. . . Then the Hard Work

 

It was supposedly the pitiable character Eeyore in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh who advised, "Brains first, then hard work." Normally, I'd consider that sound advice. Today, after a weekend of frustrating research non-results, I think I'm now stuck on the second part: I'm on the "then hard work"—no brains included.

After stumbling upon several DNA matches who claim relationship to my mother-in-law's family through a line which includes a non-Catholic Metzger, I've been on a hunt to find where this mystery Clinton Metzger might have fallen in the family tree. Though the centiMorgan link is admittedly small, there is a possibility that the match is correctly placed in this line. But where? If Clinton Metzger was truly these DNA cousins' ancestor, his parents weren't who those cousins said they'd be.

And so, I begin speed genealogy, filling out the family tree, one Metzger at a time. While I haven't yet found the answer, I have run across one Metzger descendant who (gasp) left the faith for a wedding ceremony in a Methodist church. It is quite possible I may find more.

This search involves a routine process of moving through each line of descent, step by step. Take one child of Michael Metzger—right now, I'm working my way through the children of Michael's son Joseph Metzger—and methodically register every document where that child's name is found, then repeat the process for each of that child's children. Move down the line, step by step, from oldest to second-born and beyond. Repeat the process for each of those children, down to the present day. When that list is completed, go back to the top and advance to the next child of Joseph, beginning the downhill slide through the generations once again.

Tedious? Yep. But thorough. When I'm done—don't hold your breath; this may take a week or more—I'll have all the children of Michael Metzger's son Joseph documented in my mother-in-law's tree. And then I'll move on to the next child, who at this point has been listed as Mary Ann Metzger, born in Pennsylvania at the end of 1822, just before the family moved on to Perry County, Ohio.

I anticipate gathering another two or three hundred names through this process. This is the kind of hard work which allows me to spot DNA matches far more easily than at the first, when my husband tested back in 2014 and I sat there, stumped and awash in the flood of the thousand-plus names of strangers who were supposed to be kin. There may be brains in genetic genealogy, but for me, it's really the "hard work" part that makes DNA testing workable.