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 the first place was a message sent to me on the 23andMe website. I submitted a sample to them in 2018 for DNA testing to discover health traits, but had little interaction with DNA matches until 2020 when someone contacted me in search of his birth family. I didn’t think I could help him since we were predicted to be 4th cousins, so I referred him to my father. The next major contact came in 2021 when I was contacted by a person searching for her biological father. Since I’d done some basic genealogy research on my family I felt more confident about helping and the fact that I could confirm that she was related on my father’s side based on the matches we share helped a lot. We also share enough DNA (247 centimorgans according to Ancestry, which is a unit of genetic measurement) that her predicted relationship is 2nd or 3rd cousin.
I’m still in the progress of helping her. The first father candidate I found turned out to be part of the wrong paternal grandparent’s extended family. We’re most likely related through my paternal grandmother instead. I’m still searching for another good candidate and believe I’ll be able to make progress once the 1950 US Census is released on April 1, 2022 since she was born in the mid-1950s.
Since I started digging deeper into my own ancestral past, I’ve become interested in other people’s. I’ve started helping a fellow WikiTree member work on an extended branch of the very large Pegues family that I originally came across because Flossie Avant, who’d married a distant cousin of mine named McEwan Farmer, had previously married Paris Boyd Pegues. The data I have for her is interesting and I will eventually write up something about it.