Mother's Day Takes the Lead

 

If genealogy were a race, in my case I'd say the moms take the lead. I can't yet be sure, however, whether it's my mother's tree that's out ahead or my mother-in-law's tree.

Right now, I've been working on one brick wall ancestor in my mother-in-law's tree: her second great-grandmother Lidia Miller, wife of William B. Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. However, don't let that "brick wall" status give you any notions of stalled forward motion. I've been working every angle I can on this roadblock, trying to do an end run around Lidia. I'm hoping DNA will play a part in unraveling this mystery.

Of course, with an advanced Mother's Day gift to myself—Ancestry.com's ProTools addition to my subscription—I've had some additional tools to play with, and I've been running comparisons on every DNA match I can find. Using the ProTools Shared Matches option, I've been flagging each close relative of those ThruLines matches and then adding them to my mother-in-law's tree, as well.

End result? I'm still on a tear with that Gordon and Miller line. In the past two weeks, I've added 500 more individuals to my in-laws' tree, which now has 38,871 researched people. Many of them are ancestors leading to newly-discovered DNA matches. Others are collateral lines filled with people just waiting to fulfill their role as connectors for more DNA matches to come.

That's not the only progress made in these past two weeks. While I was showing a fellow genealogy society member what I've been finding with ProTools, I tested out the Shared Matches option on my own tree. And voila! A recent DNA connection resulted in adding thirty four new individuals to my own mother's line, so I now have 40,257 people in my own tree.

It's a race. But I concede; my mother-in-law's tree grows far faster, thanks to those large Catholic families who settled in rural Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota. Though the count of DNA tests potentially linked to that tree are much less than mine—my DNA match count is a bit over twice the size of my in-laws' results—the sheer number of family members over the generations makes my in-laws' tree a robust one, indeed.

We have three more weeks before we move on to the last of my mother-in-law's Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, and then we'll shift to my father-in-law's side of their family tree. It will be interesting to see how much that tree grows between now and then. For the past two biweekly reports, the tree has been growing at a clip of about five hundred individuals for each report sequence. Three more reports at that rate would add another 1,500 names to that tree—at which point, the in-laws' tree will indeed take the lead.

Speed, however, is not the point of this exercise. While it may take learning the personal history of every Miller who lived in Perry County before 1850, the result will hopefully be that the end of the month brings us an answer to the question, Who were the parents of Lidia Miller Gordon? That's one young mother about whom I'd like to learn so much more.