RLP 161: RLP with DNA eCourse Part 4

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 161: Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse part four. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (46s):
Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (51s):
I’m good. How are you Diana?

Diana (53s):
I am doing well. I am in the finishing upstage if a client project, and it’s been really fun to come up with a good hypothesis for the client’s unknown ancestor. You know, we were talking earlier about how in these research projects, we always think, why didn’t I just start with a record that gave me the answer, but you know, of course we, we don’t know what’s going to give us the answer. So you go through a research plan and then we finally end up with, with something good. So that’s kind of why this project was, but it was fun because the client has an ancestor with the surname of Mackenzie. And we think there’s a Scottish link and it’s early in Alabama, early 1800s.

Diana (1m 35s):
And I was able to find this whole group of Mackenzie’s that had land patents in the county, 1828 to about 1852. And, you know, we always do clustering and we have cases like this, and I was able to find the ancestor. And one of these other gentlemen, back in the county, in North Carolina, so a really good place to go study next. You know, I’m not sure if it’s the right connection, but this ancestors’ associate was from Scotland. He lived past 1850 and kept naming Scotland as his home country. So fingers crossed that maybe that will lead us to, to a Scottish location.

Diana (2m 16s):
So it’s been kind of a fun project. Wow. That is fun. Good job. Well, we have a listener spotlight today. This is a comment on the podcast by Elizabeth. I really enjoyed this podcast. I’m doing my first Research Like a Pro with DNA project so this is very timely for me. I’m working through the book chapter by chapter, but listening to someone else’s guest, it was very helpful. I can’t wait to hear the next episodes. So thanks for leaving that comment, Elizabeth, we agreed that it’s really fun to listen to Alison, as she’s been walking us through her experience with the process. Okay, welcome. Alison. We’re glad to have you back today

Allison Kotter (2m 53s):
And I’m glad to be here. It’s been fun to talk about it too.

Nicole (2m 56s):
So last time we went through some of the tools you explored and the locality guides and things. So now it’s time to start working on a research plan. So let’s review your objective and then we can get started with talking about your plan.

Allison Kotter (3m 13s):
Yeah. So my objective for this research project is to use DNA and genealogical records to determine the biological father of Mary Ella Parker, who was born on the 22nd of August, 1877 in Baldwin county, Alabama. Mary Ella died on the 28th of December, 1950 in Columbus, Muskogee, Georgia. The test taker is three generations from the research subject and autosomal DNA will be applicable. However, third to fourth cousins may not share very much DNA, which can make their find the exact relationship difficult. The community of the research subject also experienced pedigree collapse. So there may be multiple, most recent common ancestors with the test taker and mitochondrial DNA is not useful in this case, as it is not unbroken maternal line and why DNA is not useful in this case as it is not a broken paternal line.

Nicole (4m 3s):
All right. Great. So what did you do first for your research plan?

Allison Kotter (4m 9s):
So for my research plan, I started by looking at what I already knew. I started with my traditional records because that was what I was most comfortable with for Mary Ella. I knew that she was born around 1877. The sources are fairly inconsistent. There’s a range from 1877 to 1885, but the sources are pretty consistent that her parents seem to be William Parker and Zillah Beck. And then I also noted everything, says she was born in Alabama, but based on where the family was at the time of her birth, it was most likely Baldwin county. And then her family moved to Santa Rosa county later in her life.

Allison Kotter (4m 51s):
And then she married James Henry Sutton in 1904.

Diana (4m 55s):
So you had really pretty solid evidence that she was the daughter of William and Zillah because on the 1880 census, it lists relationships and they listed her as a daughter. Right. Right.

Allison Kotter (5m 6s):
And in the 1900 census and her death certificate lists them as her parents and she’s in all of her siblings, obituaries and all her siblings list, William Parker and Zillah Beck as her parents. So I wasn’t really questioning it until I had a cousin contact me and let me know that Mary was actually the daughter of Zillah Beck’s first husband, Mr. Barnes, and that she adopted the Parker name. So that’s why I decided to approach this problem with DNA.

Diana (5m 33s):
So interesting. So you did a summary of the facts about Mary Ella Parker. And then did you also do summaries for the two hypothesized fathers?

