RLP 301: Genealogy and DNA Research in Phases

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 301 Research in Phases. 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 Genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research like a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (51s):
Hi. Nicole. how are you today?

Nicole (54s):
Great You know what something fun I’ve been doing is I have been working on making a baby book.

Diana (1m 0s):
Oh, well that’s fun.

Nicole (1m 3s):
Which baby is it? It’s for my third child who’s now seven.

Diana (1m 10s):
Okay. We’re

Nicole (1m 12s):
A little behind, but he was looking at some of the scrapbooks and family history books and baby books that we have, and I only finished the first two kids and he said, mom, are you gonna make one for me? And So I said, of course you can help me. So we’ve been gathering up all the pictures and things. Most of our pictures are in Google Photos, but the ultrasound pictures were not, and I couldn’t find them on my Google Drive or Google photos and I realized I had never scanned them and they were still in the box with all the

Diana (1m 44s):
Oh. my goodness. So are you doing this on the program online? How are you doing it?

Nicole (1m 51s):
Yeah, so the first two baby books I made were not online. I just printed the pictures and glued them in. But I asked Maxwell, which type of book do you wanna do? And he wanted to make it online, so we’re using Shutterfly and he’s helping me. Oh

Diana (2m 6s):
Great.

Nicole (2m 7s):
And we’re putting in like different colors and things like that. So

Diana (2m 11s):
That is so fun. And Shutterfly has a lot of fun little things you can add to your pages. It helps you make it, your book look really nice, so how fun. What a fun project. That’s neat.

Nicole (2m 23s):
Well, what are you up to?

Diana (2m 25s):
Well, I’ve been doing a lot of work on my research project that I’m doing this fall for the study group. We’ll talk about that later in the podcast. So I don’t wanna give anything away now about what I’ve been doing.

Nicole (2m 37s):
Great.

Diana (2m 39s):
Well let’s do some announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference guides available on the website and PDF format. So one for using the basic Airtable research log and one for adding DNA to that. And then we have our Research Like a Pro Webinar for April coming up. And if you’re listening to this on the Monday, it comes out the Webinar will be the very next day. So it’s on Tuesday, April 16th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. This is by our friend and colleague Alice Childs. She’s an Accredited genealogist and she is talking about the parents of Maria Terwilliger in New York, A DNA case study So.

Diana (3m 19s):
I’m excited to hear Alice talk about that. She is accredited in New York as well as the other areas in the Mid-Atlantic. And then if you are thinking about joining us for a study group, our next Research Like a Pro study group begins the fall of 2024 and registration will open this summer so you can start thinking about if you’d like to come on and work on one of your brick walls or just work on any project of your choice. And we do have a peer group leader application on our website. So we’re always looking for peer group leaders. You get a free study group and you get to be involved with a small group of people and it’s, it’s a great opportunity.

Diana (3m 59s):
And then of course join our newsletter for any coupons or deals that we have coming out. Upcoming conferences. You can see Nicole and I virtually at the National Genealogical Society Conference, which is in May. And we’re very excited about that and new lectures that we are creating for that conference. And it will be just a really fun opportunity to learn from a lot of different researchers. So, we have a listener spotlight today and this is from Scott. He says, I notice in the podcast RLP 294 naturalization records, part three that the example person you used, Mr.

Diana (4m 43s):
Solomon or Salmon, declared an intention to become a citizen on 7 April, 1917, I did a lookup and saw that the US declared war on Germany on April 6th, 1917. So he must have been highly motivated by events, maybe by 1923 he was much less motivated with the war over. It was another outstanding podcast. I really enjoyed listening to your example. So thank you so much Scott for that little extra bit of research that was so fun to learn that the US had declared war. And then Adolf Salmon, our example, declared his intention to become a citizen the very next day.

Diana (5m 23s):
And what Scott meant was 1923, he actually never showed up to do his final oath of allegiance and never really received citizenship. So always fun to learn more little bits from the context.

Nicole (5m 40s):
I love that. Well today we’re talking about Genealogy and DNA research in phases and we’ve talked about this a few times. We talk about this a lot in our study groups actually, because whenever people are working on setting up their objective for the study group, they’re thinking about You know, know kind of what they want to focus on and trying to find a manageable project size. So this is really applicable. If you’ve ever been working on a research question for a long time, many years and you’re kind of wondering like, have I even made any progress? So, we recommend that you look at your project as Phases and breaking up your complex research projects into phases can help you see the progress you’ve already made and plan future Phases.

