The "Accidental Admin" - Bolts, Fullers & Lyons "Oh my!"

Horace Lyon has been the bane of my research existance!

You couldn't ask for a bigger brick-wall than good ol' Horace Lyon, so it was pure, random luck that a Lyon 2nd cousin contacted me at this time when I'm on the high of DNA success!

So take a guess what this poor guy heard shortly after meeting me, "Would you be interested in DNA testing?" He lives within a few miles of my home, so when he and his wife came over to meet me, I showed them the Family Tree DNA video. He agreed to test, so in the first week of June 2004, I had my first participant to establish the Lyon(s) DNA Project.

On June 18, I posted a query on the EZEKIEL FULLER-L Rootsweb list asking if there were any Fullers interested in participating in a DNA project. There are SO MANY Fullers with dead end paper trails! My line to Ezekiel is pretty concrete. I'm descended from his son, Solomon, and Solomon Jr. settled in Laurens County, SC leaving his descendants with graves to GPS and abundant paper trails.

So I checked the Family Tree DNA website and there was no Fuller project already established. I called and told Max that I wanted to set one up. He seemed surprised that one didn't already exist, since Fuller is a fairly common name. So he set it up, and I began promoting it. At first, I only "marketed" it to the southern Fullers. However, Doug Miller saw one of my message list postings and contacted me about having his brother-in-law test. I agreed to open the project up to ALL male surnamed Fullers.

It took some time and lots of encouragement to get the Fullers to test, but they started to come around, and once they saw the successes of DNA testing, they became genetic genealogy's biggest advocates.

In retrospect, I'm amazed that I accomplished as much as I did last year since I was so new to genetic genealogy, and at that point, I didn't know much more than those few hours that I surfed the net the previous year. My most frequently referred to reference was FTDNA's FAQ page.

As the saying goes, "ignorance is bliss", which explains why I felt confident enough about genetic genealogy to agree to give a presentation on it to a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in early October.