A Discovery Worth the Twenty-Year Wait

Thursday, February 14th, 2019     by Debra DuPree Williams     Start the Conversation

By Debra DuPree Williams @DDuPreeWilliams
Last week I told you about genetic traits which have been passed down in my family for generations, indeed, since at least the 1500s. This week, I’d like to continue with genealogy.

My sister and I began our search for our roots about twenty years ago. When we first began this journey, we were helped by having been given a copy of a two-volume set of books titled, The DuPre Trail, compiled with the years of research done by Emimae Pritchard Langley. While we may not have known much about our father’s side of the family at the time, having these books greatly helped in our being able to piece together our DuPree tree. We are forever indebted to Mrs. Langley.
Nothing Known

While we had all of this information at our disposal, we knew virtually nothing of our mother’s Bass family. We, of course, knew her father’s name, and she knew her grandfather’s name. That is all we knew. We know few cousins. Those whose names we knew were far away in Texas. If your family was like ours, funds would never have allowed your family to travel so far to meet them.

Sis and I were armed with very little to go on when we began Bass fishing. Ancestry had nothing at the time in the way of DNA testing. And since we had no idea of other names associated with our particular Bass line, we had to really dig into records in books and courthouses for our information.

But, Ancestry had messages even back in the day. It was through one such message that I found my second cousin who was our mother’s age, and who had about forty years of research at his disposal. He had put together what he considered our line. Armed with this, Sis and I pulled out all we had and began printing page after page of records from Ancestry.
Digging Deep

Remember, this has been a journey that has covered at least twenty years for us. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we made the connection with Uncle Joe as we called him. His research was thorough and very accurate to have been compiled from research done the old-fashioned way, digging through those courthouses for old deeds, wills, land records, marriage records, and such.
But even with all the modern-day innovations, there were still holes in our lineage. Like, who was our GG grandfather’s first wife? We know his second wife and we have met and know of their descendants. We met his great-granddaughter when we were young girls. We used to walk to her home with Granny for a visit. It seemed days away, though it was just about a half-hour walk or so.

But we kept digging. Little tidbits would show up here or there. Someone would post something to the Bass Facebook page and it would jar a memory. That is what happened this past week. One of the administrators of the FB page and I were having a messenger conversation when she posted a letter written in 1950. She told me to read it, not knowing the connection we would make. So, I read this letter. One of the names in it was whom Sis and I suspected was our great-great-grandfather’s first wife. 
Eureka!
Pouring over documents we’d recently come upon and linking that information with the information in the letter sent via messenger, then comparing those documents to a will that had been sent that same day, told us, yes! This is our great-great-grandmother. After twenty years of looking, doubting we’d ever know her name—there she was. And it all fell into place and made perfect sense.

But it didn’t stop there. The will mentioned above gave us the names of our three-times-great and our four-times-great grandparents. What a gold mine of information and all the pieces fit together in a two-day period of time.

This is my way of telling you to never give up on your search. Do a DNA test. Find those cousins who can help. Join your surname’s Facebook page if one exists. If it doesn’t, consider starting one. Join the FTDNA study for your known surnames. They are a wealth of information. Join Ancestry, or FamilySearch, or Geni, or any one of a number of sites that will help you make connections. But whatever you do—do not give up your search. A breakthrough could come when you least expect it. Even after twenty years.
Have you ever thought you should give up? What stopped you? Share your story with us.  

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