RLP 175: RLPDNA Study Group 4 – Locality Research and Ethnicity

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 175 RLP with DNA study group part four, Locality Research and Ethnicity. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (45s):
Let’s go, hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (50s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (52s):
I’m doing well. I have been working on my kinship determination project, which is fun to finally get back to working on my certification portfolio.

Diana (1m 2s):
That’s exciting. And it’s fun when you’re doing it on your own family, because you’re discovering new things and that’s always exciting.

Nicole (1m 8s):
Yes. So what have you been working on or reading?

Diana (1m 11s):
Well, I just started reading a new book it’s titled Genealogy and the Law: A Guide to Legal Sources for the Family Historian it’s published by the National Genealogical Society. It’s one of the special topics series it’s by Kay Haviland Freilich and William B Freilich. And I purchased this a few years ago and I just saw in my bookshelf again, you know, how we have these ideas and we don’t get to them. And I, my thought was that I would work through it. It’s a workbook. So you have several chapters and then there’s questions and things to apply it to. And so I just pulled it out and decided I need to make it part of my morning reading so I can actually go through it all. So I’m kind of excited.

Diana (1m 52s):
Some of the chapters are understanding the law, where to find resources, finding the pertinent law types of law, citing legal sources. And I think it’ll just be really good reference.

Nicole (2m 5s):
That will be a good reference. That’s great.

Diana (2m 7s):
Yeah. So many times when we are doing our research, we know we need to know more about the law and we teach to put those references in our locality guides, but I feel like I just want to see what this book has to offer and to learn more. So it’ll be fun.

Nicole (2m 24s):
Yeah, that will be great. I think sometimes the biggest challenge is finding one of those books of a state law or state statutes from a certain time period, that’s in the public domain and you think maybe it might be online and you search in Google books, Hathi trust all the places and trying to find the best one.

Diana (2m 41s):
I agree, finding that really specific law for that little piece of information in that record. Oh my goodness. That can be difficult. Well, this book also has a nice appendix and it’s called the vocabulary of the law and it gives a lot of definitions because sometimes in these records come across terms that we don’t really know what they mean. And so I kind of wishing I would have looked at this a while ago and just remembered that this was here. How can we forget these great resources that I have?

Nicole (3m 13s):
Yeah. So great. It’s good that you’re reviewing your books that are on your shelf because we all do that. Right? We get a book, we put it on a shelf and then we forget we have it when we need it. And we ended up Googling things where we could find a better answer in one of our books.

Diana (3m 27s):
And I have to laugh because I’ve had people tell me before that they bought the same book because they forgot they had it already.

Nicole (3m 35s):
You need like a catalog on a Google sheet that you could pull up on your phone and just check and make sure you’re not

Diana (3m 40s):
That’s right. I think that we talked about this in my ProGen study group. And some of the people were using the online app library thing. And that kind of does the collection of your books phrase, so you can pull it up, but I put everything on good rates. And so I could always pull that up on my phone also. So,

Nicole (4m 0s):
Oh, that’s like another good app you could use. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Well, some announcements for today are the spring Research Like a Pro with DNA study group will begin in February 16th. You can sign up beginning in December and looking forward to next fall. We’ll have the Research Like a Pro study group beginning in September, and we’ve just got a peer group leader application the other day. So if you’re thinking about joining as a peer group leader, we would love to have you so submit a report that you’ve written and we will get back in touch with you. We are working on the index for Research Like a Pro with DNA. We’re so close to getting it out in print book format. So just a couple more weeks, and hopefully we’ll be able to purchase that in print version on Amazon.

Diana (4m 43s):
Absolutely. And actually when this podcast comes out, it might be available. So we have a listener spotlight for today. This is from Anne and she says, hi ladies. That was a very good reminder episode on the ProGen study group. It’s good to know that one doesn’t necessarily have to plan to go into the business of genealogy in order to be part of the group. I will definitely look into it as the next level. Having recently graduated from the Research Like a Pro course, I have a question for you. If one does not plan to practice DNA genealogy, what level of education should one have for a genealogy business? Thanks for the podcast and virtual mentoring.

Diana (5m 24s):
Thank you, Ann. For that question, my short answer would be that you need to at least know how DNA could help further any research question. So if you’re working for a client and you realize, wow, Y DNA could really help or autosomal DNA could provide more evidence than you need to know that and be able to refer the client to someone who could do that DNA work. But do you think Nicole?

