Family History Adventures

05/11/2024

From Eric and Rebecca's North Facing Deck

02/20/2024

I don't know who you are who follow this static site, but thank you. When I made it I hoped to make Genealogy a business, but I simply can't do it. I don't want to promise you what I don't already know about your family, and once I know it, there's simply no way to charge for it.

So instead I'm going to try to write about the process of sorting through the chaff. It's not easy to cross-reference, balance probabilities, and come to a sound conclusion. But that's what a good researcher does every day.

EVEN in an abundance of primary sources it takes a lot of work to ensure that sources don't conflict with one another and when they do, decide which to jettison. That's especially true when there's an "off the reservation" source, since every rejection MAY just be a subtle choice to conform to a result that one has already been made emotionally.

We humans are fatally flawed in our obsession to be more "right" than the next guy or gal. Sometimes we just have to say "I don't know."

If anyone has questions about METHODS or STANDARDS, please ask, but I can't help you understand the records of your country, unless your country is the US or Canada. Anything else would be arrogant presumption on my part.

If you need help like that, please contact Family Search. They are the best source for high-quality genealogical consultation in the World.

12/31/2021

These are the photos of Eliza Jane Bugg Williams mentioned in the previous post. Eliza was a descendant of the Lanier family of English Court musicians through her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Warren Lanier who married Ephraim Bugg.

Nicholas Lanier "The Younger" was Charles the First's favorite composer and a noted artist. The King gave Nicholas 30,000 pounds -- back when a pound was a pound of silver -- and sent him to Italy to buy art. He returned with what has long been recognized as the core of the British Museum collection.

What a responsibility.

I hope you enjoy these pictures of a very strong-willed and long-lived woman.

P.S. In the picture with four women and a man, my paternal grandmother Sarah Elizabeth Williams Bullington is the shortest woman in the middle of the picture.

12/31/2021

OK, some new photos have come into my possession, and I'd like to share some. Everyone seems to like the old photos; I know I do.

I think the photos of my father's maternal grandmother, Eliza Jane Bugg Williams are the only ones which have made it to the web. I recently visited my sister in Pittsburgh and was presented with our family photo album from her girlhood. She's twenty years older than I am.

There is also a picture of my paternal grandfather, AC "Dayton" Bullington at a considerably younger age than any other I've seen. So his profile picture has gotten a spiffing up in my Ancestry tree.

So, enough with the orating. Below are four pictures of Eliza Jane Bugg Williams, born 19 Aug 1850 in Clarksville, Johnson County, Arkansas and died 11 Mar 1942 in Ft. Smith, Sebastian County, Arkansas. Three of them include various descendants. The portrait is of her at a younger age than those with descendants.

09/11/2021

Here's a short post with no picture, unfortunately. It is, rather, a description of the research process when people are truly unknown.

I received an email from a young woman who is a fairly high match to me on both Ancestry and Family Tree DNA a bit more than a year ago. She is in the range at which the match MUST be true; there are too many cM of shared DNA for it to be a "false positive". In fact, it turns out that we are second cousins twice removed. We share ancestors William James Bullington and Sarah Ann Boone Bullington. They are my great-grandparents, her 3rd greats.

She was given up for adoption and her records are sealed, so she decided to use DNA to find her birth parents. She is very grateful for the life that her adoptive parents gave her, and has a strong relationship with her adoptive mother still. Unfortunately, her adoptive father passed away a few years ago.

But still, she was curious about her genetic roots.

She had tried an "Adoption Angel", folks who offer to help adoptees find their birth parents, and for some reason chose to contact me as well. I am among her highest matches, but not the highest at all. So she may have contacted others with no result. Or maybe it was just fate that led her to someone who is very active building out the extended family tree.

Anyway, she had an uncle level match which turned out to be to a maternal uncle, so it was pretty easy to find her mother, who still lives near the town in which my friend was born. But both the Adoption Angel and I ran smack into a brick wall with her birth father. She downloaded her "top 50" list of adoptions and sent it to me, and I did "matches in common" search on both Ancestry and Family Tree.

After a bit of work by me "rolling" descendants of my Bullington great-grandparents forward to identify the living people who matched us both, I concluded that the best possibility was that we did indeed share William James and Sarah as most recent common ancestors.

She was able to contact her birth mother who didn't remember much about that time, but insisted that the father was a "James Tyler" over and over. I worked hard to find a Tyler branch by marriage from William James and Sarah, but to no avail.

Brick wall.