Nicole (6m 29s):
For instance, researching the mother of a female ancestor born in the early 1800s is pretty unlikely to be finished within like a 20 hour research project that a typical professional genealogist might do. And so it will likely require several phases and each phase would have its own objective. The overarching research question would probably be the same to find the mother of that female Ancestor, but each objective could have a different focus. So as professional Genealogists, this is how we approach many of the projects that clients ask us to research, especially with projects involving the use of DNA evidence. And because DNA evidence involves so much more work and more writing and more analysis, we do wanna break that up into phases.

Nicole (7m 15s):
Let’s consider this example. The goal is to identify the mother of Elsie born in 1820. The first Phases objective would be to conduct documentary research on Elsie looking for clues that point to her mother’s identity. And so this phase would involve building a foundation through documentary work and formulating hypotheses. And often a documentary research phase is recommended before starting into DNA analysis. So then the second phase could focus on researching Elsie’s descendants and finding all of her children and her grandchildren and so forth to identify potential DNA test takers. And this phase is dedicated to extending the family tree and finding these people.

Nicole (7m 57s):
Then the third phase could involve exploring the genetic networks of DNA testers to generate possible hypotheses. So this would be where you would make a network graph and analyze the graph and look at the connections between the clusters and look for the common ancestors of those clusters. Then maybe you find like a possible common ancestral couple. And so then the fourth phase could be to test that hypothesis. So in the fourth phase you could look at different clues from DNA clusters that you found and see if they really do point to a family that actually existed in documentary records, not just in people’s trees. And then looking to see if you have evidence for all of their children going down to the DNA matches.

Nicole (8m 41s):
So this phase would involve a detailed investigation of that hypothesis. Then if that phase didn’t complete the research project, then another fifth phase could entail testing additional hypotheses. So it could take up to five phases to get closer to a conclusion. And even then the answer might not be fully uncovered. But after completing several phases of research and producing research reports about each phase, you’re in a good place to put the research on hold until additional documentary or DNA evidence is available.

Diana (9m 13s):
Well that was a great introduction to this whole idea of phases and such. A good example, I think before we learned about this idea or understood how this worked better, we would just research forever and we never wrote reports and So, we never really knew exactly what we had and we would just keep researching and trying to figure things out, kinda spinning our wheels. So this really has been a wonderful way to learn how to make progress. So let’s talk about how to set up these phases of research. And the first thing you really need to do is define that research question you’d like to solve. So in our example, who was the mother of Elsie, this is an overarching research question.

Diana (9m 54s):
And then what we can do is make a bulleted list of possible strategies to implement the first phase. We always recommend that you gather all of the documentary evidence for a person in a particular place and time. And then the next phase could involve following up on a hypothesized parent that you found in that first phase. And then if you didn’t find any, perhaps it’s one of those cases where the documents do not lead to any specific candidate for a parent, then maybe then the next phase would be finding DNA test takers. Or perhaps you’re going to have to do something like a land study or build and analyze a cluster chart or network graph.

Diana (10m 40s):
Then you’ll have to really expand your ideas about what you can do next. After you have listed all those different strategies, put them in order. And if you’re unsure of what order to use, you could just start working on phase one So. we realize that at the beginning you may not be able to have your specific strategy completely nailed down. And so what I like to do is have a rough idea of how these phases might work, but then it will really depend on what you find in each phase, what you will do next.

Nicole (11m 15s):
Right? I think we wish we could just know exactly what we’re gonna do, plan the whole thing out. Same with the research plan. We want to know exactly which sources are gonna be fruitful, which ones we don’t need to check. But we do have to be flexible, right?

Diana (11m 29s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (11m 31s):
Well breaking projects into phases is effective, although we really just don’t know how it will pan out at the outset. So it’s okay to begin by defining the objective for the current phase and then adjusting it as new information emerges. So just like with the research plan, as we start following the first step, we might find some new information that changes the next few steps. So, if like in our first phase of research, we find a document that reveals a crucial record that then guides the next phase. We might decide for the next phase to use DNA to confirm what we found. Every project is a little bit different. And of course each project will have varying degrees of success.

