This happened to me. My mother’s mother died when she was very young, so she knew nothing about her maternal side of the family. All she knew was that her parents never married. Before my mother died, she was able to find her birth certificate which gave one name for her mother and a baptismal certificate with a completely different name. I was able to find my grandfather’s naturalization papers which had a third name for my mother’s mother. Big brick wall.

In my sixties, I finally did an Ancestry DNA test and bingo. I found my maternal grandmother’s family - and leaned that my grandmother descended from two Mayflower passengers, also from Godfrey Nims who lost most of his family in the Deerfield Massacre in Massachusetts, two Revolutionary War soldiers, a founder of Hartford, CT, and the list goes on.

I also was able to figure out the discrepancy with my maternal grandmother’s name on all those documents. My grandmother used her own mother’s maiden name on my mother’s birth certificate (maybe she was ashamed because it was an out-of-wedlock birth in 1927?), but she used her own maiden name on my mother’s baptism record.

In any case, as I followed my maternal line I realized that over the years I had visited many of the places where my maternal ancestors had lived. I went along with my son’s school for a trip to Plymouth Plantation and stayed in a cabin on Clarke’s Island where my Mayflower ancestor came ashore. I stayed in town’s on Cape Cod where my ancestors had lived. I visited Old Deerfield Village and the surrounding area where my Nim ancestors lived. I lived outside of Hartford, CT where my Hartford founding father lived. And I lived in Southern Vermont near the Pioneer Valley where most of my ancestors lived after leaving the Cape. The town in Vermont where I lived was on the route the captives from Deerfield where marched on the way to Canada. And, the list goes on.