It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Graham Ancestry, but it’s not because I didn’t have anything to write about. I actually have plenty of news to share, but I’ve been doing a lot of work lately for Uncle Sam… wait… let me rephrase that. I don’t want people thinking I actually have an Uncle Sam. Next thing you know it’ll turn up on Ancestsry.com. By “Uncle Sam” I mean the U.S. Army. Anyway, on to the genealogy stuff!

In my previous post, I wrote about my DNA test at Family Tree DNA and how I had been presented with some possible matches, Tommy Graham and Keith Graham, who apparently descended from brothers of my great great grandfather Jesse Graham. I upgraded to a more accurate test, and the results came back with the same matches! Tommy and I were a near exact match, with only one marker being different. Same with Keith, though it was a different marker that mutated there. So, we’re all definitely related.

I’ve also been corresponding with Harold Graham, who is descended from the same line. He has amassed quite a lot of information in his decades of researching the family. I wonder if he could start his own Graham genealogy library. One of the items he has is a large chart that depicts the Grahams of the generations before my great great grandfather, which I was eager to see. Harold graciously loaned it to me. I was stunned by the size of it – it is huge! At first, I thought I could use a digital camera to photograph it, thinking that having a digital copy would make it easier to examine, but I found it too difficult and time-consuming to line up shot after shot, and the tiny by-hand printing was difficult to clearly capture. I finally decided to simply make a copy of it, and after a little bit of searching, ended up at an OfficeMax that had an architectural copying machine designed to make duplicates of large blueprints. A few attempts later (apparently not everyone at that OfficeMax had been trained on the architectural copying machine), I left with my own clear copy of Harold’s chart.

Harold and I were also exchanging e-mails during this time, and he decided to do a twelve marker DNA test at Family Tree DNA. When he got his results back, he and I were an exact match on twelve markers.

So, after all this time of me questioning whether “my” Jesse Graham was indeed Jesse Flournoy Graham, looking for records and not finding any, the proof was in the DNA. They were indeed the same man. And my family tree just got larger.