People often ask me why I am so obsessed with genealogy. It’s a fair question considering my family tree is approaching 39,000 relatives. I have never met nor will I likely meet 99.9% of them. Most of them are dead, so the good Lord willing, I won’t be meeting any of them any time soon. But should I ever happen to meet any of the living ones, I’ll be ready.

On Saturday I received an email from a women who is helping her mother-in-law find her birth mother’s family. She knew from Ancestry.com’s DNA test results that her mother-in-law was probably a 3rd or 4th cousin to me and my father. She only had fragments of information. Her mother-in-law was adopted as a baby. The birth mother was a teenager. She had what she believed was the birth mother’s real name and a place of birth. This was important to her because her mother-in-law had recently overcome of serious, life-threatening illness. Would I consider helping her?

As I was about to leave Richmond, I knew I had about two hours of drive time to fret over the email. How could I not help her? But I have thousands of DNA matches on Ancestry.com and I’ve only positively identified common ancestors on about 200 of them. I desperately wanted to help the woman but experience has shown me that this was probably going to be difficult to figure out. I pulled over for gas about 30 miles down the road and replied to the woman’s email. I would do whatever I could.

When I arrived home I jumped on the computer and quickly found her mother-in-law’s DNA match “profile” on Ancestry.com. It took me all of three minutes tops to figure out that she was a fellow descendant of William Barnett Sims and Clarinda Susan Rust, my 3rd great grandparents. She obviously matched my father, his sister and 1st cousins; but more importantly she also matched about a dozen other folks who I had already identified as Sims descendants. This was too easy.

I then turned to my family tree and plugged in the name of her birth mother. Had I come across this person while researching the Sims family? Yes. The name of her birth mother popped up instantly. She had used her real name when signing the adoption papers. And her mother was a Sims. In the 1940 census her birth mother was 10 years old. She would have been 19 when she gave birth to my DNA match.

By midnight, I had emailed the woman the names of her mother-in-law’s deceased maternal grandparents and uncle. I am pretty good at this genealogy thing. Maybe too good. From public records, I also knew that her birth mother had married a man after 1950 who’d given her two sons – they would be her mother-in-law’s half-brothers. In 1980, they were living in Mesquite, Texas.

The rest of this story is not my own. I hope this turns out well for the woman’s mother-in-law should they decide to reach out to the folks I helped them identify. At the very least, her mother-in-law now has an extended family member – a 4th “birth” cousin she never knew she had – me.

Kenfolk: Tranthams
Relation: 4th cousin
Common ancestors: William Barnett Sims and Clarinda Susan Rust