Since January, I have been searching for all the direct living descendants of John Liming II on ancestry, in the same way I searched for William Liming's descendants in 2014. I am not done with John's branch yet but here are the numbers so far... I hit 300 yesterday!!!! Yes there are 300 trees of people who directly descend from John Liming II.
The current number of descendants from William Liming stands at 358, but again that may not be all of them either.
So what am I doing to find all these people?? I have developed a search pattern using the member connect feature on ancestry primarily and also photo's. I already had 3 generations of John Liming II in my tree with info taken from Steve Liming's 2004 book and Ruth Hall's website. I also have the lineages of the 3 men who have taken Y-DNA tests from John Liming II in my tree down to those living men. I also have made notes as to the major tree discrepancy debate concerning which Thomas Liming B1718 or B1742 married Sarah Cox and Elizabeth Anderson. (a 50+ year debate).
So based on John Liming II's Will we know that he had the following children: William, John, Thomas, Dewilde, Henry, Keziah, Dinah, Sarah and Mary. So I will look at each person's profile starting with William and click on the member connect button. On this screen I see 2 numbers, how many people I have already connected my tree with and how many more also have William in their tree. This number is large like over 200 people. The first thing I do is go through those people I have already connect my tree too. What I am looking for with each person is are they a direct descendant or is the Liming family a side branch in their tree. To do this I click on William's name in their tree where it is a link by their user name and tree name. This takes me to their tree and to William's profile page in their tree. Then in the search box on the right I click "go to home person". Usually this is the person who started the tree or their parent and they are living so all is private, this is the best case scenario. If there is a child under the home person them, click on one of the them and then click on "see family tree". Now you can see 4 generations of people, look to see if there is a Leming/Liming here, if there is then they are directly related.
If you do not see the surname in the first 4 generations then I expand each person to see another 4 generations to see if the surname is there. If not there then I assume that this in not a direct descendant. I hold down my back arrow to see the member connect page and go back there and ignore or remove this tree. If they were a direct descendant then I add them.
For those that are descendants, I keep an excel file, where I put the username of the tree, the first connecting Leming/Liming person name, which branch William, JohnII and then the link of that connecting person's profile page. I want to be able to come back to the tree and the person later to do more followup. With someone this high up in the tree there are going to be a lot of possible connections.
I look at each tree of a descendant and look at the profiles of the direct lineage. I will add their direct lineage to my tree if they have followed the records trail and I can follow it too. I can see where the trail starts to get thin, where mistakes creep in, where they copied another tree, where a lot of work needs to be done to prove a connection. If there person who owns the tree is a man with the Liming/Leming surname I will email them and ask if they have done any DNA testing to prove their connection to the family and would they be willing to do Y-Testing. Again only 3 lines have been Y-DNA tested on John Liming II's branch and 7-8 on William's branch.
As for the photo's whenever I go to a new person's tree and they have a photo or document linked, I click on the photo to see who else has linked to this image and check the usernames to my excel file. If I don't have then on the accept list or the reject list I will look at their tree.
When I get the society website up and running the way I want it too I will be sending an email to each of the descendants I have found to come and register on the site. Hoping this blog will also bring new descendants in too.
Have a great day and keep diggin
Kari
