In Parts 1 (Casting a Wide Net, Part 1) and 2 (Casting a Wide Net, Part 2) of this series, we went through and tagged all 288 of our Ancestry DNA results that were related to a group of matches that had Woodley/Woodson surnames in their attached trees. In this installment, we get to work!

After we took a few days off, we downloaded the list of “Mary’s” (our Grandmother we’re trying to build matches to) DNA matches, and converted it to an Excel spreadsheet. We filtered the list to only show the 288 matches we’d tagged as related (DNA Line 47!), and deleted the rows that weren’t tagged. Next, we filtered on Private Trees and color-coded those 128 rows in Red since there’s no further work we could do on those lines.

That left us with 160 matches that had at least a small Public Tree. Sorting the list by centimorgans, we started reviewing each match one-by-one. The first match, with the most DNA in common, had a large Public Tree, so we started a speculative tree using the match as the root, and building back to the oldest Woodley ancestor. We followed the steps we outlined earlier in How to Build a Good Public Tree (Building a good Public Ancestry.com tree), so we had a decent foundation of facts supported by documentation. Going to the next match, we attempted to build a link between the first tree and this second tree. We found the link, and could tie these two DNA matches to each other in our speculative tree! We flagged these linked matches Green in the spreadsheet, and moved on to the next.We soon had a small skeleton tree building out nicely. We quickly found 4 matches we could link up, 2 others that we couldn’t build out from the data they had in their Public Tree (we flagged those as Yellow), when we hit the tree that brought it all into focus. “W.W.” had a 72cM match with Mary, and a Public Tree with over 3000 members. As we built this link, we found the most important data we’d learn in this project: The shared ancestor wasn’t a Woodley/Woodson, it likely was Roman and Mary (Stewart) Jones.

Roman and Mary Jones were born into slavery on the Eastern Seaboard in the 1830’s, and the Public Trees files available for them seem to have good Probate data showing the trail of ownership for them through to 1860. It appears they have 8-10 children that we know of (3 of which are confirmed with this DNA work), and there’s even an amazing picture of the couple. It appears someone has done quite a bit of work on this couple.

As we built this link, we found the most important data we’d learn in this project: The shared ancestor wasn’t a Woodley/Woodson, it likely was Roman and Mary (Stewart) Jones.

We spent weeks reviewing the 160 matches with Public Trees, and we eventually were able to link 12 of matches together in one speculative tree. All 12 share Roman and Mary Jones as a common ancestor. We also found 4 other matches that we could build out quite a bit, and we believe they are close to being linked to this grand tree, but we couldn’t find that missing piece. We called these “Orphaned Trees” and tied them into a placeholder.

The remaining 145 matches had data in their trees, but we couldn’t find good patterns to match with just what was online. For these 145 we built a spreadsheet of the listed family names, so that as we continue our research we can hopefully match those family names to new matches, and expand the tree.

Ultimately our tree has nearly 500 names with good data supporting each one. We didn’t use Member Family Trees to support any of the facts (other than some relationships), and we were able to shrub out some of the less developed branches with siblings/offspring/etc.

The bad news was, we couldn’t link ANY of these matches to our Mary directly. We are confident the matches are all were related to Roman and Mary Jones, and we can reasonably assume our Mary is too, but the link just wasn’t there yet.

That lead to our next step: leverage GEDmatch to confirm our theory that these were valid matches, and try and come up with an educated guess on where our Mary might link in with this group.

Next in the Series: Matching unmatched DNA matches by Casting a Wide Net, Part 4 – Proving the matches, and establishing a theory of connection