Often just identifying ancestors back to the 1600s or earlier is a major achievement. Understanding something about the time period and culture in which they lived provides context for the bare genealogical facts. To actually discover specific details of their lives, to have a window on their relationships, thoughts, feelings, and the detail of their daily lives is exceptional. In the case of my Cornell ancestors, a tragic set of circumstances left a record preserved by the R

After all of the time I spent on my Nantucket Origins post, I hadn't planned to write again so soon about my New England ancestors. Instead I planned to return to my Medical Cadet Corps research. As I develop my theoretical foundation for the MCC project, I'm exploring the roots of many Seventh-day Adventist pioneers and this research led me back to my own family in a surprising way. My great-great-grandfather, Daniel Cornell Wood, was the nephew of Ezra Cornell (see Nantuck

For the month of November I had thought it would be fun to revisit the Puritan origins of my family. But the process of reviewing the information I have on this part of the family led me in an entirely new direction and necessitated considerably more research than I had anticipated. I started my investigation by revisiting Bessie Eunice Packard's The Edson and Eunice Cornell Packards, a manuscript distributed to family members for Christmas, December 1945. While family histo

Let me start by saying I'm not an expert on DNA testing for genealogy. In fact, I've only recently started to get into this new world. This blog post represents my first attempt to really formalize my thoughts and communicate what I've learned from my test results. I used Ancestry.com's autosomal DNA test. Autosomal chromosomes are those we inherit from both parents as opposed to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which is passed down from mothers only and Y chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) wh