Some of you have been long awaiting this announcement and your patience is greatly appreciated! It took much longer to get here than we wanted, but (almost) all of the Early Texans DNA project members who have submitted lineage forms are now in the database at https://www.txsgs.org/TXSGS_DNA/as of January 27, 2021.
The base information on the names, birth, marriages, and deaths of the ancestors born before 1900 can be found in the database. Identities of those born after 1900 have been anonymized and assigned names such as “TX000001 Member” or “TX99000001 AncestorOfMember.”
Two members are not yet in the database: one submitted a blank application form and has not yet resubmitted the lineage information; one sent in a First Families of Texas certificate number but has not submitted the PDF form which gives us permission to analyze the DNA data and enter the ancestors into our database. However, many of the source citations for members who have submitted forms need additional information to be complete.
Project members who wish to confirm information on your ancestors can access the database at https://www.txsgs.org/TXSGS_DNA/ and follow the process below:
- Use the search box to locate your earliest ancestor(s).
- If only one person by that name is found, that person’s individual page will be displayed. If the name is found more than once, then click on the ancestor’s name in the hit list.
- On the person’s individual page click the Descendants tab.
- Under the Descendants tab, use the “Text” or “Register” link and, if needed, set the number of generations in the drop-down box to a large number to see the full line of descendants (descendants named as “TX000001 Member” are the most recent generations—the DNA test takers).
- Review the display to confirm the parent-child links are correctly made and the birth, marriage, and death information is correct.
- Clicking on the name of any individual will display that person’s page to confirm sources and other information—source abbreviations are displayed at the bottom of each person’s page and can be clicked to see the entire citation (eventually multiple citations with one source number will be split into separate sources and, where possible, linked to online images or documents).
- Use the “Suggest” tab displayed on most pages to send corrections, suggestions for changes, photos of your ancestors or their headstones, and details on sources cited when an incomplete citation is displayed.
As you review the database, please be aware that
- the PDF form handling process has sometimes incorrectly handled name prefixes, suffixes, nicknames, and Spanish surnames where maternal and paternal surnames were included.
- in some cases source citations were truncated; most have been corrected by the DNA Committee, but some may have slipped through.
- place names were changed to be of the form XYZ County, STATE such as “Dallas County, Texas”—some errors may have been induced if the DNA committee incorrectly interpreted the place (some cities and counties have the same names making interpretation difficult).
- some dates in applications resulted in marriages after death and other impossible events—dates were estimated based on other event dates to attempt to correct these errors.
Many members were asked to submit more detailed source citations that have not yet been received. After much deliberation, we decided to enter all data submitted so far into the database. Most of the inadequate citations were modified to include notes such as “need details” or, when no source was cited, “no source.” Please help us complete and correct these citations to adequately identify the records cited. The lineages must be confirmed with credible sources before any valid DNA analysis can be done on the families.
The TxSGS DNA Committee is working to link freely available document images to the source citations, to add ancestral stories linked from other sites, and to interpret DNA matches and link DNA reports to the database test takers.
We hope this will encourage all of you who joined the project but never submitted the PDF lineage form to submit now. We will continue to enhance and add to the database so that it becomes an indispensable source for Texas researchers.
Thank you all for submitting your lineages and for sharing your DNA data so we can make exciting discoveries about our ancestors who came to Texas.