Allison Kotter (5m 43s):
I did to make sure I knew exactly where we were starting with everything we knew for William Parker. I had a pretty big range for his birth based all on census records, 1842 to 1855, but they all say he was born in Texas. And then his parents on these records say they were born in Alabama or Georgia. So I thought that was interesting that he was from Alabama, lived in Texas and then came back to Alabama. And then the 1900 census says him were married around 1875. And remember Mary’s hypothesized birthday is 1877. However, we don’t have an official marriage record for that. That is just the 1900 census that tells us that.

Allison Kotter (6m 23s):
And then he kind of disappears before the 1920 census. The last record I have for him is a 1916 deed. So I think he must’ve died somewhere in between there. And then for Mr. Barnes, I know very, very little about him because I call him Mr. Barnes. So the way I found out about his existence is in the census records, there are Barnes children and Parker children, and the Barnes children are listed as step children of William Parker. So that infers that Zillah did have a first husband named Mr. Barnes. And the first two children are born 1860 and 1865.

Allison Kotter (7m 3s):
And then the next one is 1874. So there was a gap there.

Diana (7m 9s):
Yeah. So those blended families, and when you don’t have marriage records, those are tricky to figure out the parentage of the children.

Allison Kotter (7m 16s):
I was just confused when the cousin contacted me because there is that like ten-year gap that I thought no way, she’s a child of Mr. Barnes, but I just still thought I would approach the problem with DNA and figure it out. And I, it was a good project to learn with.

Nicole (7m 32s):
Yeah. That is a big gap. And certainly it would make sense that she would be part of the second marriage. Well, in the summary of known facts, after you summarize the traditional research and kind of the documents, it’s good to do a summary of the DNA evidence that you have before you get started with researching more. So tell us about what you had for that section.

Allison Kotter (7m 55s):
Yeah. So for this, I tried to show the DNA, proving the relationships up to this point. So actually no other descendants of her grandfather, Louie have tested except for Leslie, my mother-in-law and her father Philip are the only two. They both given me permission by the way, to use their names in these podcasts. But their DNA did show that they were father and daughter, which is good. That would have been dramatic. You know, Phillip is still alive and he knows his dad was Louis Sutton. And then there were a lot of descendants of Mary Ella Parker who’s the next generation back. So I was able to make a chart and put that in my research plan to show, we are descended from Mary Ella Parker.

Allison Kotter (8m 42s):
And then I was able to make charts showing descendants from both the Barnes and Zillah Beck and William Parker and Zillah Beck. So that shows that we are descended from Zillah Beck, but we do not know which husband we’re descended from.

Nicole (8m 56s):
So some of them are probably half relationships and others are full, but maybe it’s overlapping and unclear with the centiMorgans. So that’s tricky.

Allison Kotter (9m 5s):
Yeah. Trying to figure out what all that means. This was definitely the challenge of this project. So

Diana (9m 11s):
You’ve got your summary of known facts, both from the documents and from the DNA evidence. So the next step is to come up with a hypothesis. So how did that work for you?

Allison Kotter (9m 21s):
What I like about the hypothesis part of the research plan is I’m allowed to just kind of say what I am thinking and you know, this is what I’m trying to prove, but I’ve learned in your classes just as much as I’m trying to prove it I’m trying to disprove it. Cause I can fall into confirmation bias very easily, but I like writing down the hypothesis because it gets my thoughts. Okay. This is what I’m thinking at this point in the project. And it’s a good starting point. So I wrote that the hypothesis for this research project was that William Parker is the biological father Mary Ella Parker because she was born in 1877, which is two years after the reported marriage date of William and Zillah in 1875. And it seems unlikely that Mary would be at a biological descendant of Mr.

Allison Kotter (10m 5s):
Barnes because of the ten-year gap between the first brunch children and her. And also the fact that they’re naming the other Barnes children with the last name Barnes, and she’s a Parker. So if she is a biologically a Parker, it would be expected that her matches with William Parker would be in the third cousin range from zero to 234 centiMorgans with an average of 73 centiMorgans. If she’s not biologically a Barnes, they would be half third cousins sharing zero to 168 centiMorgans with an average of 48. But because it is a few generations back that is kind of hard to show, especially with the added pedigree collapse and endogamy because some matches share multiple common ancestors.

