Gillmore DNA

Genealogy nut that I am, I have taken a couple of DNA tests.  I don’t do much with them, but I do look at the trees of matches, who have people in their family tree that match mine in our online family trees.  When there is a match to someone on Ancestry.com, you can also see other people who are DNA matches to both of you.  I don’t even look at the matches who don’t have matching people in our family trees.  I occasionally get inquiries from people in the latter group, wondering if I can find a match anywhere.  Generally, I can’t and send them a short reply to that effect.  Imagine my surprise this summer, though, when I was given a little information about someone’s family, and I was able to go to my tree, and right away find where we matched!  This person is a grand or great grandchild of my great-great-grandfather Humphrey’s brother!  Unfortunately, there weren’t any other people who had matching DNA to both of us.

One of the longstanding brick walls of my genealogy research is the “nieces” who were living with my great grandfather Robert A Gillmore at the time my great-great-grandmother Flora Turner came to Colorado to stay with her brother.  I have been able to track their lives later on, but I cannot with certainty be sure who their parents were or where they came from.   Or when they came to live with Robert.   There have been times that I have wondered if they were really cousins.  I have a lot of new information about the Gillmore family, but I can’t prove anything about their parentage.  Maybe they were children of friends who died in the mining camps, and not really his nieces?  Unfortunately, because one of them who married, married a Turner, there is very little chance of DNA proving that they are Gillmores, because most of the known Gillmores are Turners as well.  That is why I was disappointed that there weren’t any other people matching the person mentioned above.

I have a lot of new information on the Gillmore family because I found a large amount of correspondence from a Marvin Gilmore to my grandmother.  This event of the DNA match, got me moving, and I realized that it was imperative that I share the information from Marvin’s correspondence.  I don’t imagine that it is always correct, and it isn’t complete, but being able to find the DNA match that easily, proved to me that his information is at least a valid starting point for more of the Gillmore family genealogy.

I’ve been working on this for a couple of months now, reverifying information that I had found several years ago, and finding new information and family connections.  AND a couple of nights ago, while doing some more research, I found a descendant of Robert’s brother John that I was a DNA match to!  And John’s descendants wouldn’t have had any Turner blood!  And when I checked to see if there were people who we both had DNA matches with in common there were.  AND several of those trees showed one of Robert’s nieces as an ancestor!  The “nieces” really were his nieces.  They are Gillmores!  Of course, I still can’t prove who their parents were or how they came to be with Robert. 

I was going to wait until I had everything completed before I started putting up the information, but there is so much, it needs to be put up a little at a time.  The recent DNA revelation has convinced me to get started sharing this information, so I will soon begin putting this information up on my blog.  I hope you enjoy and can make use of it. 

© 2017 Linda C Robinson