When I first got my Ancestry DNA match results, the list of people I matched was pretty overwhelming. My two closest matches were estimated third cousins to me. Everyone else was estimated to be a fourth cousin or more distant. Unfortunately, I wasn’t part of any shared ancestor circles either, and am enough of a european mutt that Ancestry couldn’t even link me to a narrowed-down geographic region.
Based on others’ experiences I’d read about, I had this idea that I would be able to scroll through my matches and see a bunch of surnames in common with my tree. Nope! I’m not sure if I am just unlucky but the only common surnames I am able to find without major data analysis are surnames that are TOO common. Jacksons, Robinsons, Stephensons, Bakers, Martins, Smiths, Blacks, Greens, Browns, and Joneses–you get the idea. Even less common names like Thorpe or Saunders seem common enough that just seeing them in a match’s tree doesn’t necessarily mean that surname is your connection point.
So I began the laborious process of building out trees for folks that I shared the most DNA with, in hopes of finding some time/place commonalities.
Do you know how many people came to Ontario from upstate New York between 1790 and 1820?
Anyway.
My first Elston breakthrough came unexpectedly the other day, mostly thanks to coincidence.
I had just created a list of people that match both my grandfather and one of his closest matches, writing down a list of email addresses and kit numbers. One of the people had a gedcom uploaded so I checked it out. There were some Lincolnshire people in it, so I opened up Google and started down that rabbit hole.
At some point I searched for the names of all of the people in the family one of my possible John Elstons was living with at the time of the 1841 UK census. I turned up an old post on rootsweb, asking if anyone had any information on this family. I looked at the user name, and it seemed familiar.
I had just written down an email address that started the same way. It was one of the other matches in the group I had just created.
Two emails later and I have my first real John Elston lead in England. My grandfather and I are related by DNA to someone who is descended from the family a John Elston was living with in 1841, when he was an adolescent. Further research showed me that Elizabeth Jackson, the wife, was born Elizabeth Elston.
Within a day I had penciled in a theoretical tree that placed three other matches from that group:
I don’t think DNA alone is enough to conclude anything–but tell me this isn’t a great way of finding new leads.
Elstonology 