Allison Kotter (10m 45s):
So they’re showing an average of 73 centiMorgans, but it’s just because we come from multiple common ancestors.

Diana (10m 53s):
Yeah. That really muddies the waters. Doesn’t it? That pedigree collapse.

Allison Kotter (10m 57s):
Yeah. That’s something I had to, and I don’t know if I totally figured it out, but I did have to work with that during this project.

Diana (11m 5s):
Yeah. You have to take it into consideration. So your hypothesis basically was that William Edward Parker was the biological father because everything traditionally was looking at that. So you’re going to build your research plan to see what you can find.

Nicole (11m 21s):
Great. So before we go to the next step, I have a burning question.

Allison Kotter (11m 27s):
Okay.

Nicole (11m 27s):
So why did the cousin think that it was Mr. Barnes? Did she have some kind of oral family tradition or what was it?

Allison Kotter (11m 36s):
Yeah, she came from, Amanda is Mary Ella, his youngest sibling, Amanda Parker, and Amanda Parker was her great-grandmother this cousin and her, her grandmother is still alive. So Amanda Parker’s daughter is still alive. And Amanda Parker’s daughter was the one that I was sharing this research with, that we were working together on some stories and her grandmother said, oh no, Mary Ella Parker was not my mom’s full sibling. They were half siblings. So that’s why that started.

Nicole (12m 8s):
Well, that’s a pretty good person. She, I mean, she’s a witness to that relationship, I guess

Allison Kotter (12m 15s):
I know, it’s like, dang it.

Nicole (12m 17s):
But she wasn’t there when the baby was conceived.

Allison Kotter (12m 20s):
So well then she also said the family was estranged. So like she has no memories of the aunt. And there is another member of the family named Mary Ida Parker, who is a Barnes descendant. So I thought when they first said it, I said, oh, this woman is getting Mary Ella and Mary Ida confused because I know William Parker’s her dad at this, the only thing that makes sense, but I decide to do this project and try it out.

Nicole (12m 49s):
All right. So let’s go to the next part of your research plan. So this is the identify different sources that could help you and then prioritize them. So do identify them. You get to brainstorm, which is fun. How’d that go for you?

Allison Kotter (13m 4s):
I really like identify sources because I am a chase shiny object person, which is why I need Research Like a Pro. So for identified sources, I am able to put all my ideas down and then not worry about them anymore. You know what I mean? Cause I know I wrote them down. So I went through my locality guide and wrote down any place that I thought would help me answer my question. And then I also went back through lesson six, which was exploring DNA tools and methodology. And you have a great little worksheet that you provide in that where you have all the different tools separated. So I went through each of those and I said, okay, this could help meet this way. This could help me this way. This could help me this way.

Allison Kotter (13m 44s):
And that helps me brainstorm. Okay. What do I think is actually going to help him the most? And then I also was able to keep it there so that when I’m looking for future research, I can just go back to that list I made. I like that.

Nicole (13m 57s):
So after you finished brainstorming all the different tools that you might want to use and different documents you wanted to look at, how did you kind of narrow that down to the few that you wanted to actually do this time?

Allison Kotter (14m 8s):
I started with my traditional sources and I thought I really need to find that marriage record for William Parker and Zillah Beck. The family knows, say that they got married in Covington county, which is where Zillah was from. But I think that they might have been in Baldwin county by the time of the marriage because they were there in 1880 and I can’t find them in 1870 anywhere. So I decided to look for marriage records in Baldwin county, Alabama. That was my first thing I wanted to do. And then the second thing I wanted to do was look for guardianship records for the Barnes children, because if Zillah got remarried, these guardianship records should exist. So the big question is, are they coming in county or Baldwin county?

Allison Kotter (14m 49s):
If they’re in Covington county, that’s really bad because all the records there were completely destroyed like before 1890 or something like that. Whereas Baldwin county has more records. So I wanted to look for those. And then I also wanted to figure out when the family showed up at Baldwin county. So I put tax records there to try and get in between those sets of records. And then I also wanted to look at Galveston county to try and find some Parker families there that could be William Parker’s family. Cause that could help me sort through the DNA matches quicker. If I was able to find a hypothesized family.

