Mam-ma's Southern Family

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. There is a story through my maternal grandmother’s line that we have Native American ancestry. The story was told to many of my cousins. It is usually one of the questions I get asked from second and third cousins who find me on the internet. I have not found any paper documents that support this legend. All census and vital records support that our families were white. [1] DNA test results for my grandmother also supports a European ancestry. Her mtDNA test shows her Haplogroup as U5 and my Haplogroup is U5b1. [2]   Native American Haplogroups are A, B, C, D, and X. [3] Of course this eliminates that the Native American ancestry on her maternal line. There could still be some trace among her other a...

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. I always thought that my mother and her parents were the first of my mother’s family to live in California. Tom J. Johnston, his wife, Pansy Louise, and daughter, Lela Nell, came to California during World War II. Tom worked on construction projects for the US military. However, when working on my Lancaster line, I discovered that Pansy’s great-grandmother, Martha Jane (Polly) Lancaster, died in Orosi, Tulare County, California in 1932. [1] She had been in California twenty-nine years, and six years in that town. So how did she come to be in California in 1903 when her husband, George W. Lancaster, died in Dublin, Erath County, Texas on 14 January 1919? [2] There was a divorce between Martha Jane...