Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges I have had since I began tracking down and documenting my family history, is trying to get my head around my DNA results. It was an easy decision, to take a chance and submit a DNA test with Ancestry. I was hoping most of all to crack some brick walls and stir up some new direction.
There was initial excitement when my results came through. I don’t recall how many matches I had, but there were no close matches, and barely anything that made sense. There was one name which leapt out at me. A surname which matched the married name of my grandmother’s Aunt. I duly sent off a message, and was rewarded with confirmation I had made a right connection. Something was working.
There was one particular line, I was hoping to find help on, which has remained elusive. There are a couple of confirmed 3rd or 4th cousins descending from Henry Foreman, but they have produced no new leads as to where he came from or who his parents were. Despite having produced a total of 16 children from two marriages, the clues to when and where he came from continue to elude me.
Of course the success of a DNA test depends entirely on the number of people connected to you who have tested. There has to be something to compare it to. A stand alone DNA test without any known connections is difficult to interpret. Three or four years on, I now have some close matches which I use as comparison to help me sort how the more distant cousins might connect to me. I have managed to find people from almost every branch of my tree, and there is a large chunk of people who match each other, who cannot be placed confidently anywhere – I call them “the unknown contingent.”
And, it helps if those you send messages to in hope of establishing the shared link respond, or at least in a helpful manner. Some do not respond at all, and others want you to do all the work for them. The point is, we all want something different from our DNA results. There are the adoptees hoping to find biological parents, and others whose parentage has not been revealed to them who hope to find where they fit. A large proportion of DNA testers are like myself, just looking for information to help them build their tree.
Whatever the purpose of the DNA test, the learning curve in understanding and interpreting the results is steep, and there is almost no way to prepare yourself for it. For me, I learn best from ‘doing’, so despite having read, I had to actually ‘play’ with my matches to begin to bring it together. Knowing a little bit of the science behind it helps. People choose to delve as deeply (or not) as they need to. The number and quality of your matches goes a long way to determining the success of desired outcomes. Not least in measuring your success in understanding, or making sense of matches is the factor of time. It takes time to accumulate the matches that make sense. Be patient, it does begin to make sense, and yield results.