HistorTree

William Silas & Amarentha Smart Johnston: Courthouse Research Uncovers Death Dates

This entry is part of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series. This week’s prompt is AT THE COURTHOUSE. To see other posts in this series, view my 52 Ancestors in 2019 index.

Although genealogy interested me at a young age, I didn’t pick up this hobby — okay, obsession — until the internet made record access easy. I spent my early years researching from home in my pajamas, thinking all the documents I’d ever need were online. Oh, how wrong I was! As my skills improved and I moved onto more challenging research, I learned the records needed to solve difficult problems are rarely online. The most helpful evidence is often squirreled away in libraries or located at county and parish courthouses.

**Franklin Parish Courthouse**, Winnsboro, Louisiana *(photo from Louisiana Fifth Judicial Court)*

I visit courthouses around northeastern Louisiana almost every time I travel home. Because the past four generations of my family have lived in Liddieville, I spend a good deal of time at the Franklin Parish Courthouse in Winnsboro, Louisiana. The parish has not experienced any record loss since it was organized in 1843, so over 175 years of documents are available at the Clerk of Court’s office. Marriage, land, probate, civil court, and criminal court records — it’s all there. And none of it is digitized. Researching in rural courthouses like these means skimming through huge, musty-smelling books, asking staff to retrieve boxes from storage, and then personally digging through those boxes of original court documents. I love it!

One of my first big finds at the Franklin Parish Courthouse was a succession that provided death dates for two key individuals in my family tree: William Silas Johnston and his wife Amarentha “Alma” Smart.

Analyzing DNA Auto-Clusters with Pedigree Collapse: Paternal Super Cluster C

This post is my third in a series about Genetic Affairs’ auto-cluster tool and using it to analyze my paternal matches at AncestryDNA. As you might recall, my father’s parents were likely first cousins, once removed (1C1R), meaning he has a high degree of pedigree collapse. I ran the auto-cluster tool on my father’s test at a range of 50 – 250 cM and previously identified four “super clusters”:

**Paternal “Super Clusters” as interpreted from results of Genetic Affairs Auto-Cluster Tool**, run date of 3 Jan 2019

My earlier posts examined Super Cluster A and Super Cluster B and identified a MRCA — Most Recent Common Ancestor — for each. Today we’ll look at Super Cluster C.

Analyzing DNA Auto-Clusters with Pedigree Collapse: Paternal Super Cluster B

This post is my second about Genetic Affairs’ auto-cluster tool and using it to analyze my paternal matches at AncestryDNA. (You can read part 1 here.) As you might recall, my father’s parents were likely first cousins, once removed (1C1R), meaning he has a high degree of pedigree collapse.

I previously identified four “super clusters” when running the auto-cluster tool on my father’s test at a range of 50 – 250 cM.

My first post examined Super Cluster A, which I determined to be Johnston/McCauley descendants. Today we will examine the next super cluster.

James Paul Smith: Family Photos from Louisiana REA News

This entry is part of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series. This week’s prompt is FAMILY PHOTO. To see other posts in this series, view my 52 Ancestors in 2019 index.

Flipping through my grandmother’s photo albums in 2013, I found a newspaper clipping she carefully preserved. It’s old and yellowed with age, but the article contains the earliest group photos I have of my mother’s family. At the time of the article, my grandparents James Paul Smith and Dorothy Jean Hendry were raising eight children — all age 8 and younger — on their farm in Liddieville, Franklin Parish, Louisiana.

**Article about the James Paul Smith Family**; published in Louisiana *REA News*, about Summer 1960

Analyzing DNA Auto-Clusters with Pedigree Collapse: Paternal Super Cluster A

I’ve been playing with a few of the newest DNA clustering tools this winter, hoping they could give insight to my paternal family. My father’s family has a high-degree of pedigree collapse, and his parents were likely first cousins, once removed (1C1R). Other branches of his family tree also intermarried often, resulting in DNA results that are challenging to interpret.

I ran Genetic Affairs’ auto-cluster tool on my father’s AncestryDNA test with range set to 50 – 250 cM. The tool returned 206 matches, ordered below by cluster. I have also identified “super clusters” and labeled these areas A-D:

Genetic genealogist Dana Leeds has a series of blog posts about analyzing super clusters, so I’m taking a cue from her and breaking my analysis into these smaller, more manageable chunks. Today, let’s look at Paternal Super Cluster A.