My Dad has a Y-DNA match to two Gauldings. This means we can confirm our family connections back to our most common recent ancestor. The other two Y-DNA testers are from a branch of the family that haven’t been connected to the main trunk by anyone with published information.
Distant Cousins and Gaulding Researchers
Over the past years I have been talking to a very distant Gaulding cousin (a close relation to one of the Y-DNA testers) who has one such unpublished document. To make the family connections she agreed to share it with me. The document arrived as a 70K word rich text document converted to a Word document format. There is no consistent numbering schemes. It does not follow any genealogical numbering system nor is it chronological, skipping around from sibling to sibling in one generation then back to the generation before. The formatting, because of the conversion, has globs of spacing and the indents and lists are crazy.
Making It Make Sense
It’s taken me weeks of night and weekend work to get it into a format to print so I can look at it, make notes and correct the formatting, chronology, indents and lists systems. I started three nights ago with the meat of the document. The “How are we connected?” work of getting the siblings, parents, grandparents, great grandparents all lined up correctly so I can start the research and sourcing to make it right (the author did not include his sources either).
The author of this document (in an introduction to the document) makes no excuses, no apologies for the document format or lack of sources and rightly so since it is not intended to be published.
My hope is to get the document in good nick, genealogically wise, make the connections to confirm my dad and their dad’s DNA connection and to send the re-formatted document file back to the cousin who sent it to me. What a wonderful labor this is. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate her willingness to trust me with this researchers life work. As I work, I will fill in the missing pieces on WikiTree from his work so you can follow along there if you’d like.
Follow along if you’d like
I think our most common recent ancestor is, John Gaulding, St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent, Virginia, (abt. 1665-1740).