Weldon Smith

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Weldon Smith [send private message] and Barry Smith [send private message]

Biography

I've searched but can find no bio for me. Sometime soon, I'll be up on StoryWorth (thx Barry for signing me up).

Greetings, Tree Huggers

I join you as a student of life (still with a passing grade). As such, this introduction is now a more appropriate social one.

After I receive life's final grade, I ask my immediate successor to recast this bio in an appropriate historical, genealogical style. By joining you here at Wikitree, my branch is inextricably entwined in our global tree; once here, one can not soon be totally forgotten. We are enshrined here with everyone, including those persons of greatest consequence. In such a sense, Wikitree is a great equalizer.

Having advanced far enough in life to prove scientifically I am who I think I am, my genealogical tree begins with my biological (DNA-proven) parents. This is my one and only published scientific proof, important only insofar as identifying a biologically correct ancestral network, my existential origins.

Biology aside, an infant bonds with the first humans it recognizes as friendly and empathetic faces. Hopefully, among these will be found loving, on-the-scene parents to provide for the first two dependent decades of a human life; having caring parents who show up is all most really care about.

Purpose

To my way of thinking, Wikitree is for the living to honor their ancestors and all other caring humans involved in fostering their well-being. We research, document, share; it's a simple, successful model. We are a research community and we are here to support each other's research and documentation efforts by reaching out on G2G.

When discovering relatives/benefactors we would otherwise never have known, we try to learn their historical details, gaining context for their way of life and the forces that shaped it. We can also highlight the importance of such contexts, by documenting them in Spaces (see links below for examples).

Ethic

I assert a credo: the recording of wrong stuff is an insult to the honoree's memory. Most all WTers are likewise scrupulous, with Provable Accuracy! our battle cry. We help WT remain THE site for people who insist on accurate portrayals of family histories. The wrong-headed stuff we often encounter is mostly not deliberate falsification, but rather results from ineffective education and personality quirks, magnified by powerful negative social forces^[1].

My goal is to be a competent sourcerer for my managed profiles and any to which they connect. Life being too short, I choose to focus my Tree Spirit on my immediate sphere of influence, my own lineages and their historical backgrounds. Most others who work on our Tree are inspired likewise, to do respectable research rather than leaving it to the good Samaritans to clean up ^[2].

Kudos

Let's give a great shout out to each of our relatives who preserved essential, private, otherwise irrecoverable facts from family documents, and then connected it all together into a family tree. While building on their efforts, it is appropriate to thank all family researchers, who have researched so thoroughly the treetops of our trees, creating an information-rich environment for goings-on during the last four centuries.

To pay forward this head start, WikiTree seems the best platform because we can envision it as one of the last bastions of restraint and scholarship in an increasingly profit-driven, 'facts don't matter' world. (Of course all is temporary, and being a .com site, the founders are suggesting a take-the-money-and-run eventuality, so best to keep our GEDCOM files high and dry.)

Finally, let's shout-out to all the team leaders for their efforts to improve the general quality of our tree. Your Team Spirit is admirable. We all owe to you the ambience and brother/sister-hood of our community•••.

Credentials

Having neither professional standing nor academic credentials in genealogical research, profiles managed by myself derive mainly from my high level of curiosity, my lust for accuracy, and an ability to express myself that has gotten me this far in life.

Doing genealogical research on my ancestors for three decades, and DNA research for over two decades, we likely share experiences with prowling through courthouse basements, through unorganized boxes of documents at historical societies, through LDS-provided microfiche, through old historical volumes offered freely on the Internet, and through old cemeteries with indecipherable MIs. We have further been part of a much appreciated team of online, international relatives and interested bystanders, continually pushing the historical records for all they are worth. Go Team!

My Team, now headed by son Barry (Professor and academic research guru extraordinaire), has identified (by given name, surname, location, date) all 16 of my gg-grands and 28/32 of my ggg-grands (88%); the remaining four ggg-grand brick walls arise due to two 1700s unknown paternity events in England, and two undocumented wives in the 1700s (KY, possibly Nancy; NJ, likely Catherine). This accounts for my known 6th generation ancestry back to the Revolutionary War, about half American and half English.

Interest Links

Motivation

• Why_We_Do_Genealogy

DNA Genealogy:

• My DNA Segmentology Discussion, for ways to determine ancestral family groupings from lists of DNA relatives.
• My DNA 3-Sibling Phasing Discussion, for ways to simplify determining how the above DNA relatives are related to oneself.

