More Month Than Material

 

Sometimes, a month like March can seem a very long period of time. When combined with a research plan like my one-topic-a-month Twelve Most Wanted, sometimes I find myself left with more month than material to talk about.

This month, the plan was to examine the Tilson family, among whose ancestors was a maternal line branching off to connect with the close descendants of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of Mayflower fame. My goal, of course, is to assemble an appropriate paper trail to document the connection from my immediate family—several of whom really want to become members of the Mayflower Society—all the way to those very Mayflower passengers.

Depending on what I've found along the way this month, for my research goal, I either can piggy-back on the membership application of some specific distant cousins of mine—including their reliance on Mercer Vernon Tilson's book, The Tilson Genealogy—or come up with some impossible-to-find documents. All that's left to do is construct the tree plus verification on my side of the family and see what happens when I submit the application.

In the meantime, I've been working my way through The Tilson Genealogy for yet another reason: to see where my many Tilson DNA matches fit into the family tree. I've got that process nailed down to an exact system. Starting with the eldest sibling of my Tilson ancestor, I document what I can about that Tilson sibling's own identity, then move down that line step by step from his oldest child to youngest child, then down through the generations on that line until I reach current day relatives and hopefully identify each Tilson DNA match in that line. Then, it's on to the next sibling of the Tilson ancestor and a repeat process through the ages for that second collateral line.

Needless to say, such drudge work does not yield not good material for scintillating family history stories. As I did for my previous research goals—the Broyles and Taliaferro families—I will move this project from the month's featured effort to continue the work in the background.

In the meantime, though it's a week before schedule, we'll move on to tackle next month's research goal early. Tomorrow, we'll step from working on my mother's ancestors to begin research on three of my mother-in-law's ancestors from those early years of the 1800s.