A Goal's a Goal . . .

 

. . .no matter how small? How about when the goal is massive?

When I hear examples of appropriate research goals in genealogy workshops, they often are quite measurable and attainable. That is good; results like that provide us with encouragement to keep at our work. But what about when the goal is enormous?

It has been almost exactly nine years since I first received results for a family member's DNA test. The first test I purchased was a Y-DNA kit for my brother, who was thankfully willing to do anything that would help us—siblings and cousins—figure out where our paternal grandfather actually was born. That step launched me on the longest-term research goal I'd ever tackled: to document every first through sixth cousin I could find on either side of my family.

The reason for such an ambitious project was simple: I couldn't stand looking at the names of nearly one thousand matches and realize I hadn't the faintest clue how they fit into my family's picture.

Nine years later, and I have two ever-expanding trees. (I couldn't take on a project like that for my side of the family without doing the same for my in-laws' family lines, too.) Perhaps that will provide a reasonable explanation for my biweekly reports of how my trees are growing. After all, such numbers would otherwise appear quite outlandish to the average hobbyist. 

While I took a break from blogging for the past six weeks, behind the scenes, I still pursued that overarching research goal. I'm still adding cousins to my trees. During that quiet time period, my own lines saw 114 documented individuals added to my tree, which now numbers 28,863. During that same quiet six weeks, I raced through 901 new entries, bringing my in-laws' tree's count to 29,590.

Behind the scenes, that frenzy of adding names had a sub-goal. Those directions I took from my Twelve Most Wanted research outline for the year. I was still working on my mother-in-law's Gordon line at the time, and had 168 Gordon DNA matches on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to confirm. Working on the documentation for those 168—I'm not finished yet!—has so far brought in those 901 entries. After all, families do multiply.

The virtue of having such a long-range goal is that eventually—though ever so slowly—it becomes easier to place those distant cousin matches on my tree. In some cases, I've already placed them in their correct location, before even realizing we have a DNA match. It was such slow going at first, back in July of 2013 when I first began receiving those DNA matches, but over the years, the effort has eventually paid off well.

Off the Shelf: Drive

 

While I may have many motivations driving me to read, I do admit: it sometimes takes me a long time to get around to actually sitting down and, you know, turning the pages of a coveted book to actually read it. Daniel Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is one such example.

It's taken me over a decade to get around to opening the cover to Drive. Yes, Drive actually came out in 2009, so maybe this book no longer represents the cutting edge of discoveries about the human psyche. Though I enjoy reading books about psychology, my primary reason for selecting this book was the author. I enjoy reading Pink's writing.

I first started exploring the author's work with his 2002 volume, Free Agent Nation. If ever there was a tag for what I wanted to be when I grew up, it would be a free agent; I was sold on the title alone. Fortunately, the author's engaging and thorough writing style converted me to follow not only topics like that, but the author's future works, as well.

You may think subjects like motivation have no application to the world of genealogy, but think again. I could see genies in every turn of the page. Call me too single-minded, but I enjoy finding ways to cross-apply concepts. Take this simple set of instructions included in Drive, given to help people zero in on what they find personally motivating:

1.) What gets you up in the morning?

2.) What keeps you up at night?

The author shared this technique from another book on my reading to-do list: Rules of Thumb by Fast Company magazine co-founder Alan Webber, inviting readers to write down their answers to each of those two questions above.

When I followed the instructions to that simple exercise, I'm afraid my results turned out exactly opposite of what was intended. 

My answer to #1: Obligations I have to attend to right away.

My answer to #2: Genealogy.

Granted, I've always realized I'm an outlier. (I'm also not a morning person.) But what is likely the opposite pattern—jumping out of bed with anticipation of the day's goals, but turning in at night laying a world of worries on top of one's pillow—is simply not me.

The exercise showed me something I think we all know: pursuing our passion of family history has kept many of us up half the night—and we see that as a good thing. A sign of what motivates us, keeps us engaged.

While much of Drive applies to the work world and rethinking what motivates people to achieve goals and dreams, the farther into the book I journeyed, the more it became a matter of seeing ourselves in a mirror. After all, the only ones who willingly subject themselves to cranking through pages of blurry microfilm, or to endure the dreary droning on and on of legal documents, are those of us on a mission to learn the rest of the story about our family's history. I'm not sure anyone could pay me enough to do drudgery like that for someone else, but I'd gladly do it for free for those intrinsic goals of finding my own family.

