Wow! Another New Year is upon us! I hope yours will be happy, healthy and prosperous, and that all your dreams, particularly the genealogical ones, will come true. One of my dreams is to visit all the sites in the US where my ancestors once lived. So far, I’ve been to Crawford, Spencer, Perry and Floyd, Vanderburgh & Posey Counties in IN; Jessamine, Knott, Letcher and Mercer Counties in KY; heaps in VA, including Russell, Washington, Albemarle and Page; and Frederick, MD, I’m sure there are more. I missed Ashe, Wilkes and Rutherford Counties in NC, Amherst in VA, and I haven’t made it to New England yet, so that trip is on my list. If I win the lottery, I’ll head for Europe and visit Stuttgart, Cologne, Eckelsheim, and some other locations in Germany; Schleitheim in Switzerland, Hainault in Belgium, and any number of locations in Great Britain and Ireland. Where will your dreams take you? What undiscovered treasures await you? If you’ll send me your names and your “brick walls”, we’ll publish them in our Queries, perhaps you have undiscovered cousins!

January, now our first month, was named for the Roman god, Janus, who could look backward and forward at the same time (did he need a good chiropractor?). That ability always comes in handy in genealogy. During the Middle Ages, 1 January retained the name New Year's Day (or an equivalent name) in all Western European countries, since the medieval calendar continued to display the months from January to December (in twelve columns containing 28 to 31 days each), just as the Romans had. However, most of those countries began their numbered year on 25 December (the Nativity ,or 25 March (the Incarnation), the latter is why we have April Fool’s Day (the natives kept going to church on April 1, expecting a New Year’s Day service). This leave me wondering if the god Mars, for whom March was named, also had the ability to see in both directions. Knowing the differences in the two calendars, Julian and Gregorian, is a great help in genealogy. Sometimes you’ll see a notation by various dates, OS, and NS - old style, and new style. These make it easier to discern the actual dates, but if they’re not there, then it’s helpful to know which date which country used at that time. These you can look up on the internet.

Here’s tremendously valuable information from one of the intrepid researchers in the Jessamine County Historical Society - explains a genealogical “puzzle” far better than I could. “ . . . . something interesting about female DNA haplogroups. I don't know if some similar analysis exists for male DNA haplogroups, but for the females this is great genealogy taken back thousands of years rather than hundreds: The woman from whom we are all descended lived about 150,000 years ago in Africa. Her direct descendants populated Africa and are classed as Haplogroup L, sub-group L1. Probably due to harsh ice-age climate and the fact that the areas north of Africa were already populated by Neanderthals, the L1 people never left Africa. This population shrank. Then sometime before 75,000 years ago, new mutations occurred creating two new sub-groups, L2 and L3 -- they repopulated Africa. About 65,000 years ago, two new mutations occurred among the L3 women creating Haplogroups M and N in northeastern Africa. Some of these migrated out of Africa, most of the M moved east into Asia and most of the N people moved north into the middle-east and then on into Europe and central Asia. The R people quickly emerged from the N folk about 60,000 years ago. The HV people emerged from the R people about 28,000 years ago. The H people emerged from the HV about 19,000 years ago, and the V people evidently about the same time. Mom's DNA evidently does not fit conveniently into either H in its many variations or into the tiny V group. So we are just generally classified as HV. As more data is collected they may define a classification into which we fit.” From Richard McMurtry, in Ben Lomond, CA. What’s a Haplogroup you may ask? My brand new dictionary doesn’t even list it, but it has to do with similar groups of genes/chromosomes and the like. If you have a better definition, please let us all know. If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, I’ll have more next month.