Trying This, That, the Other

Some days, the research path leads in circles. Yesterday was one of those days. With plans to review Flanagan results at four of the DNA companies where my husband has tested, I ended up trying a little bit of this, a smattering of that, and some more of the other, and came up with...nothing. If I found Flanagan matches, they lived elsewhere. If I found County Limerick connections, they didn't merge with the Flanagan family. It was a zero sum day.

I tried every data manipulation combination I could think of, checking for matches in common with my husband and either of two sisters who had tested, plus matches shared with some of their children. Nothing led to the hoped-for connections.

However, spending hours being thorough must have put me in the mood to keep checking through other Flanagan files. I not only have made it a habit to check back through the fifteen years' history of this blog, but whenever I received a useful comment on a post, or an actual email, I saved it for future reference. In addition, as I found pertinent links for specific family lines, I'd save them in a set of electronic file folders delineated by surname. My Flanagan e-file has several gems saved over the years, some of which I had nearly forgotten about. It was good to review all those notes—some of which contained details I need to make sure to add to the right places in our family tree.

While the pursuit of DNA leads didn't, um, lead anywhere, it occurred to me to try a slightly different approach. While comparing matches linked to siblings can produce some insights—in the Flanagan case here, unfortunately, it didn't—it occurred to me that widening the circle might yield a more useful set of details. Over the years, I've kept in touch with distant cousins who also research their family lines. We've compared notes from time to time. Now might be just the right time to reach out and see whether those cousins have Flanagan matches where my husband's test just doesn't have the genetic details that would point to that side of his family. It's certainly worth the try.