Keeping Up with the Jones' and Finding the Mitchell's
Every story needs a starting point and the logical place to start the story of my family is with me, Barbara Mitchell. Every person is the result of a combination of DNA from two parents, and I am the result of the mating of a Mitchell father, who himself was the offspring of a Scotch father and a descendant of a German mother, as well as, for my maternal genes, a Jones mother, who herself was the offspring of a Welsh or English ancestral father and possibly a Dutch ancestral mother- already there are four surnames involved! Mitchell, Keller, Jones, Yost, and so it goes doubling with each generation back! Genealogy quickly gets complicated, and in the end, although one really never reaches the end, it seems that we are all related to each other. I have researched so many surnames at this point, that with every new person I meet I feel I could be related. It's really a great feeling to know that my family is extensive and comes from many places and life circumstances. Each family had some brave ancestor who left the comfort of home, braved the perils of the seas, and struggled to survive in an alien, hostile and unsupportive environment, just for the promise of something better, some land with their name on it, some independence from oppression or war or disease or famine or poverty. They risked all and we must thank them for this, because we were born in this land of opportunity- America. Our ancestors helped to build this new society and prospered through their hard work. Say a prayer of thanks to these individuals as you read about them and get to know them!
I have learned about history, geography, customs. I have made two solo journeys to Scotland. I have walked on the land once walked by my ancestors! I have seen the ruin of the home where my ancestors once lived! My history is their history, and it makes all of those facts and places so meaningful. I have even had my DNA tested which yielded my mtDNA code, and convinced my brother to be tested to find the paternal DNA code. This news brings us to places far from Great Britain, back to mankind's origins in the northwest of Africa, the cradle of civilization. What an astounding melting pot the world of humans is! How could we not love each other, whatever our color or wherever we live, or whoever we worship! At some point in our history our ancestors have done and been all those things.
I have separated my paternal and maternal genealogy into two very different looking sites, on purpose so that you, the reader, are able to visually separate the "side" you are reading about. There is so time has gone into the collection of all this evidence, all these facts, and yet the actual organization and writing in a coherent form of all this has probably taken twice as long, and both the research and the presentation are still activities in progress. As the internet's scope grows, so does the access I have to sources. When I first started this project, maybe 10 years ago now, there was hardly any information that I could use on ancestry.com, the best on-line source, now that site has grown so immense and is so full of resources and other sites have over the years begun to present dusty old archived materials, previously lost in the subterranean depths of museums and court houses and libraries and made them available at the click of a button, and often for free.
If you have landed on this website, you are here for one side or the other, so I hope my work helps you find your own ancestry. Please remember that I did a lot of research to present this here, so give me credit also, and you may link to my site. i'd also appreciate if you have anything relevant you'd like to share with me to fill in some of my gaps.
Navigating the Site
My navigation buttons are fairly self-explanatory, but you will stay on the "Jones" side unless you click the MITCHELL button, whence you will be transported to the land of tartan backgrounds! Please contact me for more information, or to share information, or to tell me you are related! The surname page will cover both Mitchell and Jones collateral connections. The brickwalls- well, hope you can help pound them to smithereens, because they keep me awake at night sometimes! Somewhere lurks the answers.
