This is my monthly post to recap progress on DNA research questions. The month of June heavily featured work travel and primary obligations, and less time for family history research. I'll take this as an opportunity to look back to previous questions from May for this update.
RootsTech 2027 presentations
The call for RootsTech 2027 presentations has now closed, and I'm awaiting news. I submitted two proposals before departing to Spain. I also booked my flights and the same Airbnb I used for RootsTech 2025, so either way I'm planning to attend in person.
My Paternal Side
It's been a while since the May update, and there's been some progress on the questions related to Irish immigrants Bridget and John O'Brien. Mainly this is an update on progress with chromosome mapping. Using the tools on DNAPainter, I'm now up to 119 segments mapped (24%) for my Dad, and 183 segments mapped (30%) for me. 16 of those segments on my Dad's side are "Unknown O'Brien", as these are segments from known matches who are either from the Pennsylvania O'Briens group or a growing mystery group of likely O'Briens who left Ireland for Australia.
I'm hoping to spend some more time in July on this mystery new Australia group.
My Maternal Side
Very little progress since the previous month's update on my maternal side research questions. I hope to pick these up again this month.
New Tools
I am continuing to use Gedminer to identify errors in my tree on Ancestry, duplicates, and stray people who were added long ago without proper references or sources. There's much more to do here.
