As The Surname Society continues to grow, I am convinced that this tool will aid me greatly in my pursuit of my own personal ancestors. I have found a lot of them and do travel back a long way into the past with many of them. The advantage to being a late emigrant to North America and knowing each and every one of their emigration stories, where they came from and why they came.
But even with that much knowledge, I do have a couple of lines that need help and they mostly lie in my maternal mtDNA line and my maternal grandmother's father's male line Buller. I hope to meet more people interested in these particular lines although also welcome anyone interested in my 22 personal surnames and the four surnames of our grandsons' French Canadian lines. Although being on My Heritage has been a real eye opener into those French Canadian lines that are a brickwall as there are so many people searching for that information.
My cousin asked me to test on Ancestry DNA and facilitated that process since the DNA testing is not yet rolled out to Canada officially. I had tested her at FT DNA thinking we might share Buller DNA since we are fifth cousins once removed. But we did not share any DNA at all. However, she had matched a known third cousin once removed to me at Ancestry. So I tested and indeed I did match my third cousin once removed in the 4th to 6th cousin with a Very High Confidence of accuracy. In all I have seven such matches at the 4th to 6th cousins with very high confidence. I can place a second one of the matches as she is my fourth cousin once removed in my Pincombe family lines and is known to me. The other five though are a mystery but they have quite small trees and I am likely looking at 3rd or 4th grandparents as being the likely common ancestors. Plus their ancestry is totally American colonial thus far and I do not have any American colonial ancestors. Indeed my first ancestors did not come to Canada until 1818 and it was the emigrant daughter of this family that married the next emigrant in my lines in 1832 and then 1851 the next emigrant arrived to marry the daughter of this couple. Not again until 1908 did I have another emigrant who married the son of the next couple and she was my maternal grandmother. In 1913 my father arrived with his parents and married the daughter of this last couple. So a very shallow history on this side of the Atlantic.
Ancestry DNA has come up with a very unique way of displaying matches called DNA Circles. I do not have any yet because you need four people to make a circle and thus far I just have the two matches and must wait for others to add to their family trees, make them public or simply actually have a tree on line. I am hopeful though that I may find leads to my two lines that are most puzzling.
I am able to name 28 of my 32 3x great grandparents with 100% accuracy and the other two sets are likely but I would like to have the marriage registration of Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen Taylor and Ellen Taylor's birth registration. Then I would be completely satisfied that Thomas Taylor and Ellen Roberts are indeed my 2x great grandparents and that Samuel Taylor/Ann Lewis Harborne and Thomas Roberts/Ellen Lawley are my 3x great grandparents. One of the matches (not yet known to me) is quite interesting leading into my grandmother's ancestry but it is my Welch line which is known to me back into the early 1700s.
So hats off to Ancestry for a really great addition to their DNA material.
Slowly trying to work my way back into genealogy but suspect it will be as mentioned earlier into January before I am really back to transcription and blogging on a daily basis.
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