Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Ellen's Questions Part 2

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

 It's Saturday Night again -

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

  

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has our assignment for this week:

1)  Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted 20 questions on her blog last week - see Even MoreQuestions About Your Ancestors and Maybe A Few About You (posted 27 June).

2)  We will do these five at a time - Questions 6 to 10 tonight (we did 1 through 5 last week)

3)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

Here are the next five questions and my answers:

6.  How many DNA companies have you tested with or transferred to? Have you tested at all the 5 major companies?

I have personally tested with Ancestry, 23andMe, and LivingDNA. I had my maternal grandmother and my paternal aunt test at FamilyTreeDNA. I have transferred my DNA to My Heritage, FamilyTreeDNA, and GEDMatch. My husband has also tested at Ancestry, 23andMe, Living DNA, and the Y test at FTDNA. None of the results have made any breakthroughs.

7.  Do you have an ancestor that had a successful business? Is it still in business?  

Generally my family worked for other people and didn’t have their own business. My grandfather, Tom J Johnston, had a pool hall business with his brother, Hal, in Walnut Creek, but they didn’t have it very long. My great-grandfather, John A. Hork, who was a tailor, had his own business. Many of my southern families were farmers.

8.  How long ago was your last “genealogy/DNA happy dance?”

It has been a long time since I have discovered a new ancestor. I am happy now to discover articles about my ancestors in newly digitized newspapers of many of my ancestors’ hometowns. Instead, I’ve done mini-happy dances. I have found marriage and birth announcements, start of new jobs, auto accidents, and purchases and sales of real estate. I learned just this week that my great-grandmother, Julia Ann Hork, visited her mother, Susanna Sievert in Joliet in 1906. I had no idea she had done that.

9.  Did you ever discover that a friend was also a distant cousin?

No. Though on the FamilySearch app, We’re Related, I have found classmates at SLIG who were really distant cousins (like 12th or more), though I have not done the research myself, so don’t take it seriously. I have no New England ancestry, so am not surprised my friends and I are not related.

10.  Do you have a genealogy brick wall? Do you think you will be able to use DNA to work past it?

I have many genealogy brick walls. Some are due to lack of records like my Irish line out of County Cork, or my Johnston line out of South Carolina. I just need to start doing FAN research to see if that will help with a break through.

Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.