Jenkins Y-DNA Journey

I have always wanted to solve the mystery of my 3x great grandfather and his parentage. I was told years ago that I need to find a direct male descendant. My grandmother was a Jenkins, so that ruled out my father. By the time I was told this, my grandmother's brothers were all gone. They had left sons, but I was unable to make connection with them. One of the boys, the family didn't know where he had gone, and no one had heard from him in years. 

My journey began with building my tree down from M.O. Jenkins. Eventually a lovely young lady, Amanda Jenkins came across my tree and how I had connected her father back to M.O. Jenkins. She contacted me, and much to my surprise her father agreed to do a Y-DNA test for me so I could have the hope of taking our tree back further. Thanks to Amanda and her father Michael (ironic that he is named Michael) I may be able to solve this mystery and take our Jenkins line back further. I look forward to the day when I can re-write that part of my Jenkins book that I wrote years ago that says, "We may never know who the true parents of M.O. were." Thanks to many cousins such as Evelynn Kelly, Bill Jenkins, Betty Ann Roach, and others I've come this far, but now it's time to take this to a new level.

Join me on my journey as I study the DNA, use science, and basic old genealogy research to try and untangle this mystery. 

The first thing was to pull the list of Y-DNA matches that I needed to work with a begin to study. Actually, the very first thing was to watch a bunch of videos and do a lot of reading to try and understand how to work with the information I was seeing in Mike's test. 

Below is the list of five tests and their ancestors that I need to work with. 

Using the list above I created a chart similar to a pedigree to show where I would be most likely to encounter the Common Ancestor and also charted the most distantly researched ancestor of each individual.

Now I have a plan. N. Jenkins is the closest match to Mike and his farthest researched ancestor is Drury Jenkins born 1803 PA. I can't help but notice that Drury is the right age to have been M.O. Jenkins father and his ancestors were also from PA, which is where I've traced back the line of Joseph Jenkins, the grandfather M.O. knew. 

Now that I know that M.O. was truly a Jenkins, I had to abandon the idea that the Jenkins who raised him, were his mother's family. I have now disconnected the Jenkins that I had researched thinking they were a maternal line from my tree. I'm sure I will discover at some point where Joseph Jenkins and the rest of the family who raised him really fit in his tree. It's time to start building a tree for Drury Jenkins.

Check back again to see how my journey to discover the father of M.O. Jenkins is going.