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