 

Discovery by D N A

 

There is a saying making the rounds in genealogy circles here that DNA doesn't lie. True, if we are using a scientifically sound sampling method to gather a sufficient number of "SNPs" and accurately evaluate them and compare them to other just-as-soundly gathered samples, any sizeable matching patterns will point to familial relationship. Still, I'm a stuck-in-the-mud stalwart when it comes to insisting that we rely on the paper trail as well as genetic genealogy before leaping to conclusions. Not always is there an "NPE" lurking behind every family tree.

In my current research challenge—I'm trying to figure out how a DNA match pointing back to a Most Recent Common Ancestor shared with my husband could come up a different genealogical conclusion.

That MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor) would be Denis Tully, the Irish immigrant who sailed away to Canada from what surely would have been a life of extreme deprivation back in this homeland. Denis—at least according to my best estimate—would have been my husband's second great-grandfather, not a very distant relative at all.

Of all his DNA matches listed on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool for Denis Tully, my husband's closest match from a non-direct line (in other words, not his first great-grandfather John Tully's descendants) comes from a third cousin whose lineage is nowhere on my radar. According to this other researcher, he descends from the line of a man also named Denis Tully, son of the Denis Tully, our MRCA.

Problem: though this match might assert this, we have no Denis Tully listed as son of Denis Tully.

Granted, if this match were still alive, he would be an excellent candidate for taking a Y-DNA test, as his is a direct patriline through to Denis—which possibly could reveal some deeper ancestral connections for that particular surname. As it is, my husband's line, while passing through his father, then takes a turn to the maternal side before resuming its paternal route back through the generations. All we have to rely on would be matches through any autosomal connections.

There are, however, other tools at our disposal. In fact, more and more tools are being developed, chipping away at the task of puzzling over those mystery matches. Take the beta version of Ancestry DNA's Chromosome Painter, released just this past week. Trailing the recently released Ethnicity Inheritance graphic which Ancestry dubbed SideView™ is this new tool allowing us to view a breakdown, by parent, of major ethnicities inherited, according to our DNA test results.

Finding that latest addition on Ancestry's website, the Chromosome Painter, seemed to be a well-kept secret. It is parked under the "DNA Story" tab on the Ancestry toolbar. Scrolling down beyond the "Ethnicity Estimate" page on DNA Story to the second sheet, "Ethnicity inheritance," the Painter beta tag, "View Breakdown" is located just below the now familiar colored, split circle graphic.

 

There are, of course, other ways to reach this information. In my excitement to find this new toy at Ancestry, I had scrolled right past the tab which would have given me direct access to what I was seeking. Notice the choice, right at the top of that same page, labeled "Chromosome Painter." Oh, duh. And, if you get sidetracked and go directly to the Parent 1/ Parent 2 overview, you can scroll a very long way to the bottom of that graphic and find a third way to access the Chromosome Painter, as well.

 

What was interesting to me—though no surprise whatsoever—was to find the graphic confirmation that my husband's "Parent 2" had a nearly all-green readout for his Irish roots.

 

Small wonder, considering that all eight of that parent's own great-grandparents were born in Ireland. The likelihood that our DNA match was just as monochromatic is quite as high. The direct line connecting this DNA match to our MRCA goes from Tully, to Tully, to Tully, to Tully. No surprise with those surnames: all unmistakeably Irish. It's the given names that have me thrown.

This is where we kiss goodbye all those fancy DNA tools and hit the books, looking for the right paper trail. Before we do that, though, I do have to confess I have some misgivings about that proposed Denis, son of Denis in our match's tree. And that's something we'll need to talk about. Monday.

Tracing the Tullys

 

Researching the Tully family—my father-in-law's maternal ancestry—has always seemed a straightforward process. All eight of his great-grandparents were born in Ireland, but somehow made their way to the United States. Of course, that is not to say it was always an easy process to document; the seamless paper trail in America gave way to a documentary black hole on the other side of the Atlantic at just about the time the Great Famine convinced those ancestors to find greener pastures elsewhere. Even so, I'd always thought my persistence paid off handsomely when it came to tracing that Tully line.

Though my father-in-law's mother was born in Chicago and spent the rest of her life in that city, her father—John Tully—was himself born in Ireland. It wasn't, however, a simple move from Ireland through one of the typical ports on the eastern seaboard that brought him to the Windy City. If it weren't for the many letters, photographs, and other mementos the Tully family hoarded over the generations, perhaps I wouldn't have so easily discovered that John Tully's parents first brought their family from Ireland to Canada.

