Exploring Genealogy (mom's side)

For reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, I've recently become fascinated with genealogy. My mother has worked on our family history in the past and I've helped on occasion with the technology side of things. But I've not really been that interested for myself.

Before our trip to England, I dug into my mom's research a bit more to find some gravestones to visit. Those findings led to some of my most stressful driving situations and the unlikeliest directions ever given (but they worked!) - you can read about those adventures here. In doing this research, I'd set up an ancestry.com account and added some information for my mother's side of the family.

I've also got a profile on 23andMe.com. If you're not familiar with 23andMe, you send a DNA sample to them and they come up with all sorts of interesting things. One of these features is "Your DNA family," where you can connect with other users who share some of your DNA. I bought 23andMe kits for my parents one Christmas, so 23andMe is able to tell me the degree of the relationship as well as which side I should find the relation.

At some point, I decided to write to a bunch of people identified as being related on my mother's side. I had names going back several generations, so I felt it was likely we'd be able to find the connection. But for some time, I didn't hear much from anyone.

Now that we're in Abu Dhabi, and I'm away from all my resources, someone contacted me! We were predicted to be third cousins on my mother's side. He didn't know much about his genealogy, but when I listed the areas that my great-great-grandparents lived, he identified his grandmother who lived in that region. I took to ancestry.com to see if I could figure it out.

Exploring the "hints" on ancestry, you can look at the people in other public trees to see if they match. I found a tree that had two people similar to one set of great-great-grandparents. The GGGrandmother's name was slightly different - Jeni instead of Jane - but birthdate matched and the birth location was an obvious match. My GGGrandmother was born aboard the ship traveling from Ireland to the Americas. I sent a message to the owner of this tree and learned that she had been tracing her late husband's family. She didn't have much to add, but her tree told me the relation she probably had to the person I was talking to on 23andMe.

I went back to 23andMe with this information. My third-cousin's aunt was the person I had found on ancestry.com, he recognized her name. He hadn't realized that she'd done any genealogy work on her husband's side of the family. I've had a really good time making these little discoveries.