Week 34: Newest discovery #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

Occasionally when you are researching one thing, you come across something or someone you didn't expect.

I am still trying to pin down how I am related to the huge group of Mormon matches I wrote about in Week 23. (https://rootsshootsandstories.blogspot.com/2023/06/week-23-so-many-descendants.html). I know they are connected to my maternal side and, with that in mind, I was reviewing the DNA matches of my maternal first cousin, Karen. Karen's dad David was my mum's brother. Looking through her paternal matches, I hoped to find someone who might link to research I had already done on my matches. So... imagine my surprise when I saw a name I recognised!

The name of this match was familiar to me, not because I had come across it in my own list of matches, but because it was the name of someone I personally know, a lady named Tracey. I know her because I was her French teacher and years later we became teaching colleagues!!

So, now I have another puzzle to research - finding out how Tracey and I are related. All I know is the connection is on Tracey's maternal line. My cousin Karen and Tracey share no other matches on Ancestry, so it is back to good old fashioned genealogy to find the link. To that end, I've started building Tracey's tree.

There really is no end to where your research can lead you. Every new discovery just opens up a new door.

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2024 Week 43: Lost contact #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

When we research our ancestors and their families, it is all to easy to become a collector of names, dates and places. After all, we want to 'know' who they were and where they lived and when, in order to get a glimpse into what their life was like. We look for photographs of our most recent ancestors to see what they looked like. We trawl censuses, Poor Law Applications, Wills and Testaments to get some detail about their rank in society, their jobs, their financial circumstances. We discover their families, the children they had, the children they lost. We may read their obituaries and gravestones and scan their death certificates for cause of death. Through research, we can slowly start to build up a picture of them, a notion that we know 'who they were'. But something will usually elude us - we will never truly know their feelings/emotions, even if we know the key moments in their lives. Take my grandmother, Christina, who lost her first four children and then anot...

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Looking at my DNA matches over various platforms and my family tree research, it is obvious to me that my paternal grandmother's line - the Walkers - are the line which have the most descendants (or at least the most descendants who have tested) and who have spread out furthest over the world. My great great grandparents James Walker (1777-1862) and Ellen Muir (1790-1866) from Linlithgow in Scotland had ten children - eight boys and two girls. Such large families were not uncommon in those times. Two of the boys never married, but between them the other eight siblings produced at least 52 grandchildren! The eldest of the siblings, George Walker was, however, the only one of the children to ever leave Scotland and that was later in life, when he followed his son John, a miner, over to the USA. It is, however, many of the grandchildren of James and Ellen who decide to leave their homeland for the USA and for Australia. Their USA destinations included Kansas, Colorado, Ohio and Maryl...

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