John's father, Denis Tully, apparently first settled in a tiny place called Paris. If, in reading that city name, you are thinking of the more dreamy metropolis of the same name, disabuse yourself of such a notion. Paris in what is now Ontario, Canada, was a tiny town which, barely a decade before the Tully family's arrival, numbered a mere thousand people.

Since Tully is a somewhat common Irish surname, it might be logical to assume that, in finding Denis Tully in the 1851 census, I had mistakenly selected the wrong Tully family. I admit, that is quite possible. However, over the course of several years' work on this family puzzle, I've been able to locate the connection between John Tully's descendants and those of three of the other siblings on that enumeration. That, thankfully, was mostly accomplished due to that stash of mementos I mentioned, and further confirmed through several other records.

In addition, owing to some rather "long" generations—the baby of John Tully's family, for instance, was my father-in-law's mother, born when John was forty six—the line of ascent from my father-in-law to Denis Tully was rather simple: from Frank Stevens to Agnes Tully to John Tully to Denis Tully, himself. How, then, could a Tully DNA match not lead back as clearly to those same names?

There are, of course, sticking points in this scenario. One glaring difficulty is that the nameless enumerator of that 1851 British census taken in then-colonial Canada had qualms about actually providing the names of married women. Denis' wife Margaret, for instance, was listed simply as "Mrs." Speeding forward to the next census doesn't resolve that sticking point, either; apparently, Margaret Tully was dead before 1861—but too soon for Paris' Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church (founded in 1857) to have noted her passing in its records. Nor does the nearby church cemetery show any signs of the Tully family.

It is this very question of Margaret's identity which comes into play when I consider the closest of my husband's Tully DNA matches at Ancestry.com. Other than those matches descending from our direct line (through John Tully), this match holds the highest centiMorgan count: forty five, contained in only  two segments. The Ancestry ThruLines relationship estimate of third cousin figures prominently in the relationship possibilities outlined according to the Shared cM Project at DNA Painter. 

The only problem? The names on the match's tree don't align with those on my father-in-law's line. Am I certain I've got the right information recorded on my tree? Of course I am; I have the documentation to back up each assertion. But, like anyone, I can make mistakes.

What I haven't considered, up until now, was whether I could replicate the assertions outlined on the match's tree. If I can independently recreate the paper trail leading from this match (now deceased) back to Denis Tully, it may shine some light on a possible explanation. It's worth a try to at least explore the thinking behind another researcher's work.

Mapping Our Research Pathway

 

One of the best tools for tackling an unyielding family history research problem is to approach it with a plan. Especially if available time is limited—which it was for so many of my working years—mapping out a way to handle that shortage of available research hours made a big difference in my progress.

Though I've tried various approaches throughout the years, I've come to like the plan I developed only a few years ago. I've found that most of my research goals evolved into a cyclical pattern, in which one year I'd work on a goal until I couldn't make any more progress, then set it aside until I could travel to access appropriate documents (or find that those documents thankfully materialized somewhere online). Then, once again, I'd pick up that research goal and take it as far as I could go, given those limited resources.

That plan, which I first launched at the end of 2019, I've dubbed my "Twelve Most Wanted" approach. At the close of the year, I pick twelve ancestors, one for each month of the upcoming year, and devote my research time to whatever goals need to be accomplished to round out the story of that selected ancestor. When the month was up for the featured person, I moved on to the next ancestor. No need to fret that I was letting that ancestor slip through my fingers on the last day of the month; I knew I'd be back to revisit that research problem in another year. After all, I've been at this genealogy quest as a near-lifelong discipline now.

Since having a plan such as the Twelve Most Wanted gives me the permission to call off the chase when the time is up, it brings with that plan an agreement—and a sense of peace—that it is okay to move on to another research target, even though the last one wasn't completed. But really, do we ever come to a point when we are "finished" with our family tree? There's always one more step, one more generation, one more story...

As for this month's goal—to find the glitch in the DNA match leading back to my father-in-law's Tully roots—this is not the first time I've grappled with this family line. Every reiteration, though, brings me a bit closer to having a clear picture of where this Irish forebear originated and who was in his circle of near relatives.

