Toward the end of January 2024, after a review of Ancestry DNA matches, I discovered a match whose grandparents were Henry’s wife Julia’s sister and brother-in-law, Amalia (Harmel) and John Saiger.  Ancestry pulled up a US Border Crossings document as a hint that showed Henry had helped this couple come to Neche, North Dakota, along with a child.  Henry was listed as Henry Tom, brother-in-law.  There was also a naturalization record for John indicating that Amalia was born in Matchulik, Poland. 

It was interesting, as I explored this further into the beginning of February 2024, that Amalia and John’s oldest son was born like Henry in Klevan, Russia.  Further exploration led to my finding in a 2-volume set of books, Proudly We Speak, Volume I, a biography about John Saiger and his family.  The biography stated that John came to the Neche area from Russia in 1900, the same year that Henry arrived.  I began to wonder if John was the brother referred to in the story about Henry fleeing with a brother.  John was already married to Amalia then.  Who knows, I wondered.

The biography also provided names of Amalia and John’s children including married surnames of the family’s daughters. This sparked my interest in pursuing some more collateral research.  Even though Amalia wasn’t a direct ancestor to me, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of gaining some information about Henry through her descendants.  Amalia is what you call a collateral relative, an in-law to my direct ancestor Henry.

My next move was to check out Ancestry DNA matches for surnames associated with Amalia and John in DNA match trees.  I found two matches whose direct descendants were Amalia and John as either grandparents or great-grandparents.

Before making any connection with the matches, it was time to “do the genealogy” first.  This meant following my usual process of checking out:

• Vital records like birth, marriage, death
• Censuses
• Obituaries
• Other records that could give some insight as to names of descendants and their families

I took the time to create spreadsheets and logs with my findings.  Then it was time to connect with Amalia and John’s living descendants.  

The DNA match profiles showed that they were not online in their Ancestry accounts for quite some time. I checked Facebook out, after a Google search revealed that one of the matches had a Facebook account.  It looked like the match wasn’t that active on Facebook either.  

Further investigation identified some people who appeared to be family members.  I reached out to one of them who graciously responded to a chat and identified how the matches were connected to Amalia and John.  I was also provided with a phone number of a good family source to speak with about the couple.  

Although I didn’t get that much more information about Henry with this research strategy through living descendants, I did find my research efforts paid off.  This did provide me with some background as to how Henry and Julia probably met.

I wasn’t done pursuing collateral research in regard to Julia and her family, as while I worked with my genealogist coach Keri some old records related to them were found. These would help shape out Julia’s story when I got to that point in writing about Henry and Julia. Who knows what else I would find? Time would tell.