Challenges are all around us. Rather than blog about an ancestor who faced a challenge, I decided to write about a genealogy challenge that I am working on. As I worked on my genealogy, I noticed that I had a group of ancestors that seemed to have lot of ties to each other. They sold each other land, married brothers and sisters, and moved to similar locations. For want of a better name, I call them the Tribe. Then learned about a doing a cluster analysis of a group of ancestors, and decided that that is what I would do with my tribe.
The idea of a cluster analysis is that people do not live in isolation. They often lived near relatives, friends and neighbor. They were involved in each other’s lives. Anyone can be included in a cluster, but it typically involves siblings, extended family, and those living close by. Thus, your research is expanded in the hope that you will learn more about your direct ancestors.
So to do this, I first needed to define my cluster or tribe. The main tribe is the sons and daughters of David and Elizabeth Mears and the sons and daughters of John M. Hannah and Charity Mears, who moved from Brown County, Ohio to Edgar County, Illinois.
Inspecting what I have already learned, the Mears cluster would include the sons and daughters of David and Elizabeth Mears:
Mary Mears
Samuel David Mears
Elizabeth Mears
Catherine Mears
William Mears
Nancy Mears
Jane Mears
Charity Mears
Sarah Jane Mears.
This is the part of the cluster that I plan to explore first. My first task would be to find out who each one of these individuals married. Just dealing with this group should keep me busy for quite a while. I want to know about their children, where they lived, who they sold land to, etc. as well as what I can learn from census data. 
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