Since ThruLines appeared, a small group of descendants of James Budden and Mary Littlefield, my great x5 grandparents, has been building up. The Buddens are a West Sussex family and if I have the right marriage, Mary is from Hambledon just over the border into Hampshire. The matches are only small and match either my paternal aunt, or my father and sometimes me or my brother. The cMs total is small enough not to show up on Shared Matches so without ThruLines I would probably have missed them.

I had noticed in passing that one of their granddaughters, Harriet, had married a Larkham which is not the most usual spelling but was the spelling used by elderly friends of my mother many moons ago. Les and Win Larkham, as I knew them, were a big part of The Grayshott Stagers, an amateur dramatic group on the NE Hampshire/SW Surrey border. We lived in Grayshott between 1958 and 1962 and my mother  joined the group and appeared on stage in Grayshott Village Hall with them several times until my parents left the village for Headley and later left the area altogether. Ten years later, when I started teaching locally, I also joined them and appeared in some productions.

Yesterday, another match came up who was also descended from Harriet Budden and John Larkham. When I was adding the latest match to the family tree, I noticed a Leslie Dalton Larkham and while I was checking the various records etc. to make sure I was putting accurate data on to the tree, I also investigated him. I initially dismissed him as being the wrong person as the Les Larkham I knew was married to Winifred and I couldn’t a civil marriage record of this Leslie marrying a Winifred for a first, second or even a later marriage and the only wife I found was Edith N Gibbons. I didn’t look very hard as It wasn’t that important. I had noticed though that he had died in the registration district which covered that part of Surrey so thought I would come back later. I was looking for something else about my new DNA match’s family on a different site and spotted another record for their marriage and Edith’s middle initial was listed as  W – and further searching showed that her middle name was Winifred … they had married in 1930 in Ealing.

So it seems that Leslie is my paternal 4th cousin twice removed. The other Grayshott/Headley connections on my tree are not from that part of the family. Leslie is part of my Budden/Adams/Reed family that moved up to London from West Sussex, the other Grayshott/Headley connections are with the Elkins/Hart/Taphouse/Lewcock family which moved from Hampshire up to London via Farnham in Surrey:

From St Pancras, Chichester to St Pancras, London.

Farnham families

Ever since I first started my website in 2006, I had intended to include a sort of blog. Setting up the site while researching my family history, getting involved with FamilyTreeForum, relocating from Belgium to West Sussex and the incredibly fast moving world of online genealogy has meant that I have been playing catch up with my intentions ever since!

I started building the site with The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (“TNG”) and my “basic” HTML skills, moved on to Joomla (rebuilding it several times as Joomla upgraded or I decided to change the theme), via a luckily minor hacking and have now moved it all over to WordPress. I am still using TNG for the Family Tree area of the site.

Although most of the blog items will be genealogical I don’t spend all my time researching, honestly,  so will probably share non-genealogical musings too. I shall avoid mentions of anything to do with the B word!

It’s my tree and that is how I like it.

The other day I saw somebody commenting that they would never bother to even look at a tree with fewer than 2000 people. This was in a Facebook group where the central theme was DNA. Others won’t look at a tree with high numbers and no sources. These comments are always made in a rather patronising sniffy way and usually include the derogatory phrase “name collector”.

When I saw the latest comment, I felt sorry for them as they will be missing out and maybe big time. Since I started tracking down my DNA matches, my tree has doubled in size. It was already in the range of what some would dub name collecting as I have always followed through as many siblings and their descendants as far forward as I can through census returns and I had some prolific ancestors. I have had other people sharing their own research which has added to the total. I have also tried to collect Lewcocks as part of my vague surname study. I choose to keep it all together in one master tree because it’s my tree and that is how I like it and when I do, if I do, find the connection I can just join them up!!

Now this is paying dividends and I am able to add the descendants of the siblings who went to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA and their descendants. The advent of ThruLines has helped confirm parts of my paper trail and also added new twigs and their branches to follow up.

Another comment I often see these days is some rather thoughtless and often plain unkind comments about people with private trees, or no trees or unlinked trees. I get quite cross when I read them. Currently (and temporarily) my tree on Ancestry is private but searchable because it includes my DNA matches and I wanted to have an up to date version uploaded quickly to see if more came up on the ThruLInes – these matches have been removed on the version hosted here. Other people have no tree through adoption or just beginning their research – that’s why they tested their DNA in the first place. The same complainants also get cross when they don’t instantly receive a reply to their messages. I have to admit to being rather tardy sometimes in my own replying because I end up disappearing down a research rabbit hole to see if the suggested connection is true and so it may be a little while before I can reply.

In March (2019), things began to go awry on the Ancestry site to the accompaniment of much wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media as new features appeared and disappeared, worked and then stopped working on some browsers. A good sign that we are about to gain some new tools in time for Rootstech and so it proved. Things seem settled now although a new message system is apparently in the pipeline and some tweaking is still going on as the feedback is being fed back into the system.

The new features, which are still in Beta and need you to opted in, include a new presentation and layout, a facility for colour coding and filters. The profile page allows you to see, on one page, the amount of matching cMs, who else matches the person, to add a note and to add the person to a colour group, whether you have any potential common ancestors, a view of their tree if they have a public one and their direct surnames. There is still some tweaking needed in my opinion, but it’s getting there.

As of July (2019), the Beta became the norm and since then there have been other additions. 

The world of DNA testing for genealogy has been moving rapidly and I have been trying to keep up! Strong marketing by Ancestry with regular reductions in the cost of tests means that they now have over 14 million kits so I am gradually adding to my list of matches.

It is obvious that, if you can, you should test your parent(s) but it has been noticeable from the start that my brother has many more matches than I do and without him testing I would have far fewer matches to follow up, so I started to collect some tests for testing aunts, uncles and cousins.

Thus far, a paternal aunt has tested and sure enough she has matches which my father does not. At the time of writing between us we have 775 matches listed in Family Historian who match one or more of us and distinct family groupings are beginning to show up. Very few match us at 2nd or 3rd cousin level and there is an enormous paternal group who all match each other but we have no idea where the connection is …. yet.

AncestryDNA only highlight paternal/maternal matches from 1st to 4th cousin i.e. 20cMs and above, but using the new color grouping we can differentiate distant matches as well, although this is not going to be 100% accurate at the lowest levels of number of cMs.