Genealogy as Endurance Sport

 

The other day, a question came to mind: is genealogy an endurance sport? Setting aside the objection that genealogy could not possibly be considered a sports activity—after all, we spend most of our time hunkered over our laptops in a sedentary position—let's consider the "endurance" part of that question.

My first reaction was to dismiss the thought immediately. Having lately been analyzing the state of local genealogy society membership, I realized that perhaps it is a quixotic quest for society boards to attempt maintaining consistent membership levels.

Why? The answer is simple. Interest in family history ebbs and flows. People expecting their first baby—or even grandbaby—might wonder what could be said about that child's heritage, or where those good looks or blue eyes came from. Or a great-grandparent dies, the keeper of the family stuff, and now the family is wondering how to figure out all those unlabeled photos left behind.

Inspirations like that come and go. Sure, there are some who roll up their sleeves and dig in, faithfully attending beginners' classes and starting the long trek to find family history answers. They may even work on that fledgling tree for a year or so, maybe even a decade. But then, something else comes up, and they're off to pursue a new project: an eldest daughter's wedding preparations, or that cruise they always wanted to take. Or maybe life just got in the way.

Those are the scenarios which make me wonder whether we have adopted an organizational format which better fit our grandparents' generation—the kind of community barn-raising spirit that got things done by forming "societies" for specific long-term purposes, to address needs that would otherwise never go away. 

That generation was then; now there is the once-and-done generation, with just-in-time delivery, automated and computer-generated. Yet, we still try to fit our "society" mold around the answer-seeking mode of newer, fresher cohorts. Perhaps genealogy for them never was a marathon; maybe it was a family history sprint. Or a relay race between teams collectively chasing the same answers.

Every generation has its own approach to problem-solving. Genealogy is simply another question to be answered in life. And yet, despite some people arriving on the scene and staying only until they've found their answer, there are others for whom pursuing the answer to "where did my family come from?" does turn into an endurance sport.

There are some of us who came to this party early, and stayed late. Perhaps these were the kids whose grade school project turned into a lifelong pursuit. Or young people with questions about the missing parts of their family story. They—we—are on a quest, and the answer, once found, only provides fuel to power us through the next question. For such as these, genealogy is an endurance sport. We've been at it for ages, and we know we're built to keep going, long after others move on.

Perhaps the real question is about how to accept the reality of such a situation when tasked with forming an organization to address the needs of both the sprinters and the marathoners in this "sport" of genealogy. No matter how adept our program directors might be at finding great speakers for the next society meeting, an hour-long lecture might not be the answer to everyone's family history question.

Summering

 

Our local genealogical society recently wrapped up what I suppose we could call our spring semester. Each year, we host monthly membership meetings through June, then take a break over the summer, before resuming our schedule in September. 

This, apparently, is not how every local family history organization operates. When I first started looking at what other groups were doing, I noticed several that continued meeting straight through the summer. Sure, there were events like a July "ice cream social" to round out the year's activities, but those groups kept at it, month after month. For some, the idea of summering is apparently quaint and so nineteenth century.

On the other hand, genealogy to me was always a summertime-only event. If I was lucky, I might be able to squeeze in a few frantic research trips during the winter break, but otherwise, the teaching workload demanded full attention the rest of the year. I've had readers of A Family Tapestry contact me and mention that was the case for them, as well. It made sense to learn that our local society called it quits, come mid-June.

Around here, apparently, the idea of summering is still in force. Perhaps that's because we are a university town, populated by enough residents who expect to escape for the entire summer. Come to think of it, at our June meeting, two board members were already absent—one heading to Mexico, the other one traveling in Europe. And that is only the start of the season.

A second group of summer absentees is comprised of those for whom family vacations came with built-in side trips to visit family cemeteries along the route, or to pick up documents at nearby governmental offices while on the way to visit relatives. I wasn't sure whether that was still part of today's summertime existence, but the other day, a former genealogy class member emailed me to joyfully note she was actually on her way to pick up a grandparent's paperwork from a county nearly a hundred miles from here. There is no time like the present, true, but I imagine a trip like that would be more enjoyable in summer weather than wintertime storms.

Still, I'm hardly convinced that today's researchers reserve summer months for their genealogical pursuits any more. Or is it a sense of "keeping up with the Joneses" that pushes me to think that in our times a genealogical society should keep operations going full steam ahead, even through those summer months? 