Nicole (5m 50s):
Agreed. I think that’s a good level of understanding so that you can know if this project you’re working on could benefit from the use of DNA in which type. So just understanding the difference between autosomal DNA, Y DNA mitochondrial DNA, and then some of the limitations of each type of DNA, you know, such that autosomal DNA isn’t useful, you know, once you get back too many generations from the test-taker

Diana (6m 13s):
Yeah. I think we all have a responsibility as professional genealogists to know about DNA, whether we want to use it or not, we need to have a basic knowledge of it.

Nicole (6m 25s):
Yeah, that’s really true. And I think it’s a good question to think about another question that comes up a lot is do I need to use DNA evidence for reasonably exhaustive research? The answer is usually that you don’t need to use DNA evidence, unless you’re trying to say that the relationship is biological, because you could just be proving that these were the parents who raised the person. And in that case, you don’t need genetic evidence. So I would say, no, you don’t always need DNA evidence, but DNA evidence can be really helpful in a lot of cases where you don’t have a lot of documents. So it’s something that you may want to someday recommend to a client,

Diana (7m 6s):
Right? It’s just good for us to always be thinking outside the box. So what else can be done on these tough cases? Well, let’s get to our subject for the day. We are talking today about the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group project that I’m doing. And today we’re going to talk all about the step where we discover locality and ethnicity information. So let me just do a little review of the project. Everyone will have this memorized by the time we’re done with this series. And I often have people tell me that they feel like they know my Cynthia Dillard Royston because I talk about her and write about her so much. So we’ll, we’ll have a big party when we discover her father, right?

Nicole (7m 47s):
We’ll have to give away something special.

Diana (7m 52s):
So I am working with the DNA results of my second cousin, twice removed Victor Parker. And Cynthia is his great-grandmother. So he has better matches than I do. He would have received about 12.5% of her DNA, whereas I would have received at the most 3% or less. And so obviously he’s much better tester to work with. So that has been really beneficial. And I’m working on this project in phases. The reason everyone has heard me talk about this so much as I’ve done a lot of phases on Cynthia and a lot of documentary work to try to find her, I eliminated Dillard candidates as much as I could in Georgia.

Diana (8m 37s):
And now I’m working with the DNA solely and I, so providentially found a cluster in the network graph that you made me and that network graph had a common ancestor of a new light to Dillard that looks like he could very likely be sent these brother. So this phase of the project now is to test that relationship and learn more about Elijah. So I’ll just read my objective. The objective of this research phase is to test the hypothesized biological sibling connection between Elijah Dillard and Cynthia Dillard Royston. Elijah Dillard was born about 1814 in Georgia and died on six September, 1886 in coffee county, Alabama.

Diana (9m 21s):
Cynthia was born about 1816 in Georgia and died in 1882 in Collin county, Texas. Cynthia married Thomas Beverly Royston about 1833 in Georgia or Alabama. So what do you think the likelihood is that I’ll solve it in this phase? Wow.

Nicole (9m 37s):
All that objective is just testing the sibling connection. So you could probably come to some intermediate conclusion on that, but finding the father proving that I think will take several more phases

Diana (9m 50s):
Unless I get really lucky and find in the documentary research, something with a clear relationship that can a land record or probate for Elijah on a father.

Nicole (10m 0s):
That would be nice. What have you found a probate record that mentions of Royston?

Diana (10m 8s):
That would be so exciting. So in the previous podcast episode, I talked about how I had to create a timeline for Elijah because he wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t really pick him out of the many dollars individuals to research previously. It was the DNA that pointed specifically to Elijah. And it was nice because there were some online trees and I could quickly look at the sources and put those on my timeline and get a really nice view of his life. And that’s really important because when it comes to locality research, you have to know where you want to research. You have to know something about the person’s life, which is why we do the timeline step.

Diana (10m 49s):
And then I had also created a diagram of that Dillard cluster from the people who had trees. So I could trace back how they connect to this hypothesized father and how Victor traced back in to see if the centiMorgans worked. And so I’ve done all this preliminary work.

Nicole (11m 8s):
Very good. So for the people out there who are maybe wondering, how do you know this cluster of matches is on the right side of the family to be possibly Cynthia’s brother?

Diana (11m 19s):
Well, on the network graph, it clusters people and we can put colors to them. And the cluster is people that are all related to each other. And then they will have little lines going out to other clusters where they are also connected. And this little peach cluster was, was on the outside. And it was a group of people all connected to each other, but some of them also had lines going out to a cluster for Cynthia’s son, Richard A. Royston who moved to Texas and to a cluster that included me and a lot of my second cousins who came down from Cynthia’s son, Robert Royston, who also migrated out to Texas.

