With Patience and Persistence

 

Brick wall ancestors can languish there on the pedigree chart, their status unchanged for decades. It takes a lot to change that brick wall status. But with patience and persistence—not to mention, a big assist from advancing computer search capabilities—that status can see some changes.

As I go through each one of the children of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Simon Rinehart, I'm adding quite a bit of data to each generation's family group sheet. As I go, I'm watching for signs that I am at least nudging the status quo on that family's DNA ThruLines report at Ancestry.com. While I'm adding individuals to the family tree at a decent clip—this weekend's biweekly count will quantify that increase—I hadn't seen any changes in the ThruLines count for Simon this entire month.

Until today. 

Suddenly, instead of one hundred DNA matches linked to Simon, of which seventy also connect to his first wife, finally the number jumped up by nine matches. I wasted no time getting to that readout to verify the connections.

Granted, some of the lines of descent outlined by the ThruLines tool still rely on trees confusing Greene County, Pennsylvania, Rineharts for their name twins who left there for new territory in Perry County, Ohio. Still, there are at least three DNA matches whom I was able to verify, based on comparisons between our trees and documentation, including the very woman I had contacted so many years ago about our mutual Rinehart connections. How fun it is to re-connect with online genealogy friends from so long ago.

The work of outlining the descendants of each of Simon's children—including those from both marriages—is beginning to pay off, though ever so slightly and in such a glacially slow manner. As I've been able to find each of Simon's children in documentation, I've traced them and their descendants down to the current generation. Some of those lines appear to be robust, with multiple children in each generation's families. Other lines seem sparse, with maybe only one or two children per family, or with descendants who died childless or unmarried.

After twenty days of this process over the month so far, it is encouraging to see ThruLines pick up on some additional possible DNA matches. I'm hoping this is a delayed response, as updates only happen periodically, and that I'll reap more matches as the month moves on. We'll see, tomorrow, how many Rinehart descendants I did manage to add in the last two weeks.

It may seem like a lot of work for very little result at first, but with patience and persistence, eventually the answers will begin to appear. Every bit of additional information can bring us closer to the breakthrough that we've waited for so long.