In Genetics and New England Pathology, I sketched a possible line to medieval England to illustrate a simpler truth from population genetics: the number of ancestral positions doubles geometrically, while the number of people who actually left you DNA shrinks via pedigree collapse. From this follows an unsettling comfort: living humans are orders of magnitudeContinue reading “The Wadhams Surname”
Category Archives: Family
Chris Adams
I struggle to create a post about Chris. He died Wednesday, March 13th, 2024. I have put this off for over a year. Time to reflect. He would have appreciated dying on the 13th. It would have been more appropriate had it been a Friday, but so it goes. Halloween was his true new year.Continue reading “Chris Adams”
The Barker Surname
My Uncle Tony recalled that his grandmother, Lucy Burr Wadhams, thought of her husband [Abram Barker] as a “Johnny-come-lately” without the deep historical connection to America (and Goshen specifically) of her lineage. My Uncle Tony mused that the family name was associated with a carnival barker, yet it seems more likely that the surname derived fromContinue reading “The Barker Surname”
Protective Arts 