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.

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.