The search for a Dorset connection

 

                           The Acorn Inn in Evershot where some of my Dorset ancestors came from (the village not the pub)

It always pays to look twice. I was deep into research on my Maidment line when I realized I was on the wrong track. Not that I got far - just far enough to see that there were unnamed fathers for some of the offspring on that family line which will make genetic research tricky.    

But it turns out that was not the main problem with pursuing that family line to see if I could find the common ancestor for my DNA match and myself. What I had done when I looked at my match's family tree was to enter a search term. I chose the surname Maidment for my search. A name popped up, a Susanna Maidment from the 1700's. I didn't have a Susanna on my family tree but it was the right surname. But it turns out that many of my family names would have popped up if I entered them as search terms. Susanna wasn't attached to any family line on my match's tree. My match had added the Dorset names from my tree to a kind of free form tree that sits behind but doesn't link up with hers. Maybe that was in anticipation of joining our lines later or perhaps as a reminder of the names that may eventually link to her family tree. 

So the research I did last Sunday hit a bit of a dead end. Since then I've jotted the Dorset names on my match's tree down in a notebook with their birth and death dates, if available. I'm hoping that some of those locations will give me a better idea of where to start expanding my family tree with collaterals to see if we can come up with our common ancestor sooner rather than later.