I am having some problems locating my line and I don't have any male Davidson relatives to submit to the DNA project. I do have a family tree as follows: According to our family tree (Volume 2 by Dorothy Davidson Symmonds, entitled "A History and Genealogy of the Families of Howland, Brown, Follett, Van Dyke, Lamb, Spaulding, and Davidson with Related Lines of Treat, Botsford, Parker, Burwell, Clark, Andrews, Symmonds, Burnaman, Ashbaugh, and Smith From Holland, England, Scotland, and France to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas From "The Mayflower" pilgrims in 1620 to the 1980s"), which came to me from my father Seemer Halley Davidson, there was a William Davidson who purchased land in Maryland in 1649. This document is in the Hall of records, Annapolis, Maryland, Lib. 6 Fol. 118, Transfers - 1649. I don't know if this is our ancestor or not. There is also a Volume 1, published in 1985, (now out of print), entitled "A history and Genealogy of the Pritchett, Rimmer, Jacobs, Hamilton, Eldridge, Etheridge, Smith, Brown, and Davidson Families from North Carolina, Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas in the early 1800s to 1900s." I have a list of the libraries that received Volume 2 if any one is interested. The start of our line, in America, was James Davidson who was born around 1710 (DOD 28 March 1764). He married Elizabeth Treat (granddaughter of Territorial Governor Robert Treat) 2 Sept 1736 in Milford Connecticut. Five sons (James Jr., John, Andrew, Joseph, and Isaac) are listed in her will. Their son, James (DOB 24 Aug 1737.DOD 6 April 1826) was in the Rev. War. The record is confusing as to whether he was a Sgt., Lt. or Cap. He married Ann (Anna) Hine Mar 1760. The direct line continues as follows: Richard Treat Davidson known as Treat, (DOB unknown.DOD 10 July 1858) married Mary "Polly" Stowe 28 Aug 1791 in Milford, New Haven, Ct. (9 children) Jonah Treat Davidson also known as Treat, (DOB unknown.DOD 3 Jan 1875, Roxbury, Ct.) married Mehitable Botsford 30 Dec 1812 in Milford or Roxbury, Ct. (5 children) Rev. David Botsford Davidson, (DOB 19 May 1815 in Roxbury, Ct.DOD 29 Aug. 1886 in Aurora, Nebraska) married Susan Harriet Parker. (1 child) David Treat Davidson (DOB 25 June 1847 in Delhi, Michigan.DOD 2 Sept 1911 in Almeda, Harris Co., TX) married Mary Louisa Lamb 23 Aug 1871 in Grinnell, Iowa. (11 children) Willis Herbert Davidson (DOB 29 Oct, 1884 Aurora or Grand Isle, Nebraska.DOD ? in Stillwater, OK) married Rosia Marshall 22 Jan 1908. Seemer Halley Davidson (DOB 19 May 1910.DOD 14 Dec. 1973) married LaVerne Williams Close date of marriage unknown. My father was born in Almeda TX but the family did live in Cherokee County, Kansas sometime in the early 1900's. >From the Semi-Centennial Historical and Biographical Record of the Class of 1841 at Yale University, published 1891, pp 74-75 regarding David Botsford Davidson (in part): "The year after his graduation he taught school in Milford Conn. He then studied three years (1842-5) in the New Haven Theological Seminary; was licensed to preach by the Litchfield South Association, August 6, 1844; in June,1846, received from the American Home Missionary Society a commission to the West, and in September of that year began to preach in the Presbyterian church in Paw Paw, Mich., where he remained for several years; February 9, 1847, was ordained to the Gospel ministry; preached a while, it is said, in Indiana, about 1850; supplied the Congregational Church in Streetsboro, Ohio, 1852-4. In the fall of 1854 he moved to Iowa, and for five years supplied Congregational churches in or near Monona, some of which he organized, his residence being a few miles from Monona. In 1864-7 he was preaching to the Congregational church at Danville, Iowa. After 1868 he lived on a farm of two hundred and forty acres, seven miles north of Grinnell, Iowa"..."D. B. D. removed from Grinnell to the residence of his youngest son, in Aurora, Neb., in 1884, and died there August 29, 1886, at the age of 71 years." His first wife Susan died in the summer of 1850. In the fall of 1850, he married Susan's sister, Jennette Parker Bronson. (3 children) There is no information in my copy of the family tree as to whether the other sons of James Davidson and Elizabeth Treat Davidson remained in Connecticut or moved elsewhere. My father was the last male of this direct line. I would be interested to know if any DNA testing has been done. There may be some surviving male relatives since the children of two of the male children of David Treat Davidson (Charles Treat (9 children), George Alfred (9 children), Arthur Bertrand (?) may have had sons, who in turn had sons. However, I don't have any contact with any of my distant relatives. I would really like to know what group our line belongs to. Hoping to hear from some of you soon, Sharon Davidson Goyette -----Original Message----- From: davidson-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:davidson-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of John Lisle Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 6:01 PM To: davidson@rootsweb.com Cc: davison@rootsweb.com; davisson@rootsweb.com Subject: [DAVIDSON] Updates to the Davidson DNA Project Hi, The Davidson Surname DNA Project is now into its 5th year of operation. We cover the Davidson, Davison, and Davisson surnames and their variations. We have over 150 members who have been tested, and, so far, we have identified 18 different Davidson/etc families with two or more members. We still have many members for whom we have not yet found family matches. http://www.davidsongenes.org We have four VOLUNTEER