Heartland Genealogy

When researching a difficult ancestor, sometimes the people surrounding that ancestor become almost as important as the ancestor himself. That's certainly true in my continuing effort to untangle the various Crawford families of early Kentucky. One of those people is Moses Dooley . Moses isn't a Crawford, and I currently have no evidence that he was related to my Crawford family by blood or marriage. Yet the more I learn about him, the more convinced I am that he belongs in my Crawford FAN club. Why? Because Moses Dooley keeps showing up in the same places as the Crawfords I'm trying to understand. From Virginia to Sugar Creek Moses Dooley was born about 1748 in Virginia. By 1780, he was involved in Kentucky land acquisition. A survey for 500 acres on Sugar Creek was completed for him on May 26, 1780. He later filed land entry papers and received a grant for those 500 acres. Moses was also an early Baptist preacher associated with the Old Sugar Creek Meeting House in what...

Do you ever feel as if DNA results are breaking family connections instead of verifying them? That has certainly been my experience with my Kentucky CRAWFORD research. For years, many researchers have identified William, James, and John Crawford , who lived in the early Garrard County, Kentucky, area, as brothers. That relationship appears in online family trees and has become part of the commonly accepted reconstruction of this Crawford family. But what happens when Y-DNA says otherwise? Testing a Descendant of William Crawford Some time ago, I asked a descendant of William Crawford of Madison County, Kentucky , whom I will identify as RC , to take a Y-DNA test. Since Y-DNA is passed from father to son along the direct paternal line, I hoped RC's results might help confirm William's connection to the other Crawford men living in the area. Instead, the results created another Crawford puzzle. RC's Y-DNA placed him in the R1b-05 group of the Crawford Y-DNA Project. More rec...