Floating

 

When faced with charting an unexplained connection to a possible relative, my first step has always been to set up a separate family tree. On Ancestry.com, I usually created an entirely new tree, often making it private and unsearchable while my doubts yielded the upper hand. Once my sandbox experiment made it clear to me that I was on the right track, only then I might add the person as a "floating branch" in my own tree.

Once I caved and signed up for Ancestry's ProTools subscription, "floating" became a far easier proposition. While, yes, I could always create a floating branch in any family tree, the ProTools arsenal helped me tackle that a bit more easily. By creating a "network," I could link a person to a known relative in my tree, beginning the process by clicking on "Networks Beta" at the bottom of the "Relationships" column.

Though the next step offers several options, I simply named the network, specified the person I wanted to add, and that was it. In this case, I named my network Kelly FAN Club, wrote a descriptor for the network's purpose, and entered my first candidate, Timothy Kelly.

While it is true that I will be duplicating some effort—after all, I already had set up a small tree headed by this same Timothy Kelly—it was effort expended several years ago. With all the improvements in accessible resources over that time period, I am hoping more digitized records will help point the way to Timothy's family. After all, he did not come alone. I want to know not only who his siblings were, but whether his parents also migrated from County Kerry. Such a discovery as that, alone, would be a gift, especially if he turned out to be a close relative of John Kelly, his co-worker and my father-in-law's great-grandfather.

The next step, then, is to find any new additions to record sets, both at American resources such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, and also back in Ireland, and add them to this new floating branch. But first, I'll be following up on that newspaper obituary clue about Timothy's work on the Fort Wayne Road in 1857. I'll be looking, first, for signs of his residence right there in the same city where that other Kelly family was soon to arrive at their new home.