It was May 2023.  I had just finished the DNA Skills Workshop.  I figured out who the main players were of my DNA matches from Ancestry and a few from 23&Me.  But, I was eager to bust through a genealogical brick wall that my newly found first cousins were trying to break through for years.  

I came up with a strategy to identify DNA matches beyond first cousins formally known as reverse genealogy.  These matches had to be second cousins, since the brick wall was the inability to identify the parents of a great-grandfather.  

I thought reverse genealogy, which is doing a search for descendants of a person, dead or alive, would provide me with some clues.  With the brick wall where it was, I couldn’t dig any further into the past.  I decided to start digging toward the present.

If you really want to get technical, doing reverse genealogy leads to what is called cluster research.  The goal of cluster research is figuring out which descendants may have records or information you don’t have.  In this case, “which descendants” were second cousins or the children of the children of the great-grandfather. 

There are 3 steps to my reverse genealogy/cluster research approach:  

1. Evaluating records and sources that provide names of people related to the ancestor in question.
2. Doing some online research based on findings from the record/source evaluation.
3. Making connections any way I can to see if a live one can be contacted to get the information I need.

The First Step

We’ll start off in this post evaluating records and sources that provide names of people related to the ancestor in question.  It’s important to “do the genealogy” first with this step.  

Here are the records and sources I use:

• Census records.  Go back as far as you can, working your way to the most recent census released.  It’s helpful if you have an ancestor’s arrival date to the country they emigrated to.  You may find a census after that date.
  • Record all of the children’s names of a family unit connected with either the ancestor or the ancestor’s adult child.  These names can be added to a working tree or on a working family group sheet.
  • As descendants of the ancestor marry and have children, add them to a working tree.
  • Continue this process until you can’t find any more census records.
• Newspaper websites (www.newspapers.com and/or www.genealogybank.com) or a Google search for obituaries and marriages.  Obituaries will often provide names of children and others related to the deceased.  
• Sources that provide death dates and names of relatives.
  • Social Security Death Index – sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, GenealogyBank, MyHeritage have this index available from 1962 to 1988, 2014 the latest.
  • State death indexes online are helpful for deaths before 1962.  FamilySearch and https://www.deathindexes.com are good sources to start to check for these.
  • Though www.findagrave.com can be helpful, dates may not always be accurate. 
  • Deeds through a county register of deeds.
  • Death certificates.

In Conclusion . . .

When you’ve determined who your first cousin DNA matches are but need to identify other cousins for an unanswered research question, the reverse genealogy strategy can be implemented.  It’s even better to apply cluster research to gather more detailed information that could give you specifics like names of people who could be on your DNA match list.  

Evaluating records and resources to get those names is an important first step.  Read about the second step in the next post.