Sorry, A bit of a long one today, but here goes.
I was curious about something. In gedmatch when you put a kit number into the One-to-Many matches you obviously get a list of dna matches to that kit number.
Now, when I put in the kit numbers for my mom and dad, in the list I find a small but decent number of wikitree links. I wish there were more, though.
In many of those cases I can't find the link between that person and myself. But what I've been doing is slowly but surely working on those trees.
My question is, is anyone else doing the same?
I've come to realize that with several of these other people, the link between us is behind one of my brick walls. So in working on those trees and adding more ancestors and family members to them, I hope to get lucky and find the common ancestor. Granted in some cases, I don't even know which brick wall it comes from. But I've got it narrowed down to a few.
I've only had limited luck so far, in a few cases I've been able roughly work out where the common ancestor is my tree.
Several of my brick walls are in either Virginia or West Virginia. But In those case's I've determined that I'm descended from more than one family where my branch went north and the others went south.
Several of these trees have all relatives from the south or deep south. I'm born in raised in the Midwest.
But just the other day, a new wikitree link popped up. I picked one of the people on that tree and worked on pushing the line back, and was able to connect it to a larger part of the tree. Low and behold, when I did that at least one common ancestor popped up. it's a bit far back and may not be the one I share dna with but it's a step forward.
I encourage those of you who have gedmatch accounts to do the same. I skip around a lot to the various trees. But when I do work on them, I add ancestors and sometimes siblings to existing ancestors. I look at the tree and pick one ancestor from it, and work a it, pushing it back a bit further.
Sometimes if they have an ancestor is far enough back to be one of mine as well, I then start with that person and begin to work forward. Adding children and grandchildren.
Granted my chance of finding jus the right line, is small, but it helps the wikitree project as a whole. Each family presents a new challenge and helps me improve my skills as a genealogist. Not to mention it's welcome distraction from my own brick walls.
In one case, I picked a person's ancestor, whom we'll call X and found that a 2nd person had the profile for X's father. Looking a bit further, I found that a 3rd person had a profile for X's brother. So now they are all neatly connected together.
Of course when I add people to other people's trees, I always put sources and then remove myself as profile manager.
So again, do any of you utilize the wikitree links in gedmatch? If not, I strongly recommend it.