Allison Kotter (15m 29s):
And then I know nothing about Mr Barnes. And so there were two known children through Mr. Barnes, William and Sarah, and I have William’s death date and I’ve worked with the Florida Department of Health. And I actually have this certificate that says, we can not find this death certificate does not exist, which is very frustrating because I wanted to name his parents. And then Sarah, she disappears before 1900, the other daughter. So I think that she must have died before then. So I wanted to look for death records for her in Baldwin county, which is kind of hit or miss because they didn’t keep them consistently til like 1907. But there are some in Baldwin county that I was going, I look through.

Nicole (16m 12s):
I hope that it panned out, I guess we’ll find out next part.

Diana (16m 19s):
Yeah. That’s a great priority. I think sometimes it’s tricky to figure out which thing to do first, but when you write it all down and then you have, your plan is so nice to go onto the research stage and just go right down your plan. What did you do for your DNA research plan? Because that’s the other half of this process.

Allison Kotter (16m 37s):
Through all the earlier steps I had been tracking cousins that, oh, that’s an interesting match, that’s an interesting match, but I hadn’t really built their trees are really dived into them. So that was my first step was to kind of go back through those matches that I had noted in my air table throughout the earlier steps in the process and really build their trees and figure out how we were related. And then I did want to try segment triangulation as well and see if I could find which segments were specifically coming from Zillah and figure out if any of them were not on the Beck line, but on the paternal line. And then I also thought I could use the auto tree on genetic affairs that I made in the last lesson to figure out these common ancestors that were showing up in other trees and how they were related to our tree.

Diana (17m 25s):
And that you just had three things. You didn’t try to do 10 more tools, you just focused on some specific things. So I think that’s so important with DNA to not chase the shiny objects of all these various tools, but to really think through what will be the most beneficial. So good job.

Allison Kotter (17m 41s):
Thanks. Yeah. I learned very quickly that just building your matches’ trees could be the entire project because that was very time-consuming and not an easy step to just check off.

Diana (17m 52s):
That’s so true, but it is pretty key to the whole process that’s for sure.

Allison Kotter (17m 56s):
Oh yeah, it definitely is helpful.

Nicole (17m 58s):
Well then let’s go jump into this. Tell us what happened when you followed your plan and you started building trees for these shared matches that you thought were interesting

Allison Kotter (18m 6s):
So one of the ones that I just was dying to look at, but I was trying to follow the process and be a good student. He was a descendant from William W. Barnes and that was the name of the son through Mr. Barnes and Zillah, but through my traditional research, he didn’t have any children. So I was very excited to look at this. And so I started building this tree using Ancestry hints. We used a lot of obituaries and I figured out this was probably a different William Barnes than the son of Zillah, but it was still a Barnes match where that was one of the ancestors I was looking into.

Allison Kotter (18m 47s):
So I built out their tree and I kept track of all their surnames on airtable and everything. And then I started looking at the shared matches. And as I started building, this matches’ shared matches. I found that we actually were not related to them through the Barnes’ line but that we were related to them through their maternal line. So then I was able to decide, okay, this is probably not a Barnes descendant, but what was interesting is the maternal line came from Texas, which is where the other hypothesize father is from, William Parker. So I thought that was kind of interesting, but I wasn’t sure also if endogamy was a problem here, like maybe we were related through the Barnes’ line and I just wasn’t finding that common ancestor.

Allison Kotter (19m 30s):
So I was still trying to figure it out.

Nicole (19m 32s):
Yeah. It’s hard when you’re just like looking at that one name that really stands out and then you realize it’s kind of a red herring actually related on the other side of the family they get, but that’s good that you were able to rule out that possibility that the William W. Barnes was Zillah’s son. So that was good. Yeah,

Allison Kotter (19m 48s):
I, that would have also been another thing where maybe I need to question all my traditional research. I don’t know, just question everything. So did you have another match that you were looking at? So I felt a lot of trees and as I did that, I was having a really hard time finding common ancestors even between the trees. So I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong or if the endogamy was just intense. Building trees also was kind of its own learning curve, especially when you had someone that only had like private, private, and then a last name, you know, I’m on their tree.

