I'm still at it, trying to trace the descendants of the one daughter of Lyman Jackson I've been researching for almost a week now. Susannah, next to youngest child of Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson, had married Henry Kennedy and moved west from her parents' home in Pennsylvania to a county in Illinois where some of her relatives had previously settled. Her children, in turn, had followed the same pattern, moving in stages across the American west.
With no way to assure myself that discovery of someone with her children's names were not merely name twins—after all, some of them showed up in records hundreds of miles from their Illinois home—I started looking around in those records for familiar names. If one Kennedy descendant surfaced in, say, Kansas, could I find any others from the family in that same new town? This was time to weave together all those extended family lines, tracing not only Susannah's children, but their children as well, to see how the families clustered.
The answer to my question, in the cases I've already researched, has been in the positive. At first, I was surprised, but upon further examination, I realized that line upon line, what might hold true for researching one individual family might hold true for cousins—or, complicating the equation, even half-siblings from second marriages of widowed parents.
In all, I've got seven Kennedy siblings to trace on their multi-decades move westward. I'm not finished yet, but the pattern, which seems to be holding firm, has become a guide for me in following a large family whose many stopping places along their westward migration seem designed to shake everyone off their trail. I'm hanging on to that cluster concept on every twist and turn—and hoping the process will also yield distant Jackson cousins who might just become DNA matches for added confirmation.
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