The Beas, the whole Beaz and nothing but the Bees

Beasley DNA Update 4

Doug to Mark  Sun 4/5/2009 10:47 AM

I’ll admit that your grasp of the workings of DNA is better than mine. What you are saying is that we need to identify the earlier ancestors in order to find the link. In my mind, that is a challenge for which I haven’t had a lot of experience. In complete support of your approach, I’m attempting to add what I think is an important angle. My call for organization and for cataloguing data is aimed at both the early information and the late information.

My greatest efforts have been at collecting the Beezley’s in the US. That is because, as I have said before, it is more manageable, this is true. But also, it is important for making sense of DNA matches and for encouraging participation. When we find matches (whatever spelling) we could be finding a link in the 1700’s, in the 1600’s, in the colonies or in England. On the other hand, the link may actually be in the 1800’s after spellings firmed up. Matches might be an indication of earlier linking or of possible errors in the presentations of lines that people come in with. I’m being exhaustive and meticulous about defining the Beezley lines so that, as a goal, any “Beezley” who approaches me can easily find where they fit back to the mid to late 1700’s. There are certainly some later immigrants who arrived in the 1800’s or 1900’s, which may point to English lines still there. The other reason for being meticulous for the 1800’s and 1900’s is that those who haven’t yet identified their genealogy can find reason to invest in the larger picture.

My sense of the Beasley lines, frankly, is that I’m confused. At New Bern, I tried to work us toward combining various threads of information to come up with a definitive, mutually agreed set of known facts. In spite of our discussions, I found, when I returned home, that I’m still confused. I would really like to see, especially in the “Blue group” a clear documentation of up-lines from each participant. To some extent, it is present on the World Family website, but some of them need a lot of work. Besides that, I’d like to see, given the earliest known ancestor of each individual, a unified attempt to fill in the “down-lines” from that individual. I know that my being confused about might just be a function of my addled mind. On the other hand, I think there are ways of demonstrating clarity that would be useful if we could agree on how to carry it out.

On the other hand, I completely agree with your goal of locating each of the Beasley/Beezley/Beesley/Beazley’s that came into America. My question is how do we catalog what we know in a way that people can share. So far, we’ve accumulated lots of fragments and clues, but until we agree on a method of organizing, cataloging, indexing the information, it will remain fragmented and hard to manage. Eloise has been fantastic about finding information, and for that I’m am thankful. If someone wants to print out all the information and start working with highlighters and scissors and tape, that would be a good start. That work can proceed by one person working alone, groups of people in the same location, or LOTS of communication. If we can digitize, organize, index and publish information on the web we can get further. I’ve had some suggestions, but we have a lot of people who are very busy and my suggestions may not be the most understandable. I still believe, though, that we are working with narrative descriptions where we need to be moving to a common database (or multiple databases in a commonly indexed format.) Once we get our facts clear, we can continue to develop compelling narratives. If there is an author among us, maybe a book, eh?