Next Steps on the Free Family

I am attempting to identify the parents of William Free, my 4th-great-grandfather, using my Mom's DNA matches on the various platforms. I had previously built a network of Matthews-Free matches descending from my 3rd-great-grandparents William Matthews and Martha Jane Free. A complication in looking for descendants of William Free and Nancy Hayden Clark, among their four children, only Martha Jane had children of her own. In order to separate out the matches who may descend from William's parents, I need to peel off all the Matthews matches from the Clark-Hensley matches. This should leave "leftovers" who descend from the families of William's parents.

This approach worked well to identify the parents of Bridget on my Dad's Irish side, so I'm attempting a similar method on my Mom's side of the tree, one generation back. Another challenge is the presence of multiple relationships and endogamy among these Kentucky-Virginia settlers. I can clearly see overlaps among my Mom's Whitley/Wheatley, Read/Cain/Gibson and Matthews branches.

Among the groups I'm building on Ancestry, there already over 1100 matches in the Matthews-Free group. I'm in the process of building out the Clark-Hensley group, and then need to separate off the Matthews side from the Free side. I am hoping to have another update later in the week on separating these groups and working with the mystery matches who might point to the Free network.