I am finally able to dial back a bit on my volunteer work at the Southern California Genealogical Society because I now have some very talented volunteers sharing the load on the IT work.

Recently I have received useful information and some interesting queries from several Holladay cousins. I also received a plaintive question from one of my “DNA cousins” asking whether this blog was still active. All this has prompted me to make a new attempt at blogging about my genealogical activities.

I’m also inspired by Geoff Rasmussen’s signoff line when he ends one of his excellent webinars: “Life is short – do genealogy first!”

Unfortunately, I’ve done very little in the way of research in the past several months. My main activities in the genealogy world have centered on support for the IT department at the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS) in Burbank.

One labor of love for me at the SCGS is organizing the RootsMagic software user group. We meet on the third Sunday of most months. The focus of the next meeting will be the newly-released RootsMagic 5 and early user experiences with it. My first order of business is to migrate to the new version from RootsMagic 4 and get some experience with it myself.

I also enjoyed meeting many Newcomb cousins at a birthday party and family celebration in January, and I met many of my Holladay cousins from Boone County, Kentucky, at an impromptu reunion in April.

At the beginning of this year I became co-administrator for the US part of the Halliday/Holladay Y-DNA Surname Project at FTDNA. This project includes all variants of the Halliday surname, including Holladay, Holliday, and many others. Through this effort I hope to learn more about the ancestors of Zacharias Holladay and their relationship to other early Holladay immigrants to Virginia. More about this work in future posts.

For the moment my genealogy efforts compete for time with volunteer support at the Southern California Genealogical Society. With the successful conclusion of our recent Genealogy Jamboree I’m hoping to find more time for serious genealogy work and for posting to this blog.

Since returning from my trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, I have been fortunate to locate some living descendants of John and his wife Margaret, or Margery Gustavus.  Their descendants use the surname Holliday, and my post also comments on the issue of how our surname is spelled. I am hoping we can verify the genealogical evidence of these relationships by DNA testing.

In the past year I have found some more distant Holliday/Holliday cousins, had a 67-marker Y-DNA test, and verified that indeed I share a common ancestor with them. These findings verify the results many years of genealogical research done by Dr. Alvis M. Holladay, Sr., and his family that were published in his book, The Holladay Family, in 1983.

More about Margaret Gustavus Holladay in a future post.

The ACPL certainly lived up to my expectations. My initial goal was to search for clues to the ancestry of Henry Reynolds, one of my “brick wall” great-great grandparents. This effort was moderately successful – some good information was found in Kentucky and Virginia land records about possible members of his family.

A second goal was to look for new information about the Holladay family in the ACPL holdings for Adair County, Kentucky. These holdings are quite impressive, but I found little for Adair that is not available in Salt Lake City and no Holladay information that was new to me.

While there I also looked for new information about Zachariah Holladay’s somewhat mysterious older brother John. Here I was spectacularly successful in learning about his descendants and about the woman he married, Margaret or Margery Gustavus. John is mentioned briefly in my biographical sketch of Zacharias, especially in footnote  3, but much of his life has been a mystery to me, especially what happened after he disappears from Washington County, Kentucky, records in about 1798.

Both during this trip and since my return, this effort to find more information about Zacharias’ brother John Holladay has occupied much of my genealogy time. The trouble is, other priorities and commitments keep me from spending more than one or at most two hours per day on genealogy. I now have two more genealogical projects to pursue in addition to various tasks under what I call the Holladay Family project. These new projects are the search for Henry Reynolds (1778-1849) parents, and developing a biographical sketch of John Holladay (1755-1800). I’ll be commenting on each of these and summarizing results in future posts.

The surnames are: Anderson, Brawner, Holladay, Montgomery, Reynolds, Sallee, Smith, and Waggener.   The Creel family is also closely associated with several of these families. I will be making a number of posts about these families and sources of additional information about them. Your comments and inquiries are invited.

I also spent time helping to set up a new user group for the RootsMagic genealogy database program as part of my activities in support of the library of the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS). I have been using RootsMagic and its predecessor, Family Origins, to record and report on my work almost since I began to do serious genealogy in the mid 1990s. I have been putting off entering additional data into my database during the past few months until the new RootsMagic version 4 was released, since it contains a lot of cool new features, especially the way it facilitates entry of the source information required to conform to good genealogical practice.

RootsMagic 4 has now been released to the public and it’s time for me begin entering a large amount of data collected over the past several years. I plan to report on this work periodically in this blog, along with some information about the Holladay family DNA studies, the RootsMagic 4 program, and some of my volunteer work for the SCGS.

For the time being, the main focus will continue to be on Zacharias and Kitty Anderson Holladay, their four children, and later descendants. Stay tuned…