New Family Line Coming Soon

For those tracking on Ancestry right now, you probably already know. But if you do, shhhhhh.

The reason I ever began researching my own ancestry is because most of my family was an unknown. My grandmother never told my dad who his dad was. He met most of his aunts and uncles and stayed in touch with a few, but didn’t know anything about his grandfather (and didn’t like or have anything to do with his own grandmother). My mom was always very secretive of her family, wishing to not expose me to the skeletons in that closet.

I dove headfirst with the little bit of information I had. A possible embellished story of how my grandfather died, a couple of dates, and some nicknames. The more I dug, the more it spun his own memories. I ended up getting decently far back, and met other people researching the same family. Met a cousin whose dad was my dad’s uncle, she was visiting near us and stopped by. It was a pretty cool journey.

But I hit roadblocks, and I stopped. I was dejected that I couldn’t find out more about my Hamm line, and that I had yielded 0 clues to my grandfather.

I started considering doing Ancestry DNA. At first I didn’t because I couldn’t afford to spend the extra money. Then I backed off after my dad said he really didn’t want to know who his father was. “Why should I go looking for him? He never came looking for me. I’ve done alright without him all these years, no need changing that now.” So I backed off. I think he would have liked to know but I left it alone.

A couple of years after he passed away, I saw the sale for Ancestry DNA. Decided to jump on it. The results that came back were mind boggling! How in the world do I make sense of all of this and sort it out. I showed the list to my mom, and I was able to sort out a few last names from her side. But then I backed off again.

Eventually I decided to pick it up again, this time to expand out her side of the family. So I started expanding. And then I started taking the time to look smarter at my matches, not harder. A newer match, a half nephew I didn’t know existed, popped up. I realized that I could start limiting my matches to my mom or dad, and was able to finally limit a number of people to being likely related to my paternal grandfather.

Only one – a fairly close match – had a tree. Unfortunately it was private, and I still have not heard back from her about access :-/ However, I was right about the relation.

With a lot of luck and the help of the tools leveraged on Ancestry DNA, I was able to crack the code and figure out who my paternal grandfather was. I will hold off on sharing that here until I have provided a full reveal to my own half siblings.

Keep an eye out though, the story is good and interesting.