With my late start to the month's assignment, I may—or may not—find the solution to this Tully tangle. But with documentation of my progress, a research log to track which records I've found, and a finite time span, this research plan gives me the freedom to line up not just this one goal, but tackle a wide array of goals from previous years' unfinished research business. There will always be another chance to revisit the issue, gather new resources, or visit new promising repositories or online collections. And there will always be new research questions which spring up, even for those ancestors for whom I've already found so many answers.

Tomorrow, let's get started with a review of just who our Denis Tully was, and where I found him in colonial Canada.

Where We're Going . . .

 

The beauty of having an overarching research plan for family history challenges is that it becomes the guiding map allowing us to pick up where we left off during those pesky but necessary interruptions to our progress. More on that tomorrow by way of a refresher, in case anyone's lost focus on last January's plans. For now, let's talk about what's in store for this genealogy guinea pig for the remainder of the month.

My plan for July was to shift from researching my mother-in-law's story to digging deeper around my father-in-law's roots. That means—eventually, at least—we'll be going to Ireland (well, virtually). But first, a necessary stop in Canada.

Why Canada? Because like so many Irish emigrants, my father-in-law's great-grandfather Denis Tully chose the more wallet-forgiving route of sailing from his beloved homeland to Great Britain's remaining outpost in North America, rather than any port on the eastern coast of the United States. Thus, by the time of the 1851 census, it is quite easy to find him in "Canada West" with his wife and five of their children.

How do I know this is the right Tully family? Despite the apparent difficulty of researching an Irish immigrant family possessing such a common surname, I've not only followed each line of descent to the current day members of the family, but have the rich resource of ancestors who saved photographs—and labeled them, too!—letters and other mementos of these ancestors. Though representing what was likely yet another poverty-stricken Irish household, that collection, indeed, is an unrivaled source of wealth, as far as family heritage goes. 

There is, however, one problem. No matter how diligent or resourceful I might have been in combing the available paper trail, I may have missed one detail. And it is that one detail I'll try to grapple with for the remainder of this month's research. You see, my husband has one lone DNA match which, according to that account's administrator, leads to a Tully ancestor whose story is not quite the same as what we thought it would be. My father-in-law's tree doesn't align quite as neatly with this match's tree as I'd have hoped.

There are some possible twists and turns in that branch of the family tree which I didn't quite correctly trace. We'll take a look at those possibilities this week. But first, tomorrow, let's go back and review just what having that overarching research plan did to help us pick up, mid-year, and get back on our research feet again.

Where I've Been . . .

 

Incredibly, it's been a long six weeks since I last entered any research notes on that continual quest to mine the stories in our families' history. There have been some good reasons for that—health-wise, mostly—and some not-as-sterling reasons for lingering as long as I have. But for now, let's see what we can piece together. The goal is not so much to look back, but to move forward.

All told, posting one puny day's entry usually requires about three hours' effort, start to finish, but it's always been a worthwhile process. For one thing, blogging one's research journey provides a record of what has already been accomplished, and what still needs attention. Having a blogging plan helps organize the research path, too. But if nothing else, I always figured that, after a long day's work when most people collapse on the sofa to unwind to the sights and sounds of network television, my choice of wandering along the branches of my family tree was just as viable a way to relax.

While I didn't post any of my wanderings this past six weeks, that doesn't mean I wasn't looking. There's always time to poke around those half-finished branches. And I did find some tempting stories—like discovering a fourth cousin from a southern family connection ended up living on the other side of town from me, an entire continent's distance from where we both started life. There were some stories that broke my heart, and others which made me proud of my family's roots. Those are all stories which need to be told.

Since my goal in June was to untangle all the branches of my mother-in-law's Gordon roots—after all, 168 DNA matches can make for a gnarly Gordon tree—I have been busy behind the scenes with that attempt. To talk about it, though, might equate to the excitement of watching grass grow, so perhaps that can save for another year's posts.

Looking forward, July represents a shift in my Twelve Most Wanted quest for 2022: a move to examine the roots of the first of three ancestors from my father-in-law's Irish heritage. That is a task to be introduced tomorrow.

For now, my gratitude to those of you who reached out with comments and emails. Your prayers and well-wishes have been encouraging. If there is anything I have felt was missing from the medium of blogging, it is the wish that this could be turned into a true conversation. It's always nice to have a listener talk back, to join in the conversation—almost as if we are sharing a cup of coffee before going our separate ways to start our day.