Nicole (12m 15s):
And so it’s important to think about You, know whether a research project is concise or complex and consider the scope. If it’s really complicated, we need to break it into phases. Some like simple projects would be like finding one biographical detail for somebody born in the 1900s. Like that could be a simple project depending on what it is and what records are available. And then more complex projects are the ones we typically would want to break into phases because we really want to find the answer, but we don’t think we can do it all at once. And it usually involves like a time when there’s less records available or there’s some kind of complication like we want to use DNA, but there’s endogamy involved pretty much anything with DNA, you should break into phases.

Nicole (12m 60s):
So it just depends on the scope and kind of the complexity. And even something that seems simple might turn into a complex project. So, we just have to be ready for whatever comes our way. So when you write your research objective, you’ll want to use key identifiers like full names, spouses, birth marriage, death dates and places. And to learn more about writing research objectives, you can listen to our our second podcast episode. I think the first one was kind of an introduction and then Research Like a Pro number one is about objectives. And then we had had several additional podcast episodes about writing research objectives over the years. So there’s a few out there, but you can also look in our Research Like a Pro at DNA book because we do have a section in there about writing DNA objectives and talking about phases,

Diana (13m 50s):
Right? We have developed this idea over the years, haven’t we? As we have done our own projects and as we’ve worked with clients. So as we develop this idea, we write about it and talk about it. And it’s so fun to look back at how we originally started without even this idea of phases and how we’ve come so far in figuring out how to do these complicated projects.

Nicole (14m 12s):
Yeah, I will say that it makes it a lot more doable for difficult client projects to think of it in this way and realize that probably the first phase we will just barely get started with the DNA analysis, reviewing the documents. Whereas the second phase you can really dive in a little bit deeper to understanding the network analysis and whatnot. So yeah, it is cool to see how as we’ve done a lot of research projects that incorporate DNA, we’ve kind of seen like a kinda more of a structure for the way the phases usually go.

Diana (14m 45s):
Right?

Nicole (14m 47s):
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Nicole (15m 31s):
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Diana (15m 41s):
Well I thought it would be fun to illustrate this whole idea of researching and phases by talking about my current project, which is Clemsy Cline. Great.

Nicole (15m 50s):
And

Diana (15m 51s):
I am on my third phase and it has been amazing to see how this is coming together. I’m really excited about it. And we’re gonna go through each one of the phases and you can get just a really good idea of this research and why it was so difficult. Yeah, and I am using DNA, this

Nicole (16m 9s):
Will be a good example because it is a challenging one with some of these things we have been talking about, like record loss and adding DNA women. And

Diana (16m 19s):
Yes, So, we have You know a few, few places on our family tree where we have a woman and we have no idea who her parents are. And for a long time we have had this goal to figure out who clumsy Klein’s family is. and I had done a little bit of research, but I just didn’t know what to do next. So here’s my objective. The objective of this research phase is to discover a candidate for the father of Clemsy Cline. She was born about 1817 in Alabama and died after 1880 in Wise, County, Texas. Clemsy married William Henderson Weatherford about 1839 in Arkansas. So that’s what I had to begin with.

Diana (17m 1s):
And You know the first phase was really foundational. I wanted to discover a candidate by just looking at the documents. So I already had the 1850, 1860 and 1870 censuses for Clemsy and she was always a Weatherford in the records, but we had two children that had had identified her maiden name as Cline in their death certificates. So that was our only clue we had to for a candidate. So those censuses gave us a birth range of between 1817 and 1820 in Alabama. So I hypothesized her father would’ve been born before 1800 and I chose Virginia because the 1880 census does have her father as a birth in Virginia.

Diana (17m 50s):
Now the 1850 census was our best clue because her household, the Weatherford household is in Morgan County, Missouri. And right there on the same page is a Jacob Cline and he’s the head of the household and he has two boarders in his household, a Mahala Cline. Then he’s got a younger child listed under Mahala and so I would look at that over the years and think there’s gotta be some kind of a connection. But I’d really never done a detailed project on them, but I just felt like these two people could possibly be Clemsy. Siblings Jacob was born 1811 and Mahala 1828. So Clemsy just falls right in the middle of those two.

