Working on Tree, New Discoveries!

I have been doing better about working on my tree, although I am still slacking off on writing regular blog posts. So I thought I would take a moment to write a quick update about some of my recent findings....

Several months ago I had been contacted by a gentleman named Bruce in Canada saying he was a match to a couple of tests that I manange and that he believed it is on my Simmons line, and he let me know that Simmons was not their original surname which is why I was having trouble getting past my 2x Great Grandfather George Simmons b 1841.

His theory is that George's parents are George Clements b 1801 and Mary Wagstaff, and that they used the Clements surname until sometime before the birth of their youngest daughter. I beleive there is some credience to his theory.

The oldest male son of George (1841) is George Thomas Wagstaff Simmons. That is point one in favor of a family connection to a Clements/Wagstaff couple. Also the marriage certificate for George to Emma Halsey says that his father's name was George and he was a Coachman.

I did take a quick look at his information, but since I was busy on different projects at the time I basically said thank you for the information, filed it in the back of my mind and didn't really pursure it. He was kind enough to give me viewer access to his DNA, which will prove relevant to the story here.

Recently I received an email from a woman saying she was trying to trace her family and she was a match to several of the tests I manage. I took a little time to check out how much she shared with the various tests. Lo and Behold, not only did she match me and my known cousins on the Newman/Simmons side, but she also matched Bruce! These means that we all probably descended from a common "Simmons" ancestor.

I contacted Bruce to tell him of this new match and we worked together to come up with a spreadsheet chart of all the shared matches between us. We now have a pretty good supportable theory on the descendants of George Clemments and Mary Wagstaff as we seem to have descendants of at least 3, possibly 4 of their 7 children.

We used a combination of old fashioned record research, and careful analysis of DNA matches to reach this conclusion. So what was a brick wall for me, has become another generation of ancestors! We are still working some of the DNA matches and maybe in those matches we will find descendants of some of the other children.

I am pretty excited about the breakthrough, and have hopes for further developments on this line.