About a year ago the Ancestry products team reached out to me and invited me to record a testimonial video for a chance to star in an Ancestry TV spot. I thought I had an interesting story to tell so I figured, why not? So I submitted. Well, unfortunately I was not selected be featured in a commercial. But I want to share the testimonial video I submitted.
Here it is:
My Ancestry Testimonial Video on YouTube
The video captures the amazing journey of discovery I’ve had the pleasure of travelling, working to uncover the story of my Cumbo ancestry. It’s so exciting to think that the family reunion I referenced when creating this video will be happening this July 15-17, 2016 in Williamsburg, VA. Details can be found here.
Since recording the testimonial, I’ve learned to be highly cautious in relying on those little green ancestry hint leaves to build my tree back, particularly if those hints are coming from public trees built by Ancestry users and are not backed up by evidence from Ancestry’s vast historical collection of digitized historical records. On the evening I describe in the video, public tree powered tree hints helped me to map my ancestry back to Emanuell Cambow. The problem is that many of those connections are not well documented. I have high confidence in my Cumbo lineage all the way back to Britton Cumbo Sr. who was born between 1776 and 1794 and who lived his life in Northampton County, North Carolina. But my confidence in my lineage starting from Britton Cumbo Sr. and working my back to Emanuell Cambow is much less certain. So my research is driven by a goal to build a fully validated pedigree from Britton Cumbo Sr. back to Emanuell Cambow.
