General

The first news is so far I have found NO NPE in either line. What is an NPE? Non Parental Event.¹ In other words, my paper records do agree with DNA. All lines have been confirmed to around the mid 1700s or as far as I have been able to go. I need to learn more about using DNA results to try to find our last few missing “recent” ancestors. One is the wife of John Ratliff (ca 1805-1847), my third great grandfather. I’m also not sure of his parents, but from DNA I know who his grandparents are. Also, I do not know for sure who the parents of our second great grandfather Alexander Anderson (1805-1884) is. We think the name is Archibald, but I cannot be sure of a suitable person in the records. The good news is I have a clue that might work out. We do know the ancestry of his wife.

The chart below is how ancestry.com displays something they call Thrulines, and is so far the most important way that I am using the DNA information. What they do is compare DNA matches with me to other people’s ancestry trees comparing them to my tree. In this case it works pretty well because Robert Davis’ ancestry is well known and that means most people’s trees are reasonably correct. I conclude from this that I am related to 5 children of Robert Davis. That does not prove the name of Robert Davis, but does provide confirmation that I am related to 4 other children who we believe are children of Robert Davis. I say this because sometimes we do know the names of the children, but not the parent’s name, usually in the case of missing or incorrect wife’s name. All I know is I am related to 78 other people who claim to descend from Robert Davis. But in this easy case, this is sufficient for my purposes, which is to confirm that Robert Davis is my ancestor.

“You might have only thought you are a product of your parents (Mom and Dad), but it does go much further than those two. If you double the number of ancestors in each generation, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and so on, we can see that by the time you are back 10 generations, you have the potential for 1,024 ancestral lines. True, you might not learn the names of over one thousand ancestors, but they did exist.”¹.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them… (George Eliot)

When I was a child I enjoyed visiting the St. Matthews cemetery. St. Matthews had family pot luck dinners that I really appreciated as a child – there were so many good cooks in the community! And after we ate, we kids would often go outside and play in the cemetery, where our ancestors were buried. The living and the dead.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Day of the Dead and maybe wondered what it is and if it relates to Halloween… Apparently its origin is not well known, but it’s believed to be a combination of native cultures with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day of the Catholics. The pre-Hispanic cultures believed mourning the dead was disrespectful – death was a natural phase of life’s continuum. The dead were still part of the community and kept alive in memory and spirit. And, during Day of the Dead, they temporarily return to earth.

This blog is for histories and stories that I found about my ancestors. My paternal grandparent’s surnames were KLAMM and BRENNER and were German origin. My maternal grandparent’s surnames were ANDERSON and KIMSEY. They came to northern Missouri from Virginia, so I’m calling them the southerners. Most people coming to these pages will be related to only some of the people I write about, but I hope you enjoy the stories nonetheless.

My German ancestors came from near Mannheim on the Rhine (the left blue line in the Germany image). My southern ancestors came to Virginia and moved west, finally to Missouri.