Allison Kotter (20m 28s):
And I started actually looking at people on Facebook and stuff. I don’t know if you’re supposed to do that, but that actually helped me figure out the next generation back and kind of get that, that living person wall. And then I could build their trees for the matches that I thought were helpful, but didn’t have good trees on Ancestry.

Nicole (20m 47s):
Absolutely. Facebook has such a good tool for finding the living. And like you said, past that wall, so good job. There’s some really good tools out there, but Facebook is one of my favorites.

Diana (20m 57s):
Yeah, yeah. It’s it is what we have to do because you have to build those trees and you use whatever clue you can.

Allison Kotter (21m 4s):
People have a lot of good genealogy information on Facebook.

Nicole (21m 11s):
It’s so true. Here’s me at my three generations

Diana (21m 14s):
Or, you know, they will often put up an obituary of a deceased parent. There’s good stuff out there. Yeah.

Allison Kotter (21m 21s):
I have a newspaper.com subscription, which I used a lot in the building of trees to find obituaries. So that was really helpful.

Diana (21m 31s):
Another one of my very favorite things to do, if you can get an obituary that gives all her siblings and the people who were previously deceased and then the pallbearers who are often grandsons or sons. Oh yeah. Those are full of great things. Well, let’s see what happened when you were working on your segment triangulation step of your DNA research plan.

Allison Kotter (21m 55s):
I was not as successful as I probably wanted to be. There were only four known Parker matches that I found on GEDmatch. So I was doing this segment triangulation. And once again, as I was building trees for the ones, I didn’t know, you know, I had a known Parker descendant, Leslie. And then the third person we matched with and I could not find the common ancestor and I was so frustrated. So I just kept trying, and I did it for so many people and I learned a lot about segment triangulation and DNA painter and all those good things. But I was realizing, I think endogamy is this really big wall that I need to figure out how to overcome before I’m going to find some answers.

Diana (22m 36s):
Yeah. Sometimes, you know, just depending on the DNA you’re working with and the families, it can be easy to find the common ancestors and other times it can be really a problem. So I have just found with all the different client work and my own DNA work, that every case is so different. So it sounds like you started off with one that was kind of a challenge, even though you didn’t think it was going to be that hard. I thought it was going to be straight forward,

Nicole (23m 3s):
How it works out for me too. Sometimes, you know, when I chose my case study for ProGen, I thought, oh, I’m going to choose something that I already know the answer to. And I just need to write up all the evidence. And in writing up all the evidence, I realized how it was not an open and shut case at all.

Allison Kotter (23m 19s):
Whenever I write it, write it down, I realized how much confirmation bias I’m using. And I’m like, oh, dang it. I have to dig a little bit more outside the box. Yeah.

Nicole (23m 28s):
Well, let’s talk more about what you learned about undocumented, because it sounds like this was kind of a stumbling block and you did a little research to learn about it. Yeah.

Allison Kotter (23m 36s):
And I would say that this was probably the most important part of my research that I did educating myself on endogamy. So you guys had talked about Paul Ward Barry’s Legacy webinar on endogamy, but I don’t have that subscription right now. So I found some articles where he talked about it on Legacy tree and he just defines it as endogamy is the custom of marrying only within the limits of a local community clan or tribe over the course of many generations. Members of endogamous populations may descend from a limited pool of founder ancestors who represented the initial genetic makeup of their population. And then he also defines pedigree collapsed. Cause we use both those terms and he says, pedigree collapse occurs when two related individuals produce offspring as a result, the number of unique individuals occupying locations in a pedigree decreases or collapses pedigree collapses, not the same as endogamy.

Allison Kotter (24m 32s):
However, recent cases of pedigree collapse in an individual’s tree and long term endogamy can have similar effects on DNA inheritance when practiced over multiple generations. And over the course of several hundred years, continued pedigree collapse can lead to endogamy. So that helps me understand what I was dealing with a little bit more, cause I’d heard the terms, but just reading it helped me understand it. These were two different articles and I link to them in the blog post for anyone dealing with the problem and want to go read them. But one of the things he says to do to overcome it is to test multiple individuals, which may be difficult, but I had Leslie’s DNA and Leslie’s father had his DNA on Ancestry.

