When I started my research, my goal was to trace my families either “across the pond” or to where they lived before they settled in Illinois. Then my focus concentrated on working through my colonial era families in the east coast of the United States.
I never really worked up the siblings of my great or great-great-grandparents. Their parents were easy to determine and, for the most part, those aunts and uncle lived and died in the two-county area where my families had lived since the 1850s. So I figured I’d do it ‘later.”
Later came around the time I got my DNA results back. Matches can be more easily analyzed when you know something on the descendants of the siblings of your great and great-great-grandparents. But it wasn’t just that. I learned of an uncle who spent 10 years in Montana and purchased federal land and served in World War I while he lived there. I discovered another uncle who actually homesteaded in Alberta, Canada, and whose sister who filed suit against her husband three times before the divorce was final.
There may be just as many stories in those ancestral siblings as there are in your ancestors. Don’t neglect them.
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