Then, about ten days ago I got a huge surprise when a new top level match for me popped, my third highest. She has two tiny trees on Ancestry, but one showed me her maiden name and the other her married name.

With some work on Whitepages I was able to identify the woman and trace her lineage and it went right back to William James and Sarah. When I saw that her birth name was "Taylor" and that she lived in the town in which my friend was born, I was really excited.
"Taylor" could certainly be remembered as "Tyler".

I emailed her and asked "How high is your match with [my new match]?" She quickly replied, "The cm's are SO HIGH. She must be my Aunt!" And indeed she is her Aunt, with 1900 cM shared, smack in the middle of the range for aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews.

That brick wall was broken down because of the good fortune that my new cousin decided to take a DNA test. Perhaps she was only interested in her ethnic background, because she was surprised when I contacted her. She had not looked at her match list in the two days since it was completed.

But what a very nice end of the search for my cousin.

05/24/2021

My pretty distant cousin Mary Bullington, who is a professional artist living in Roanoke, VA, recently had a one-woman show which included this fantastic painting that spectacularly blends the style of Van Gogh and the coloring of Matisse. She calls it "Alien Orchidaceae".

I hope you like it; I certainly do.

Her more frequent style includes human faces charmingly abstracted but intensely personal as in the second example.

If you like her art -- and she has other styles as well; these are my favorite examples -- contact her at https://www.facebook.com/marybbullington

She's also a VERY nice person and was a professor before she gave herself to art full time, and, so, is extremely interesting.

09/08/2020

Woo-Hoo! Something to post about! As those of you who have read this little effort for a while -- thank you! -- you know that I'm involved in a Y-DNA project trying to disentangle the Bullington genealogy back in the 1650-1770 time period. There are several "competing" versions, and they can't all be true.

There are probably elements of truth in all of them, but each tries to be the "final answer" and that's just not going to happen. There have been people intensively studying the family since the time of the previous pandemic in the 19-teens and the arguments continue. There are over 2000 trees with Nicholas Bullington our common ancestor on Ancestry.

If there were a cache of documents that would silence the disagreements, they would have been found by now.

BUT, Y-DNA when allied with Autosomal DNA can almost certainly do the trick. So I spend a good part of my research time "rolling" Bullington lines from the late 1800's forward to living men today and enrolling them in the program.

Just this evening I have discovered this wonderful bit of Americana which has been run by a branch of the descendants of a Benjamin Bullington born about 1775 in what is now the extreme northeastern tip of Tennessee. Soon after the stock market crash of 1929, a man named Isaac Nicholas Bullington opened a little restaurant in downtown Roanoke, Virginia and made a go of it. His great-grandson, James Matthew Bullington runs it today. Now THAT is a family business!

So, here is the link to the Texas Tavern's website. Please, if you ever go to Roanoke, give them a try; the prices are lower than you can believe and most people give it at least four stars.

https://texastavern-inc.com/

The classic 1930s 10-stool diner awaits you in downtown Roanoke. Hotdogs, Hamburgers, our signature Chile and the famous "Cheesy Western" is sure to please!

08/02/2020

My cousin David Lee Bullington with whom I'm working in a Y-DNA study of our family sent me this family history excerpt written by a Thomas H Bullington in 1961. Thomas was born in 1877 in Limestone County, Alabama and died soon after having written it for his children.

"I am still thinking and dreaming that we may be back again at home to live it over again but guess it’s too far gone. I must not forget to tell of my wonderful brothers. ... Their going away was my great shock up to that time, it happened that I lived on to share bitter with sweet and I wonder how long this can continue. It must be a long journey or road that has no end so I just wait and hope all will come well for all concerned. But I never understood why God made a man and let him die."

12/18/2019

OK, it's PICTURE time! Linda found a large number of water-damaged but mostly salvageable photos when we were in Anchorage this past summer. I have finally gotten them all scanned and there are a few very nice ones.

My favorite is her great uncles Albert (left) and Max (middle) with her great aunt Ida (right) on their father's farm in Rusk County Wisconsin some time around 1917 or 18. Max unfortunately was killed in a hunting accident in 1922, but he was obviously a very happy young boy!

There is also this amazing "photo postcard" of Linda's grandfather Fred C Stassel's cousin Ella Deuel and the students of her one-room school in Arnold Wisconsin postmarked Nov 25 1907. There is no information which one of the children is Ella, but she was born in 1901 so she's one of the smaller three in the front center.

Also present are Linda's paternal grandparents, Fred Carl Stassel and Lillian Christina Sandberg on the day of their wedding, the 3rd of September 1921.

