Internet and digital newspaper searches for individuals with common names can be difficult. John Smiths and Mary Jones are everywhere. Searches for individuals whose last name has another meaning, such as Lake, King, Noble, etc. can be just as challenging–if not more. Elizabeth Lake, William King, and John Noble create their own search problems. For some searches, location keywords based on your ancestor’s life can facilitate finding the person of interest, such as: place of birth (town, county, etc.), place of death, other residences, etc. Names of states or territories may be too common and not effectively narrow your search. Or they might perfect–if just depends. For other individuals, searches that include a specific part of a residence (particularly a street name for urban relatives), an occupation, or […]
Searching the trees of your DNA matches for names can be a way to sift through some of the low-hanging matches that are easier to figure out. Of course many DNA matches do not have trees so this approach only looks at those trees–a definite limitation. There are other things to consider as well: The tree might not be correct and the name is wrong. The shared name (and the connection to that family) might be too far back in the tree to share any DNA through that family. There might actually be other connections you have with that person (through spots currently blank in their tree or yours) and while you share an ancestral name on your paper genealogy tree, your shared DNA is through another family. […]
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