To paraphrase a famous advertisement:  Document gathering – hundreds of dollars. Genealogical research – thousands of dollars. Ancestry DNA –  priceless.

It does work! That is, assuming I and two other Pope descendants have done the research thoroughly.

For years, I’ve believed that my POPE line originated in Bosham in the late 1600s. But I’ve not been able to prove it to my own satisfaction. My three times great-grandfather William POPE married Elizabeth SAVAGE at Westbourne in 1...