Determining a genealogical connection using Ancestry.com online family trees - Part 2

In my last post, I talked about how to find an Ancestry.com online family tree using a Google search. So now I have identified my match, I have found her online family tree, where do I go from here?

How do I find a connection between us?

I will start by looking at her online family tree in pedigree view. I will assume that my match is the home person in this tree marked as "private." This view illustrates my match's ancestry from her to all 16 of her 2nd great-grandparents.

I don’t recognize any of the people listed in the first page of this pedigree. So I start by clicking through each of the arrows one by one to expand the tree. I start at the top with Leroy Beauchamp. Clicking on the arrow beside his name brings up the expanded trees for the Beauchamp-Martin family. This view shows her ancestry back to her 6th great-grandparents.

The Family Finder test says it can find matches up to the 5th cousin level. 5th cousins share the same 4th great-grandparents. So I should be able to find a connection to my match without going any further back in her tree. I don't see any familiar surnames in the Beauchamp-Martin family tree, so I’m ready to move down to her 2nd great-grandmother, Nancy Ellen Layman. To return to the original view of her 2nd great-grandparents, I simply click on the minus button beside Leroy Beauchamp's name. This will bring the original pedigree chart back into view. Next I click on the arrow beside Nancy Ellen Layman. Again, I go through the surnames, but I do not see any in common. I click the minus sign beside her name to collapse the tree and do the same for the remaining 14 of her 2nd great-grandparents (except for Thomas W. Dyer who does not have any ancestors listed).

When I expand the ancestors of Thomas Daniel Dendy, I see a familiar surname - TINSLEY. I wrote about them last week in my Follow-up Friday post. My match's 6th great-grandmother is Rachel Tinsley. This is what it looks like in expanded view:

I hover my mouse over the name of Rachel Tinsley and I see that she died in Newberry County, South Carolina. My Tinsleys were from Laurens County, South Carolina. My curiosity piqued, I then expand the tree further to show me the Tinsley family by clicking on the arrow beside Rachel Tinsley's name.

The expanded tree includes Thomas Tinsley I and II as the father and grandfather of Rachel Tinsley. BINGO! That’s it! Thomas Tinsley I was the 9th great-grandfather of my match and the 10th great-grandfather of me, making us 9th cousins 1x removed. Our common ancestor is Thomas Tinsley II and his wife Sarah Jackson.

Just for kicks and giggles, I kept going, looking through my match's pedigree. I got down to the very bottom and expanded the tree for Nancy E. Minter, another one of my  match’s 2nd great-grandmothers. Doing so pulled up two Hill ancestors. Hill is another common name that comes up a lot when doing the Family Finder test. I didn't recognize the Abner Hill or Tibitha Hill that showed up in this view, so I expanded their trees further. As it turns out, both Abner and Tilitha Hill turned out to be children of Robert Hill and Tabitha Green. And as it turns out, their grandchildren intermarried with each other (see Abner Hill Minter and Charity Chapman in the red box).

To my surprise, I am also connected via Robert Hill and Tabitha Green's daughter Ann Hill who married John Steed in Brunswick County, Virginia. Robert Hill was my 9th great-grandfather. He was my match's 7th great-grandfather, making us 8th cousins, 2x removed (in addition to being 9^th cousins, 1x removed on the Tinsley line).

Finding a 2nd connection was the "surprise" I mentioned in my last post. I am not really surprised to find a connection so far back as 8^th or 9^th cousins. The test is validated or guaranteed or whatever terminology Family Tree DNA uses in their FAQs to go back to 5^th cousins with a good amount of surety. After that, the DNA gets diluted. In fact, on their FAQs page, they say that the chance of finding a match to a 6^th cousin or more distant is “remote or typically less than 2%.” I have 7 confirmed matches so far and of those 7, 2 are 3^rd cousins, 1 is a 4^th cousin, 1 is a 5^th cousin 3x removed, which can be rounded up to a 6^th cousin; 1 is an 8^th and 1 is a 9^th; and 1 I have not figured out yet.

