Missing the Connection

 

As frustrating as this seems—seeing we are nearing the end of the month, and thus time to move on to yet another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026—I am having a difficult time making the leap from my husband's DNA connections in North America to their Falvey ancestors back in Ireland. Come to think of it, even the twenty of his DNA matches in New Zealand seem to be missing any connection to the parents of our specific Johanna Falvey Kelly. I'm beginning to wonder whether that sliver of matching genetic material is actually a persistent fragment passed forward from generations long before that time period.

Needless to say, this DNA puzzle has slowed down progress in adding another generation to my father-in-law's side of the family tree. In fact, not much of anything has actually been added to that tree. In the past two weeks, I've managed to find only thirty four individuals through tracing these Falvey connections, most of them through work on DNA matches. Truth be told, many of those new names hide within a "floating branch" of my father-in-law's tree, a token way to say, despite its presence, "I'm still not sure about this one."

Still, my in-laws' tree contains 44,402 documented individuals, which I'd consider a good start. Reviewing all the DNA matches yet to link to that tree, though, there is much work ahead, whether for the Falvey line or other branches of the tree. Other than what we might discover in the last few days of this month, we will need to move on to the next month's selected research subject.

With that shift, we'll also step from my in-laws' side of the family to my own. Not that that will be an easy transition; up next will be a leap from the dearth of documents in Ireland to the challenge of navigating foreign language records in the old dominion of Prussia. The last three months of the year will be the domain of the ancestral brick walls on the paternal side of my own family.

In advance of that move, in the last two weeks, I've had the opportunity to add ten more names to my own family tree. Most of those came, thanks to a recent email received from a distant cousin on my father's side of the family who shared some resources with me. In preparation for next month's move to research my paternal ancestry, that puts me at 41,979 individuals in my own tree.

Before we make that jump, though, we do have just three more days to muddle through some observations made evident by delving into those Falvey DNA matches which still stump me.