Y-DNA

Since it has been almost a whole year since my last post I figure it might be time to make another one.

In the last Blog post I talked about doing the Ancestry.com DNA test.  Thru the year we have connected hundreds of DNA matches together to try and find our relatives.  Our database now has over 57,000 names all connected together.  My maiden name was Sullivan so I certainly expected the surname of Sullivan to show up in this database.  It does way back in the 1700's but nothing in the early 1800's to the present.  We have narrowed it down and have a list of some of the surnames we believe we are going to be related too.

In the chaos, we decided to do a Y-DNA test on my Uncle Roger Sullivan.  The Y-DNA test checks the paternal side of the family.  It goes from son, to father, to grandfather, to great grandfather etc so we were expecting the text matches to have the Sullivan surname.  No Way!!  There wasn't a single match to the Sullivan surname.  The top three matches had the surname of Cole.  Cole is one of the surnames we had narrowed down that we were related too but we didn't consider it being our paternal line.  So we figure that somewhere along the line one of the male ancestors changed his name from Cole to Sullivan or one of the female ancestors was pregnant with a Cole child when she got married to a Sullivan and she named the baby after the Sullivan husband.

So the question is how much of the story on the previous post is true?  Was it grandpa that changed his name?  Was he dishonorable discharged from the army in the early 1900's?  Did he change his name after that?  Is the story about his father dying in the Blizzard Fire in New York City in 1889 true?  Did he really go to live with an Uncle Sheehan in Indiana? Or is all his story still true and his father was responsible for the name change?  The more research we do the more questions we have.

James Edward Sullivan & Louise August Watterberg with 5 of their 6 children.

Did James Edward Sullivan change his name from Cole to Sullivan?

New plaque for the Miners Memorial

I received word this month that a new plaque is being made to go on the Miner's Memorial that will contain the names of the three miner's that have been found since the Memorials creation.  The names are: John Douglas Glasson, 12/10/57 age 37 killled at the U.S. Steel Prep Plant in Wellington.  Honorius Meloche, 5/01/1900, age 36 killed in Winter Quarters Mine Explosion, and Reubin Naylor Tucker, 12/25/45, age 53, at the Utah Fuel Mine at Clear Creek.