The reason I'm highlighting this methodology as a post is because when I first started trying to connect with my matches there was a lot of family tree exchanging, especially on Ancestry.com. And the problem I was running into was that I was constantly getting lost in all the profiles of each individual and then losing sight of exactly how my match was connected to the profile I was looking at. In my genealogy software, all of my direct ancestors are color-coded red. So when I look at the index of names, I know immediately who my direct ancestor is. But in Ancestry.com's family trees, especially in the profile view, there are no color coded ancestors.

This is what the list of descendants look like in the profile view. From this view, there is no indication of from whom or how my match is related to Robert Hill. 

I finally figured out that the success to finding a connection to a match is to find the COMMON ANCESTOR and he or she WILL show up in the PEDIGREE VIEW of their tree. I do not have to look at all of the children of everyone in their tree to find my ancestor. I only have to look for the common ancestor. At least this is what has finally started working. So give it a try and let me know if this works for you or not.

Follow-up Friday – Jan 20, 2012

I definitely got sidetracked this week and my surname research took an entirely different turn, but for the better! Even though I have committed myself to setting and following certain goals for the new year, I encountered one of the many quagmires involved with genealogy research and we are only in our 3rd week of the year. I set a few goals for particular surnames that I wanted to research, either because I wanted to learn more about them or because they had presented a brick wall. But I also committed to finding connections to the 178 autosomal DNA matches I have acquired in the 6 months since taking the Family Finder test.

I know I haven't written much about the test and all that is involved in working with my matches (that is also on my goals list - to write more about my experience). But anyone who has taken the test knows that 1) your tree has to be pretty well built up 2) that includes your collateral lines and 3) you will inevitably spend more time exchanging more family and historical data once a match is determined which means building up your tree some more, entering more sources, transcribing more records, etc. but the bottom line is that you will get sidetracked into looking at several different surnames at a time, especially if you have any of those annoying common surnames that you will inevitably have in common with 75% of your matches like Jones, Smith, and Johnson!

So long story short, even though last week I was researching my Ward and Joy, Peters, and Dunlap families and still had a bunch of Ward and Joy information to input into my database, this week I was researching my HARDIN and TINSLEY families!

It started off with one little email to a match who had a few surnames in common with me. I'm not even sure why I picked him. I guess I was bored last weekend and just randomly emailed him. (Now you see why I don't write too many posts about this - wouldn't want the method to my madness getting out). Anyways, he sent me his ahnentafel and told me that we connected through my 6th great-grandmother, Clara Hardin who was born 1793 in Kentucky. She married John Carman LaRue in Maury County, Tennessee in 1811. Clara Hardin's great-grandfather, Mark Hardin, born sometime in the late 1600s, was my match's 7th great-grandfather and my 9th great-grandfather, making my match and I 8th cousins, twice removed!

So I spent the first half of the week (Monday was a holiday for me for MLK's Birthday and then I was out sick one day) looking on the internet at all the conflicting information about where and when said Mark Hardin was born and who his possible parents were. I reviewed sources and analysis and research reports. And then I found out that my cousin Kay Haden (you might remember her because she was featured on the FGS blog as the first registrant for the FGS conference in Birmingham!) is also descended from Mark Hardin! She had done a lot of research on him when she lived in AL years earlier and sent me some stuff to look over.

Then my match and I used this not-always-so-handy-tool called the "In common with" filter on our ftDNA homepage to see who else we both matched to and it came up with two names. I emailed them thinking they might be descendants of Mark Hardin as well. One of them wrote me back and although she did not have and Hardins in her ancestry that she knew of, we did find not one, but TWO connections via the TINSLEY and HILL lines!!! How cool is that???