Diana (12m 2s):
So because it was connecting to these two sons and our DNA matches, I wanted to explore that cluster. And I looked at the trees. There were, I think, three people that had independent trees and they all went back to Josiah, Dillard, and then doing a little more searching. I thought that Josiah’s father was Elijah and Elijah was right there in the timeframe that he could be a brother, you know, born in eighteen, fourteen, fifteen, and then something is born about 1815, 1816. So that’s my premise. That’s what I’m testing. Okay.

Nicole (12m 40s):
Yeah, that’s great. So if people don’t have a network graph, what would you recommend that they do to find relevant matches?

Diana (12m 48s):
You can do clustering yourself by doing a Leeds Method and just going through and using the shared matching to try to find people that all share with one another. In this case, it would have taken me maybe a little bit more time, but I could have searched for the Dillard surname and the surname search on ancestry because it searches for that surname and the trees. And I could have gone through some of those trees and then looked at shared matches and probably created this cluster using the ancestry shared matching, and that tip of the Dillard surname. I like the network graph though, because it gives me a real visual and it made it easier to find that and faster.

Diana (13m 34s):
I felt like,

Nicole (13m 35s):
Yeah, one thing I’ve done too in the past is, you know, once you find all those descendants of Cynthia or whoever your research subject is, and you find DNA matches who are descended from your person, then looking at their shared matches and finding ones that are a little further back, you know, maybe that share less centiMorgans. So you can assume those are more distant cousins and that they have a more distant, common ancestor along that line. So you can kind of do it manually as well. But it’s really important. I think for people to realize, you have to find people who are connected along that line of interest, you know, that are shared matches with people who are on the Royston side of the family and not on the other sides of the family, just by doing random surname searches.

Nicole (14m 20s):
And I’ve seen that with, you know, some people I’ve worked with, they are looking for names and recognizing all these different names that come up all the time. And then, you know, we’ll look in the cluster chart and find that some of those names they really thought were important or actually on a different side of the family. So it’s just really important to use some kind of method to separate your matches into groups, to buckets into clusters so that you know, that you’re on the right path,

Diana (14m 45s):
Definitely that you’re researching the right side of the family. The other caution I would give is finding a cluster of people like a surname and then making assumptions about that cluster. So sometimes we see cases where people see this cluster and they’re really only sharing the 30 to 40 centiMorgans, but people assume that this is their unknown great-grandfather, you know, or a known parent, because they don’t realize that you’d have to have a lot more shared DNA for that to be real. And so, you know, you want to really make sure that you check your assumptions and check the amount of shared DNA and, and try to hypothesize how far back on the family tree this cluster would be when we have an unknown in our family tree, it’s just can be so easy to have confirmation bias and think we’ve, we’ve found them because we have this cluster.

Diana (15m 40s):
So it takes a lot of analysis and work to make sure you’re you’re on the right track.

Nicole (15m 45s):
So true. Well, that’s what the Research Like a Pro with DNA process can help you do, especially the step four, analyzing your sources helps you to look at the Centimorgans and compare that against the shared set a Morgan project and see if it matches up with the expected relationship. Well, the next step in the Research Like a Pro process is to research the locality and see what you can learn about extent records and any kind of historical contextual data that can help you. And then also to study locations and ethnicity of your DNA matches and your DNA test takers, and see if that information provided by the DNA testing companies can help you.

Nicole (16m 25s):
And often you’ll think that the ethnicity estimate may not be useful, but the companies have been innovative and providing new and useful information like ancestry as these communities. And you can also compare your ethnicity estimate with your matches ethnicity estimate. And so there are some tools and some methods you can do, and you’ve been 23 and me has a wonderful tool for their ancestry chromosome painting that tells you which segments are from what part of the world. So even that can be really useful. So there’s a lot of things to learn and to do in this step. So tell us about your locality research for the Dillard’s.

Diana (17m 6s):
Well, as I mentioned, the timeline is where you go to see what locality you should be researching. The timeline will show all the places that your research subject lived, and then you have to choose what you’re going to be researching. So with Elijah Dillard, I actually found that he was in five different counties. My timeline pointed to his moving a bit, which we often see. And sometimes it’s just that the county changed boundaries and they’re not actually moving the county boundaries moved, but that’s still, it’s a different locality, a different set of records for us to research. So I already had an extensive Alabama guide, you know, he, all of his counties were in Alabama.

