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Saturday, June 22, 2019

GRAVESTONE PHOTOS, COLLATERAL LINES & GENEALOGICAL SYNCHRONICTY

This is going to ramble a bit.

I live in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, USA.  My roots here go back to the Mayflower. So whenever I was doing photo requests in one of the old cemeteries I would also take photos of old  headstones that had any of my family names. It was for one of those ideas I had for a project, matching those names up to my family tree someday. I filed them in folders under the name of the cemetery, the town, and the date they were taken.

I haven't loaded many of them up to Find A Grave but over the years whenever I see a Photo Request for a family name I check those folders first and have fulfilled requests from them.

Here's the rambling part.

Lately I've been adding  and extending collateral lines on my Ancestry tree. The reason being I thought by extending those lines it might add more Shared Ancestor matches to my DNA results. And it has. But it's doing something else.

Today I saw a Photo Request for the headstone of Isaac Dunham and his wife Augusta (Packard) Dunham at a local cemetery. I have done requests before for that cemetery and I have Dunham and Packard ancestors, so I checked my cemetery folder and sure enough, I had taken a photo some years ago. So I Fulfilled the request, and then I checked my Ancestry tree to see if they were there and exactly how we are related.




It turns out Isaac is my 9th cousin 1x removed, the son of Isaac Dunham the lighthouse keeper I blogged about in 2012. I don't have a connection yet to Augusta Packard yet but I'm still collateral lines to that family so I hope to find that connection soon.

Genealogical synchronicity.

End of ramble.

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