The Box Family Project encourages researchers to find their common heritage through sharing of information and DNA testing. All variant spellings are welcome. If your Surname is missing and should be included, we'll be glad to add it. Please visit our website and add your family to the Patriarch Page. -Michael Michael and I crossed paths online at least 10-15 years ago, I can't recall exactly. But I know he messaged me by email a few years before I even had an ancestry kit done. And my ancestry kit was done Jan 2018. Our common ancestors (rather, who we thought at the time) were William J Box b 1838 and Matilda Worth b 1842. This pair had given both of us a lot of trouble due to what appeared at the time to be 6 wives attached to William J, an indeterminate number of women nicknamed Pinky, and DOUBLE census records all over the place due to South Georgia being the United States but Florida being a territory. Our people were Floridians by way of Lowndes/Clinch Georgia like many others. And like those many others, South Georgia by way of South Carolina, Beaufort specifically. For a few years I had my eye on some Boxes over in Beaufort who SEEMED like they ought to go with our two Box brothers, John 1795 and William 1800, who ended up in Lowndes. (This would be the father and the uncle of the complicated William J Box 1838.) I WANTED TO FIND THE FATHER OF JOHN AND WILLIAM. I wanted to know who the grandpa of my William J Box 1838 was. I was endlessly annoyed about it. I just felt really obsessed with this guy in particular. He bothered me. I needed to figure out all of the things. And so eventually, I crossed paths with Michael Revels again and he told me about Big Y, which, I had not really understood the point of before. I thought, what good will an estimated year do me without a NAME? And without another MATCH?? But we could try for a match. We had our Box guys. And we had descendants of those other Box guys, who split off from us in Beaufort, SC circa 1800-1830. So, we hunted. Michael was good at this because Big Y was old hat for him but it was new to me. But I caught on enough to get into the hunting part at least, even if I failed to grasp what the Big Y was going to magically do. Ancestry family finder transfer said the first cousin I got was A-M31. And this made Michael even more interested since he knew that meant "Bass" and not Box. And he thought maybe we were only half related. Maybe he was related to William J Box, but I wasn't. Either way, we were both related to Matilda Worth, but he had suspicions before I did about the Y stuff and how things didn't look right in autosomal to him. So then, I got a totally different first cousin once removed who didn't cross the line of my first basic tester who was just a transfer kit. Still, the new guy with an FTDNA kit was A too. So we sent that for Big Y and I hunted for a 3rd cousin. Meanwhile, we went after all the Box lines and we got two lines from the Beaufort SC Boxes and then our two lines from the South GA Boxes. No match. William and John lines were E and the Beaufort lines were R. We got one autosomal match that could be something still connecting them on a maternal line but we have not proved anything about that. The R line appears to be a "true" Box line. It is also possible that the E line had a father named Box, but that is less clear. Possibly they are connected to the Allen Box 1760 who was in Beaufort, or perhaps Box was not the name of their biological father. There are still multiple possibilities. Did they take the last name of their mother? Was Thomas Box their uncle? Their stepfather? We only know that the E line is not from Thomas Box, because the R testers match up to the known family tree of Thomas going by the paperwork. (Their tree did mention a William Box in it, but their William in the tree had to either be an R, or not biological.) The two Big Ys we did matched, so the Richard b 1802 line (which is opted out of showing) and the Allen line are R. (Side note, we also now think William Box 1838 and Matilda Worth 1842 were cousins.) And, my John Walter Boxx 1872, was confirmed an A with my second big Y tester. Since Jeff Bassett has created a nice "ceiling" to pull from over in the Bass project, working from a giant blob of 1673, I already know a fixed point that John Walter Boxx 1872 comes from. I will work his line from the floor up here in the Box project, taking any main line Bass who are relevant to the Boxx upline. As for the E and R, we hope to find out more information and have more testers find us. As for the G, he does not want to share any information so we cannot work that line. If you are a Box, you can do a basic family finder kit and join our project. That will tell you what basic haplogroup you have, and then we would be able to give you suggestions on next best steps. Our focus is Big Y. PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH US AND EMAIL US WHAT YOUR LINE IS IF AND WHEN YOU JOIN OUR PROJECT, THANK YOU. -Aletheia