Diana (17m 46s):
So I knew I had Alabama down because I created that procrastination years ago. So I decided I would choose to do just a couple of county guides. And although the records pointed to five different counties, I decided I would do the first county. He was a resonant of, he received a land patent in 1848. And it said, when you actually looked at the patent image that he was a resident of Macon county, and then he received the land patent in Lee county. So because he was a resident of Macon, I wanted to start there. And I figured he must have been there from about 1845 because to receive that land, you generally had to have lived on the land for two or three years, depending on the situation and the law.

Diana (18m 34s):
So my hope is that in researching Macon county, I can possibly find clues to his kinfolk parents or cousins, somebody that he moved from Georgia with out to Alabama. So I chose Macon county. And then I also chose pike county because elide to live there from about 1855 to his death. So, you know, as early as county and then the county, he lived in for the majority of his life. And I, and I skipped a couple of the others that he got land patents in, and I can always return to those, but, you know, we start with the most likely places to have information.

Nicole (19m 13s):
Yeah, that’s a good place to start. And you can always expand later, like you said, but I like the thought of exploring the place where he spent the most of his life, because there will be more records there. And although you’re looking, you know, for his parents, there are records later in life that could mention clues about extended family, possibly siblings or parents. So you don’t want to ignore his later life just because you’re looking for clues about his early life.

Diana (19m 40s):
That’s so true. I have seen in those county histories where they have a little blurb about them and they name the parents and the county they came from. And so I always want to check those county histories to see if the ancestors perhaps mentioned, do you never know

Nicole (19m 57s):
Great clues, even though they are authored sources and sometimes the information could be second hand, it could be still a great clue. So it’s good to check those.

Diana (20m 8s):
Yeah. The other fun thing that I learned by doing the locality guide on pike county was that there is this really great genealogist society, and they have a publication. It is called the genealogical society of east Alabama, and they have a website. They publish the taproots journal and I was super impressed with their webpage because they have a table of contents and index for each issue available online. So you can’t see the articles that you can go to the PDF and you can look through the index for each issue to look for your surname.

Diana (20m 48s):
And then even better is that they have compiled an Excel spreadsheet that you can access with all that information indexed. So, you know, how great is that right on the website? And of course, you know, we talk a lot about using Percy, the periodical source index over on pine, my past to find periodicals, but this is so specific to the county and the area that he lied. Joel, Dillard lived in that. I’m excited to explore that more. And then if you find an issue you want, you can order it, the issue from them for $8 per issue. And I also saw that these issues are up at the family history library. So I can just go up there and look at all of them when I’m ready to do that research.

Diana (21m 32s):
So we’ve talked a little bit about these really local publications and how they can be really valuable. So for sure, this is going into my research plan.

Nicole (21m 42s):
That’s great. I think those are really helpful and provide insight into what might be available if you actually visited the county as well. I think we sometimes imagine that visiting the place will be like our last resort and something really expensive and difficult, but we have to do it someday, but you never know, like you could find some helpful resources. Like you found in a journal that’s created by people who are local and it could have a lot of the things that you might find if you go visit the county.

Diana (22m 15s):
Right. Because they are trying to put those out there. You know, these journals, they have to come up with content if they’re publishing them every quarter. So the editor and those who are working on it are going out, looking for content. And if it’s been published for many, many years, you’re going to have quite a bit of content that’s been compiled.

Nicole (22m 32s):
Yeah. Did you remember anything specific of what type of articles they did have? No.

Diana (22m 37s):
No, but I did, of course look at the excel file index and I saw a lot of references to Dillard’s. I didn’t resist looking at the index to look for Dillard’s

Nicole (22m 50s):
Well, they made it so easy for you to just peak in that fight.

Diana (22m 53s):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I couldn’t go down the rabbit hole of actually reading the articles cause those aren’t available, but I can make a list and I am excited to get to the research on this project. Right,

Nicole (23m 7s):
Right. So you would have to go in there and order it. And in a future assignment, you will make a research plan where you’re going to kind of look at that and decide what you want to order maybe. Right.

Diana (23m 17s):
Right. Or I will just make, you know, go up to the library and just make a list of all the articles. Cause you can look at the table of contents and you can decipher what the article will be about. So I could see, oh, it’s, Dillard’s in world war II. Now I don’t need to look at that. So I could get the relevant articles and make my list and I could order them or I can just take a field trip, which is probably what I will do

Nicole (23m 43s):
To the family history library. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice that you can go there whenever you want. I’m kind of jealous, but thanks for always looking at my stuff up for me.

