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 ...

06/02/2023

Visiting Lincoln in 2020, I found a tablet memorial to my great grandparents, William & Ann Rudgard. While searching for their marriage & baptism records, I thought I had made a mistake and added the wrong family to my tree, as the dates didn’t add up, but it turned out that there was no mistake an in fact the ‘mistake’ was repeated 4 times, starting with the birth of my great grandmother! In addition, I discovered that the vicar who had married my great grandparents was in fact my great great grandfather, who also ended up baptising 7 of their 8 children! The only one he didn't baptise was to be his daughter-in-law, a few years later.

A post about my search for the maiden name of my great grandmother, and how the dates did not add up ...

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.

A post 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.

20/01/2023

My 2x great grandfather was very out of place…. So much so that he forgot where he was and sleep-walked out of the second floor window …

My 3x great grandfather was very out of place…. So much so that he forgot where he was and sleep-walked out of the second floor window …

07/01/2023

This weeks 52 ancestors there is 'Favourite Photo'.... I don’t really have a single favourite photo, but I do like family trees with thumbnail pics of ancestors. Obviously, the further back you go, this is not possible as the world’s first photo was taken in 1826 (and my tree goes back to the 1500’s). Some of the earliest portrait photos are pretty stunning, and can be found in the internet (link in my blog). My tree has some early one’s, but none so grand. For this week’s blog, I thought I would look at all the photo’s I have for ancestors born before 1850.
The photo’s themselves would have been taken much later, as most of the pics I have of these ancestors are when they are much older, up to the early 1900’s. I have some portraits of earlier ancestors from the 1700’s, but these are paintings not photos. Obviously this is quite biased, and I only have these for ancestors or family connections that were reasonably wealthy or famous. None of my ancestors that were ordinary agricultural labourers or tradespeople had this luxury.

The theme for this weeks 52 ancestors challenge is “I’d like to meet …” Well, there really is one person I would like to meet, but the conversation might be a bit awkward. She is Anne Rudgard, my great grandmother – born in Lincoln in 1824, and passed away at the age of 95 in 1919. In the ...

04/01/2023

I only managed to go for 8 weeks last year, so trying again in 2023! The theme for this weeks 52 ancestors challenge is “I’d like to meet …” Well, there really is one person I would like to meet, but the conversation might be a bit awkward. https://watsonroots.net/id-like-to-meet/

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...

12/02/2022

For this weeks theme of 'Branching Out', I decided to explore 'Gephi' – a graph database and network analysis tool, by looking at all the surnames in my tree and how they connect to each other.
https://watsonroots.net/branching-out-big-time/

For this weeks 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge, I described branching out my family tree to identify common ancestors of DNA matches

28/01/2022

:-)

24/01/2022

The theme for this weeks in 52 weeks challenge is CURIOUS.... and I have a curious record of 2 Dudley Charles Wall's - One in Canada, and one in the USA who are probably the same person. All the records from England, Canada and the USA align on a scenario where Dudley Charles Wall, born in England in 1875, migrated to Canada in 1903, then married and had a family, but by 1915 had moved to the USA and married again and started a new family. BUT ... the US census, newspaper articles and obituaries make no mention of his time in Canada, or the family he left behind..... Or maybe they are 2 separate people who happened to have the same name and birth year and left England at about the same time? https://watsonroots.net/dudley-charles-wall/

For this weeks 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge, I reviewed a curious record of 2 Dudley Charles Wall's - One in Canada, and one in the USA .... could they be the same person?

18/01/2022

The theme for this weeks in 52 weeks challenge is 'Favourite Photos'. I decided to use the opportunity to find photos of my grandparents, who I never met as they had passed away by the time I was born. I thought I would also try out MyHeritage's new Photo enhancing and colourising technology .... and the results were amazing!
https://watsonroots.net/technicolour-grandparents/

For this weeks 52 ancestors in 52 weeks challenge, I decided to try out MyHeritage's new photo enhancement technology