And finally, though it's not a very crisp photo, here are Fred C Stassel (driving the team) and his brothers Albert (left) and Paul (right). Max is barely visible behind Fred.

11/20/2019

So, I have some exciting -- for me at least -- news. My remaining Y-67 "match" has agreed to upgrade to Big Y 700. He has a very well-documented path back to Robert Bullington who died in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, 1822. Robert was a strong Patriot, and there's a delicious family story about him and his wife's brother-in-law who was a suspected Tory sympathizer.

The man's name was David Nance, and apparently they had bad blood, and any of you who are Bullington relatives know that can be a tense situation.

There is a surviving court record from the 22nd of January 1780, which states that "Robert Bullington was found guilty of having stabbed and murdered David Nance". Apparently nothing was done about it because Robert lived another forty two years. I guess Nance being a Tory excused it as "all's fair in war", but that must have led to a pretty scene between Elizabeth, Robert's wife, and her sister Mary.

When I first was researching the Bullington line back in Ol' Virginny, I found a large number of trees which asserted that Robert Bullington who died in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1852 was "Robert Jr" the son of the Robert who killed David Nance.

Alas, a lack. A lack that is of proof. Based on Census documents from Union and Spartanburg "Districts" (e.g. "Counties") in 1800 through 1850, I believe Robert of Spartanburg's father to have been a John Bullington born around 1730 in Henrico Parish and probably, though not certainly, the brother or half-brother of Robert of Pittsylvania.

In fact, the Y-DNA results almost certainly rule out Robert of Spartanburg being the son of Robert of Pittsylvania, though we are all definitely descended from a "MRCA" ("Most Recent Common Ancestor") who lived about 1700 according to Lucas. That agrees well with the "common opinion" of Bullingtons in early Tidewater Virginia.

The "real" "Robert Jr" is the likely ancestor of one of the men in our research group, and that brings me to my exciting news. That man has four "personal variants", that is a unique value for a single Single Nucleotide Polymorphism ("SNP") that nobody else who has been tested has. There are roughly 80,000 of these SNP's and, according to the Admin at the DF27 project, once they change they almost never change again, at least, not for thousands of years.

A father carrying a particular SNP marker passes it to his son who passes it to his father's grandsons who pass it to his great-grandsons who pass it his great-great grandsons and so on. This is one of the two mechanisms by which Anthropology by genetics is carried out. The other involves study of the mtDNA genome which is carried through one's all-female ancestral line. One's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's ....... mother back to "genetic Eve".

So, if our new tester has one of those personal variants, that will become a slam-dunk identifier for the descendants of Robert of Pittsylvania.

I am working on a chart to display these Bullington family relationships, but it's not easy to do manually.

11/20/2019

11/04/2019

Facebook keeps nagging me to post something, but I don't have any cool old pictures to share. So, I'll take a chance that you won't get TOO bored if I update you on the Y-DNA study I'm in at Family Tree DNA.

Please bear with me, though. I'm typing on a $29 phone because Linda and I are in Mexico and I didn't bring my computer.

The Cliff's Notes version is that the four other fellows in the study and I share a Most Recent Common Ancestor ("MRCA") who was born between 325 and 410 years before our average birth year of 1955. That means he was probably born between 1545 and 1630, though it might have been a few years on either side of that range.

Since no pair of the five of us has any further SNP variances in common, we probably descend through at least two of the MRCA's sons.

This description fits Nicholas Bullington who was born in 1587 in Kidderminster, Worcesterdhire, England and came to Jamestown before 1623 perfectly. Four men born between 1625 and 1640 with the surname "Bullington" are mentioned in one or another documents surviving from the period, and two of them left wills which name at least two sons.

So I believe that the broadly accepted theory that all of us genetically "Bullington" males (and you daughters, grand-daughters, and so on, plus men related through you) living in the US are his descendants. Because of "Non-Paternal Events", that group of Nicholas' descendants includes a number of "Bowling" and "Ball" descendants as well. And because of a documented name change, it includes a number of "Burlington" descendants as well.

However, the results have thrown some doubt on the likelihood that Robert Bullington who died in 1822 in Pittsylvania County was the father of John Bowling born in 1790 in Pittsylvania County. If Robert Bullington was John Bowling's father then the other Bullington-surnamed man in the study should have at least one additional variant in common with the Bowling member. Both men have four private variants, and Robert Pittsylvania is four generations and 160 years later than Nicholas. One of their four variants should have arisen in that time.

