I had been trying without success for some time to get past the “brickwall” that my 3^rd great grandfather, Samuel Shipler had become. No matter what I did or where I looked, I was unable to find any other older Shipler’s in the US who could be his father. This was many years ago when Ancestry offered a Y-DNA test. On a lark without completely understanding what it could do for me, I did a Y-DNA test on my Uncle Shipler.

Weeks later the results were posted. He had many distant matches, but his closest match caught my eye. It wasn’t the Shipler surname, but it was close, Shepler.

I can’t say that I immediately recognized the significance of this, but it did not take long to connect Samuel with the rest of his Shepler family! Since that time, I've been in a quest to reconstruct the Shepler Family Tree by use or both DNA as well as traditional genealogical methods.