What makes one family a clan and another family a loosely connected network of households–if they even know each other? Is it simply a function of a mutual effort and willingness to communicate? Is it the comradery of shared experience and close proximity? Or is it a social and cultural phenomenon doomed to obsolescence in the developed world and relegation to isolated pockets of ethnic homogeneity? I'm not a sociologist and I'm not even going to pretend to answer these quest

We all have them. The stories at which our grandparents only hint and won't satisfy us with answers, usually because they are too painful to think about. I grew up with a vague story usually referred to as the time Grandma G.G. (my great-grandmother Edith Menges Morris) was kidnapped by that terrible man (her step-father Fred Warner). I was told Warner took Edith to his sister's house near White Pigeon, Michigan, just over the state border from the Menges family farm near Br

Although I've been interested in the contributions DNA testing has made to history and genealogy ever since DNA testing proved that Sally Hemmings' descendents were related to Thomas Jefferson, I didn't think it was something I'd ever do myself until last fall when I was contacted through Ancestry.com by someone else researching the Monheit family. That is because my family's relationship to the Monheits bears some similarity to the relationship between the Hemmings and the J

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