The Internet age has made information much more accessible, allowing easy access from the comfort of one’s home. This is also true in genealogy research. What once took weeks and several contacts by mail or physical visits to archives, can now be achieved with a simple search in the right database. Paper trails are vulnerable to time, but digitization is bringing history back from the brink. It wasn’t soon enough for some records though, and that’s where the era of at-home genetics testing has stepped in.
Genetic Genealogy Tools
Genetic tools are extremely helpful in confirming a theory about lineage when documentation is missing or unclear for a family line. Each tool has benefits and disadvantages, so rather than choosing one and sticking with it, I find that using them to complement one another is the best approach. There is a caveat, however, in that the heritability of alleles decreases with each generation in addition to the random assortment of conception. So negative findings don’t mean you’re wrong, just that you have to keep looking.
First, you need to obtain your genetic data that you’ll be comparing to others’. You can get an autosomal, Y, or mitochondrial DNA test. 23andme, Ancestry, and FamilyTreeDNA all have similar price points but run sales at different times. Check each one out, and any others you’ve heard about, and choose the company you’re comfortable with. Or do them all! Each picks up only a portion of your DNA so you’ll get more information if you have more data files. I would recommend Ancestry, because you can then download the data file and upload to FamilyTreeDNA to utilize their free tools (with options for upgrading to additional). FamilyTreeDNA appears to work this way as well, but I’ve only uploaded to them, and I don’t have experience with 23andMe but have been told they work like Ancestry.
If you want a comparison of the various sites and how to use them to examine your results, I wrote about Genetic Genealogy Tools elsewhere (don’t have a Medium subscription? Read more Gen Tales by subscribing at this link - note: I get a portion of the subscription fee).
Untangling the Unknowns
I’ve found out a lot about my ancestry while researching a book on my family lineage. If you research back far enough, which isn’t very far at all, you’ll find that records are incomplete. So the ones we do still have, they were for people deemed important enough to keep records for. They were the winners, the powerful, the conquerors. One of my ancestors is Governor Stone of Maryland — his role in the adoption of slavery in the new colonies is somewhat controversial given the current political climate but very well documented. Another of my ancestors is Major John Mason, whose claim to fame is the very thing some argue never happened — the slaughter of the indigenous peoples of Colonial America.
And among the ancestors who conquered are the ancestors who suffered. The victims of those in power. The so-called ‘witches’, the indigenous people who intermarried into the colonial settlements, the victims of political crossfire, the immigrants who were invited but shunned, and the non-whites.
Like investigators in other fields, genealogists need to be cautious and aware about bias in their work. With lineage research it can be all too easy to be caught up in the emotion or attachment to a particular tale, especially if it has made its way down through the family. Breaking the illusion can be traumatic, particularly for older family members who have integrated the falsehood into their identity.
There are a number of ways in which a non-existent connection can become the general understanding. Sometimes it’s a story that gets passed down like a game of telephone. There have also been incidences of conscious deception by, for example, individuals paid to find a connection to royalty.
Also, amateur genealogists sometimes make a leap of faith that they shouldn’t and it creates a narrative that isn’t real but attractive enough that it gets shared until it seems to be common knowledge. If you’re researching your family lineage, then you are already committed to looking for connections to the past. Why put in all of that work just to latch on to something that isn’t true? It may be a difficult endeavor, but when you have that moment where it all comes together, you’ll feel closer to your ancestors for it.