My apologies to the list for being so absent. Greg knows, but most of you do not, that I am spending a lot of time with ailing family members. At the end of a long day, all my good intentions about correspondence tend to collapse. Not too long ago we got DNA results for William Steven Loveless, kit 173703. We know that William descends from Thomas (Good Tom) Loveless, and his results show clearly, as Greg reported a month ago, that Thomas was a member of the Maryland group and can trace his ancestry back to Dorset in Southern England. Our conclusions from William's test results are largely negative or exclusive -- that is, we can say that he does not belong to either of the two distinct Maryland lines that we have identified from other tests. He does not have the mutation that identifies the line of John Lovelace (abt 1750-1822) who m. Mylla LNU, nor does he have the mutation that identifies the descendants of Barton Lovelace (1756 - after 1805). William does have a mutation that distinguishes him within the remaining Maryland group, but since he is the only person to have this mutation it does not help us further sort out the tangled early Maryland generations. William has DYS389i=12, which is one less than the dominant value in the MD Lovelxxxs. Since another marker, DYS389ii, incorporates the value of DYS389i, William's value for that marker is also one lower than the dominant value among the MD group. But there is really only one mutation at play here -- not two. At the moment, we cannot tell exactly when William's mutation first occurred. It may be that William is himself the first person in his line to have that mutation. Or it may have occurred first in his father, or his grandfather, or any other male line relative back to Good Tom himself. If Good Tom proves to be the son of a Lovelxxx with other descendants we have not tracked, it may be that Good Tom's father was the person in whom the mutation first occurred. We simply cannot know at this time. Now that we know we are looking at the MD group, we can look again at chronology. Good Tom was born in 1776, which seems to suggest that he would have been of the generation after the generation of John who m. Mylla and Barton. Since those two men are likely to be second or third cousins, we have a limited set of Lovelxxxs who are candidate fathers for Good Tom. I would like to invite Lou Ann to resubmit her thoughts on Good Tom's position in the family tree. I don't think she needs to compose a new message. If she just finds her earlier summary in the archives, she can post a link to it or even copy and paste her summary in a new post here. Please excuse me if what I say here simply duplicates something said in the last few weeks. I don't always have a chance to follow the list traffic closely, and I skimmed but did not study the posts dealing with new DNA results in March and April. David Wilson Line of Barton the Horse Thief