Meeker Siblings Frank and Maybelle
My most recent work is on my personal Meeker line. My great great great grandfather, Horace Meeker, has been a bit of an enigma for me. He first pops up in 1847, where I found he had a letter waiting for him at the post office in Waterloo, New York. This is where he lives in 1850, with his new wife and her family. They then moved to Michigan, and by the 1860 census she was remarried.
I eventually found more information on him – in the 1860 Mortality Census and in some land and tax records (see my previous post on using the card catalog for more information). But where he came from remains a mystery.
I’m starting to crack that mystery though, using my DNA matches from Ancestry DNA. I have several matches with Meekers in their tree. Almost all of them led back to three families: an Edwin Meeker (b. 1825) mentioned in the card catalog post, a Samuel Oscar Meeker family that was in St. Louis, MO in the 1860s, and a famous Meeker couple named Timothy Meeker and Desire Cory, who lived in New Jersey in the 1700s.
I started by making trees from these three families as well as my Horace Meeker, with branches leading to each of my genetic cousins. From there, I noticed a few patterns. First, I share more DNA segments with the Edwin and Samuel branches than the other Timothy Meeker branches save a few descendants of his son Amos. There are also several shared matches between various sons of Timothy Meeker and descendants of Edwin and Samuel Oscar. One of these includes a grandson of Timothy named Luther, who lived in the neighboring county to my Horace Meeker around the same time.
While I’m still in the process of trying to connect Edwin, Samuel Oscar, and Horace to the Timothy Meeker/Desire Cory family, it is a promising lead that has reinvigorated a stagnant search of mine.
Do you have a brick wall of your own that has been helped with a DNA test? Or, if you’d like some help with your brick wall, contact me for a free quote!
Weaving the Tapestry 