Ewing Family
Association

Audaciter!

The Y-DNA Project of the Ewing Family Association welcomes your questions and comments: dna@ewingfamilyassociation.org.

Most project participants have provided a lineage including their known direct-line Ewing ancestors and their wives and children, with dates and places of birth, marriage and death. These lineages are posted here to facilitate research. We have not scrutinized or independently verified the evidence for these lineages, and we have intentionally focused rather narrowly on the lines of Y-DNA transmission to the participants. Some participants have provided incomplete information, and we probably have made some mistakes in transcription. A few lineages (so far, only for Groups 1a and 1b) are available in the Ewing Genealogy Documentation (EGD) project, where they are much more comprehensive and well documented than the lineage sketches that appear here on the Y-DNA Project website. We very much encourage participants and others interested in the lines represented by the various project groups to prepare EGD genealogies for posting in that section of our website.

To Contact Project Participants

We encourage interested persons to be directly in touch with project participants to discuss their lineages more fully. Please send all inquiries to the project administrator, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and he will forward them to the appropriate person.

How the Lineages are Prepared

The lineage charts posted on this web site have been prepared using the report feature of Legacy, a genealogy database program.

The “standard” version of Legacy (i.e., a stripped down version) is available for free download at http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/. If you are already using another genealogy program you like, there is no advantage to changing to Legacy—you can easily communicate with the project by using GEDCOM or even sending copies of your genealogy program file to us.

We have intentionally omitted details about all living persons.

Many people have found the way siblings are displayed in these lineages to be confusing. In each generation of the direct paternal lineage, the lineal male ancestor of the project participant is shown in bold type with his relationship to the participant following in parentheses. Immediately below this line are shown the dates and places of his birth, marriage and death, if known. Immediately below that, there appears a list of his younger siblings in the order of their birth. Above his name appears a list of his older siblings, also in the order of their birth. The idea is that in each generation block, there is a list of siblings in birth order with the direct-line ancestor in bold type. There is a space below the youngest sibling, and then the name of the mother of the direct-line ancestor in the next generation appears, with the dates and places of her birth and death.

Other wives of the direct-line ancestor are not shown. Often, not all of the siblings are shown and sometimes none of them are shown. In many lineages, we have excluded sisters of the direct-line ancestor and brothers who died without issue, even when this information has been supplied to us. This results from our focus on the transmission of Y-DNA in these lineages, which does not pass through the female lines, and from our wish to minimize data entry to the extent possible and still sketch the line of interest while providing enough information for a researcher to identify the line.

To Submit a Lineage to the Project

It is crucial to the success and usefulness of the project to have lineages for as many of the participants as possible. Project participants have submitted their lineages to the project in a variety of forms. If genealogical data is submitted to us as a GEDCOM

GEDCOM is a standardized file format designed to help different genealogy programs communicate with one another. Virtually every genealogy program has the ability to export data as a GEDCOM file. If you do not know how to do this with your program, you can probably find directions by Googling the name of your program along with the words “GEDCOM directions” or some such. GEDCOM is not perfect and it often screws up notes and references, but it works fine for our purposes. In the Y-DNA Surname Project, we can also work from the original genealogy program file, if that is more convenient for you.

or genealogy program file, we can easily prepare the lineage without having to do any data entry. It is virtually effortless for us to exclude collateral lines, remove data on living persons, and to achieve the focus and uniformity we are trying to accomplish. When we get the data in this form, we leave in all of the siblings’ names that are contained in it.

We will also accept genealogical data in any other form — PDF or word processing documents, handwritten charts, references to book chapters, basically anything — but when we receive data in these ways, we must type it into our Legacy Program to prepare the chart. This involves a little work and creates the possibility of making transcription errors. If we have to enter the data by hand, we usually leave out female siblings, etc. Still, we are happy to do it, because our success depends on sharing this information with others interested in the project.

Mistakes and Corrections

Mistakes are inevitable. We strive for accuracy, but invariably fall short. If you spot inaccuracies or inconsistencies (or any plain old stupid mistakes), please contact the project at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Corrections are always welcome. If we made a transcription error, we will correct it. If you think you have found an error in the lineage information provided to us by a project participant, we will put you in touch with him to discuss it and if you convince him, he can give us a correction.

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