ROOTS & BRANCHES

You never know what rabbit holes you’re going to fall down into when you do genealogy.

Last summer I finally joined the “DNA generation” of genealogists by taking several tests, including the autosomal one from AncestryDNA.

After a little initial playing around—including breathing a sigh of relief that a paper trial “first cousin, once removed” actually showed up with the appropriate amount of shared DNA—I pretty much shelved it because many of the motivations for doing DNA testing didn’t apply to me.

There wasn’t an adoption I was attempting to solve and the great majority of my brick walls are in the 1700s or earlier, which butts up against the limitations of the current matching technology.

Just being introduced at the time was AncestryDNA’s ThruLines, which the company describes as follows: “ThruLines shows identified descendants of a given ancestor who have tested with AncestryDNA, and share DNA with the tester whose results are being reviewed. The ancestral path between the common ancestor and each DNA match is provided, along with predicted relationship and amount of DNA shared.”

Initially, I didn’t really see anything I didn’t know already and, actually, the one thing I didn’t see was alarming: The family of Harry Frederick, the man I thought I had correctly identified as my illegitimate grandmother Luella Emma Frederick’s father, wasn’t represented.

I had cast this all aside until I was having difficulty sleeping recently and I decided to take another look at ThruLines, and it was a bit of a bonanza:

• First, there were some matches to relatives of Harry Frederick’s mother that would only be matches to me if he had made the correct connection. Whew!
• Then I found that a match showed the tombstone and burial place for my ancestor Johann Christian Albrecht as Epler’s United Church of Christ, a congregation about 3 miles from my house. Its cemetery records are difficult to access and this brown sandstone was probably deemed illegible.
• A match in my Rupp family showed me that the immigrant Johannes Rupp was not the man by that name a prominent genealogist had identified. Instead, the match led to the right man’s baptism in Germany and also a photo of his tombstone in Lebanon County that I had never seen.
• And seeing matches in my Bickel / Böckel line led me to take that line beyond the barebones identification made by Annette K. Burgert. The myriad of newly digitized German church books led me to additional ancestors of immigrant Tobias Böckel, including ones coming not from Kallstadt, his Palatine town of origin but also from relatively distant Hessen-Cassel and Canton Bern in Switzerland!

Of course, many of the ThruLines had erroneous information, like leading to a Find A Grave memorial in which correct information was apparently merged into a clearly erroneous one.

As I write this, what I hope is the last cold snap for quite a while to come is giving way to some pretty weather.

Which is a good thing. I have some cemeteries to revisit.