Hello from Connecticut

I'm Margaret and I live in Connecticut, USA, fairly close to New York City with my husband and our dog, Windy.  Our children don't live here most of the time -- the eldest is off on his own and the other two are at universities in western states.  I was raised in California and Arizona, but for the past 15 years we've been here in Connecticut about 35 miles from where my ancestor, John Beers, died about 330 years ago.  In the 10 generation span from John Beers down to me, only one person died in the town where he was born.  Many of my family lines tend to be filled with wanderers.  My Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors were already living in what is now Mississippi when most of my European  ancestors immigrated to the USA from England, Germany and France in the 1600s and 1700s.  My Irish ancestors came a little later in the mid- to late- 1800s.

I'm excited to meet all of you and learn more about genealogy through this collaboration.  I am also using this as a jumping off point to revive my abandoned genealogy blog, Hummingbird on Her Hand, so named because hummingbirds landed on the outstretched hand of my great grandmother, Ida Austin.

Although I enjoy genealogy, much of the information I write about was and is collected by my mother, Sandra. She has been doing family history research as long as I can remember.  When I was a child, Mom occasionally gave me a paid challenge -- 5 cents for each correct name or date I could write in a blank family tree.  I got pretty good at it and eventually she lowered the rate to 1 cent per fact.

Me with my mother visiting my paternal grandparents in Kansas City c1970.

My mother has spent countless hours researching her lines and my father's, but in the past few decades, she has concentrated on Choctaw Tribal history and is extremely well versed on the Dawes Rolls, many Oklahoma Choctaw family lines and other tribal records.  I have learned a lot from her and this spring I will accompany her again to the National Archives in Washington, DC where I will serve as her copy assistant.  We try to copy records as efficiently as possible when we are there and we read them more carefully later.

In the past few years we have been making genealogical connections through DNA.  This has been pretty slow going, but I now manage the DNA accounts for about twenty family members. We continue recruiting relatives to give samples so that we can try to pinpoint which lines matches fall on.  Although we have good documentation for many family lines, we are missing three of my mother's great- great- grandparents and four of my father's great- great- grandparents.  Our DNA match-ups will be more successful when we fill in those missing surnames.

I look forward to getting to know you all as time goes on.

Margaret