Research Progress September 2025

Here's a progress check since last month. There's been good movement on the maternal side of the tree, but I'll start my recap from the paternal side.

Paternal side research

1 - Identifying the Irish parents of Bridget, my 3rd-great-grandmother. I'm revisiting the Shared Matches of Matches course on YourDNAGuide. There are still strong hints to County Longford, Ireland. I am hoping to make more discoveries ahead of my meetings in Dublin later in October.

2 - Generation of connection for the Pennsylvania O'Briens. Not much movement since I started testing out a theory using Irish naming conventions.

3 - Identifying potential matches descending from the Thornhill/Westall side of the tree to do a mtDNA test.

4 - McIntosh side of the tree and mtDNA matches.

5 - Finding Jones cousins for YDNA testing. I have identified several potentials to ask to test, and need to take the next step to reach out. There are at least some options on various branches descending from my Jones line in Jefferson County, Tennessee.

6 - Trying tools to isolate matches from Ireland on MyHeritage.

Maternal side research

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

2 - Working with DNA matches on the Amado side of the tree.

3 - Campuzano mtDNA results! This one is about to have a major breakthrough, as any day now my cousin Catherine's mtDNA kit will be processed at FamilyTreeDNA. This will give us a place on the MitoTree for her, and also a mtDNA haplogroup for my 2nd-great-grandmother Maria Jesus Vasquez, her mother Maria Jesus Suastegui, her mother Ana Maria Orosco, and her mother (my 5th-great-grandmother) Reyes Valdes. Another cousin descending from Vicente Campuzano and Maria Jesus Vasquez, has also agreed to take the mtDNA test. Once we have both sets of results, it will be interesting to see how we can use these mtDNA matches and autosomal matches on FTDNA's FamilyFinder to triangulate for Campuzano-Amado and Vasquez-Suastegui connections.

4 - Identifying the connection with the mystery Guerrero-Leyva matches. I've used the DNAPainter matrix tool on this group of people, and am trying to build out a larger understanding of the connection to these people through a floating tree. I have a feeling these people are connected to the Portillo line, but no breakthroughs yet. 

5 (new) - Resolving descendancy from the wives of John Carter using mtDNA.

Numbers update:

In early May I wrote about numbers of matches across AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA. Four months later, here's a look at the numbers:

On FTDNA: My Mom's results show 6813 matches, my Dad's have 7116 matches, and I have 7167. On MyHeritage, my Mom's results have 16,767 matches, my Dad's have 20,965 matches, and I have 19,449. on AncestryDNA, my Mom has 63,450 matches, my Dad has 51,481 and I'm at 79,317. It's really a lot, and shows the challenge in boiling down that many matches to useful DNA connections.