… three to go
It was one of The Legal Genealogist‘s goals for 2022: to identify the nearest as-yet-unidentified autosomal DNA match at each of the major testing companies.
Including — at MyHeritage DNA — “match JS, a predicted 3rd – 4th cousin with whom I share 67.5 cM. Shared matches strongly suggest this is … another Robertson cousin — not surprising, since those Robertson second great grandparents had 11 kids, and they have left a truly prodigious number of descendants.”1
So… I finally got around to starting this, and began with that one.
And yep.
A third cousin, descended from Gustavus Boone and Isabella Rankin (Gentry) Robertson.
Now I’ll confess, this cousin wasn’t all that hard to identify. The match name on MyHeritage is a full birth name, including a middle name. The birth of a child of that name is recorded in the Texas birth index, and Texas is where the Robertsons moved after the Civil War.2
Tracking it back, it sure doesn’t hurt that:
• The match’s parents’ full names appear in that birth index.
• The match’s grandparents are all identified by full name (including maiden names) on various Social Security index entries for the parents.
• The maiden name of the match’s paternal grandmother is one I readily recognized.
• The marriage of that paternal grandmother is recorded in the county where I knew my Robertson kin of the same name would be living at that time.
• That marriage record produces the surname passed down to this match.
• And the death record of that paternal grandmother verifies that her mother — the match’s great grandmother — was, in fact, the daughter of Gustavus and Isabella Robertson and the sister of my great grandfather Jasper Robertson.
Sigh… if only they were all so easy, right?
In any case, one down …
Three to go.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “One down…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 10 Apr 2022).
SOURCES
- Judy G. Russell, “The 2022 DNA goals,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 9 Jan 2022 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 10 Apr 2022). ↩
- And no, I won’t be source-citing these details out of respect for the privacy of match JS. See Genealogist’s Code of Ethics, Board for Certification of Genealogists (https://bcgcertification.org/ : accessed 9 Jan 2022) (“When working with DNA test results of living people, I will not publish personally identifying information without each test taker’s consent”). ↩
Thank you, Judy, for this terrific post. I did a somewhat similar thing, in a different way, and it produced a very gratifying outcome.
My great-grandparents brought my maternal grandmother and her siblings to the United States from Finland in 1899; my grandmother was eight years old. There were no unknowns in the line of descent from my great-grandparents, but I wanted to know if I have relatives in Finland. I uploaded my 23andMe DNA data to GEDmatch.com and looked for an e-mail address with the extension “fi” (for Finland). A Finnish g-mail user would have foiled this effort.
One match seemed to fit. He shared a most recent common ancestor estimated at 3.9 generations back. Four generations back was my great-great-grandfather, from whom I had traced a line of descent using records of the Finnish Lutheran Church. This fellow and I easily vaulted over the GEDmatch CM and SNP criteria for communicating with a match. I wrote to him, attaching the fruits of my traditional (non-DNA) research, and asked if he might be descended from my great-great-grandparents.
His response back was warm and welcoming, something like: “It’s very nice to find a new relative. Your great-grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers.”
He is a third cousin, and introduced me to two more third cousins. We write regularly, if not frequently, and have exchanged family stories and photos. I especially like a photo taken in Finland in 1912 which shows my great-grandfather’s brother and his family. This was a worthwhile exercise with a wonderful outcome.