I never really did much research on my Tinsley line because frankly, there was already tons of information out there on the internet and there looked to be two or three very capable researchers who had posted their research on the internet already, so I figured they had it covered and I could use their research as a guide when the (free) time came. But we know it's never that easy, so of course I had to perform my own research. Including starting an annotated bibliography of the secondary sources on the Tinsley family that came into Virginia in the 1600s which included my ancestor, Thomas Tinsley.

It didn't take long to find the connection to her Tinsley line, even though it was several generations back. It turned out we were 9th cousins 1x removed! She had sent me the name of her Ancestry.com online family tree and I was able to find the link to it by running a google search on it. Her tree was very easy to navigate in the pedigree view and by going through each of her lines I found a 2nd connection to Robert Hill (1678-1766) and Tabitha Brown Green (1690-1765)! My lines goes through their daughter Ann Hill who married John Steed and my match's line goes through their daughter Tabitha Hill who married David Chapman.

I have to admit, I'm getting pretty good at finding connections using genealogical tools like Ancestry.com's online family trees! It does take patience though. Oh and with this connect, we were 8th cousins 2x removed.

So as you can see, I'm a pretty well-rounded genealogist. Or you might say I get bored easily. But I don't think this is a bad thing. Last year I was more focused on one of two things and this year I plan to make more connections and get back to building my tree up some more.

So not bad for a first 3 weeks. Last week I added some new information and worked on breaking down a couple of brick walls. This week I opened two new can of worms and got my brain's juices flowing and started pushing myself to think about how to deal with what I find on the internet, how to resolve conflicts, how to cite my sources, how to deal with not being able to make the report I want to make with my gen software (that's never ending right?), how to find books, and how to start thinking about the historical context of the area that my ancestors lived in. Oh yeah and how cool DNA is! And did you notice that my test seems to be really sensitive? They guarantee to only go back to 5th cousins, but most of my matches have been 8th cousins. I think that's pretty cool!

My Genealogy Goals for 2012

My class load this year will really start to wind down, so I will need to start to focus more and have some goals if I'm going to get any major genealogy research done. So I have set quite a few goals for myself for the upcoming year based on what I've been thinking about these past few weeks and hoping that I could start working on one of these days. I have organized my goals in to categories to hopefully help me keep even more focus. One thing I do not have on this list is a goal towards increasing my genealogy expertise. I think this will occur naturally and can be incorporated once I get a feel for how the ebb and flow of my life will start to take shape. So without further ado, here is my list:

Think outside the box:

1. Extend my research to University collections, for example, the Thomas Hume papers at UNC (and evaluate Mildred Holladay's papers from UVA which Lori ordered)
2. Search for brick walls on Google and in Google Books - maybe do one surname per week
3. Search for brick walls in newspaper archives online

Organization:

1. Organize my paper files and file cabinet
2. Scan, transcribe, abstract, and analyze all of the documents I have retrieved in the past 7 years of research (they are in a pile), file them in respective family folder(s); add the relevant information to my genealogy database and submit transcripts to respective USGenWeb sites

DNA:

1. Connect with 5 more Family Finder matches - I connected with 5 from July to Dec of 2011, so this shouldn't be a problem
2. Sort through my Family Finder matches by maternal and paternal - my mother took the test in Dec so this should help me sort through them
3. Work more closely with existing Family Finder matches from July-Dec to exchange historical data and recent data; my goal is not just establish a connection then never speak to them again, but to build a relationship with them; ask them for photos, documents, etc...share, share, share!
4. Try to connect some American Godwins to English or Irish Godwins via Y-DNA
5. Update my Goodwin-Godwin Y-DNA surname project website with goals, success stories and summaries of existing lines

Brick Wall Research:

1. Find the parents of Jess Dunlap from Stokes County, North Carolina
2. Find the parents of William Peters, b. 1873 in Thomasville, Missouri
3. Find the parents of James Silas Barton from South Carolina

Research:

