Any theories on how my gt gt grandparents would have met?

[Silvercup]

Thank you.

Interestingly if I search for the surname Brundage in the trees of all my DNA matches, there are a few other matches that are not in this cluster, but show some Brundages much further back (1600s/1700s) from the NY state area. Could just be a coincidence.

Rhoda Brundage's father Joseph Sutton Brundage was a pioneer from New Jersey. His age could fit as a potential candidate, 1842 - 1903. But he was a farmer and what would he be doing in London either!

On Ancestry it says that my most common maternal ommunities include Delaware Valley, Chesapeake & Midwest settlers, and West Virginia, Kentucky & Tennessee settlers. This would fit in with the Brundage line but I guess it could just be that I'm seeing that through Joshua's marriage.

[Silvercup]

I've found another match descended from Joshua McCourt, but they are descended from his first marriage, so back to my initial thinking that it's the McCourt side rather than the Brundages!

[Annie65115]

I think you need to stop jumping about and approach this logically.

I'd look at building a tree backwards for2-3 generations from Joshua, then branch out into siblings of those earlier generations and try to follow those lines forwards. I'd do the same for Rhoda's side.

I'd largely ignore other people's trees for this, and rely on your own eyes and evidence that you can collect and confirm. I'd definitely ignore those Ancestry "communities" - one of my "common sommunities" is "Early Connecticut & New York Settlers" and I can't see any of my matches there, and I know for sure that that side of my tree is rooted in central England! These "communities" seem to be anew thing on Ancestry and I suspect need rather a lot of tweaking before they're ever going to be useful.

BTW, for reference and so that you can compare, my distant Mormon cousins and I share between 14 - 62cM of DNA, placing us (according to Ancestry) at anything between 4th and 8th cousins. (The discrepancy is because each person will inherit different bits of DNA from each parent, so not all descendants will carry the same amount of DNA from each shared ancestor). Our Orton ancestors were born in the first 12 - 15 years of the 1800s.