Beginning with my family's stories, the adventure started in the Bluegrass of Kentucky. My maternal side kept many pictures, and the stories were readily passed down through the generations and many family reunions. My paternal side was somewhat different, and the family stories were fewer. At any rate, Kentucky was the beginning, and the branches led back to Virgina. A lot of years were spent digging around this area, and it was not always clear which direction one should attempt. Finally, the branches led to London, then to the county of Kent, then to Rochester, and finally to an area of Wales outlined in the figure which follows:
It was some five years back, that all this stuff about DNA became available. Find your roots, and be certain of your origins. What if I check my DNA and found out I really was from China??? Not sure I wanted to do this, now some 50 years into the family's story. Did I trust my genealogy, or did I find out some other story.
Struggling some two years to decide to do my DNA, the "bullet" was finally bitten (as we would say in Kentucky) and that jaw swab was taken. Sweating some two months for the results, they returned that I was haplogroup R, and haplotype R1b1b. [Now labeled R1b1a2]
It took a few months to try and figure out what all this DNA stuff meant. [Being a physician helped] I put together the following table:
