Good Morning List Readers, here we are on the first day of a brand new year. It looks the same as the last day of 2011 - wonder what happened? As I told you yesterday I did DNA back the first part of December and my results came in yesterday. For hours I have plowed through that stuff reading and trying to understand what I have. All this time my mud and tape job is going to the dogs while I study genetic markers. Here is the long and the short of it - I am related to all of you! LOL No, not so! Just kidding! But the truth is that I have cousins that connect to names that I have never heard of before. I have done more genealogy that 90% of the people out there so I really didn't expect too many surprises; however, there was one major one around 12% of my ancestors came from Sweden and Finland. Maybe this has something to do with my Simpson mystery - don't know. I plowed threw stacks of New England families, checking my work against the DNA results - coming up with no new surprises other than I have a lot of relatives. My Barry County Crumley line connects in Georgia, and so I see a lot of names there on trees of cousins that I am surprised to find. Daniel Boone's Morgan connection and mine connect and his Sarah and my Ruth were sisters - looks like I had that one right. Anyway, I see that I have my Fedro - Fetrow family lineage correct and that they did come from Heidelberg, Germany as I have reported. This one has Barry County by the neck with Janetta Fetrow who was married to New Englander James Alvin Pease. A lot of the Fetrows are buried in Cedar, Kansas. On my Hancock - another Barry County family - I see that Cooper County, MO, was named for one of my kinsmen - connecting to the Shashell Cooper line, a famous frontiersmen who built Cooper's Fort in the early days of Missouri. I am related to them through Ruth Hancock, daughter of Stephen Hancock and Catherine Merchant - through Benjamin and Jane (Armeger) Hancock of Goochland Co., VA. I see that my Jamestown connection to the Hancock family looks sound, too, since I am a cousin to one another leg of the family that comes through the group. In the data was pages and pages of connections to families that I would have no idea about had I not studied some of the early colonial families. Don't misunderstand me - there is plenty there that is confusing and much there that I don't understand. Since I have cousins on the brain I chose a featured photo that Jay McCandless submitted that he called cousins - submitted a few years ago. Jay said that those in the photo were cousins. What he didn't know was that I am a cousin to some of them, too. Most of you know that Florella Ireland was a Haddock descendant. Cousins - taken 1928 - From left to right: Doris & Morse Baker - daughter and son of Evert and Mabel (Owings) Baker; Laura Muriel Owings - d/o Vance and Florella (Ireland) Owings; Eral McCandless - s/o Leonard & Cressy (Owings) McCandless; and Pauline Owings - d/o Vance and Florella (Ireland) Owings. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mobarry/oddsnends/bryfams.htm Now that you are fully aware that I have have the goods on this subject you should be aware that I might say you are my cousin. Hear this, you can't say that I didn't warn you! LOL Have a wonderful 2012. Donna Cooper, Coordinator