Diana (18m 32s):
Well, here’s the other tricky thing, like you mentioned Nicole, that the very earliest known location for Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford is in Iser County, which is severely burned county. So there are no probate, there’s no marriage, You know, there’s just, there’s hardly anything left that we would usually use. But I had federal land patents and the tax records had been sent to the state. And so those survived. So I decided just to look for all the clients in Izard County and see if I could figure out who else could be there. and I discovered a John C Cline and Mahala Cline and another John Cline and thought maybe this was clumsy family.

Diana (19m 16s):
So this project I researched John C Cline. I found him in the 1850 census of the neighboring county, Fulton County. And he was 65 years old, born about 1785. So I was excited to see he could be a possible candidate for the father of Jacob, Clemsy and Mahala. And then I found that Mahala had married a man named Thomas Shockley in 1854 in Morgan County, Missouri. So right after that census and I thought maybe, okay, is she the connecting link between the Izard County clients and the Morgan County clients? So. I found some connections, but I still had a bunch of questions.

Nicole (19m 59s):
Yeah, you had found a lot of good clues, but nothing was really obvious. Right,

Diana (20m 4s):
Right. There was nothing that said for sure. These are the siblings, they’re just, they’re on the same page in the census. and I should mention that in the 18 50 cents, that same one where they’re on the same page. Clumsy also has two Kline children in her household that we could never figure out who they were. And they were younger children, so they were born in Arkansas and several of her children were born in Arkansas So. we knew there was this Arkansas, Morgan County Missouri connection.

Nicole (20m 34s):
Love that. It’s so fun when you have little clues like that. Okay, there’s like a family network here. It’s not just this one Kline family in isolation. Like you sometimes see you’re like, okay, well there’s some kids here who have the same surname, like maybe they could be cousins. Who knows.

Diana (20m 51s):
Right? Right. That first one did not have any DNA in it. It was really just looking at the records I already had then creating a research plan to go try to find more. And so that’s, that was really helpful to find that whole little group of people of clients in insert county in the federal land patents and the tax records. ’cause I hadn’t found them before. So that was really good to find them.

Nicole (21m 15s):
Yeah, phase one was very effective. You not only established a foundation of documents and kind of like the fan club, but you’ve actually found some clues leading to some possible hypotheses of relationships of the Cline family.

Diana (21m 28s):
Exactly. And it was great to know that John C Cline was of an age to be the father. That was really helpful. Yeah. So moving on to what I did next. So the phase two objective was, as you might guess, was following those fans of Clemsy who each patented land in Izard County Arkansas. And the dates were between 1844 and 1850. So kind of in that sweet spot in the 1840s when Clemsy was still living there. Before she had moved to Missouri, all, like I said, all of her children were born in Arkansas except for like a couple of the later ones. So I could really pinpoint her migration, which was about 1849.

Diana (22m 7s):
So I hypothesized, this was all making sense. So I was going to explore John C Cline, Mahalet. She was known as Mahala Cline in the land patents and then John Cline. So it makes it a little confusing when you have men of the same name. and I wasn’t sure if I had John C Cline senior or junior in in the records. I knew there were two separate men because a John Cline who was younger shows up in Morgan County, Missouri in 1840 right next to Jacob Cline So. we have another connection there between between these Clines, but then this other second, John Cline does go back to Arkansas and Pat’s land.

Diana (22m 54s):
So I really needed to try to study these three people and see if I could figure out more about them. So this second phase was all about land and tax. and I had ordered the land application files from the National Archives. So that gave me a lot more detail about when these specifically applied for the land patents, because you have different dates, You know for when they apply and when it actually is finalized. And then I used the taxes. Oh, just did such a deep dive in the tax list. So let me tell you what I found because I made some amazing connections and it was so fun.

Diana (23m 35s):
So John C Cline was senior and he first appeared in Izard County in 1837 and he applied for a land patent for 40 acres. So he has the first record there. And then that land patent was finalized in 1838 and he went on to patent two additional 40 acre parcels in 1838 and 1844. So he had a total land of 120 acres. And the tricky thing was Fulton County was created from Izard County. So then he became a resident of that county. So I had to look for tax records in both counties, which is always fun. But he did pay taxes on the Izard County land in 1839 and 1841.