Looking Ahead

 

While I'm working on extricating myself from the current tree-building mess I'm in, I thought I'd take a moment, despite being early, to introduce next month's research project. After all, tree-building, while a lot of work, only rarely provides the kind of fascinating discoveries worth writing about.

As the Twelve Most Wanted project has done for the past several years, come July, I shift my focus away from the three selected ancestors from my mother-in-law's line and move on to my father-in-law's tree. With a step like that, we leap from colonial America to land in the turmoil of mid-1800s Ireland, a very different part of the dominion of the United Kingdom.

In the next three months, we'll focus on three Irish ancestors from my father-in-law's family. The process will begin with the selection for July: John Kelly.

Regardless of who he was in my father-in-law's family tree—we'll get to that next Monday—we first need to consider how convoluted a search like that can be. 

Just by considering his name—John Kelly—we already realize what a challenge we face in the coming month. A given name like John, bestowed upon an Irish-born son of the mid-1800s, would put him in ample good company. While I don't have statistics for popular names in the exact year of his birth, just taking a glance at name popularity statistics for a time period just after his death, we can see that the name John was a popular choice for Irish parents. One source indicated that, by 1911, John was the most common man's name in Ireland.

Add to that predicament the fact that the surname Kelly won't make the situation any easier. Based on data available in the mid-1800s, the surname Kelly wasn't exactly the number one surname on the island but it came in close—the second most common surname in all of Ireland, after Murphy.

And there you have it: the task lying ahead of us for next month's selection for my Twelve Most Wanted. Truth be told, I've needed to jump into this messy research project for years but being aware of the challenge just seemed to help point my attention in other directions. Now that I'm running out of low hanging fruit in my hunt for ancestral history, it's finally time to face up to the challenge when July gets here next week.   

Each Step Makes the Next One Easier

 

As I work through the finishing touches of last month's research project, adding DNA matches to my mother-in-law's Jackson ancestors, I realized one encouraging detail. For every DNA match whose place I secured in her family tree, it made the next step easier to complete.

There are requisite tools to have at hand in order to make such a statement. I'm working now on those Jackson DNA matches by way of Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, along with their ProTools capability of listing shared matches. Each identified match fills a known place in the family tree, thus becoming a beacon of relationship for all the others in this line, no matter how small the match may be.

The last time I checked, that Jackson progenitor, Lyman, had seventy three matches listed in his ThruLines results. But for each of those seventy three, there are multiple others who show up if I click on the Shared Matches tab under ProTools. Many of those share very little genetic material with my husband, the proxy test taker for this project. Yet, bit by bit, identifying each one's place in the Jackson family presents a second helpful clue by showing me how even more mystery matches fit into the tree.

It's amazing to see how many DNA matches turn out to have siblings, parents or children, or close cousins who have also tested. Identifying one's place in the tree brings the others into the picture more clearly, multiplying my effort. All I need to do is keep at it, adding more and more matches until I run out of options. Then, usually after a short waiting period, even more DNA matches show up—perhaps thanks to a Father's Day sale or other promotion—and the relationship clues help zero in on where the newer ones belong, as well.

I'm still quite a long way from completing those seventy three ThruLines matches—plus those other affiliated cousins—but it has helped find some otherwise invisible Jackson descendants. Of course, only six of the original thirteen children of Lyman Jackson have appeared in those DNA results, represented by their descendants, but I'm hoping this process will coax some of the other Jackson lines out of their hiding places and onto my mother-in-law's family tree. 

Dime a Dip

 

Yesterday's summer cleaning adventures—both of the real-life and genealogical kind—brought to mind some unexpected memories. On the real life front, cleaning projects unearthed an unused gift certificate for one hundred dollars—an impressive gift when it was received years ago, though just enough to purchase a decent restaurant dinner for two nowadays.

A day's worth of such discoveries, going through old files in the summer heat, was enough to prompt our family to head to our favorite ice cream shop after dinner. That, in turn, put me in mind of the dime-a-dip ice cream parlors of bygone years. Perhaps it was owing to the many projects unfolding during the day in our family—our daughter was helping a friend explore potential real estate projects, comparing prices today with original purchase prices on eighty year old homes—that put me in mind of an entire world of dime a dip life.

Meanwhile, on the genealogical front, I was delving into my mother-in-law's Jackson roots, a reach so far removed from today's generation that I barely can find matches who reach a mere ten centiMorgans of shared genetic material. As rarified as that "dime" of genetic material may seem in today's inflated economy, just like the dime-a-dip of the ice cream world, it can yield some useful results. 

