Branching out or focusing on your direct line?
This is a question every genealogy researcher will have, and each will make their decisions based on their own research goals.
My decision was to branch out right from the start because I honestly didn't know a lot about my side of this Bramble Bush.
My husband's side is pretty straight forward.
Had my side been as easy to research as his I may have opted to just head up with no regard for going sideways.
This week the benefits of going wide in addition to straight up became clear.
About once a week I check for any new matches to our Ancestry DNA kits.
This week I had a good sized one to grandma.
Looking at the in common matches I found one that I had put a note in 3.5 years ago.
In 2018 I reached out to a DNA match asking if I could look at his tree. I explained that my grandma & I matched one of the kits he managed, and grandma and my mom's sister matched the other kit he managed. His reply left us both confused.
He let me know that Grandma & I matched his mother.
Grandma and my aunt matched his father.
His mother and father were not related.
The match to his mother was super tiny for both of us.
6 cM across 1 segments, Unweighted shared DNA: 6 cM, Longest segment: 6 cM
Grandma passed the segment to my mother unchanged, who passed it to me unchanged.
I made note that it might just be 'noise', and not a real match.
It might be endogamy from the intermarriage patterns of the great migration.
I promptly forgot about the strange connection to his mom.
The match to his father was a good sized match, and the shared connection was easy to place.
His father is my 4th cousin.
The shared ancestors are:
Samuel Bayes
BIRTH 2 SEP 1778 • Thornage, Norfolk, England
DEATH 21 JUL 1818 • Hunworth, Norfolk, , England
and
Elizabeth Alexander Saunders
BIRTH 28 OCT 1786 • Attleborough, Norfolk, England
DEATH JAN 1866 • Burgh, Norfolk, England
After adding his line to our Bramble Bush I had branched out a little further which made adding this week's new match super easy.
When I was done I stopped back to look at the shared DNA matches, and found another confusing match from 4.5 years ago.
In 2017 I contacted a small match for my grandmother: 22 cM across 2 segments, Unweighted shared DNA: 30 cM, Longest segment: 23 cM.
I was intrigued by her tree because she had my great grandmother's NPE name there, but the match was to my grandma & the NPE is grandpa's line. It was early in my DNA matching research so I hadn't yet found a focus on exactly who to reach out to.
If this match showed up today I wouldn't bother reaching out.
It's just too small a match to bother with.
BUT this was at the beginning before I decided how little was too little so I had messaged her.
We messaged back and forth over the weekend. Then promptly gave up when we both decided there was no possible way we would ever figure out our connection.
With the new match this week I added more collateral lines, and this match from 2017 slid straight in.
I messaged her that we are 5th cousins X1 removed.
Our shared ancestors are :
Roger Merrill
BIRTH 1755 • West Hartford, Connecticut, USA
DEATH 1851 • Ontario, Canada
and
Chloe Ann Merry
BIRTH 1773 • Vermont, USA
DEATH 1841 • PERCY TWP, Ontario, Canada
Fresh off the success I decided maybe I could look at the tiny match from 3.5 years ago to the mother.
Looking at his mother's line in the tree I discovered a shared surname in England. In looking at my tree I discovered that I had done quite a bit of work on that line over the past 3.5 years, and our connection was easy to see.
That 6 cM across 1 segments passed unchanged down through two children of
David Mitchell
BIRTH ABOUT 1770 • England
DEATH OCTOBER 1863 • Dorset, England
and
Arabella Scotney
BIRTH FEB 1769 • Spaulding, England
DEATH 20 FEB 1859 • Framingham, Massachusetts, USA
Me through their son:
James Mitchell
BIRTH ABT 1796 • Wotton, Surrey, England
DEATH Unknown
and my match through their son:
David Mitchell
BIRTH 1 AUG 1794 • Mintern, Dorset, England
DEATH AFTER 1861 • Dorset, England
Are you confused yet?
Let me point out the not so obvious.
A 3rd great granddaughter of David & Arabella (nee Scotney) Mitchell married the 2nd great grandson of Samuel & Elizabeth (nee Saunders) Bayes on July 24th 1925 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Their daughter is my grandmother.
AND
A 4th great granddaughter of David & Arabella (nee Scotney) Mitchell married the 3rd great grandson of Samuel & Elizabeth (nee Saunders) Bayes. She is the small match discovered in 2018. Their son is the manager of the DNA kit that I was messaging with.
James and Solomon appear to have arrived in the same area of Ontario about the same time, and then James' descendants moved to Michigan, USA while Solomon's stayed in Canada. This is our Bayes connections.
My great grandmother was the first child born in Manitoba, Canada to recent immigrant parents from England in 1906. My match's great grandfather immigrated to Michigan, but appears to have had a stop in Ontario where he got married in 1886. This is our Mitchell connections.
Both families were in England prior to the immigrations noted above. Not all of the family members left England.
What are the odds of two families intersecting at two very different times & locations without any evidence that they were connected in any way.
This small match is my 5th cousin X2 removed via my maternal grandmother's mother & her husband is my 4th cousin X2 removed via my maternal grandmother's father. It has taken my 4.5 years to figure this out.
Current me is very pleased with past me who opted to branch out rather than head directly to the top making this confusing find clear as mud.
Pulling together the strands to weave a tapestry that tells the tale!
This is why I search -
Cause ...
You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family you know!
***Any errors are my own. Please send me any updates or corrections via the comments at the bottom of this blog post***
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