Diana (24m 17s):
But he had sold that land by 1850 and the tax lists were such good information. They showed a George French paying tax on the land originally granted to John C Cline. Nice So I. Love that. When the tax records tell you who the original grantee is.

Nicole (24m 35s):
That’s so helpful. I wonder if they’re using that to help them know where the land was because they’re considering that as the location like well You know that land where John C Cline originally lived. Well now George French is there

Diana (24m 47s):
Maybe, but you know in the text list they still put the land description. Oh nice. So, so you get both of those things. But that was very, very helpful in following this family. So it was interesting that John was taxed on town lots. So he sold his 120 acres and then he purchased two town lots first just one and then two and I don’t have any record of those purchases because the deeds are all gone. Those records were destroyed. So often we will depend on the deeds to tell us what happened, but in this case, I didn’t have that. Luckily I had the tax records that gave me a clue. So I found John, he was headed a household in 1850 in Fulton County.

Diana (25m 31s):
And that household had a female by the name of Milky. And then it had about four children and so I hypothesized, okay, are these maybe a second family? These would be really young children. I mean this would be way too young for this to have been Jacob and Clemsy and Mahala’s mother having children. This would not work. This had to be a second family with perhaps half siblings. Oh. So that was something that that I thought of.

Nicole (26m 2s):
What was the name of the woman again?

Diana (26m 5s):
Milky. M-I-L-K-Y. Yeah, that’s new. Yep. So then we come to John Cline Jr. And he was so tricky to nail down. He had paid a poll tax in Izard County in 1839, but then he was up in Morgan County by Jacob Cline in 1840 in the census. But then he’s back in Izard County in 1847 and 1848 applying for land patents. And those patents do state his residence as Fulton County and Pulaski County. And of course then I go to Pulaski and research there and there were no records for him and Pulaski whatsoever.

Diana (26m 48s):
So that must have been just a short little stay there. But the text list do reveal his death by 1849, which I was so surprised at when I first saw that. I had assumed it was John Cline senior that died. You know he was the older man. Oh. So the only way I figured it out was by tracing the land. I had to look at all the land descriptions to figure out who this was that died.

Nicole (27m 14s):
Did the tax records say junior and senior on them?

Diana (27m 18s):
Occasionally they did. And in one instance it was incorrect. And the only way I figured it out was looking at the land descriptions. Again, the federal land patents sometimes said senior and sometimes didn’t. So it was really tricky because sometimes John C Cline was John C Cline. Other times he was just John Cline So. I literally made tables of those land descriptions and sorted out these two men based on those

Nicole (27m 46s):
Good job.

Diana (27m 47s):
It was confusing and tricky. So here’s a really interesting thing. So John Junior had died by 1849 and Absalom Wiseman was listed as the administrator for his estate. And as we know, an administrator means that he died without a will. And he was young and so he probably just had an accidental death or got ill and died suddenly. But Absalom Wiseman pays the taxes on his land that he had patented. And then a Sally Cline paid the tax for one of the land parcels in 1852. So now I have another woman and I’m hypothesizing maybe that is his, was his wife.

Diana (28m 27s):
And then a Sarah Blair paid the tax for the other two. And by 1843 and Irvin Blair paid the tax for the two parcels. And we don’t hear anymore of Sally Cline or the other parcel. So it sounds like that land was sold to the Blairs, but what about the Sally Cline? Well, I had to look for her. I found a Sarah Cline in the household of F Heron in Fulton County. and I felt like she could be the widow of John who had died in 1849. And she had twins in the Heron household. She had these two twins who had been born in 1848. So I again hypothesized that perhaps Sarah and these twins were the the wife and children of John Jr.

Diana (29m 13s):
Who had died. And maybe she had three other children that she sent north to Morgan County to live with Clemsy and Jacob Cline, who would’ve been their aunt and uncle. ’cause I’ve always tried to figure out who are these children that show up in Morgan County?

Nicole (29m 32s):
Hmm. That is a really interesting guess.

