I have fallen in love with New Orleans. There is something about the city which hits me viscerally. I have no way to explain it. And it's not the Creole or Cajun food or the jazz music particularly... it's the architecture and feel of the city. Wait, I need to amend that, as I love the Zydeco music!) I don't know what it is really, but I am very happy in New Orleans, but not for the reasons others may love NOLA.
You may understand, then, how excited I was to find a DNA connection with people born in New Orleans. Now I have fantasies that my DNA aligns to the city like a compass to magnetic north! I have not yet been able to connect their trees to my tree, but they also have Irish heritage and they have the Oliver name in their tree, as do I, through my 2nd great grandmother. Though my second great grandmother and her husband settled in Troy, NY, not Louisiana. So, where is the split? Did one of her brothers go to NOLA while she headed to NY? Or was the immigrant further up the tree?
I have communicated (and soon to meet) a fellow genealogist who is related the the wife of the man I believe to be the patriarch of the branch I am researching - so the younger generations tie us together, but we are not biologically related. She has not researched the Oliver family in New Orleans, but perhaps she can point me to some of the resources not yet available on Ancestry.com which can help me climb the tree. My new friend has been researching for 20 years.
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