I have aded three small updates to the website:
1. They Crossed the Plains with a Handcart.
Some time ago I produced a post describing a Google search for an article with the above title. In considering it for inclusion in my next newsletter I realised the search no longer seemed to work. Margo Duran has sent me a copy of the original article, which was written in 2002 by Laurel Bushman. I have now loaded it onto the site and put a reference to it on the Papers page (and in the sidebar). The Wikipedia article on the Handcart Pioneers that I previously referred to still exists.
There were a number of groups of Mormon pioneers who trekked to Utah in the 1850s pushing handcarts. The article focusses on the 1856 expedition which included John Warburton of Haslingden and his son Edward.
2. DNA Materials from the U106 Project
Both the Lancashire and Cheshire groups of Warburtons fall within the haplogroup R1b-U106 and there is a U106 project within FamilyTreeDNA. The project maintains a project space within Yahoo which includes some interesting documents on the origins, history, and geography of U106. These are frequently updated. I have included a couple of these previously, but there are now three documents which are linked to from the DNA Project page. Two are documents by Iain McDonald. The third is an abstract by me from a spreadsheet by Iain. The documents are:
a) U106 explored: its relationships, geography and history. This is a new document.
b) The Pre-History of the House of Wettin. This document previously existed as The King’s’ Cluster. It covers a subset of U106 which includes The Cheshire Group.
c) SNP ages for the Lancashire and Cheshire Groups. Iain produces a large spreadsheet with the ages of SNPs (mutations) within U106. In this document I have extracted the ages of the SNPs that are relevant to the Lancashire and Cheshire groups. They are based on results of BigY tests and as more results come in they are continuously updated.
3. Origin of the Warburton Name.
I have just been given a copy of the book Warburton, edited by Michael Nevell and published recently by the University of Salford. It is an archeological and documental study of the village. In discussing the origins of the village it differed slightly from the story I documented from Norman Warburton’s Warburton: The Village and the Family. It questioned the 915AD date for its founding, though accepted it was a Saxon enclosed settlement. Also there is no actual evidence it was named for St Werburgh, or that its church existed in Saxon times, though it seems the most obvious derivation. I have updated my Origins and Statistics paper (accessed from the Papers page) to reflect this.
