name of his ancestor from McNairy County, Tennessee. Tennessee sounded promising, so I looked up the ancestor's name on Ancestry.com. I found a tree posted by someone whose name I had seen as a match on Family Tree DNA. I emailed her and found out that two more of my matches were her mother and brother, and another was someone she had matched who had similar surnames. Five matches accounted for!
Using some of the tools on FTDNA and Gedmatch, I verified that all the Pickler matches indeed had DNA in common with my Huff matches. Still didn't know how, but it was definitely there. I looked at the family trees posted by my new Pickler relatives and was confused by the fact that the surname changed from Blankenbaker to Pickler in one generation. I thought it might be a mistake, until I found out that the Pickler surname was originally Blankenbuhler or Blankenbaker. Pickler apparently was a more easily pronounced translation and contraction. I came across a great explanation of how that happened, but of course, I can't find it now. And yes, Kellie Pickler is a descendant of this family.
Doing research on the Wilhoites and Picklers, it's hard not to stumble across the Germanna Colony, because those two surnames are associated with Germanna, especially what they call the Second Colony of 1717. At about the same time that I found Germanna online, Barbara heard from another Wilhoite match who told us about the many books and articles that have been written about the Germanna Colony.
I'm certainly no expert on the Germanna Colony. Heck, I'd never heard of it a month ago. What I know I've learned online on Wikipedia and websites like www.germanna.org. What I've learned is that Virginia Governor Alexander Spottswood brought 42 colonists from Germany in 1713 to create a mining industry in Virginia. He named the colony Germanna, combining "German" with the name of Queen Anne, the ruler of Britain at the time.
The so-called Second Colony arrived in 1717, and their story is truly bizarre. The ship's captain they hired to bring them to America used their fares to pay off his own debts, then sold the passengers (who thought they were headed to Germantown in Philadelphia) to Spottswood as indentured servants. The surnames of the 20 families, who came from the Palatinate region of Germany, include Wilhoite, Blankenbaker/Pickler, Clore (originally Klaar), Broyles (originally Breuel), and Yager. Once we knew to look for them, these names popped up everywhere in lists of surnames from our DNA matches. Using the Chromosome Browser feature on FTDNA, I think I have found the point at which dozens of us match on Chromosome 7 from position 86131629 to position 87246282. The colored lines below represent five of my brother's matches who have Germanna surnames. They line up exactly at these positions on Chromosome 7.
Since so many Huff cousins from different branches seem to have these same matches, we think that perhaps the Germanna lineage came into our Huff family with Susanna or "Sookie," the wife of William Nathan Huff. For years and on many Ancestry.com trees, Susannah was given the maiden name Toney, but no-one ever seemed to have any proof of that. We know that branches of the Wilhoit and Broyles families lived in Greene Co., TN, and so did someone that eventually ended up in Jackson Co.--Barbara's ancestor Enoch Carter. He was a neighbor to the Huffs in Jackson Co. and had a relationship later in life with Sookie. Barbara thinks that Sookie may have been a Wilhoit or Broyles who came to Jackson Co. with Enoch and his wife, perhaps as a servant. There she met and married William Nathan Huff.
Some of my new relatives also match in much larger segments on Chromosome 19. Remember when I said I had found a dozen new cousins who matched on Chromosome 19? Well, it turns out they are also Germanna descendants.
We still have ends to tie up and further data may bring us to different conclusions, but we would never have known without DNA that we had any connection to Germanna's Second Colony. My brother and I even plan to modify our trip to North Carolina this summer and travel north into Virginia to visit the site of the Germanna Colony, about an hour and a half south and west of Washington, D.C.
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| Germanna Visitor Center from www.germanna.org |
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