1. Do research on my O'Neal family from North Carolina - other researchers, including my grandfather, have a pedigree already drafted which I can use as a guide to find the documents
2. Use more research reports to tract resources searched and analyzed
3. Use  more matrix reports to better display disparaging or corroborating information
4. Build on my collateral lines to help me collaborate with my Family Finder matches in order to see where different branches of each family migrated to (ex. the Cox family)
5. Add the South Carolina wills and probate records on FamilySearch.org to my Cox, McCoy, Cheek, (my SC) family files
6. Work on my Steed and Lewis families of North Carolina. I have lots of documents. I need to scan, transcribe, abstract, and analyze them and add to my genealogy database 
7. Obtain copies of the deeds mentioned in Ann Jobe Brown's genealogy files to validate parentage from Ephraim Thomas and his migration
8. Start building a genealogy profile for the parents of James Franklin Lasiter: John Riley Laister and Emily Jones (per his death certificate, obtained July 2011)

Blogging:

1. Write more blog posts
2. Write about my Family Finder DNA experience
3. Make my blog look more snazzier
4. Turn my header into an image so that I can post a blog link to Facebook and Google+ and the "description" will be of the blog post and not of the blog itself

Graduate School:

1. Graduate in 2012...but in order to do that, I have to complete a few more things...
2. Take 1 more class this spring
3. Write a Master's Paper
4. Take Comprehensive Exams
5. Test out of 1 class
6. Do a Field Experience (Internship)

Addition - I would like to add the creation of Annotated Bibliographies for the geographic locations of my Brick Walls to my list. 

Amanuensis Monday - The Will of Samuel Lewis of Randolph Co., NC

Transylvanian Dutch blog author John Newmark started the Monday blog theme called Amanuensis Monday. According to John, “amanuensis” means:

"A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another."

This week I want to share some records about my LEWIS family from Randolph County, North Carolina that I haven't worked on in several years. I started looking at this family again after connecting with a woman who was a Family Finder autosomal DNA match to one of my matches. Although we were not directly related via ftDNA's Family Finder DNA test, we did find we were related via the STEED family. You will see some STEEDS are mentioned in the will I've presented below. We did not let the lack of shared DNA deter us from exchanging information about our respective Steed family connections. Both of us have yet to find the connection to the other woman that we both match to.

Below you will find scans of the will of Samuel Lewis. He was born sometime before 1759 either in Virginia or North Carolina. It was written 23 August 1823 in Randolph County, North Carolina. Although Samuel does mention all of his children, including the married names of his daughters, he never does mention his wife's name, though he does will to her two acres of land and the house, so we know she is still living. I have not been able to identify her name to date either. I am descended from Samuel's son, John Lewis.

Here is the transcript of the above will: (formatting added by me for emphasis)

In the name of God Amen, I Samuel Lewis of the County
of Randolph and State of North Carolina being of
a  sound mind and disposing Memory and knowing that it
is appointed for all men once to die do make and
ordain this my last will and testament in the following
manner To wit,
1st  I give to loving wife my dwelling House
with two Acres of Land with one cow and calf one
feather bed & furniture, and one Sow and pigs. One pot
during her Widowhood.
2nd  I give to Son John Twenty five cents in cash.
3rd  I give to Son James Twenty five cents in cash.
4th  I give to Son Clayton Steed twenty five cents.
5th  I give to Daughter Polly Wood twenty five cents.
6th  I give to Daughter Peggy Blaylock twenty five cents.
7th  I give to Son William twenty five cents –
also one half of my Land including the
plantation and Land where he now lives
to the South line of my tract.
8th  I give to Daughter Rachel Smithson
twenty five ets.
9th  I give to Son Jesse Twenty five ets
also one half of my Land including my old
plantation Except my dwelling house & two Acres
of land which is giving to my wife unless
She and son Jesse can otherwise agree ---
As to Negro Georo [George?] my - will is that he be sold
and purchased by some of my children if they
can otherwise to sell him where he wishes.
10th  I give to grand daughter Levicy Steed twenty five ets.
11th I give to Grand son Lewis Steed twenty five ets
then the balance of my property to be sold
and Equally divided between my wife
and my children named with my two Grand
children Levicy Steed and Lewis Steed after paying
all my just debts -------
my two Grand children is only to have the part
of one of my children ----------
Also my wife to keep what property she had
when I married her.
Lastly, I nominate and appoint Thomas Thornleigh [or Thornbough]
and Samuel Hill Executors to this my last
will and Testament in witness whereof I have
hereunto set my hand of seal 23 day of
August 1823.
Witness
Jesse Shaw Jurat. Samuel His Mark Lewis
H. Nailor