The odds say either the Bullington-surnamed man is not descended from Robert of Pittsylvania, or the Bowling man is not. The Bullington man is a GREAT researcher, but even he admits that the paper trail is not ironclad.

We have a Bullington-surnamed man who DOES have an iron-clad trail back to Robert of Pittsylvania who has agreed to join the group, and his test will be upgraded to Big Y 700. He should share at least one variant with one of the two of them.

I also thought we had figured out who the father of the Ball-surnamed man in the group was, but the lack of any shared variants with me has disproven my theory. I believed that his grandfather, John Ball, born in 1890 in Cocke County, Tennessee, was the son of one of the four sons of a James Bullington who moved to Cocke County after tge Civil War. James was born around1830 in Spartanburg, South Virginia to Caleb Bullington, my 2nd great grandfather's younger brother. So, the Ball-surnamed gentleman and I should be close enough cousins to show up as Autosomal matches. Alas, we do not share any additional variant, nor are we "cousins" on either Ancestry of FTDNA Family Finder.

So, this testing spree has probably verified the Nicholas-Is-Grandpa-To-Us-All theory, but blown to shreds two beautiful theories of later detailed descendancy.

I hope this isn't too boring.

By the way, I THINK that you can comment on what I write here. It is my intention that you are able to do so, and I would love hearing your reactions.

04/23/2019

This weekend Linda and I visited with her brother Paul at Hansville. We had a really great time and saw a number of normal winter visitor birds still hanging out but in breeding plumage. The Horned Grebes were spectacular in the evening sunlight!

But the REALLY cool thing is that Paul found several envelopes with pictures and genealogical profile sheets on the Neel/Neale family from Linda's Aunt Joan who did genealogy the hard way back in the 1970's and '80's. The blockbuster is a picture which Joan has tagged as "Asberry Sr Neel". In it he looks like he's about 40-45; he was born in 1822. It's below along with one from about the same time of his mother, Mary Ann Sheridine.

It also had photos of Paul and Linda's all paternal line great-grandparents Carl August Stassel and Emma Christine Caroline Schoening and their 2nd great-grandparents in that line Johann Gottlieb Stößel and Marie Emma Gehrtz. They're all below as well. Carl August and Emma are the younger couple; Gottlieb and Marie the older.

This is exciting for me because it means that we have good photos of six of their eight great-grandparents and five of the sixteen 2nd great-grandparents in their section of my big tree.

Photos make such a difference.

03/10/2019

I've been working on the photo reminiscences for Angie's memorial next weekend and have received a LOT of wonderful photos from Maize of Angie growing up.

These aren't the old photos I usually put here, but they may mean something to some of you. They certainly do to me since I didn't live with her after her age three.

08/09/2018

I have very exciting personal news today. Last night Family Tree DNA notified me that I have "a new Y-DNA match" at the 37, 25, and 12 markers levels. The gentleman is almost Bullington-surnamed, unlike four of my five previously identified close matches who are "Bowlings" He is a "Burlington" and his GEDCOM tree on FTDNA shows when the first "l" became an "r".

As I mentioned in my introductory email "Lots of people say 'Burlington' when they read my name. Maybe your great-grandfather got tired of correcting folks and said 'Yeah, that's right.'" The response email I received from his cousin, the genealogist managing his "kit", essentially said "That's what happened". She said that Phylander Bullington's "first first few children are Bullington and the younger are Burlington". That's funny, at least to me.

I am REALLY excited about this contact, because Ms. Byxbee (the cousin of my match who is managing his kit) is attending a "Genealogical and History Conference" this weekend. She's obviously a professional!

For readers who like the pictures more than my techno-babble, here is one of my Dad's Williams family relatives, with my formidable grandmother front and center with her brothers and sisters. Front row left to right: Bonnie Hiram, Norah Etta, Sarah Elizabeth (grandma), May Addie. Back row left to right: George Wesley, Minta A, John Benjamin.

07/11/2018

Whew, this genetic genealogy ("Gege" pronounced like "Gigi"?) can be nitroglycerine. Handle with care.

First I find that five out of six of my y-line (AKA "surname") matches are "Bowling" men, and now I stumble onto an unknown "first cousin" of someone who has entrusted me to manage her test (actually "great-neice" which is the same genetic distance). I'm like the Angel of Bad News.

Fortunately, the NPE which eventually gave rise to the grand-niece was already known, so that was a relief. And the young woman is going to be welcomed into her biological paternal family if she wishes. So the outcome is great, but there was a moment of real discomfort. Do I tell or not?

