These are my great-grandparents Anthony Sakusky (1878-1921) and Cecelia “Tillie” Buscavage (1883-1922). They lived inShenandoah and Tamaqua, coal and railroad towns in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Anthony was a coal miner. Both Anthony and Tillie were born in Lithuania, but neither left documents specifying their family places of origin. Tillie...
Finding female ancestors often challenges researchers! DNA–both autosomal and mitochondrial–is a powerful tool for identifying the often-hidden women in our family tree, and case studies–illustrations of how researchers have solved particular kinds of problems–help us learn how to use new methods and tools in our own research. Here is...
In so many ways, 2016 was an interesting and productive year, and 2017 looks even more promising. One of my favorite things is teaching, and I had the opportunity to do lots of that! Some of my highlights were beginning to give talks on DNA, presenting a webinar on...
Today AncestryDNA announced that they sold 1.4 million DNA test kits in the fourth quarter of 2016, setting a sales record for the quarter and bringing their DNA database over three million participants.[1. “Ancestry Sets AncestryDNA Sales Record Over Holiday Period and Fourth Quarter,” 10 January 2017, Ancestry Corporate,...
Earlier this week Blaine Bettinger posted on “The Danger of Distant Matches.”[1. Blaine Bettinger, “The Danger of Distant Matches,” 6 January 2017, The Genetic Genealogist (http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2017/01/06/the-danger-of-distant-matches/ : accessed 7 January 2017). This was a follow-up to an earlier post, “Small Matching Segments–Friend or Foe?,” 2 December 2014 (http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2014/12/02/small-matching-segments-friend-foe/ :...
