There are generally two fronts in my Elmore genealogy work, one front is identifying branches of the Elmores in the U.S. and getting people tested to try to place them. The second front is getting out of the U.S. by any means. Specifically getting out of Connecticut. That is what is on my mind today.
DNA would work, it would be nice to match someone from one of the former colonies who was not directly descended from Ed. We could also go for some real record of where Ed Elmer was from before he boarded the Lyon. I suspect, for me though, that would just direct more recruiting and testing to find a living human descended from Ed’s uncle or cousin or great great grandfather.
Because of the variety of surname spellings that basically sound like Elmer, we have a lot of options to choose from. So many spellings that it is hard to pick which ones to pursue.
Every so often I strike out looking for records of the Elmers in the UK around Ed’s time. I’ve come up with several possible families in multiple locations.
Reaching Out
At the same time, I normally search ancestry.com family trees for Elmers, Aylmers, Elmores, Ellmores..etc that were born since the 1940’s and are from Australia or England or Canada and so on. I then contact the tree owners to see if they know any living male Elmers (or surname variants) who would be interested in testing their Y DNA to connect to distant cousins.
I don’t have a high success rate in recruiting or really even in getting responses back, so I can’t recommend this tactic, but I do keep trying it hoping to find someone out there who would like to bridge the gap.
Ancestry is not the only track, it’s just the easiest for searching, we’ve also been in contact with the admin of the Aylmer family site and have been able to get their help in leaving a message in a bottle for Aylmers interested in connecting.
Putting our Money and Time Where our Mouth is
When we do get someone interested in making a connection we usually offer to pay for a basic YSEQ Y test of DYS458 which for us carries a micro-allele of .2 normally with a value of 16.2. That is really a yes or no test, either you’re related to us in the last 2000 years or you’re not.
If they have the micro-allele, then we can move on testing SNPs to see how closely they are related to Ed. If not then we recommend they purchase a more extensive test at either FTDNA or YSEQ. Since YSEQ doesn’t have its own matching service for Y DNA we usually push for the Y37 at FTDNA.
The other offer that is always on the table is that we’ll help them sort out their Y DNA no matter where they test, to see if they do meet up with another of the perfectly good Elmer and Elmore families that have tested.
All Y DNA tests have value, disproving a connection to our family just opens up opportunities to match with other families who I’m sure would love to get out of North America as well. The more Aylmers, Elmores and Ellmores that test, the more likely we are to find our living relatives and in the meantime we can help connect other families too.
The Aylmers
Aylmers are tough. Recently as I was joining the Thompsons to the Irish DNA group, I found that they listed Aylmer as a surname, with one tester. That was of particular interest because we don’t show any Aylmer matches, so they might possibly match with some other lucky Elmer/Elmore family. It also raises the possibility that we could eliminate a family of Aylmers from our search. Unfortunately, their results don’t show up in the project page, which makes me think they are hidden…or it’s some freak accident in the project page. I don’t know.
What if they’re in our haplogroup but not close enough in STRs to show as a match? We would never see them. The possibility that we’ve got distant family members already tested both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time.