What Got it all Started

 

When, at the beginning of each year, I outline my research plan for breaking through ancestral brick walls, I usually take a look at where, in my family tree, I'm currently stuck. No matter how much research I tackle, there's always some place where I'm stumped about ancestors. At the end of each year, twelve of those sticking points become my research plan's Twelve Most Wanted for the subsequent year.

That wasn't exactly how it worked for February's plan this year. My goal to research Job Tison of Glynn County, Georgia, came rather from a spark of inspiration. I shared that story, back in December when I was outlining my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

To give you a quick recap, last fall during a local genealogical society meeting, I had asked all our members, friends, and visitors to pull out their phones and launch the "Relatives Around Me" function from the FamilySearch.org app. Just taking a few minutes to do that in the midst of such a meeting is an instant guarantee of launching multiple sets of attendees abuzz in conversation. 

One new member at the meeting came up to me, surprised that we were listed as seventh cousins, twice removed. Only a genealogist would even understand what that response meant.

Curious, I inquired which family line connected us. It was the family which included my fourth great-grandfather, Job Tison. When that happened last October, I already knew that Job Tison had been one of my brick wall ancestors. I had seen that other people stated his roots were back in Pitt County, North Carolina, but I couldn't find any documentation to tie Job Tison to both locations.

Since that day, my new-found cousin and I—and our two laptop computers—got together at a local coffee shop for a jam session on locating Tison records. That prompted her to exclaim how much she enjoyed the collaborative effort, and how she wished our group could do something like that more often.

That exchange with my fellow genealogical society member last October not only inspired me to schedule Job Tison as one of my research projects for this year, but to devise a way to gather together with others to collectively research our brick wall ancestors. That became the inspiration for a class series I and a co-instructor will facilitate later this month at a local community college.

In the meantime, the most encouraging outcome of that exchange was that my friend confirmed her family's connection back east to—yep, you guessed it—Pitt County, North Carolina. Her family didn't move on to Georgia, as my Job Tison had, but remained in North Carolina for generations after that. 

While such discoveries through "Relatives Around Me" should include a cautionary tale regarding verifying connections through documentation, the discovery of a possible nexus centered in Pitt County has encouraged me to pick up the search once again. There is definitely something to be said for the generating encouragement of collaborative effort. Sometimes, we need that encouragement to pick back up and keep going.