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From: "KERRY BRANDOFF" <>
Subject: [S-I] Legacy Family Tree
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2011 16:38:23 -0600
References: <947331567.96043.1301264340020.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <947331567.96043.1301264340020.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>


Linda ( or anyone else who knows),

Can Legacy Family Tree software be bought in stores or just online?
How long does it take to down load the standard edition which is free online?

Thanks from an old woman who need lots of help!
Kerry
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:>
To: <mailto:>
Cc: <mailto:>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2011 4:19 PM
Subject: Re: [S-I] McCartneys of Lancaster Co., Pa. circa 1772


Hi Steve, it's generally difficult (and time consuming) to assess accurately what's been done on a family by reading compiled genealogy. I see that he used compiled genealogy to fill in the background on Ephriam's father. Whether he cherry picked individuals to exclude and include, whether he lists all possible tax records (including surname variants) for the county? township? adjoining townships?, and ditto for military records -- I donno. Doesn't seem to use land records. People have written books on PA land records and how to use them, as well as other books on US land records. Lot to know about using them effectively. PA warrant indexes are on line free at the PA archive site. Did he consult? Donno.

He is explaining a family, not explaining what research he did and what he based his conclusions on. Research summaries are very boring to write and read. Sometimes when a client asks me to do work and I say what I must say "Send me what has already been done or I must start from the start", he/she does send raw work sheets -- with, say, a table with a row per dude found in the tax lists, etc, etc -- so you can basically see that the person has gone through all the local records of a certain type and examined all possible surname variants. These records, after all, were hand written, and thus subject to interpretation. Not all transcribers will read them the same, plus standardized spelling of surnames didn't exist in the 1700s, and if it had, so what -- not a lot of people went to spelling classes. Not many people do research like this.

Usually they send compiled research, like your fella has. As you probably have figured out, it's hard to tell what he did do.

However what you can do is spot check. These days, that's easy and fast: so much is on the Internet. Lots of wills, deeds, etc, are transcribed or abstracted at rootsweb for these areas. Or in Ancestry. Or findable with a google. The PA militia records are free on line at the PA archives site. The US military records are indexed at Ancestry. It ain't hard to check. If there's many McCartney families in the area (not the county: the township -- at the time (not just now), maybe he cherry picked.

It's excellent he has preserved the oral history. The records will be available for a very long time, but the oral history is very transient. So he focused on what is initially important: preserving oral history that could perish any day.

One starts with raw data, does analysis, and creates a compiled genealogy. Can't usually work backwards! Need to see raw data. But as I said spot checking works. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~palanca2/<http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~palanca2/>; -- one place to start. Or purchase Legacy Family Tree. The PAID version includes a research guide that'll list commonly used sources for your place and time. (www.legacyfamilytree.com<http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/>; ). The FHL also has free guides on PA research. These can be very helpful. Have spent many hours burrowing into Lancaster County -- usually need to do this to understand the situation. Need to understand township evolution and the history of each township or town. Often to research the same family in the same place you must use records from several townships or even counties. Did he do this? I don't know, it's not in his compiled family history, but maybe he did, donno!

Superficially, the use of footnotes and standard genealogical numbering system like the Register System or NGSQ System (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_numbering_systems<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_numbering_systems>; ) suggests that the person is educated about these things -- but frankly you can find some pretty awful footnoting and bad use of Register System too.

The ideal (never achieved!) is to leave behind you a 'trail' that if the next person follows leads them to the same place you ended up. So you would provide all references and explain all your logic clearly so the next guy can reconstruct your logic. Otherwise the next guy, if wise, chucks it, and begins anew. That's the 21st century. However in the past, someone made up a nice fantasy and no one was allowed to question the sacred family history. I don't think that's the case here, but sans data, can't reconstruct, analyze or judge, your cuzzin's process. Wish it were so! Would seem he's made a good beginning (no descent from mythological kings, hypothetical clans, seals, or fairies). He's sane. (Some of us....ain't <grin>).

I have a fantasy genealogy (preserved in the FHL) claiming descent from a Viking nobleman whose descendants had an estate in the 1400s and included a page to Henry VIII and a lady in waiting to Queen E I. Oh, and several well place clergymen, of course! However very little of it bears any resemblance to wills for the area. No such estate seems to have ever existed. I've not sorted through Queen Lizzie's ladies but I suspect I won't find her......So sad -- my 'tree got severely circumcised by few lookups. Not even any analysis needed.... And it had everything but a fairy (easily supplied from some other lines of mine <grin>). Your cuzzin definitely produced something of much higher quality than this fantasy genealogy of mine -- how do you convince the Mormons to shred the thing?