About My WikiTree Involvement:

• My Profilology for all the latest on my adventures in WikiTree space.
• Tooting My Little Horn for observations on how well Wikitree is doing its job.
• My TO_DOs for a list of needed updates that I am trying not to forget.

Supplementary Information About Ancestors and Places in Spaces:

• Y-DNA: Clues to Our Paternal Ancestor Origins
• New Sweden Life: Finnish Settlement Details
• Venetz in the Rhone Valley of Kanton Wallis, Switzerland
• E.O. Orpet, Horticulturalist
• A Better Profile for Grietje
• Third Waldeck Regiment (Hessian) of Revolutionary War
• Unusual Profiles In My Tree

Online Essays, Cataloging My Intellectual Interests

• Who Is This Guy?
• A Few of My Grandparents
• Other Areas of Interest (Caveat: I don't always know a lot about these subjects.)

Sources

Footnotes

1. ↑ Preaching to the choir:
   • We are living through a period of great social divisiveness, which seems to center on a 'gullibility gene'. The people so afflicted adopt a narrative world view, stories concocted to reassemble reality to meet needs of the 'mentally frail', and which then can be promulgated by the powerful to meet their own nefarious goal of absolute power over others. In this digital age of promiscuous, two-faced (mis)information sharing, any such narrative can become a runaway train with no possible good ending. It's biological; frail minds, faced with constructed chaos, flock to appealing (supportive) narratives, particularly as those views approach the majority status that bestows group power.
   • Such narratives can be embedded in Wikitree profiles, perhaps to 'adopt' other families as one's own on Wikitree, further decorating the profiles we construct when actual information is not available or is not 'flashy' enough. But the sacrosanct data fields must be reserved for recording probable and documented biological ancestry that is applicable to all relatives, not just to those few wanting to choose a different origins story. The changing of this tree structure based on one's own selfish desires is exceedingly harmful to the multitudes who are struggling to document a true story.
2. ↑ 'Recollection of First Hand Experience' never means 'I personally saw this in an online tree'.

DNA

My scientific proof that I am who I think I am (woohoo) is spread among my ancestral profiles. It validates my documented descent from most of my g-g-grandparents.

• A MATERNAL aDNA match is CONFIRMED via testing at 23andMe:
  • Matching DNA was found between Patricia (Foster) Morrison and Weldon, second cousins.
  • Predicted relationship from 23andMe: "2nd-3rd cousins, based on 2.09% DNA shared across 9 segments, with largest segment 37cM."
  • Patricia and Weldon share a total 156cM of DNA across 6 chromosomes.
  • The MRCA of Patricia and me is Owen Orpet and Mary Adcock
  • The lineage from Patricia to MRCA is: Margaret Alice Foster<-Edward Owen Orpet II<-Edward Owen<-MRCA.
• A PATERNAL aDNA match is CONFIRMED via 23andMe testing:
  • Matching DNA was found between Kyle Smith and Weldon, first cousins twice removed.
  • Predicted relationship from 23andMe: 2nd - 3rd cousin, based on 1.92% DNA shared across 8 segments, with largest segment 43cM.
  • Weldon and Kyle share a total 143cM of DNA across 6 chromosomes.
  • The MRCA of Kyle and me is Charles N. Smith and Carrie Amelia (Mae) Jackson
  • The lineage from Kyle to MRCA is: Kyle Smith<-Roy Smith<-Robert F. Smith<-Roy Francis Smith<-MRCA.
• MITOCHONDRIAL DNA: Through genetic testing by son (Weldon) at FTDNA, Hilda and all her maternal ancestors have been identified as mtDNA haplogroup U5b1c2b, a western European subclade found in Southern Europe (Portugal and Italy) among mesolithic Western European hunter gatherers (WHG). Her maternal ancestors were likely the majority U5 signature of the ur-European maternal population of 40K years ago.
• Y-DNA: Our Smith males are known to be Y-DNA haplogroup I2-BY66988, tested at YSEQ by me. As of 2024, YSEQ can identify no subclades of this marker and its only known instances are found in two Smith lineages in early 18th century Virginia. The ancestors of this clade were Anglo-Saxon (WHG) along the German/Danish Bight during the Mesolithic. See what this Y-DNA tells us about our more recent Smith Family Origins.