Now that I've mentioned the Bowling thing again, it's time to put out a call to any readers (I know there are a few of you out there) who are yourself a Bullington male or who has a Bullington male brother or uncle or whatever to consider y-line testing.

I've made the "investment" -- or maybe the narcissistic ego-buy -- in "BigY 500" at Family Tree DNA. They claim to investigate each and every SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) in my y-chromosome and will soon pronounce me a "Terminal SNP". Given the relatively slow mutation rate of the y-chromosome, any of you who have not been tested would not need to replicate my big purchase but just get tested at Y-67 and purchase two or three SNP match tests, depending what they find for me, at $40 apiece. The more SNP's which match, the closer two men are genetically.

There has been a lot of controversy around the confusion of Robert Bullington of Spartanburg, SC (my 3rd ggf) and Robert Bullington Jr of Pittsylvania County, VA. For years it was "settled" that Robert of Spartanburg was the same person as Robert Jr of Pittsylvania. However, there is far too much documentary evidence that refutes that. Saliently, in the 1850 Federal Census for Spartanburg County, Robert is shows as "84" years of age and his progression through the age tranches in the previous three Censi is consistent with that. That means he was born in 1765 or 1766. However, the birth documents for Robert Jr state clearly that he was born in December of 1776, a full decade later.

But the icing on the cake is that in the 1820 Federal Census for Pittsylvania County there is a "Robert Jr Bullington" of the proper age tranche ONE PAGE from "Robert Sr Bullington. Even when confronted with this clear evidence, there are still holdouts who refuse to consider the documents. DNA might finally convince them; at least I can hope.

There is already one Bullington-surnamed man (the other one of my six real matches) who has tested at Y-67. That gentleman is a descendant of Robert Sr of Pittsylvania through an older brother to Robert Jr and is three degrees of genetic distance from me at 67 markers. The one Bowling gentleman who has also tested at Y-67 is also three degrees of genetic distance from me, but I do not know if the same markers are involved. I'm hoping to convince the Bullington-surnamed man to contribute to the Bolling Family Project as have I. If he does so, I will know the specifics of his marker values.

There is another descendant of Robert Sr of Pittsylvania who is "considering" y-line testing. He is actually a descendant of Robert Jr as well so that will be a DIRECT test of Robert of Spartanburg's ostensible relationship with Robert Sr of Pittsylvania. If a descendant of Robert Jr matches the descendant of his older brother noticeably more closely than he matches me on individual markers, then Robert of Spartanburg CANNOT be Robert Jr of Pittsylvania.

I have also established a relationship with a gentleman who is also a descendant of Robert of Spartanburg through my 2nd ggf's older brother. We should be genetically closer to each other than we are to either of Robert of Pittsylvania's descendants and strengthens the likelihood that our link to early Virginia Bullingtons is through John Bullington, the elder brother of Robert Sr of Pittsylvania.

I'm willing to be wrong on all this, but I think that the preponderance of the evidence hints that the data will support the hypothesis.

And as a parting shot of GeGe this evening, the Bowling-surnamed male who has tested at y-67 also did a small sample of individual SNP testing back in 2008 when he joined FTDNA. He unfortunately passed away the very next year, so I can't talk with him, but he did enough testing to have a "R-DF27 Terminal SNP".

Since we are genetically separated by only a distance of 3 at 67 STR (Short Tandem Repeat) markers, there is a 100% probability that we share a common ancestor within 23 generations, or about 750 years. That's a lot more recent than 4300. So, the probability is 100% that I have that SNP marker or would have had it except that there was a later "reversion" mutation to that marker within the last 700 years. IOW, we come from the same people.

R-DF27 arose about 4300-4600 ybp (years before the present) in the area that is now the French-Spanish-Andorran border. It reaches its highest presence in living men in the Basque communities in that region. How our ancestors madd the migration to the British Isles may be described by the string of positive SNP's following R-DF27.

So, a leetle hot Iberian blood for us Bullingtons! I like that; we have enough of "John Bull"......

06/30/2018

Last night and today I had the great pleasure of finding pictures of Linda's Neale grandparents and her great-uncle and aunt when they were all young. When Linda was searching in her Dad's room in Anchorage she found a box of Neale family photos and documents which are a treasure trove back to the 1850's. I will be working to link the pictures of William and Mary Anne Sheridine Neal's descendants to their profiles in the family tree in the next couple of days.

But right now I'd like to add a photo of her great-grandparents Oscar Winfred and Cora Dell Combs Neale at their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1948. They clearly had a very affectionate relationship.