Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Research Progress July 2025

It's been a while since I've given a thorough update on my DNA research questions. Although I post these each month, the last update where I went through each question dates back to April.

1 - Identifying the Irish parents of Bridget, my 3rd-great-grandmother. There's some progress and I'm still looking at some potential connections. As I write this, I will have already been to Dublin for a day, and continued on to Belfast. That's not enough time to follow up on various connections which will have to wait for another future visit to the Emerald Isle.

2 - Determining the generation of connection for the Pennsylvania O'Briens.

3 - Verify the father of Cora Belle Medcalf using DNA connections. Using shared matches of matches between Allison's Mom and grandmother, I believe I've now confirmed Daniel Brown was the father of Cora Belle. Marilyn (Allison's grandmother) shares 101 cM with a descendant of Crawford Brown (Daniel's father) and 58 cM with a different descendant. There's several more matches in between that range descending from the Browns. There's more I can do with shared matches of matches for this group, but I think the connections look pretty strong.

4 - Identify possible siblings of my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez.

5 - Identifying living descendants of my 5th-great-grandparents Jose Jesus Amado and Gertrudis Palomino, exploring potential connections to the Amado family of Los Angeles. This one is in progress, and I'm also looking into some other Amados who arrived in the US from Ottoman Türkiye.

6 - Determining the connection to a cluster of Amado matches from FTDNA and Gedmatch. Pending a follow-up conversation with the distant cousin who manages these DNA kits.

7 - Locating another Jones cousin for YDNA testing. So far, not yet.

8 - Working with a Campuzano cousin on mtDNA. Again, pending further information.

9 - Campuzano YDNA matches. Yep, still pending.

10 - McIntosh line research. I have done some digging into distant connections from the John McIntosh line, and further work will continue after I'm back from Scotland and my visit to the Edinburgh University Archives (which should have occurred yesterday 1 July, but this post was written in advance of travel).

11 - Identifying the connection with the mystery Guerrero-Leyva matches. Again, pending further work.

12 - Working with mtDNA matches and trying to identify connections. I've reached out to them, no responses so far.

I'm preparing some new questions as I retire old ones and continue taking the DNA Study Group online sessions.

As of the end of June, my Mom's DNA matches on Ancestry total 63,000. My Dad's matches are at 51,100. On MyHeritage, her match total is 16,626. My Dad's matches are at 20,805. Both numbers are a lot of people, and it's a challenge to boil those down to matches that reveal connections to hidden branches of the tree. I'm hoping these approaches through DNA Study Group help sift through these thousands of connections to identify the real gems that unlock new stories.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Edinburgh, 1836

 

Google Arts & Culture. Edinburgh, 1836.

By now I've been in Edinburgh for a couple of days, exploring the city and seeing Allison's choir perform. Today I have a visit to the University Archives to view the records on John McIntosh, my 5th-great-grandfather. I'm curious to learn more about his time as a medical student before he shipped off to America to serve in the British Army, and maybe learn more about his Scottish roots.

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Travel by Ferry

 

Made with Ideogram 3.0.

Another image created using Ideogram, this time in the style of a travel poster. I think travel posters are pretty great, and I've regularly featured them on the blog. There's even a super cool Poster House museum you can visit in New York City.

For this particular example, as I share this post I'm taking the Stena Line ferry from Belfast, Northern Ireland to Cairnryan, Scotland. I'll have photos from the voyage when I return.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Leaving Valparaiso

 

Gabriel departing Valparaiso. Made in Ideogram.

I know there's a wide variety of opinion about using AI in genealogy and family history circles. As I continue testing image generation for various scenes in my family's branches, this tool is growing on me and I'm impressed with what it can do. The example above is an imagined scene of my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez, departing the port of Valparaiso, Chile in 1858 for a new life in Mexico.

Gabriel was likely about 20 when he left Chile. He reported in his informacion matrimonial in 1863 that he had been in Altar, Sonora for the past five years, providing an estimated arrival in Mexico of 1858. It's possible he arrived in Mexico even earlier, but I don't know. I certainly don't have a photo, he died in 1873 at the age of 34.

My prompt was pretty simple, "a twenty-year old merchant boarding a ship in Valparaiso, Chile in 1858, looking back at the harbor. He has dark hair and a moustache." I like that Ideogram returns four options. The other generated images didn't quite fit the time period or the look that I was expecting to see for a representation of Gabriel.

At the time, this journey from Valparaiso to Guaymas, Sonora (Gabriel's likely landing spot) would have taken 3-4 weeks, maybe longer, with multiple stops along the way in locations such as Peru, Panama, and south of Guaymas on the Mexican coast. According to a query with Claude, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company sailed along the coast from October 1848, and some of those records are preserved through the Pacific Mail Steamship Collection through the Huntington Library.