Breaking brickwalls example 2 - jonathanbrecher/sharedclustering GitHub Wiki

Thomas Daniels shared this example in the Shared Clustering User Group of how he used Shared Clustering as a guide to breaking a brickwall that had been baffling his family for decades (reposted with permission):

Introduction

I had two great-great-grandfathers who were brick walls. One, John Paul Jones (b. around 1850), had been studied by my uncle for over 30 years, including trips to Wayne Co., KY, where the family came from. I'll use him as an example.

I realized that the information in Ancestry.com and other places was not going to yield help directly. My approach was to find all DNA descendants and their associated relatives that I could. Call this the Jones Cousins. I had several sources for these Jones Cousins:

  • Ancestry's ThruLines
    • My John Paul Jones had several descendants in ThruLines
  • Clusters associated with John Paul Jones
    • Of course, the ThruLines suggestions show up in the Common Ancestors column
    • There were several clusters that had John Paul Jones as well as a few clusters related to those clusters
      • All of the folks in these clusters, were considered as part of the Jones Cousins

Processing through the Jones Cousins

I worked through each Jones Cousin with a sizable tree, looking for Jones lines in their trees. A good first check was the number of Jones surnames, but sometimes they had a Jones line obvious in the Ancestry tree view.

For each of the Jones lines, I looked back as far as the 1810s (1-2 generations before my John Paul).

In my processing, I noticed that I had run into an Orrilia Jones who was about John Paul's age. Frankly, it was just the strange name... it stuck with me. Her family was from Rabun, Co., GA.

Hence, a Hypothesis: Maybe my John Paul Jones was tied to this family from Rabun Co., GA instead of Wayne Co. KY!

Building Trees

I worked back through the Jones Cousins that had long Jones lines.

On scratch paper, I built a sequence of the Jones ancestors from their Ancestry trees. I did this for each Jones Cousin that had a long Jones line. These sequences converged at William Thomas Jones and Dicey McClain, parents of Orillia.

Refined Hypothesis: William Thomas Jones and Dicey McClain are ancestors of mine. And maybe parents of our John Paul?

I went through many tree entries in Ancestry to amass children names for WT and Dicey. And there was a John L. P. Jones. Close-ish in birth year. But Georgia???

I then searched forward from WT and Dicey through their kids. Several ended up in Wayne Co, KY including his brother Malcom Glen Jones... whoa? Maybe John L. P. Jones is our John Paul?

Presenting this to my uncle, he found that Glen Jones in Wayne, Co had married a woman named Fairchild. My uncle had a record of John L. Jones selling land to her brother! And we'd always assumed the L. middle initial in this record of John L. Jones was a mistake, but now, we've got paper records tying a John L. Jones to the family of Glen and my great-great-grandmother's name.

Add the DNA evidence, and Boom. We're convinced.