Research Update: A Tree That Now Spans Five Continents

 

Since April 2023, my family research has grown far beyond anything I expected. What began as a simple attempt to understand where I come from has turned into a global investigation stretching across five continents, dozens of archives, and hundreds of ancestors.

In just three years, I’ve been able to identify:

• All 8 of my great‑grandparents

• All 16 of my 2nd great‑grandparents

• 29 of 32 3rd great‑grandparents

• 47 of 64 4th great‑grandparents

• 59 of 128 5th great‑grandparents

  
  
  
  

That’s 159 ancestors across five generations — each one discovered through a mix of persistence, luck, and a lot of late‑night reading of parish books.

My Madeiran lines advanced quickly thanks to the island’s exceptional archival system. Madeira is one of the few places where you can trace entire families from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. The structure, clarity, and accessibility of those records made the early stages of my research feel almost effortless.

Northern Portugal was a completely different story. No indexes, no shortcuts, just page‑by‑page searching, deciphering priests’ handwriting, and hoping the right entry hadn’t been lost to time. It’s slow, meticulous work, but every breakthrough feels earned.

Then there were the true missions: Angola and the old colonial ports. Records scattered across institutions, limited digitization, and long stretches of silence after promising emails. Progress comes in small, fragile pieces, but each one adds something important to the story.

Along the way, my research has taken me far beyond Portugal. I’ve followed family threads to Spain, England, Australia, South Africa, Angola, Venezuela, Guyana, Trinidad, Curaçao, Hawaii, California, New Bedford, and Ontario. Each place adds another layer to the map of migrations that shaped my family.

DNA has become a powerful tool in this process. It has helped me bridge distant cousins, confirm old paper trails, and reconnect branches that were separated by oceans and generations. Every new match is a clue, a reminder that our ancestors left traces not only in documents but in the people living today.

One of the biggest puzzles has been the Brazilian branches. DNA keeps connecting me with cousins across Brazil, but figuring out which cousin belongs to which ancestral line is its own detective story. Records vary by region, families moved often, and the paper trail can be thin. Still, piece by piece, those Brazilian threads are finding their place in the larger tree.

And I’m sure I’m not done yet.

The deeper I go, the more the story expands, new regions, new migrations, new histories. What started as a search for names has become a journey through the movement, resilience, and accomplishments of the people who came before us.