Diana (29m 37s):
Well we know that they all end up there in 1850 and I know that Clemsy moved about 1848, 1849. So it kind of makes sense that if her brother John had died and he had these three older children and Sarah had just had twins that You know she’s gonna keep the twins, but it was older children, maybe she sent them north. So yeah, that was a fun find and I traced those twins forward and they were living with a Ferguson Heron in 1860 and by then they’re going as Herons and Sarah is not in the household and I could not find her anywhere. So I wondered if she had died.

Nicole (30m 15s):
Wow. And probably someone today, a descendant of those people is trying to find their ancestors.

Diana (30m 22s):
I know. Trying to figure out who are the parents of, right.

Nicole (30m 25s):
If it’s a like DNA project and they can’t find any

Diana (30m 30s):
Certain

Nicole (30m 30s):
Point and they’re like, why not?

Diana (30m 32s):
Right. And there are two other younger girls in the household by 1860 and maybe those are more daughters of Sarah, I don’t know. ’cause she you know maybe she married again, I dunno. Or other relations to Ferguson here. And so that kind of you know I stopped with that part. But I finally have a hypothesis for those children that end up in Morgan County. Which was good because You know I just couldn’t figure out where they came from

Nicole (30m 57s):
For sure. That could be the explanation for that.

Diana (31m 0s):
Right. So then we go to Mahala. And Mahala, as I said before, she shows up in 1850 in the household near Clemsy. And she’s living in the household of Jacob Cline who I think probably is a brother. And the interesting thing about Mahala is she was also born in Alabama, like clumsy So I thought, okay there’s another connection. And I found Mahala applying for land patents as a young woman, which you don’t often see. And she applied in 1844. And in 1850 we see that a George French is paying tax on her land that was originally patented by her.

Diana (31m 40s):
So again, we don’t have deeds to see when she sold that land, but now we have George paying taxes on it. So she had likely moved north to Missouri by 1850 and she was the same Mahala Cline who was in that household of Jacob Cline with the younger Robert age five, who I think maybe was John Junior’s son. And then she gets married to Thomas Shockley in 1854. So I can just picture this little caravan of Clemsy Cline Weatherford and Henderson Weatherford and then Mahala all you know going up to Morgan County, Jacob Cline is up there and established. He’d been there for quite a while and settling there for a bit.

Diana (32m 21s):
Yeah. So anyway, there’s my hypothesis. So my question was to Discover a connection between the Missouri and Arkansas Cline. And so that really did result in this hypothesis that John C Cline Sr. Was the father of Jacob, John Junior, Clemsy and Mahala. So nothing so far disproves that hypothesis and finding that John Cline Jr. had died by 1849 gives me another little piece of evidence that those three Cline children in the 1850 households of Clemsy and Jacob Cline could be the children of their brother. Yeah. John John Cline Jr.

Diana (33m 1s):
You

Nicole (33m 1s):
Convinced me. I think it’s

Diana (33m 3s):
True. Well it was really fun doing the land and tax. It was the tax records that just really helped You know I only had land tax in the census. So that really helped. So now I’m onto phase three, which is what I’m currently working on. and I am testing that hypothesis of John being the biological father doing You know the research on him. I only have him in the 1850 and 1860 censuses and it gives him a birth of about 1785 and we’ve got a Pennsylvania or a Virginia birth depending on which census. And then he dies, dunno when he dies, but he is in 1860.

Diana (33m 44s):
He is out in Texas. So that’s where I have him. So, so that’s gonna be part of my documentary work is to start the Texas records for where he died. I don’t know if there’ll be anything for him there, but my main focus is DNA this time. And here’s an exciting thing. I have a network graph that found a really good cluster of Clines and within that cluster are some descendants of Mahala Cline Shockley. Yay. Isn’t that great? And even more exciting, I have found some descendants of John C Cline with that family who I think are half siblings.

Nicole (34m 24s):
Oh, with Milky and her children.

Diana (34m 26s):
Yes.

Nicole (34m 27s):
Nice. Well I love her name and it’s, this family has fun names. We have Clemsy Cline, we have Milky Cline

Diana (34m 36s):
Mahala. Yeah. So it’s kind of fun. And of course looking at the online trees, people have really mixed up the records on John C Cline. They have got that just so convoluted. I bet. But I just found with the full text search on family search new searching for deeds, I just found a deed in Sangamon County, Illinois for John and Milkhas Cline.

