THIS IS THE GATE to my genealogy online. I hope you will become excited about the discovery of family history and dig deeper into who you are. You never know what bit of information will surprise you. Everyone on my gedcoms is either connected to me by blood or marriage except the Blizzard Gedcom which is mainly for research for the Blizzard DNA Project.

Genealogy is on the cutting edge of science with DNA testing. It can create great changes in who we thought we were with a simple swab of the cheek. In DNA testing we are actually looking for your earliest proven ancestor and not you per se so that you may remain anonymous if you so choose. The point is matching ancestors. In projects with only surnames listed, you are still publicly anonymous because they only list your surname with your DNA results and no further information.

If your DNA doesn't match your maternal or paternal ancestor it will probably tell you which ancestor you should match. Then you can make a correction such as in the Pace Chart of my Pace ancestors William Pace and wife Ruth Lambert, who has the same y-DNA as Richard Pace who married Elizabeth Cain, but has been linked with an entirely different Richard Pace line. If your maternal DNA doesn't match another person and you believe it should, it's possible you descend from another wife of that family, so mt-DNA is important there, also. DNA testing has proved there were three different Pool/Poole families in early South Carolina. And all the Blizzards tested so far are different haplogroups as well.

My husband's Pool and Blizzard families have all been within a radius of 30 miles of Lexington County, South Carolina for well over two centuries. The American colonies were a great melting-pot of nationalities. So Tillman and I are both a little of everything, and descend from royalty through our Gunter/Awbrey line, of William Gunter of Abergavenne, as well as other lines.

Among the ancestors of three of my grandparents are Ramses the "Great" Pharaoh of Egypt, Muhammad the Prophet, Emperor Charlemagne, and the great Spanish warrior "El Cid," Rodrigo Diaz, and in the book Royalty for Commoners, 4th Edition. I am descended from Lady Godiva who made her famous bare-back ride to prove the innocence of her husband. And William Marshall the undefeated knight, Regent of England, through four of his daughters.

My Smith great-grandmothers, Nancy Nora, and Caroline, were both of royal descent but not related to each other. On my father's side, Nancy's father, Al Sidney Smith was the son of Capt. James Hans (Shmidt) Smith, Senator and Congressman, on the Neel page.

And on my mother's side, Caroline's grandparents, William Smith and his wife and cousin Betsy Smith are on the Headley page. William and Betsy were both descendants of William Smith of Willoughby, the brother of Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame. Caroline married George W. Headlee whose grandfather David Fry entered the Mormon Church and each generation after that, down to my mother when she was two years old. At that time three generations of Headley/Headlee's became Catholic.

Email Barbara at bj_neel at hotmail.com or bjblitzen at yahoo.com

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