WatsonRoots

30/07/2025

https://watsonroots.com/molecular-hitchhiker/

Earliest Ancestors: From Y-Adam to Lincolnshire (via a few mammoths, Saxons, and a DNA test kit)

Ever wondered what your paternal ancestors were doing 200,000 years ago? Mine were dodging predators in East Africa, riding horses on the Eurasian steppe, and eventually preaching sermons in Lincolnshire—before the Y chromosome and I made our way to Australia.

Thanks to Y-DNA testing, I’ve traced an unbroken line from Y-Adam to a brand-new haplogroup shared only with my son.

What Y-DNA Testing Actually Tells You (and Why Your Autosomal Test Is Basically a Blurry Family Photo) Before diving into the long, winding journey of my paternal ancestors—from the savannahs of East Africa to a village in Lincolnshire and from there to Australia via Africa, it's worth pausing to ...

19/07/2025

The Kent family of Lincoln, Lincolnshire, didn’t just dabble in cousin marriages—they made a multi-generational art form of it.

If the Kents of Lincoln were baking a family pie, they definitely reused the same ingredients—twice. In what can only be described as a genealogist’s twisty delight (or a geneticist’s mild concern), the Kent family of Lincoln, Lincolnshire, didn’t just dabble in cousin marriages—they made ...

28/01/2023

This week's theme for the 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge is ‘Education’, so I used the opportunity to find out more about my great uncle who was a professor of physiology at Bristol University, and who had an electrical node in the heart named after him – the Bundle of Kent.

When I first began researching my family tree, I never imagined it would lead to the discovery of a world-renowned physiologist—let alone one with a part of the human heart named after him. But that’s exactly what happened when I traced my lineage to Professor Albert Frank Stanley Kent, or as he...

27/11/2022

If you're thinking about a DNA test, this is the best price I've ever seen for an Ancestry DNA kit - Black Friday sale price $85 (AUD), with free delivery from Amazon. https://geni.us/9C1D

That is the current price for Australia, but Amazon Stores in other countries are probably offering similar deals. Normal price in Aus is $129 plus $30 postage.

AncestryDNA tells a more complete story of you. See different regions that make up your ethnicity estimate, learn the history of the areas from ancient to modern times, and even discover surprising facts about locations and the people who called those places home. AncestryDNA not only tells you w...

28/01/2022

:-)

11/01/2022

I have just signed up for the *** 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks *** challenge, were we write a short story about one of our ancestors based on a new theme each week. This weeks theme as "Favourite Find". For me, this is definitely a batch of newspaper reports about the antics of my 3X great grandfather, Joseph Watson. Joseph Watson arrived in Australia (as a ships surgeon) in 1857, leaving behind a wife and 3 very young children in Northumberland. All I had when I started my research was a copy of a letter he wrote to his wife when he arrived in Melbourne, and that he had died in Australia. After a little bit of searching, I found a death certificate from Wollombi from 1864. He had been in Australia for 7 years, and missed most of his children's childhoods ... What was he doing here ? and why did he stay for so long? Over the years, I have found a number of newspaper reports that describe his antics including stealing spirits from a pub, being imprisoned for a month, riding on horseback through the night to rescue a young boy who fell down a well, and sleepwalking out of the second floor of the Maitland Hotel ....

I never expected that an old letter, written in elegant copperplate and signed “Your affectionate husband, Jos.,” would be the spark that ignited a life-long fascination with genealogy. But then again, I never expected to find that my ancestor, Dr Joseph Watson, was a scandal-prone, sleepwalking...

06/12/2021

Finding Families

Discover Your Roots with Professional Genealogy Services Unearth the stories of your ancestors and preserve your heritage for generations to come. These genealogy services combine meticulous research with modern tools to create a comprehensive family history experience tailored to you.Kickstart Your...

11/06/2021

New Season of Who Do You Think You Are started in Australia -

Malcolm Turnbull, Celia Pacquola, Denise Drysdale, Jeff Fatt and Uncle Jack Charles join Grant Denyer, Chris Bath and Natalie Bassingthwaighte in new Australian season of Who Do You Think You Are? Premieres Tuesday 8 June at 7.30pm on SBS.

02/06/2021

In the Charles Booth Archive, there is a map of London drawn in 1898 which highlights the extent of poverty in London. Charles Booth accompanied police officers on a tour of each district, street by street where they described the inhabitants, levels of poverty & crime and colour coded a map of streets from upper class – wealthy, down to lowest class – vicious, semi criminal.

One of the families we are researching was living in London at the time, and from census records, we found his address as Sun Street, Bishopsgate in London.

A description of the street in which the family lived is described in his notebooks as 'Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings', however one block behind Sun Street is Whitecross Lane, which is classified as Lowest class, vicious semi-criminal.

Maybe this is why they decided to emigrate to the colonies ....

https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/14/-0.1174/51.5064/100/0

11/03/2021

If you're thinking about getting a DNA test, now is a good time.
Ancestry DNA test kits on sale for St Patricks Day unti 17 March. - down from AUD129 to AUD89

07/02/2021

This is a cool way to investigate your DNA matches. Each of the dots represents one DNA match with the tester (and the bigger the dot, the closer the match), so by checking how each match connects with other matches, we can create a graph showing all the connections. Then, by running a cluster analysis on the data, we can separate out related families by colour. We can zoom in on each of these clusters and identify the best match to focus our research on, and try and potentially break through some brick walls we were unable to solve via paper records

22/01/2021

The Story of Joseph Watson
https://www.watsonroots.net/joseph-watson