Building a Tree for King Stockton

I promised myself last summer that I'd focus on my mother's southern roots for my next research project. The reason was clear: I was registered for a week-long intensive class on that very topic, and I didn't want to show up on Day One of that class, being as ignorant of the topic as I was at that point.

All has gone well with said research goals until I hit an unexpected connection: a DNA test indicating that I had some relatives I didn't even know about. That, as you've realized if you've been following my pursuit of King Stockton and his family, has beckoned me to jump into a new branch of that research project: finding just how King Stockton, my new DNA cousin and myself connect.

We have our theories, of course, but our goal is to find supporting documentation—or, if not outright declaration of the fact, at least corroborating evidence.

All that to say, if you have been expecting my research numbers to keep up their stellar pace, post SLIG studies, think again. It's been hard trying to start from someone else and work towards the present, especially on a family that is unknown to me. In the past two weeks, I've managed to build a tree of forty one people. Not very impressive, but at least it's a start.

In the meantime, you know the usual drill. I didn't add any names or records to my father's tree nor my father-in-law's tree. Score for them still remains at 516 and 1,514, respectively. Ditto my mother-in-law's tree, much as I can't wait to get back to some easy researching in the home of her roots, Perry County. Her tree is still holding at 15,989.

As for my mother's tree, I only managed to add forty eight new names to her records, to bring up the total there to 16,876.

I keep vacillating between adding the King Stockton tree to my regular, biweekly stats—or whether to see that more as a temporary exploration. I've set up the tree as one of King Stockton and his descendants—though obviously, I'll need to push back another generation or so to find the nexus connecting me and my DNA cousin. All that will take time, and possible come with a few twists of its own before I'm done filling in all the blanks.

To add to the mix, while looking over my most recent added DNA cousins, I found someone else with that Stockton surname—making me wonder whether I had found another descendant of that tree. The more I think about it, the more likely it will be that I'll track my progress on this tree for a while, as well. Any of those descendants might show up as a DNA match to me, and it's nice to be prepared to see how we all fit in this one big tree of humanity.

In the meantime, as I work away in the background, building what I can find of the King Stockton family tree, we'll continue tomorrow, exploring the man's own narrative about his life experiences as a child, growing up in the territorial frontier of a very wild and forsaken Florida.