Allison Kotter (25m 14s):
And you know, I know him, he’s my grandpa in law. So I was able to call him and say, okay, I need access to your DNA in order to kind of figure out this problem. Yay.

Nicole (25m 24s):
That’s one of the greatest things that you can do is get more test takers when you’re dealing with a tricky problem. So I’m excited that you were able to get his results to use.

Allison Kotter (25m 33s):
Honestly, if I were to go back, I would’ve done it at the very beginning, but I just didn’t realize how helpful it would be to have more than one person’s DNA. So when I got his DNA, it pretty quickly helped me realize where my problem was because when I’d done the Leeds Method analysis for her, you’re supposed to get four genetic networks showing your four great-grandparents and I had five for her. So I was like, okay, she has some pedigree collapse in there. You know, she’s from the south that’s expected. And then I did Philip’s DNA. So remember he’s a generation closer or Mary Ella is his grandmother. And I found 15 genetic networks, etc.

Allison Kotter (26m 14s):
I was like, oh my gosh, This is insane pedigree collapse. So I had a, quite a big problem on my hands. So what I did was I went through each of the 15 networks and I decided, okay, what last name is really being represented here? And I think I found for Parker in the 15, there were four Parker networks. So I went through the people in there and I found which people didn’t have overlap with the other networks. And then I reached out to those people that is a lot of work. Yeah, it was.

Diana (26m 46s):
Did you keep track of all this in Airtable ?

Allison Kotter (26m 48s):
Check up a lot of it in Airtable . I did a lot of it in Excel with the Leeds Method and just kind of like wrote down notes, like on that matches’ box. I think I need to figure out a better system for how I did all of it. Airtable is really helpful and it was a new tool for me in this project too. So now that I’ve done working on some of the other things I’m working, I’m able to use Airtable a little bit more efficiently to do things like this.

Diana (27m 15s):
Yeah. It’s interesting. Because with one project you can do things a certain way, but then you run into something like this, then all of a sudden you’re trying to decide how to log it, how to keep track of it. And you just have to think outside the box and do you need to create a new page? Do you need to, you know, so

Allison Kotter (27m 32s):
I think I added a new column called genetic networks and I colored them. So I would put people in whichever multiple kind of like the Ancestry dot system, the on Airtable .

Diana (27m 42s):
Yeah. You just have to figure it out some way to keep track of this information because once you find those matches that don’t overlap anyone else, you want to make sure you know who they are. So yeah. One of the great things about keeping everything in a research log that’s for sure.

Allison Kotter (27m 59s):
Absolutely. So these people, there was only a few of them that were only in one genetic network and they didn’t have awesome trees. So I was trying to build them, but I was getting pretty stuck. Well, I messaged a few of them, but one of them responded, his name was Mark. And he also has allowed me to use his name and he was so helpful and turns out he was actually adopted, which is why I wasn’t able to build his tree because the names weren’t making sense. So he shared his DNA with me as well, which honestly was the key to unlocking this research.

Nicole (28m 32s):
Wow. I love it. So this is Ancestry?

Allison Kotter (28m 34s):
Yes, this is all on Ancestry.

Nicole (28m 36s):
So you found a guy on Ancestry who shared his results with you. And now you can start, like you just did with your grandpa in law from the beginning and try to organize his matches and see what you can find from his family. So how did that turn out?

Allison Kotter (28m 53s):
It was so great because he did not have pedigree collapse because his mother is from Colorado and his father is from Florida. So he had four distinct groups of his grandparents. And I had never seen that in DNA before. And I was so excited. So I found out that he was the great grandson of Virgil Mosley and Mary Ida Parker, which is a different person than Mary Ella. I don’t know why they named them that, but they did. So Mary Ida, based on my traditional research, my understanding is that she is a granddaughter of Zillah back through that first daughter, Sarah Barnes, and that when Sarah died William and Zillah adopted Mary Ida and her siblings and changed their surname to Parker.