Diana (23m 55s):
Well, it’s nice to have it open now and not have to make appointments or have it closed. So I’m very grateful for that. But for everyone listening, they do provide a service that if you send them an exact reference, they will look that up and make a PDF copy and send that to you. So hope is not lost. You know, you can do that. And the missionary serving there do that as a free service. And Nicole you’ve used that before.

Nicole (24m 22s):
I’m so glad you met mentioned that. I, I give, we, we haven’t talked about this yet. It was really easy and they even got it back within like a week or less. So it was pretty quick. I just filled out a form. It was just on the family history library website. And then I put in exactly what I was looking for, the names of the people. My search was really easy. It was just a book that they had. So I just said the name of the person I thought that would be in that book. It was a list of biographies of doctors from certain county. And so he was a doctor in that state. So I thought he’d be in there and sure enough, he was. So I got back a PDF of the biography and his picture. So it was

Diana (25m 2s):
Great. That’s really a nice service. All

Nicole (25m 4s):
Right. So are there any more amazing things you learned in your locality guides that you want to share?

Diana (25m 10s):
Well, that there was no record loss. I mean, for the time period that I’m looking at, I know pike county had a fire in 1828. So marriage Cortland and probate all began after that. So I’m hoping that, you know, Elijah’s family moved in there after that point, but it’s always good to know that you at least have some records you can look at and then doing just a little research on the history. This whole area of Southeast Alabama, all was settled after the Creek session of 1832. And so up until then, this was all Indian lands and no white settler could go in there.

Diana (25m 52s):
Of course they didn’t obey that. And they did go in before, but then after that is when they could technically start patenting the land. And so that’s how we see the counties created. So it gives me the clue that maybe this was the draw that brought Elijah and his family from Georgia into this area. Of course there were a lot of people pouring in. So that’s always good to know, you know, when settlement was opened up and what you’re looking for, I just don’t know if the Dillard’s came from Georgia earlier or later, and there’s so many ifs, but I have somebody to research and I’m hoping Elijah’s records will open that up for me.

Nicole (26m 38s):
Well, along with the locality guide step, we do the ethnicity analysis. And this is an opportunity to think about how the ethnicity estimate and other biogeographical reports that the testing companies give you can help with your project. And sometimes it’s not going to be useful other times it can be useful. And you can also look at comparing the ethnicity estimates of your test takers with their matches and see if that helps narrow it down at all. And there are some cases where this is really important in other cases where it’s not, but it’s a good step to always look at and to think about and consider. So let’s hear from you Diana, about how this helped with your case.

Diana (27m 23s):
I was really curious to see what I would find when I looked at my tester Victor’s DNA and his ethnicity, and he was broadly European, very similar to my own with 41% England, Northwest Europe, 33% Scotland, 12% Wells, 8% Sweden Denmark, 4% Norway and 2% Portugal. So that tells us that this Dillard line is where’s that coming from? Well, it’s coming from somewhere in Europe, which we basically knew. And the interesting thing though, was that ancestry DNA has identified three communities for Victor and they’re all in the Southern us.

Diana (28m 10s):
So I was really interested to look at his communities and see if the DNA matches in that cluster that I’m using that Dillard cluster compared. So I did a little table because I just, it was part of the assignment to somehow analyze this. And I like tables. I just went through, he took the people in the cluster. It was that a huge cluster. So it wasn’t that hard. And I found that the majority of them were also either in Southern states, settlers community or the Georgia and Florida settlers community. There were two of them or that were in Western, North Carolina. And so, you know, those were the outliers, but pretty much everybody else was in those communities of the south and Georgia and Florida and the image on ancestry.

Diana (28m 59s):
So interesting because it shows this broad purple swath, which goes from the Carolinas all the way over to Texas, which has Southern communities. That’s pretty broad, right. But then the Georgia and Florida settlers is much smaller. You know, that’s just taken up the central part of Georgia and going down to about the central part of Florida. And then there’s this little intersecting part that central Georgia of those two communities. And I thought, oh, I wonder if this is where my Dillard’s are. You know, the little bit of DNA they’re showing are these communities that are out of this area. So anyway, it didn’t really tell me anything, except for I’m on the right track that this cluster of people, they have communities in the right area.

Nicole (29m 45s):
Can you tell us for people who are wondering, and don’t know how to do this, how do you find the communities and how do you find them for your matches?

