Page 107 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

THE USUAL UNUSUAL SUSPECTS : "IT IS A PUZZLEMENT!"
There have definitely been some surprises!
I do not remember exactly when Ancestry.com started using DNA Circles to suggest relationships between various matching members to a possible common ancestor. I believe that it was after I had been working on Ancestry.com for a few years, building my family tree...so possibly 2014?
I thought the circles were interesting, but they were mostly confirming connections that I had already made. It did not break through any brick walls for me. There was one DNA circle that puzzled me. I could not find any common ancestor that related back to my family that would have been a direct ancestor. It was clear, when reviewing the trees of the other members of this DNA Circle, that they were all related. There were four family surnames that were shared in many of the trees; The Pace family, the Thompson family, the Harris family and the Reavis family.
The Ancestry.com DNA Circles suggested that our family was specifically related to the descendants of Rosannah Harris (1824-1904) who had married John Posey Reavis (1816-1864). Rosannah was the daughter of Archibald Harris (1789-1856) and Mary Jane Thompson (1801-1886). John was the son of James Reavis (1786-1859) and Rebecca Pace (1790-1840).
I knew of the Pace family. My third great grandmother, Phoebe Woodruff, who married Francis Bryan, had a sister, Lydia Woodruff. Lydia had married a man named Burrell Pope Pace. He was a member of the Pace family that was associated with the families of the DNA Circle.
But the DNA Circles did not name the possible common ancestor, it just suggested that there probably was one. I researched all four families but never could find the connection and I eventually gave up the search.
In January of 2020 I came across a genealogy service called ConnectedDNA. Shelley Caldwell, the owner of the site, produces graphs which show DNA matches in clusters. The members of each cluster are related to each other.
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