Linda Merle

----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:>
To: <mailto:>
Cc: <mailto:>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2011 2:21:28 PM
Subject: Re: [S-I] McCartneys of Lancaster Co., Pa. circa 1772

Linda,

Thank you very much for your comments. I have to give all the credit to the amount of great research that has been done on our McCartney family line to a cousin (distant: we are related through our G-G-G- GF Robert Mccartney) Dr. Dame McCartney. He has set up the website on the family line of Ephraim McCartney: www.mccartneyhistory.org<http://www.mccartneyhistory.org/>;. he has done all the detective work that you have suggested as he devotes a whole chapter to a discussion of who might be Ephriam's father. If you vere have a few moments, take a look at it as i am sure any comment that you may want to make would be very good.
Thank you.
Steve McC.
---- <mailto:> wrote:
> Hi Steve, statistically speaking, there were more "Scotch Irish" in the colonies than Scots and the Scots 'tended' to be in different places. David Dobson has written many books on the Scots including ones on the Scots banished to the colonies, Scots in New Jersey, etc. You can learn a lot about their patterns of settlement and surnames by reading his books, which you can borrow from a library or interlibrary loan, buy second hand, get on a DVD, etc.
>
> Of course there were also some in Old Mother Cumberland and surrounding areas of Pennsylvania that were largely Ulster Scots.
>
> You know the people with the same surname in the area and can't prove any of them are the father -- can you eliminate any? That's Part II. Part I is vacuuming up all potential relatives and inspecting them to see if you can prove that they are the dad. You will not find a document that says (in bold) "YO, dude, THIS is the father, you numbskull, you" (just in case you drifted off <girn>). You gotta put clues together like solving a crime. The two no-brainer sources are wills (short hand for actual wills and other orphans court records -- sometimes intestate records are far better than a will) and deeds. "Deeds" is short hand for a slew of records including partitions, surveys, deeds, land grants, etc. I assume your relative has done a thorough job of this step.
>
> If so then Part II needs done. Usually you can eliminate a fair number as the father (too young, too old, died too soon, etc). It's critical to profile both your ancestor and the target father. Fact: father probably has the same surname as ancestor. Fact 2: father had to be alive nine months before ancestor was born.... The dad was an adult when he fathered ancestor, so he was probably born 20 years or more before ancestor....etc....
>
> Then with the men left standing, you check out additional kinds of records.
>
> I don't know why you assume the father is in the area. You may have good reason to have made that assumption. If the lad was born in PA in 1772, then unless he died very soon afterwards, he's in Revolutionary records. These are PA militia records, Continental records, Virginia records. If they stayed on after the Revolution, his enemies were unable to peg him for a Tory, but you may find mention of court cases in county records. And you should not neglect to search Tory militia records for the area. There are a couple books of these you can get on line or on a CD (that I do not own, so can't help).
>
> Other common avenues, that you probably tried, are to trace collateral lines. Maybe they have information that'll help you out. They did give first names to their male children -- these alone will help suggest the dad's first name. The only reason I know where some of my ancestors came from is clues from collateral lines that were verifiable (Ie 'recruited from Antrim by Chambers brothers when over with Mason (of Mason and Dixon fame) to view eclipse off Donegal") -- Mason was there, there was such an eclipse, and the Chambers Bros did return to Antrim to recruit friends and neighbors at the time of that eclipse with Mason. Conclusion: this is a good lead and the ancestors were probably from Antrim.
>
> Often you got lots of clues but are overlooking them, hoping for a 'smoking gun'. There is no smoking gun. You got to analyze the clues. So another piece of advice in the articles and books one can read learning how to do immigration research is to review all the stuff you already got. You already got the information needed to id the father and where they came from. This has, most embarrassingly, happened to me personally a few times. Analysis is hard and sometimes boring, but it's the key.
>
> There are free courses on how to do immigration research. See www.genealogical.com/university.html<http://www.genealogical.com/university.html>; . GREAT info, free.
>
> However here's the important piece of information: GET YOUR Y CHROMO TESTED. I hope that's loud and clear <grin>. Proceed to www.familytreedna.com<http://www.familytreedna.com/>; and order a 67 marker test. Join the Ulster Heritage project when the results come through. With it and by recruiting descendents of the other McCartneys in Lancaster, you can tell if they're related, even if there is not a single clue or shred of evidence. You can determine if they came from Ulster or not. You can get a bead on whether their ancsetors were likely to be in Scotland or Ireland. If your DNA is North west Irish, without matches in Scotland that seem 'old', your paternal ancestors were probably Irish. Many assimilated into "Ulster Scot". Ethnicity is learned behavior -- nothing genetic about it. So you can learn a huge amount of things with DNA testing.
>
