Building it Yourself

 

Sometimes, ya just gotta build it yourself. Since I've been stuck on the origin of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe, I wondered whether following the lines of his two eldest sons might shed some light on where Alexander came from in Virginia, and who his first wife might have been. Quinton and David Boothe, supposedly born to that first wife, certainly were with their father when he arrived in Tennessee, so I have at least a toe-hold to climb their family tree—or build a descendancy tree to use in exploring DNA matches.

Turning to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what matches might already have been lined up for me, I saw that I'd be amply rewarded if I followed the eldest son Quinton's line, but for David, his younger brother, not one match was showing.

Quinton's line has been easy to follow, and I've actually been in touch with distant Booth cousins from that half-sibling to my own line's ancestor. It turns out that this was the family of whom my grandfather used to tell unverifiable wild tales about John Wilkes Booth—yes, the John Wilkes Booth—that he survived the manhunt following his assassination of President Lincoln and escaping to "a horse farm in west Texas." 

That farm in west Texas, incidentally, belonged to Quinton Booth's family. And apparently, that story was so widespread among Booth cousins that I actually got a phone call from someone wanting to exhume the body from the supposed burial site and use DNA testing to verify the identity of the person supposedly buried in John Wilkes Booth's grave.

For as much as we've known about the descendants of Quinton Booth, I don't know about his full brother David. Checking Ancestry.com ThruLines to see if there were any matches aligned to David's descendants, I was disappointed—but not surprised—to see there was not one DNA match attributed to that ancestor.

That is where the "build it yourself" comes in. If I build that branch into my tree, will ThruLines pick up the possibilities and point me to David Booth's descendants who have tested their DNA? That's what I'm hoping, but doing so will mean lots of work.

Sometimes, building out a DNA match's tree is the only way to verify connections. There are so many who test their DNA, yet never build—or post—their family tree so others can compare notes. For those of us convinced of the utility of genetic genealogy, we have to take that do-it-yourself approach.

In the case of this missing line of Alexander Boothe's progeny, it is certainly worth it for me to check out what can be discovered. Perhaps there is a cousin out there who does know the rest of the Boothe story, going all the way back to Virginia—not speculation, not information copied from someone else's tree, but actual records that will piece the story together and allow us all to take yet another step back through the generations.