Allison Kotter (29m 43s):
Wow. So this is my understanding of it. And Mark’s did show that he came from Mary Ida. And so then I wanted to see if Mark and grandpa shared DNA that was not shared through the Beck line, if that makes sense. So any DNA that they did not get from Zillah Beck, I wanted to know if they had something else, because to me that meant that they would have a paternal ancestor. And I did find a group that did not share any DNA with the Beck line, but was sharing DNA with both Mark and grandpa.

Nicole (30m 18s):
That’s exciting because you’ve gotta wonder, it’s not coming from Zillah who, you know, is one of their common ancestors. Who’s the other guy that’s coming through them. Right.

Allison Kotter (30m 27s):
And I’m pretty sure that Mark is a Barnes descendant because he was sharing DNA with the Parker descendants as if they were half descendants. And like I said, his DNA was much cleaner and you could separate it a lot easier than the pedigree collapse populations that I was working with.

Nicole (30m 43s):
Right. And that traditional research was showing that Sarah Barnes was clearly a Barnes on that 1880 census, right, who was the mother of Mary?

Allison Kotter (30m 51s):
Yeah. Right. This was pointing to me that perhaps we are Barnes related and not Parker related. Fascinating.

Diana (31m 2s):
That’s so interesting. So as you were working with Mark’s DNA, you came up with a different couple that you had not worked with before. Is that right?

Allison Kotter (31m 10s):
I did. Yeah. One of the big questions with this whole thing is I’m not running into the surnames I want ever, but as I was going through this group of matches with grandpa and Mark, that didn’t share DNA with Zillah. So what I believe to be paternal matches to Mary Ella, I found this common ancestor in multiple of these matches trees, Frank Ward, and Mary Brooks, Frank was born in 1842, which is about the same time that Mary Ella’s father would have been born. He was born in 1842 in Alabama, and he died in Texas. And also as I was looking through his census records and while he was living in Texas, he was neighbors with Barnes from Alabama.

Allison Kotter (31m 54s):
So that was interesting to me. And then another thing that was interesting was that in the 1880 census, the Parker family is neighbors with a Ward family. So there were some connections there, but I didn’t quite figure out exactly what the connections were because I started trying to figure out who’s Frank’s parents were just based on Ancestry hints, and I made a timeline for him and all the family trees on Ancestry. So the authored sources were saying that William Richardson Davey Ward and Henrietta Marie Vivian Ward were his parents. However, I found a letter for pardon, for William Richardson Davey Ward, where he lists every single one of his children and the child that was getting confused for Frank was actually named Leahnitis.

Allison Kotter (32m 48s):
But the L he would, he normally went by L G ward and Frank is Frank G. Ward. And the L and the F kind of looked the same in that cursive. So after comparing timelines and finding that source, I decided that this might not be the correct parents for Frank, and I might need to do my own research project to find his parents.

Diana (33m 11s):
Well, you have found a lot of information as you’re doing this research. One of the things that I have a challenge with is you follow your research plan and you have all this information and so many thoughts, and you have to start getting it down somewhere. I mean, you’re logging it that you’re probably thinking it’s time to start writing.

Allison Kotter (33m 30s):
Yeah, I did that because I spent a lot of time and I had so many thoughts in my head and I said, okay, I need to start writing this down to kind of know where my next direction needs to be. I also want to know, I did follow my traditional research plan. I didn’t write about it because it was the DNA eCourse. And I was so focused on that. And also everything came up as NIL not in location, not on location, not in location. So my traditional research plan was not as exciting as my DNA, but I did follow both research plans. And I think it was probably about 20 hours possibly more. And after I got to this Frank Ward problem, I realized I probably just needed to start a new project, just focusing on Frank or focusing on finding that next generation back for him.

Allison Kotter (34m 18s):
And I didn’t want to muddy up my project or muddy up my brain. So I wanted to stop and write down what I had found. Yeah.

Diana (34m 25s):
That really is helpful because as you’re writing it, you make more connections.

Allison Kotter (34m 29s):
Yeah. Which I really did. And we’ll talk about that then when the next time I come on, but writing it just really made the puzzle pieces fall together for me.

