Hints of a path

As I take a closer look at the matches in common with my Dad's DNA on the O'Brien-Bridget side of the tree, very little has changed since I starting building clusters using the dot method in August 2024. At the time I isolated 71 matches, and I'm now up to 76. This is exactly where I was in November, and almost all of these matches seem to be connected to the line of mystery Pennsylvania O'Briens descended from James J. O'Brien and Mary Nolan. There's a small set of mystery matches pointing in another direction, which seem to trace to back to Longford, Ireland.

I'm digging into this group now, hoping this will provide a lead to Bridget's family. Here are my steps so far: I've selected a match from among this group of 76 with my Dad's results. This match, DK, has 14 cM in common. This is pretty small, but this match has 22 cM in common with my Dad's 1st cousin Mike O'Brien, giving me a little more confidence that this could be a potential match to Bridget's family. DK doesn't have a public tree, but using shared matches of matches with Ancestry's Pro Tools, I can see he has an aunt with a detailed tree. She has 11 cM in common with my Dad, but doesn't match to Mike.

With a quick look at her tree, I can see Irish names and checking a bit further, see a branch of her line came from Longford, Ireland. This is a promising start.

Next, I've started to build a quick tree, using Ancestry's MyTreeTags labeling this person as part of a Floating Tree and a DNA match. Now I'm "doing genealogy" working backward to Longford, hoping this will lead me to a family that connects down to Bridget.

George Barret Sr. Landscape with cottagers. 1775.

There are some hints in Longford that Bridget's family might connect with this line. More to come, and a monthly research question status report to follow with the next post.