Duplicate Laws

 

It was bound to happen at some point. Adding collateral lines to my hypothesized Laws line to find confirming DNA matches, I ran across what appeared to be a duplicate entry. A Laws family relative had lost his wife, and quickly remarried. He and his new wife, who had also recently lost a spouse, blended their families together.

A few years later, the wife's daughter from the previous marriage married the husband's son from his first wife. If I hadn't been focusing on researching this particular surname—Laws—I might have missed the fact that I had seen that name before. The only reason I had been tracing the other spouse's line from her previous marriage was to ensure that I didn't attribute the wrong children to the newer line. If not for that research detour, I might have missed the connection.

Thus, step-siblings became husband and wife, an unexpected progression—until you really think about it. Once I traced the connections and verified them to my satisfaction, I was able to merge the two entries for each person into one in my family tree database, unifying each identity in my tree.

Running into a situation like this is not new, and it reminds me that it is probably time to go through the entire database and harvest duplicate entries again. For isolated communities such as some mountain communities in the late 1800s, there is bound to be intermarriages over the generations—or, as we see in this case, blended families resulting in dual relationship labels. Much as I had seen in my mother-in-law's Perry County, Ohio, families where intermarriages over generations in a limited community led to what I call "endogamy lite," the Laws family in Greene County, Tennessee, may be headed in the same direction.

For now, my biweekly count shows me that I've added 150 new names to my tree this time, growing my family—collateral lines and all—to 38,961 documented individuals. Over the next two weeks, I'll review these Laws family names to make sure I haven't added any more duplicates. Likewise on my in-laws' tree, though I'm not focusing on their lines this month, I'll make sure that the 116 names I added there don't contain any duplicate entries. We'll see whether that 37,339 count will hold steady there after this double-check.

One more promising sign, as I review my biweekly report, is to see a spurt in additional new DNA matches. Over the past several months, I had gained from only five through seven new matches for each biweekly count, but perhaps with the earliest of the holiday sales results coming online now, I gained thirteen new DNA matches this time—although that didn't hold true for my husband's matches. Perhaps my own distant cousins just preferred catching the holiday sales earlier than the other side of the family did.