Nicole (34m 37s):
Wow. You really, I got led down a different path than what you would have thought, but how great that you were able to follow those trees and get more information from additional test takers. It seems like you had good success with your DNA research plan, and that’s a bummer that your traditional resources didn’t lead to any breakthroughs, but that’s why it’s so fun to work with DNA because oftentimes we don’t find anything in the documentary research and it’s disappointing and frustrating. So it’s exciting to have a new avenue to pursue and to have a future research suggestion.

Allison Kotter (35m 16s):
Definitely, and I was not super surprised by the traditional research since I had done research on this family for awhile. And I think they were in Covington county where all the records were destroyed because they’re not really showing up in Baldwin county until right around 1880.

Nicole (35m 32s):
That would make sense. Yeah. So as you follow your plan, you’re supposed to keep a research log. So tell us about your experience with doing a research log.

Allison Kotter (35m 40s):
Yeah. I did keep a research log. It’s a little different with DNA because the sources are different. And sometimes, you know, you’re just using a tool and you’re not thinking of it as searching the source. So I had to kind of train myself to write down everything I was doing in my research log, but I really needed it when I was building those trees. It was so important. I was keeping a research log to know what I was doing, how I was searching for each of those ancestors for the matches. So I just was using airtable, which has a lot of really cool tools relationally. So you can connect the match and you can connect the ancestor.

Allison Kotter (36m 20s):
So it was different doing it with DNA, but at the same time, it was just when you do something for your research, put it in your research log, write down what you learned from it or what questions you got from it. And it just helps keep everything ordered so that it’s not just all in your brain taking up space.

Nicole (36m 37s):
Yes. That’s one of the greatest things about keeping track of everything you do in your plan and your log is getting out of your brain. And it’s just like the getting things done, method where he says, you’ve got to get it out of your brain and onto paper so that it doesn’t clutter your mind and free up space for thinking. So that’s great. I’m glad that that was something that was an outcome for you with logging.

Allison Kotter (36m 58s):
Yeah. Yeah. Especially with DNA. There’s so many different names that you’re dealing with. So it’s really important to keep track with it with a log because when you walk away and you come back, you’re not going to remember all the details, but all these different people you’re working with.

Nicole (37m 12s):
So true. There’s so much data to keep track of. That’s what I found as well. Good job.

Diana (37m 17s):
One of the things I love about your table is the page where you note all the localities and the trees that you are searching through. And I found that really helpful as well as the surnames, because you’re going through these trees really quickly. And it’s so nice to look and go, oh wow. I found five trees that have the surname of Ward or Brooks or whatever.

Allison Kotter (37m 37s):
Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly how I did it with the Ward and Brooks, because I don’t think I would have remembered going through all those trees. Cause I’d gone through so many trees at this point and Ward and Brooks are both kind of common names. So I don’t think it would have hit me if I hadn’t been keeping track of it through the surname tool in my airtable.

Diana (37m 55s):
Yeah. I found that that works so well. Well, one thing we didn’t talk about was, you know, making these trees in your Ancestry tree floating branches, I’m guessing that you did that as well, that you built some of these trees just right within Ancestry.

Allison Kotter (38m 11s):
I did on my private tree that I just named DNA research and that helped me. I could look at these hints and these other trees and I could add things to my tree as hypothesis, without worrying about it, messing up, everybody else’s research if it wasn’t correct. So yeah, I used a lot of it on my practice tree on Ancestry.

Diana (38m 35s):
That’s really helpful. I’m excited to go through your research report. And when you report to us, what you found out, that’ll be so fun to find out now that we’ve taken a deep dive into your project. So thanks so much for being on and leading us through your process. I think everyone listening really learned a lot about what you can do with your DNA when you actually have process.

Allison Kotter (38m 56s):
Definitely. And it just helped me get over so many learning walls. And now that I’ve done one project, I can approach other projects now and it won’t be as scary

Diana (39m 7s):
And everyone will be different, but that’s the fun.

Allison Kotter (39m 10s):
Yeah. Yeah. You always are learning.

Nicole (39m 11s):
All right. Well, thanks everybody. We’ll talk to you guys again next week.

Allison Kotter (39m 17s):
Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Nicole (39m 18s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.