Staring down a longstanding research roadblock, somehow hoping this time it will reveal the answers it kept secret last time, surely doesn't work. Sometimes, the problem requires looking at it from a different perspective. Granted, I'm still stuck on Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, despite looking at her from both the perspective of her second marriage and the early years of her first marriage.
There is, however, a different approach yet to take. That attempt at problem solving I had begun last May, when mulling over the neighborly connection between another Miller family and the young family of Lydia and her first husband William Gordon.
Knowing that the Gordons had a neighbor named Jonathan Miller, last year I had used the Ancestry.com ProTools to form a "network" to examine what could be found about Jonathan Miller and his family. That was when I ran into the additional surnames I mentioned yesterday, of the Dupler marriages and the Anspach line.
Today was the time to review those notes—not only that, but to pull up what I had entered in the floating branch in my tree to add those mystery Millers as a potential connection to Lydia's own roots. From that point, I examined DNA matches among my husband's results who had any connection to the lines including those additional surnames, Dupler and Anspach.
While I am a long way from confirming any possible Miller matches, I am mapping out those several DNA matches' lines of descent from their founding Miller ancestors. Granted, each of those matches shares a tiny percentage of DNA with my husband—wobbling on unreliable, in the estimation of some experts—but I'm tracing them, just in case something does reveal itself in the examination. We'll take a closer look at the proposed connections tomorrow.
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