Look at Your Tree

 Sometimes I focus on a single person or family, and lose the larger context. A recent discussion in our Tech User Group opened my eyes to this, and shows me that our focus must remain on finding the stories of our families, and then passing along those stories so that our history lives on. SKCGS is here to help you use whatever you need to find those stories, and to help you tell them.

Tree Completeness

One way to begin to do this is to look at your overall tree, and one way to do that is with a fan chart. As I look at my tree, I'm a bit behind filling in some of the lines here on FamilySearch Family Tree!

I need to fill in my Swedish great-grandmother's grandfather, at least. That's the big gap on the upper left. I believe I can do that soon. The gap to the upper right is in my focus family for the next few years, in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, aided by DNA evidence, so these women are not forgotten. 

Who Were Your People?

To pull back even further, who were my people? My father was the son of recent immigrants; his father Thomas Cowan the most recent, arriving in the US after World War One. My grandpa's people were Canadian Scots, mostly arriving in Upper Canada (now Ontario) from Scotland in the 1820s and 30s. 

My grandmother Elsie Schell was the daughter of Swedish immigrants who met and married in Duluth, Minnesota and moved west to Seattle to run a bakery. As a result, my father's DNA matches are very few compared to my mother's, especially at Ancestry.com. Interesting to see that my sister has more matches and more close matches than I do, so I should work her matches diligently! 

Look at this contrast in DNA matches between my father's and mother's side.

Immigration Pathways

My mother's people mostly were here in the colonies before the War for Independence; the latest of her known immigrants, the Baysingers,  arrived in Philadelphia in 1770. I do not have all of her direct lines back to an immigrant yet. Mom's mother was Anna Baysinger, and about one third of my DNA matches are Baysinger descendants. Her mother was Minnie Disney, whose line arrived in Maryland in the 1600s. These are the folks who create most of the connections I find in RootsTech's Relative Finder, which is quite fun! 

Pedigree Collapse and Endogamy

Mom's father was  Harvey McBee, and it is his family I've been researching for the past year and am planning to write a book about. It seems that the first McBee/MacAbees also arrived in Maryland originally, although my research has not taken me back that far - yet. Associated families of Booths (his mother's people), Smiths (his paternal grandmother), and Willis (paternal grandmother) Davidsons, Delaneys, Beelers, Dyers and Hamiltons are frequently intermarried with the McBees, I'm finding. This can complicate DNA results even when the multiple relationships are all identified. Look at this tangled mess:

Pedigree collapse in a DNA match's tree

Focus

Before I joined SKCGS I had little idea how to research, or where I wanted to go with it. Because of SKCGS' excellent educational program, my research is more focused, and I'm going further and more thoroughly than I ever thought possible. And along the way, I'm finding friends, relatives and collaborators. What a great time to be doing genealogy! 

I'm eager to hear from readers what you see when you look at your overall tree. I found it really useful to write this up, and hope you will do that too.

Valorie Zimmerman