Diana (29m 55s):
You go to your ethnicity, results, your own. And you know, first of all, you see how the percentages, and then within that you’ll have communities. Now, not everybody has communities. I am one of those people that has no communities. Don’t know how I missed out on that because you have communities. And my mother has communities. I don’t get that. But if you do have communities, then they will show up right there on your ethnicity estimate. And it’s fun because you can click on them. You can see some of the people that are in those communities. I wish we could see more about that, but we can’t. And the also give you a little bit of a history about that group of people.

Diana (30m 37s):
So to see the ethnicity of your shared matches, you just select one of your matches and you go to the page that talks all about you and your shared match. The page that comes up first is trees. And so if your match has a tree, you’ll see a little snippet of a tree and maybe a common ancestor, or you’ll get the message that they haven’t built a tree yet. But then you can also click next, the trees ethnicity, and that will compare your ethnicity with your DNA match. And you can see exactly what percentage they have versus the percentage you have. And you can see areas where you have ethnicity estimates and they don’t and vice versa.

Diana (31m 21s):
So it’s really great. And then below that you can see your shared communities. That is how I got all the data for my table was just clicking on ethnicity on the match page between my tester, Victor, and each of his matches in that Dillard cluster. So it’s pretty fun. The ancestry gives you that opportunity to do some comparison. This can be really helpful if you are looking for someone who’s sharing match on a very specific ethnicity, say you’ve got someone, who’s got some Hispanic ethnicity. And so you are looking for people with some of that indigenous Americas or a large group of Spain.

Diana (32m 5s):
So like Nicole, you said sometimes it’s really helpful. And other times, not as much, but we worked projects where ethnicity was the key to figuring it out.

Nicole (32m 15s):
Absolutely. And I really liked that you made this table to compare the ethnicity estimate and communities from the people in your Dillard cluster. To me, it just shows you that they also have ancestry in the south and in the same communities. So it’s kind of another form of clustering, right? It’s not as specific, but it can show you that you’re on the right path.

Diana (32m 38s):
But on the other that my table does for me is that will help me figure out the trees of some of these matches. Like I said, only three of them had really good trees and the others either have no tree or very small trees. But if I am looking at a match, for instance, here’s one who has a lot of Ireland and Germanic Europe, and some areas that Victor does Not have. So when I’m building their tree, that might help me to lop off some of the branches and say, oh, okay, this group was coming out of Ireland. And it’s probably not the part of the tree that’s going to have the Dillards on it. Does that make sense that it can kind of help me see what this DNA matches tree might look like as I’m building it?

Nicole (33m 24s):
Yeah. Is Dillard a surname that you think came from England? Or do you have any hypothesis on that?

Diana (33m 30s):
Not really, but I’m, I’m going to guess Scotland or England. It looks like the common ethnicity is England and Northwest Europe and, and actually Scotland too. So

Nicole (33m 41s):
Well, a quick Google search just told me that Dillard is an English surname. Well, there you go. A variant of the name Dollard, which comes from the old English doll and north Dole, meaning conceded or proud and ARD, meaning hard.

Diana (33m 58s):
I love these origins of names. This was a family that was very proud and hard of a definitely hard, no, that’s too funny. Well, I do know that they go way back in the United States from the colonies. So I thinking that they arrived pretty early.

Nicole (34m 19s):
Yeah. Probably one of those early groups of English colonists. It’s a good hypothesis.

Diana (34m 26s):
It is. It is. And I’m going to guess they’re out of Virginia. That’s just my guess. We’ll see how accurate that is.

Nicole (34m 33s):
Wonderful. Well, do you have any final thoughts on how this part of the project has helped you make progress in your Dillard case?

Diana (34m 39s):
Well, the locality guide is my foundation for my research planning. You know, now I have someplace to go. I know some specific things I want to look at. And as I come back to this project in future phases, I have a good foundation and the ethnicity analysis is always fun. And it just confirmed that I’m on the right track with this group of people. If I had seen that all of these people had really different ethnicities, I would know that I was completely off base, but this confirmed that yeah, this group of people is right there where I think they should be ethnicity in Georgia. So it was

Nicole (35m 20s):
Good. Well, that community is label with the Florida and Georgia community seems to be really useful because that’s exactly where you’re looking. And especially with the clue that you’ve shared in the past, that the Dillards may have lived in Florida at one point or come from there. I think this is definitely showing you’re on the right track and I’m excited. See what happens next with your project? Me too. That’s an adventure. All right, everyone have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. All right. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers.

Nicole (36m 2s):
You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.