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| Vincent van Gogh. Poppy Field. 1890. |
We've reached the end of the month, and tomorrow we'll watch our senior reach a milestone and graduate from high school. Family is in town, and we're looking forward to celebrating with family, friends and fellow parents as our kids take their next steps on their grand journey.
As the calendar flips to June, we have the start of summer, a return to some travel, and possibly, maybe, some DNA progress toward identifying mystery family lines.
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| Painting by S. Jones. Top of the grad cap. |
As high school graduation is a couple days away, above is the top of our daughter's graduation cap. S painted a Bob Ross-inspired scene on her cap over the weekend. Super cool & well done. We are excited for the upcoming festivities.
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| Winslow Homer. 1878. National Gallery of Art. |
Yesterday S & I took in a quick visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, prior to a special lunch at Oyamel. The painting above is on display at the National Gallery.
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| AncestryDNA Shared Matches extract |
Using the same dot method as yesterday, I tried to isolate the matches to my Dad's branch for Asa Putnam Smith. From the screenshot above, I've run into a complication, as there are matches related to both my Dad's maternal and paternal lines that are connected to the Smith/McIntosh branch. Uh-oh. This is going to add some wrinkles to my research. My Smith connections also have a few matches on the O'Brien/Bridget side as well, which was unexpected.
I am going to try the same dot method on my Mom's Read/Cain line to see if I can isolate these matches and potentially verify whether the Cain/Mainard link is real or if there's another mystery 3rd-great-grandfather possibility.
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| AncestryDNA Matches. |
Working from my Dad's AncestryDNA results, I am using the dot method outlined during various Rootstech presentations by Diahan Southard of YourDNAGuide. Above is a snapshot from narrowing down the 23,311 matches on my Dad's maternal side of the tree to 84 matches who likely belong to the O'Brien/Bridget branch of the tree.
I used the dots to separate out the shared matches until I had settled on those who were likely shared matches of the O'Brien/Bridget branch (at the second-great-grandparent level of my Dad's results). I still have quite a bit of work to do, but it is cool to see how this approach can target the specific matches who also share DNA on the O'Brien side or Bridget's side from Roscommon & Longford.
It will be really helpful once AncestryDNA rolls out the update for DNA communities by parent to sort those matches to specific regions.
I'll be repeating this approach to some of the other gaps I've covered here previously. I plan to try this same approach using Allison's grandmother's shared matches to verify the connections I highlighted back in November 2023.
