Articles on genealogical and DNA-related topics.
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The time I thought I would finally be connected to the global family tree
If you can trace your ancestry to a famous person, the odds of you also being able to connect to the global family tree on WikiTree go way up. I thought I’d found one such person for myself a few months ago. Why is this important? According to WikiTree every human is at most 100…
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Breaking through a brick wall 2
After I was finally able to find the parents of my paternal grandmother’s mother (Fannie Dennis), I quickly hit another brick wall in that line at her mother. According to the earliest record I could find for her mother Mariah (Herod) Dennis (an 1880 US Census record after she was already married), she was born…
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Breaking through a brick wall
A brick wall ancestor is one whose parentage is partially or completely unknown. My paternal grandmother’s mother was one such ancestor for me. On my father’s side I’d otherwise had plenty of success finding ancestors; it’s my mother’s side where I keep hitting brick walls only a few generations removed from me. One of the…
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How it’s going
Unlike the meme, it’s going pretty well. I’ve added at least 200 genetically-related family members to my tree so far. I’ve also been able to go back a lot farther than I’d previously expected; my earliest known direct ancestor, Jane (Unknown) McGhee, was born about 1820. I used “Unknown” because I don’t know what her…
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How it started
This blog is a place to share my genealogical journey and to hopefully help others in their own journey. I am an amateur genealogist who has only been researching seriously since November 2021. I stumbled across the WikiTree website and was interested enough to become a contributor. What motivated me to begin genealogical research in…