It takes a lot of collateral relatives to put a DNA match in the proper place in the family tree. As I search for clues about my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon, there have been a lot of DNA matches connected to one growing branch of that family tree. And that means the numbers keep growing for every biweekly count—just not at the usual five hundred per fortnight rate experienced in the last two counts.
Still, in the past two weeks, my mother-in-law's tree has grown by an additional 416 relatives, mostly from known Gordon lines and those proposed Miller relatives whose descendants have turned out to be DNA matches. Granted, that falls short of that five hundred rate of the last two session, but my mother-in-law's family tree now has 39,287 documented individuals included in the records.
In addition, this past two weeks brought in another seven DNA matches, including at least one related to my mother-in-law's Gordon line. As I work through the DNA results with my recent addition of Ancestry.com's ProTools assist, I'm connecting more and more of those Gordon and Miller collateral lines. Eventually, there will be enough information to figure out Lidia's connection to her own roots—and thus push back the curtain obscuring her origins at last. Someday.
In the past two weeks, I think the only reason that rate of increase on the tree has slowed has been because I've been traveling. It is, after all, Memorial Day weekend—not to mention graduation season. Hopefully, in the next two weeks, the celebrations and socialization will slow to a normal summertime pace, and I can get back to the typical five hundred additions for the next biweekly count. After all, it will only be a few more days, and we'll be on to a new research target for June's ancestor in my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025.
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