I’ve adapted Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge.
Each week I follow my children’s ahnentafel numbering to select the featured ancestor, ensuring no one through the mid–sixth generation is left behind.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2026 Week 14: A Brick Wall Revisited

Introduction

My assigned Week 14 ancestor is A. Gordon West.  About a year ago, I wrote a post about an unexpected DNA match.

This man was definitely related on my maternal grandfather’s (Ohio) line. Due to a rather unique surname and fairly recent immigration, his tree was easy enough to build out – and it didn’t intersect at all with mine, in terms of names. But it did in locations. I was left wondering if there was a MPE (misattributed parentage event) on either Grandpa’s line or this match’s line. Both men had somewhat suspiciously old mothers (age 40, with a gap to the next oldest children – certainly not impossible, but worth a second look) in their lineage.

Then vs. Now

Then: I didn’t chase that challenge down, having been disheartened by finding the death of the match. I suppose I didn’t want to find something offbeat in my own line. And I was uncertain how to be confident in any conclusion.

Now: I’m taking a DNA class in IGHR and this is the perfect time to look with a critical eye at these matches again. I’m learning and relearning the frameworks, and not just the basics but some good details on Y-DNA, mtDNA, atDNA, and X-DNA. Our exercises include analyzing our own matches and clustering shared matches to identify common ancestors.  We’ve also used The Shared cM Project 4.0 tool v4 to make sure centiMorgans were within the appropriate range. I noticed that I have a lot more matches than I did the last time I looked, so clearly more people have tests posted on the testing sites.

It’s definitely worth revisiting, with new knowledge and new data, to see what linkages I can now make.

The Plan

I’m going to revisit each shared match between him and me and build out trees to the best of my ability. I’ll draw pedigree charts, determine expected amounts of DNA shared, and compare those to the actual amounts. Somewhere there I hope to find a discrepancy, and that will be the key to this mystery.

Was I really stuck?

I wasn’t stuck because there’s no answer. I was stuck because I did not yet have the knowledge and data to solve the problem. Now, maybe, I do. And that changes how I see this brick wall: not as a barrier, but as something that can shift over time.

Sometimes a brick wall isn’t solved – it’s outgrown.

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.

Next Week’s Topic: Unexpected