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.