While I've been taking the long way around my genealogical problem—finding the parents of Lidia Miller in Perry County, Ohio—there is a speedier way to find my answer...maybe. The fastest route, it seems, would be to follow the suggestions at ThruLines, Ancestry's tool for connecting DNA matches.
Granted, ThruLines has an Achilles Heel of its own: suggestions are based, in part, on the family trees posted by subscribers. As we all can see, some trees are more accurate than others, hence the need for caution for anyone using this approach. But if the trees used are all correct—and adequately documented, I might add—it's worth following the family line from a shared ancestor down to the present-day DNA match.
In Lidia Miller's case—that unfortunate young woman who lost her life after giving birth to her second child in 1840—there is a suggestion for her father. While I've already looked at the documents available for this possible father—Ancestry suggests a man named Jacob Miller—the difficulty with that suggestion is that there may be more than one resident of Perry County with that name.
However, ThruLines also suggests a possible sibling for Lidia, for whom there are five possible DNA matches.
Granted, looking for DNA matches sharing an ancestor that many generations back in time—this would be my husband's fourth great-grandfather who was possible parent of both Lidia and the assumed brother—stretches into the murky area of the tiniest of shared genetic segments. In other words, the connections could border on coincidence—either from Perry County's notoriously high incidence of intermarriage of family lines over generations, or from the possibility of all the matches coming from the same geographic origin.
In what seems like a coincidence of its own, the suggested brother for Lidia turns out to be one and the same as the Jonathan Miller I've already been tracing this month. He was my first candidate to include in my "Millers of Perry County" Network on Ancestry's ProTools. While I am still following the ownership of that property which was mentioned in Jonathan Miller's will, a far quicker process would be to explore what can be documented on these five DNA matches descending from Jonathan Miller.
Looking at those five matches, right away I could eliminate two of them. One match was a person whom I had previously examined as part of my mother-in-law's Gordon line—the same line as Lidia's husband, William Gordon, descends from—who also had Snyders intermarried into that line of descent. Even if this match was descended from Jonathan Miller, that information wouldn't tell me much.
The other match had a line of descent outlined by ThruLines which I couldn't replicate by documentation, so I discarded that possibility.
However, there were three other DNA matches. I followed each one's line of descent, as outlined by ThruLines, being careful to find several documents confirming the connections. Again, despite the paper trail seemingly nodding yes to this connection, each DNA match is quite distant, containing one small segment for each match shared. Better yet, using ProTools to view shared matches of these Miller candidates, I then identified several other matches descending from this same Jonathan Miller line.
Does this point to a confirmation for Lidia and Jonathan? Possibly. But that still means identifying the right Jonathan and confirming who his father was. While DNA might have been the fastest way to speed up the process, it still requires verification by those monotonous plodding trips through the paper trail.
No comments:
Post a Comment