Connections We Didn’t Know We Had

Before I discovered the wonderful world of genealogy a couple of years ago, my hobby of choice was cross-stitching. I still enjoy stitching, I just don’t do it as much (you can see all the projects I’ve completed here).  Back in 2003, while on a business trip out to San Diego and while there had dinner with a group of stitchers there – one of the ladies I met during that time was a woman I’ll call T.   Since then, we’ve exchanged emails, read each other’s blogs, etc.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, T emails me a genealogy related question.  There is a cross-stitch design called Mother’s Tree that she is wanting to stitch and she’d hit a road block with her 2nd great-grandmother, Elizabeth Daw.   She didn’t know who Elizabeth’s mother had been, but she knew Elizabeth had married a man named John Wimberly. Well, she was internet searching the Wimberly name and up came my genealogy blog. My blog came up b/c I’ve been researching Wimberlys. I have previously posted this, but I have a 3rd great-grandmother named Mariah Wimberly, whom I believe was a slave of a very wealthy Robert Diggs Wimberly of Edgecombe County, North Carolina.
Today, I took about an hour to spend some time trying to help her and I think we made a breakthrough! As she’d given me enough information to start, I was able to find her ancestor in census records and from those, combined with burial records available online, I am at this point about 90% sure we’ve found Elizabeth’s mother. If we are right, her mother would be a Nancy Daw, and Nancy’s mother was Anne Wilson. This would add two more generations to T’s family tree and cross-stitch chart – how cool.
As I was looking further into Elizabeth’s husband John, I came up with a hypothesis on who his father was based on again,  census records and burial records – a Watford Wimberly, who is listed in the census as being from NC — ooh, was this a connection in any way to “my” Wimberly?
So, off I go to Google Watford and one of the pages that is returned is a genealogy from a very detailed an comprehensive Wimberley Family History.  Working my way through the site, according to this researcher, Watford was indeed John’s father as on this site, John is listed as having married a Mary Elizabeth Daw.
More interesting to me is that when I worked my way up through Watford’s ancestry, it appears he is a 8th great-grandson of a William Wimberly of England (1455-1510).  “My” Robert Diggs Wimberly is also listed on this site as a descendant of the same William Wimberly.  Through my own research, I had only identified up to Robert’s grandfather, a George Wimberly.
I have emailed the site owner to learn more about his sources. One thing I often lament when visiting other’s trees is the too frequent lack of sources. This is one reason I value the program that I use for my own genealogies and my website is b/c it makes it very easy to include and show sources.  I have emailed the site owner to find out more, but this is such a cool connection for me and T.   Over the next few weeks, we are going to try and further verify this information, but it is for reasons such as this that I absolutely love the internet!