Thankful Thursday - The power of working in groups

Image from thegoldguys.blogspot.com/

I belong to a private Facebook group that started out as one thing and has turned into another. It started as a group interested in some commonalities in DNA testing but it has turned into a group of friends. It's a small group of 18 people who are some of the best researchers I know.

Several of the people have blogs, a couple have written books on their family history for family reunions (that is a huge task!) and a couple more are working in that direction. We each have different experience levels and different ways of researching. We are all ages and come from very diverse backgrounds. The common thing among us is our love of genealogy or as some call it family history.

We have solved several mysteries and worked on a couple that have not been solved...yet. Some having to do with our own research and a few that were just something one of us had run across and was curious about... such as a grave marker being sold on Etsy. One of the members posted about the marker pondering if it was ethical to sell and wondered where it come from. We put our virtual heads together using different searching techniques such as looking up the name on Ancestry.com, using Google to look for obituaries, funeral homes, and cemeteries in the area. We discovered where the plaque was from. A phone call was made to the funeral home and contact was made with the cemetery. It was discovered that the lady did have another marker. We still wonder about the ethics of selling a funeral home grave marker online!

Another thing a couple of people worked on was a missing persons/identity case that was in the news. The investigator had turned to autosomal DNA testing to try to solve the case but was not using the full power of the science. The investigator was contacted and given help on ways to utilize the information he had. That case is still being worked on.

A few personal family mysteries have been solved by working as a group and I'm sure more will be brought up and worked on. I have a few things I could throw at the group such as; Who is the father of George Washington Baker? That ought to be a fun one to try to figure out! It is such a common name.

The power of working in a group draws on the strengths of individuates working for a common goal. That is very powerful and I value this group of friends very much! You know who you are and thank you for being you, you are golden!