If your family lived in one small area for centuries, you may discover that you have “repeat” ancestors, people from whom you descend more than once. Of course for this to happen, cousins have to marry. But husband and wife couples who are related to each other may have had no idea of their relationship, particularly if it was distant. Charting out these relationships may be helpful to see the connection, but most genealogical software packages don’t easily allow such relationships to be diagrammed easily–paper and pencil is my personal favorite for drafting these charts as can be seen in our longer blog post.
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2 Responses
I broke ancestry because of those relationships! Now my tree looks like one of those What Was She Thinking! trees. But there’s no way to make it tidy. Even I get lost in the spider web from time to time.
So many of my DNA matches have “multiple shared ancestors.” One day I may break Ancestry too!