Family Tree Update 20180628

Working on a family tree is a labor of love. It requires patience. Today, my patience paid off. I know who my paternal grandfather is!

It’s been busy for me the past week. The 23rd was my daughter’s birthday and ironically, we received the best gift completely by surprise: I found out who my mother’s father is. His last name was Mathis. I was blindsided. I mentioned previously that I figured my mother was a Mathis and that the Mathis/Matthews line crossed my family tree in multiple places. I contacted a DNA match I match quite high to on the Mathis side thinking she and I were related via a completely different way, through a different (related) Mathis line. I pulled my hair out for a couple of days trying to figure out why it wasn’t connecting and she mentioned the family member that lived in Ohio and my jaw dropped. There is only one, of three brothers, that moved to Ohio from South Carolina.

I thought my grandmother went to South Carolina because I could never find a Mathis in Ohio that connected but honestly, there wasn’t a fact to support it. My grandmother wasn’t big on traveling long distances by car, she didn’t take a plane ride until my mother took her to New York. Thomas Sr. and my grandmother were separated, he died before they could divorce, and Mr. Mathis lived (I’m not kidding) one minute from the Turk household and five minutes from my grandmother. While there are three Mathis brothers, one brother stands out as way more likely than the other two. And the DNA matches as we share almost 600cms of DNA on Ancestry, who uses conservative (low) numbers.

So…yeah, that happened. I’m still connecting the two Mathis lines because we share a DNA match highly that proves they connect. I’m talking with the granddaughter, it is her mother’s test I DNA match, and her grandmother is still living which is awesome! She’s 91. I dropped quite the bomb because there is no way they could of known about my mother because Mr. Mathis didn’t know. No one did.

Anyway, this proves, solidly, the Mathis/Matthews connection on my tree is concrete. That means the Bergeon and Summers’ lines coming from the Matthews line is concrete. The White and Meredith lines cross it too because I have DNA matches for them matching the Mathis/Matthews line. I’ve been busy this week so I haven’t had much time to work on the family tree. I spent the time re-scanning DNA matches as I reinstalled Windows. It finished scanning this morning, so I will work on it this weekend.

One tip: Beware of those potential family tree matches Ancestry suggests (you see them when working on the family tree, not in the DNA area). They aren’t necessarily accurate. I thought about doing a video about it, showing how I work on the tree. I thought it might be helpful.

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