When we were in Charleston for Celeste’s grandmother’s funeral I spent a little time talking genealogy with Celeste’s cousin Bill.  He’s been working on his family tree for eons and he had some sage advice for me:

1. Focus on your paternal lineage. If you try to branch out into maternal lineage much past the first few generations you’ll end up with an unbelievable amount of data that’s just too cumbersome to work with unless you do genealogy full time.
2. The DNA services out there are pretty useful and they are interesting if you consider the fact that you have a ton in common with your paternal ancestors.  I don’t know squat about science but he said something about the Y chromosome not changing much through the generations so our Y chromosomes are virtually identical to our male ancestors from way back when.

Last week I revisited my account on Ancestry.com for the first time in at least nine months.  I’d hit a brick wall on the Lowder tree about four generations back and couldn’t get past it with the records available on Ancestry.  I decided to keep trying in hopes of finding some nuggets of info that might help and ‘lo and behold I think it worked.  Long story short, I think most of my dad’s ancestors as far back as the 18th century were born, were raised and died in the Albemarle, NC area.  I’m hoping to carve out a day to go down there and do some digging through the land records and other public data.  It’ll be my first foray into actual physical genealogical research so who knows how it’ll go.  I’m sure I’ll write about it when the time comes.