administrators. I profoundly thank Dave Koester, Bill Davidson, and Sharon Morrison who give their time so generously to help everyone be successful in this project. The key principle that the project was founded on was that DNA results are meaningless without real "paper trail" genealogy. From the beginning we have insisted - sometimes with less success than we would like - that a member of the project needs to supply the project with, at least, their Davidson pedigree. We try to work with each of the members on their Davidson pedigree to assure that it can be confirmed both by reviewing available research data and by the DNA results. As the project is growing, the administrators are discovering that we cannot do this ourselves. We had two choices. Either add more administrators or add a "Project Lead" for handling the genealogy of a specific family. We may still try to recruit another administrator this year to accomplish some of our outreach goals. But we have decided to create a new role within the Davidson DNA project called Family Coordinator. A Family Coordinator will be responsible for working with the members of their family to review each member's Davidson family genealogy and to help research to find out how each member connects into the Family. One of the Admins will also be assigned to each family to help and train and backup the Family Coordinator on DNA science and techniques as it relates to genealogy and their specific Family. For Family Coordinators, we will be looking for special individuals who are interested in learning new techniques, who want to increase their genealogical research skills, and who are willing to increase their research focus beyond just their personal family. They also have to like working with others as they will need to work with the other members of their family and keep the admins apprised of what is going on in their family. It is not a JOB; there is no pay; and I do hope you will find it enjoyable. If you would like to volunteer, please contact the administrators at admin@davidsongenes.com, and we can start a conversation. In part to put this in place, I am in the process of a major re-write of the Davidson DNA web site software. As some of you may know, the pages are not simple HTML pages. The contents of the site are dynamic and are driven from what is becoming a fairly complex database. If you have not visited the site - www.davidsongenes.org - recently, you should look at it now as it is much different. And will be evolving on a weekly basis until all of the necessary changes are in place. If you find it misbehaving, it may just be that I am in the middle of an update! Here are some of the changes: 1/ The Home Page is a now a Results Chart Selector. You can select to look at the results for a specific Family or Group or all families or groups. Groups are members who are not yet assigned to any Family. These are grouped by the Haplogroup they have had predicted or measured. 2/ For Families, we have added a feature called a "Predicted Ancestral Haplotype" (PAH). In DNA jargon, the Haplotype is the collection of Y-DNA marker values for an individual. When we test a man's Y-DNA, the results are for the single individual. The science is that their male ancestors had the same Y-DNA with the exception of some mutations along through time. By seeing the results of several family members, we can PREDICT what the Haplotype COULD have been for their most recent common ancestor. And then we can highlight the differences between the prediction (PAH) and each of the members in hopes of looking for clues for family branches. Overtime, this should help us predict which family branch a new member, without a good paper trail, is part of. 3/ We have added a contact form in place of email links for sending email to the Admins and to the Members. This will reduce the risk of having email addresses harvested by spam bots. Further, to prevent spammers from using forms to inject spam, we have added Captcha technology when sending a message when the user is not signed in. 4/ To make life more convenient for members to be signed in when using the site, we have added an optional "Remember Me" cookie. Sign in once and for a year, you could be signed into the site from your personal computer. When you are signed in, your member page becomes your home page for our site. You will be easily able to update your Member Profile or Davidson Pedigree; send project messages without going through the Captcha step; and (if you have added your FTDNA password to your member profile...) be able to link directly to your FTDNA page. 5/ We will soon have a "Frequently Asked Questions" page on the site to help with how to use site, some DNA basics; etc. There is now a page of Resource links to help you with your research. And from any page on the site, you will be able to access the results page to check on any result. These are just the most visible changes to the site right now. More will be coming as I get them coded and tested. I still have to add more support for Family Coordinators but these changes were the beginning of the infrastructure needed to make that happen. We value your comments and suggestions. And any volunteers who wish to participate! Finally, if you are not a part of the DNA project, this is a perfect time to join. FTDNA has a big sale going on through the end of August 2008. We have already had several new members join as a result of the sale. The price of a 37 marker Y-DNA test is about 40% off the normal price. thanks, john. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to DAVIDSON-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message