Polly Daniels Randall: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt "Luck"

Polly Daniels Randall: 1774-1851

Lucky Cousinhood: An App Led Me to My 4^th Greatgrandmother’s Family

            When I attended my local genealogical society’s Christmas party, I never expected to find a roomful of cousins, or to knock down one of my research brick walls.

            As part of the party entertainment, all the attendees were encouraged to open the FamilySearch app on their phones, and then select the “Relatives Around Me” option in the drop down menu. The app then compared everyone’s family trees to see who in the room shared common ancestors. To my surprise, 22 of the people in the room were my cousins—admittedly very, very distant cousins, but still, we were all stunned to discover we actually shared ancestors.

            My biggest surprise was discovering that my best friend, Pat, and I were ninth cousins three times removed, the closest relationship I had in the room! We were so thrilled. We used the app to examine the linkage—the app placed our trees side by side and traced the relationship back to our common ancestor, Reverend Joseph Hull, born in England in 1594. This surprised us both, as neither of us had any Hulls in our family trees. We had some work ahead of us to prove this relationship to our satisfaction.

Cousin connection with Rev. Hull as common ancestor

            As I looked at the lineage on my side of the image, I saw some names I did recognize: my second-great-grandfather Jerome Dane and his mother Sally Randall. But I did not recognize Polly Daniels, the next name and Sally’s mother. A quick glance at my Ancestry tree showed that I had poor Polly listed as “Polly LNU”, or “last name unknown.” Was this FamilySearch tree the key to information I had been unable to find? Had I just discovered my fourth great-grandmother’s family? The only documents I had ever found for Polly were from after her marriage, and only showed her married surname of Randall.

Polly Randall headstone in Genesee County New York

            Verifying the information required bouncing back and forth between the FamilySearch and Ancestry websites. I looked at the documents attached to the FamilySearch wiki-based tree that showed Polly, her parents and her grandparents. I then returned to Ancestry to try to find those documents and any additional records that would verify the relationships. I was excited to finally find Polly’s father’s will, which included a provision for his “daughter Polly Randall”. The brick wall was broken at last! I had found Polly’s parents, Samuel and Elizabeth Nobles Daniels.

Samuel Daniels will with provision for daughter Polly Randall

            I had never expected a Christmas party would bring me such lucky discoveries: a new set of fifth great-grandparents, and a room full of distant cousins, plus, best of all, a familial connection to my BFF Pat.