This was my day to chase those "shared matches" of Jackson descendants to help build out that family tree. Simply by using the ThruLines results for Lyman Jackson, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, I used as a next step the "Shared matches" option from Ancestry's ProTools to find close relatives to each Jackson DNA match.

One after another, those mystery matches who shared such dime-sized genetic results helped guide me to build out that Jackson branch on my in-laws' tree. Yes, of course I used documentation to verify connections; it's just that without that chain of discoveries, I would otherwise not have known to even look in those directions.

Such small DNA matches are often lost in the myriad results at the bottom of the pile. They otherwise would have totally stumped me—if I even bothered to try connecting them to the family tree. But with the right tools, and a huge helping of patience added to the mix, it is possible to let each match find a place in the family tree, no matter how small. 

A DNA Housecleaning

 

Face it: when confronted with twenty thousand DNA matches, it's hard to place those distant relatives in their place on the family tree. Far easier to concentrate on the other, smaller category—fourth cousins or closer—for whom we have much better chances of confirming connections.

But—and there always is a caveat—since I've decided to pursue DNA cousins who share descent from my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandparents Lyman and Deidama Jackson, her proxy test volunteer (her son, my husband) must find connections with matches who are at least sixth cousins. That's where we start dipping into that larger pool of twenty thousand contestants. Facing a number like that, it's time for a DNA housecleaning.

That larger pool of possible cousins is further restricted by genetic limitations. After about the level of third cousin,  some distant relatives will share no identifying genetic material at all with a percentage of their cousins. That is not to say, of course, that there is no DNA shared at all. There is a high percentage of genetic material that all human beings have in common—it's just that the selected SNPs that genealogy companies use to identify closer family connections may not include the array of items passed down from specific distant ancestors.

However, combining use of both a paper trail of documented family connections and data about distant DNA matches may still confirm a distant cousin's place in the family tree, despite sharing only a small number of centiMorgans. In such cases, what I've done is build out the lines of descent from the distant ancestor—the Jackson line in this case—then move from already-confirmed known cousins to "shared matches" identified by tools such as Ancestry's ProTools.

Of Lyman Jackson's thirteen children, there are six whose descendants are itemized in the ThruLines listing at Ancestry.com. Of course, the bulk of those matches come from John Jackson's own line, which is the line of descent leading to my mother-in-law. However, through this process I've managed to connect the majority of other ThruLines Jackson cousins to her family tree.

From that point, my next step is to take each one of those verified Jackson cousin matches and open the "Shared Matches" tab on their own entry. I then look to see how many of those connected cousins I can trace through the family tree. Sometimes, that task presents problems, but in many cases, that two-step sweep leads to discovering other Jackson descendants among those twenty thousand distant matches. And each match confirmed makes the next ones easier to place, as we place more pieces of the puzzle where they belong in the tree.

From there, it's basically "rinse and repeat" as far as I can go with that same process. Bit by bit, it opens up possibilities for where DNA matches fit in the bigger picture of a much-extended family tree. 

More Month Than Projected

 

I remember a phrase from my starving student years, something about always having more month than money. I've always hated running out, no matter what supply was dwindling too fast for comfort. Thankfully, I'm far from those student years, but I still struggle with any sense of not having enough.

How strange it is, then, to find myself with more month than research project. With each month's Twelve Most Wanted candidate, I usually run out of material to secure my research goal before I get to the close of each month. What a shift it has been to find myself ten days away from the start of a new month, yet finished with the goal for that time period.

What to do next? Granted, I could just jump ahead and move on to July's project. With the shift in this upcoming quarter from my mother-in-law's family to that of my father-in-law, that might work, but it would take a leap from colonial American research to the brick wall woes of tracing Irish immigrants back to their beloved homeland. That may become a project never completed, no matter how many months are allotted to the effort.

However, there are so many odds and ends scattered in my wake as I plow through those family history questions each month. What comes to mind most are the DNA connections hinted at, but never quite confirmed, from the collection of literally thousands of matches. 

I'm thinking mostly of the thirteen children of Lyman and Deidama Jackson, whose lives spanned the era in which a nation was birthed. When we last left that endeavor to document the Jackson family, all thirteen children had been identified—barely. There is so much more yet to do.

There are now seventy three DNA cousins among my husband's Jackson matches, according to Ancestry's ThruLines tool, cousins who descend from that couple we had followed for April's version of this year's Twelve Most Wanted. It's time to wrap up those dangling strands and tie them into this family tapestry. Sounds like a "summer cleaning" project to me.