Nicole (35m 3s):
Ooh.

Diana (35m 4s):
So that is like before they went to our Arkansas So I, think it was 1836-7. And the other tying thing to Sangamon County is that their older son, Jesse Cline, joins the army and gives his birth place a Sangamon County, Illinois. Nice.

Nicole (35m 23s):
Don’t you love it when you can see all the puzzle pieces just coming into place and you’re like, I finally have this family.

Diana (35m 30s):
Yes, yes. So I haven’t done my research plan yet for the DNA study group, but you can bet it’s gonna take place in Sangamon County, Illinois and Texas because I now have some bookends. Yeah. For John C CLine’s life. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t start out You know in Sangamon County. But that’s my next location pushing him back. And what I really wanna find is a connection to Alabama where those girls Clemsy and Mahala say they were born. So Wow. Yeah. You know if he did do Alabama to Illinois and then to Arkansas and Texas. Oh my gosh. He reminds me of Benjamin Cox, he’s friend that just moved all over the place.

Nicole (36m 7s):
Its very long migration path in their life. And you would think they would stay there like in the north or the south. ’cause like around that time is the civil War when everyone is like either associated with the south or associated with the north. But then you have some of these people who just migrated all over the place.

Diana (36m 24s):
Right. Well in Arkansas and Missouri were interesting because you could be either or there. Those are the

Nicole (36m 30s):
Border states. Yeah,

Diana (36m 31s):
Yeah. You had both. And Texas was the same way. You know going out to Texas. So really interesting. But I am very excited that the DNA is starting to provide evidence that my hypothesis is correct, that this is a family for clumsy and that the DNA is showing it, which is really cool. I love the network graph because Clemsy had a lot of children who had a lot of children. Oh So. we have many, many people who have tested that come through her line and they all connect also You know, which is the value of a network graph. They all connect to these other climb descendants. So that’s pretty cool. It’s not just me, it’s not just my test taker.

Diana (37m 12s):
It’s like a whole cluster of people connecting, which is what we want. Right?

Nicole (37m 16s):
Yeah. You wanna have multiple descendants of your research subject connecting to multiple descendants of your hypothesized sister or whoever. That’s really good. While this has been so interesting to hear the phases of research and the client project. So to summarize, you started with phase one, setting a foundation in documentary research and you actually found some clues that led to a hypothesis of a family to connect to. Then in phase two you dove even deeper into land and tax records and found a lot of connections in the documents. And then phase three has been testing the hypothesis you found in phases one and two with DNA.

Diana (37m 55s):
Absolutely. And I’m hoping to continue the documentary work and find even more connections and more clues. So it’s really fun to look at this ancestor that for so long I had no idea what to do with her and to now actually have some really good ideas about her family.

Nicole (38m 13s):
Well I hope to see this in an article in the NGS someday. So good job. Yes. And that great. That’ll be fun to see what comes out of this third phase. And like you said, it’s not just a DNA phase because it, it just goes so hand in hand with documentary research. When you find You know a hypothesis and you find a connection in DNA, then you have to go back to to the documents again to figure out more about the connections in the documents. So it’s kind of a ping pong game back and forth.

Diana (38m 45s):
Absolutely. I would’ve had no idea about the Shockley connection without really taking a look at Mahala and then looking at John C Cline You know you have to research those people so well so that when you see their descendants in the DNA matches, they, they jump out at you or you look at their tree and you go, oh, okay. Now I know who you are. But until you do that work, you really just have no clue who these people could be.

Nicole (39m 11s):
Right. Well thanks for sharing your example and I hope that all of our listeners will try doing their research projects in phases and kind of conceptualizing them this way to help reduce the overwhelming feeling that you’re continually working and never finishing. So the idea of doing research in phases or blocks of research is not a new concept, but it’s usually just used by professional Genealogists who are researching for clients. But I think it really can be used in our own work as well to help us to make progress and to better Research. Like a Pro.

Diana (39m 41s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening. We hope you have a great week and we will talk to you next time.

Nicole (39m 47s):
Bye

Diana (39m 48s):
Bye-Bye

Nicole (39m 49s):
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 books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro at D on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.