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

State of North Carolina )

Randolph County ) August Term 1826
The execution of this will of Samuel Lewis
was duly proven in open court by Jesse Shaw, one of the
subscribing  witness thereto & order to be recorded.
Jesse Harper

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to the will, I was able to glean the following information:

• He willed twenty five cents to each of his 8 children (named) and two Steed grandchildren.
• His wife is not mentioned by name. He willed to her 2 acres and the house.
• He willed half of his land to sons William (lives on it) and Jesse Lewis.
• Eight children named in his will:

                                                               i.      John Lewis

                                                              ii.      James Lewis

                                                            iii.      Clayton Steed

                                                            iv.      Polly Wood

                                                             v.      Peggy Blaylock

                                                            vi.      William Lewis

                                                          vii.      Rachel Smithson

                                                         viii.      Jesse Lewis

• Executors:

                                                               i.      Thomas Thornleigh (or Thornbough)

                                                              ii.      Samuel Hill

§  Witnesses:

                                                               i.      Jesse Shaw (Jurat)

                                                              ii.      H. Nailor

One of the children that is missing is Elizabeth Lewis. She died probably around 1802, prior to the signing of this will. She was married to Clayton Steed, who is listed as "son" in this will. Their two children, Lewis and Levicy Steed are listed as grandchildren in Samuel's will. Clayton Steed was my 6th great-granduncle. His wife Elizabeth Lewis was my 6th great-grandaunt. I was related to both of them through the Lewis and Steed families. Their children, Levicy and Lewis were my 1st cousins 7x removed. We shared two sets of ancestors in common - Nathaniel Steed and wife Susannah Franklin, and Samuel Lewis and his unnamed wife.  

I am descended from Samuel Lewis via the following:

1. Samuel Lewis, d. 1826 Randolph Co., NC
2. John Lewis, d. 1830 Randolph Co., NC; md Lavinia Steed (daughter of Nathaniel Steed and Susannah Franklin and sister of Clayton Steed mentioned in Samuel Lewis' will)
3. Nancy Lewis, b. ca 1809, Randolph Co., NC; md. Elijah Godwin 1826, Randolph Co., NC
4. Agrippa Spinks Godwin, b. 19 Mar 1827, Randolph Co., NC, d. 28 Sept 1864, Ironton, MO in the Civil War; md. Elizabeth Ann Orr (daughter of David Orr and Eliza T. Caldwell)
5. David Orr Godwin, b. 10 May 1854, South Fork, Fulton Co., AR, d. 24 Oct 1928, Mammoth Springs, Fulton Co., AR; md. Zilphia Ann Elizabeth Pulley (daughter of William Henry Pulley and Emily Casinda M Gooden)
6. Alvin Theodore Godwin, b. 27 Jan 1879 Mammoth Springs, Fulton Co., AR, d. 17 Nov 1950, Mammoth Springs, Fulton Co., AR; md. Lou Ella Davis (daughter of William Davis and Dora Nix)
7. Orville Godwin, b. 12 Oct 1905 in Hardy, Sharp Co., AR; d. 10 Sept 1956, Tulsa, Tulsa Co., OK; md. Nova Lee Peters (daughter of William Edward Peters and Dora King)

[1] Will of Samuel Lewis, 1823, Randolph County, North Carolina; Found at the North Carolina State Archives, Series of Original Wills.