Family Tree Trails

01/02/2026

I have had an article published in ‘The Septs’, the journal of Irish Genealogical Society International. The article is about finding alternatives to locked records in Northern Ireland and is available to members of IGSI.

06/16/2024

I will be presenting a breakout session at the North Star Genealogy conference in October. If you'd like to find out how to solve family mysteries by researching the lines of cousins and far-flung relatives, this might be the session for you! We will explore paper trails and DNA trails as evidence and clues in our 'Siblings and Spouses' hour. There is so much else to explore at the conference, do take a look! (Headliners are Judy Russell and Blaine Bettinger!)

Marie Mattson, CG, lives in Oulu, Wisconsin. In 2023 Marie won the MNGS Family History Writer Award and in 2024 the NYG&B Record published her article about Uncle Philo's buried treasure. Besides researching for others, she enjoys researching her ancestors who settled in Minnesota.

05/30/2024

"I have my DNA results, now what??"

Have you taken a DNA test but never really looked at the results closely? Are you interested in working out who all those matches are? Do you have a family mystery you would like to solve?

I am planning a webinar called "I have my DNA results, now what?"

This will be around 90 minutes and cost $20 per participant.

Please let us know if you are interested and we will let you know when we schedule the session.

If there are other areas of genealogy you would like us to explore in future webinars, please drop a comment below and we'll let you know if we can accommodate you!

04/30/2024

Important news for Minnesotan adoptees seeking their birth family information. From July 1st, adoptees will be able to request their original birth records.


More information available from the MN Dept of Health is available here:

After an adoption, birth records are changed to show the new name of the adopted person and new parent information. When people born in Minnesota are adopted, courts collect a $40 fee from the adoptive parents and send it along with a Certificate of Adoption or a court order to the Minnesota Departm...

04/14/2024

We are delighted to announce that Chelley has been selected to present at the Northstar Genealogy Conference with her presentation “Siblings and Spouses: Indirect Solutions to Direct Mysteries” in Eagan, MN in October 2024.

You can find out more about the conference here:

Blaine Bettinger, Ph.D., J.D., is a professional genealogist specializing in DNA evidence. He is the author of the long-running blog The Genetic Genealogist, and frequently gives presentations and webinars to educate others about the use of DNA to explore their ancestry.

03/20/2024

As some of you might know, I sit on the board for the fabulous Four Humors Theatre Company - and a silent auction item this year is 20 hours of genealogical research from Family Tree Trails!

This is your opportunity to access a research package at a fraction of its full value! You can bid from ANYWHERE in the world and services can be provided remotely.

Follow this link for details:

Silent Auction Prize: Twenty Hours of Services – value $800 Chelley McLear, Family Tree Trails What do I get for my donation? 20 hours of my time – i

03/08/2024

What's in a name?

I have been researching a DNA mystery for a client in County Antrim in the past few weeks and boy, oh boy is it a muddle of cousins and cousins and cousins! All branches lead to a Craig!

So, I have been searching the civil records at irishgenealogy.ie for all records for Craigs born in the Larne district since records began. From there, I have built out a spreadsheet of all Craig birth, marriage and death records in Glenarm, Carnlough, Ballyvaddy, Raloo and nearby areas - there are hundreds! It's a work in progress to map all these families - but fascinating picking up on the 'FAN' club (Friends and Neighbours) who appear in the records and often unlock the iron gates around solving those mysteries!

(Why oh why, was everyone called Robert?)

03/01/2024

We are attending RootsTech this week (virtually) and are very excited to see some of the new features that are being rolled out by the big genealogy companies and organizations - which will make our adventures into YOUR family history even more fascinating.

Things that have peaked our interest include:
1) new DNA tools at Ancestry
2) the new 'What Are The Odds +' at DNApainter (a tool which helps with parental hypotheses and your position in relation to DNA matches)
3) Familiysearch labs - which could allow us to search records that have not been indexed yet (this could save hours of scrolling through hundreds of pages of land records to find that ONE deed that named your great great grandparents!)
https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/

02/05/2024

Thank you for following us! If you are wondering whether we can help solve YOUR family mystery, this is what we have been doing recently:

1) Helping an adoptee born in Northern Ireland in 1980 find their birth father using DNA and 19th century records!

2) Finding the parents of a Civil War Soldier (living in Michigan in the latter part of the 19th century) through land records, wills, newspaper articles and pension files from Maryland. A case that the family had been mystified by, for decades.

3) Solving an unknown parentage case in England from WW1

We are great at spotting tiny details, working with small DNA matches and digging into the records to find the links and connections that others have missed.

That Northern Irish case? The searcher had already laid out thousands of dollars for an Ancestry progenealogist who was unable to solve the case. What they couldn't do, we did!

02/04/2024

Welcome to Family Tree Trails! We will have a website up and running this month and in the meantime we'll share a little here about what we have been doing in 2023 and what we are looking forward to in 2024!

First off, I will be presenting at the Minnesota Genealogical Society DNA Interest Group on February 4th with a presentation called "Finding a Father: DNA searching in Northern Ireland when records are scarce"

This presentation details the steps we took when a woman was searching for her biological father in Northern Ireland. It discusses the challenges that are particular to this case given the lack of publicly available Birth Marriage and Death Records for the past 100 years and the lack of census records prior to 1901 or past 1911.