> Ultimately, if you educate yourself by reading the free course above and other articles, books, courses, etc, on American colonial genealogy, you'll have learned that the place of origin of most colonial Americans was not documented. It is not a matter that you can't find the smoking gun piece of paper that says "This dude came from Ballybumpass, Ireland": it's a matter that no such document every existed. So searching for it for 20 years is not something to brag about (people say "I've been searching for twenty years for this...."). Nope, It's stupid because even if you search for 100 years for a document that never existed -- you still can't find it! It's smarter to conduct a strategic search and then get on to solving the problem, which isn't not finding a smoking gun document but finding the place of origin executing a series of strategies like analyzing your clues, tracking down collateral lines (ie searching in on line databases).
>
> However you do have clues -- we all do but we may not recognize them as clues. And with DNA you can figure out where they probably came from. And who they probably were. The odds are a lot better than sticking to the paper trail exclusively.
>
> The collateral line approach is extremely important, though everyone hates it (it's work). The first clues I got on my ex husband's people were in a Kentucky county history that was indexed and on line. His direct line was never in Kentucky, but a collateral line married into what became an important family in this county, so her ancestrage was documented -- when and where they came to America, county in Ireland they came from, religion, and the town in Scotland they came from before that! A major find. I've not verified any of it yet but still..... (This is the Seth Duncan line, supposedly Queens Ferry, SCT> Donegal> Philly, 1750). A smoking gun!!!! Without collateral line research -- would never have found it.
>
> It was quite some time before Methodists actually set up separate congregations from the established church (in England or Ireland). When doing genealogy on Methodists in these places, you are cautioned to check the established church records for baptisms and marriages because at first Methodists didn't do them separately. See Falley "Irish and Scotch-Irish Ancestral Research" for a long chapter on Methodist records in Ireland.
>
> There are also books on the history of Methodism in America. Check our archives. I recall some are in google books. In Ireland the Methodist strongholds was not Ulster but elsewhere in Ireland.
>
> However according to Bell "Book of Ulster Surnames", in Ireland the surname clusters in Ulster with 2/3rds in Antrim. In Scotland, says Bell, it is believed to be a variant of the Irish MacCartan and based on McLysaght, he goes off on some clan in Fife, but notes that most in Ulster would have come from the "Stewartry, Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Wigtownshire," etc -- western Scotland, not north eastern. There are MacCartneys in Antrim known to descend from a family in Auchinleck in Ayrshire. Now the bad news: in 1900 it was still being used interchangably with MacCartan in Co. Down, MacCarten in Moira, MacCaugherty in Newtownards, MacCarthy in Newry, Mulhartagh in Ballyshannon in Donegal. The last is an old Tyrone name, he tells us.
>
> You need a DNA test to start sorting this out, unless you can find that smoking gun. They do exist -- my ex lucked out with one. The key is joining the Ulster Heritage DNA project. http://www.ulsterheritage.com/<http://www.ulsterheritage.com/>;
>
> Best of luck,
>
> Linda Merle
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <mailto:>
> To: <mailto:>
> Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2011 1:35:47 PM
> Subject: [S-I] McCartneys of Lancaster Co., Pa. circa 1772
>
> My oldest known american ancestor was Ephraim McCartney born in Lancaster Co., Pa. in 1772. His parents are unknown except there is one reference found by those of our family line that has stated that his father emigrated to US from Ireland. One of our family line researchers (who has a website devoted to research of this family line) has devoted a considerable amount of time in trying to find who Ephraim's father was and has at least identified at least 4 or 5 McCartney males who were living in the Lancaster Co. area in that 1772 time frame that are possibles for being that father but there is no definitive evidence to link them to Ephraim McC. It is known that Ephraim had siblings but their names are also unknown.
>
> Other clues include the fact that Ephraim married Ann Sanford in 1790 in Mifflin Co., Pa. His only known child was his eldest: Robert McCartney born in 1790 in Mifflin Co. it is know that they had other children bu their names are also unknown at this time. Ephraim died in Washington Co., Pa. in 1825 & Ann also lived & died in the same county in 1853 (possible clue). the family line of Robert McCartney lived in many different counties in Pa. from 1810 on and then moved westward (Ohio & later Iowa). The last clue about this later family line of McCartneys are the fact that they were Methodists or as one source states attended Methodist-Episcopalian churches (as opposed to Presbyetrian churches) although there is no known reference to where Ephraim & Ann worshipped. (as of this date, all known McCartneys of this family line are Methodists except me who was raised as a catholic & a religiously indifferent father Edgar McCartney who was raised as a methodist).
>
> Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated that might help find that elusive McCartney thought to be an irish/scots-irish ?? ancestor.
>
> Steve McCartney
> Warwick, RI
>
>
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