A Different Kind of Distant Cousin

When it comes to disappointment over ineffective “cousin bait,” for someone who has been the constant sniveler, I certainly didn’t anticipate the kind of email contact I received this week. I’m always hoping a distant cousin will sit down at his or her computer, type in the magic words—one of my family’s many surnames, of course—and presto! Be led to my blog post about that very ancestor.

Granted, I have been having a few of such responses lately, so for today’s post, I will only own up to “snivel lite.” But you know I’ve always wanted to connect to that dream distant cousin who will have all the answers to my family history questions.

So what should show up in my inbox earlier this week, but a letter informing me that I am definitely someone else’s cousin. Not even a question. It was a fact, apparently demonstrated scientifically. The only thing left for us to do is figure out how to make the connection that bears out that verdict.

With paper trail of ancestors in hand, I could have easily determined relationships back to the early 1800s, at least. The only problem is: the person addressing me is an adoptee.

How do we know we are related? Only by virtue of a DNA test. This particular test is called the mitochondrial DNA test, or mtDNA for short. It traces the maternal line, from child (either male or female) to mother to mother’s mother, and so on, along the maternal line for each generation. ISOGG, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, explains it this way: the mtDNA molecule—or its specific (but rare) mutation—is passed in a direct female line of descent.

In the case of this new distant cousin, our mtDNA results are an exact match. This, incidentally, only means that whatever mutations I may have received from my mother’s line compare to the exact sequence also received by this new distant cousin. The catch is, as FamilyTreeDNA explains in their Learning Center page on Maternal Lineages:

Your mtDNA exact matches may be recent, but they may also be hundreds or thousands of years in the past.

Suddenly, my bravado over having a genealogical paper trail stretching back, on this specific line, to the early 1800s is retracted. How can anyone’s genealogical prowess stand up to the test of a possible time frame like that?

And so, the genealogy dance begins: poking and prodding, trying to figure out which female ancestor specifically related to someone in my direct maternal line might have been in the right time and place to become this mystery cousin’s birth mother. Or mother of this birth mother. Or maternal grandmother of this birth mother…

You get the picture. We’ve immersed ourselves in this search all week long. In a way, it’s nice to have a partner in the quest to push back the generations, to struggle against the silencing forces that made prior generations’ women nearly invisible.

Yet, there’s another side to a question like this. Though not to as extreme a degree as one story featured recently in Vox, explaining how genetic testing actually became the catalyst that tore one family apart, there is the aura of a witch hunt in the who-done-it aspect. Only this search isn’t for a murder suspect. The winner of this woman-hunt, in past ages, might at best end up wearing a scarlet letter.

And so we progress, my new-found cousin and I, email by email, piecing together facts from documents as we find them, with each discovery moving us one step closer to the revelation. In one way, it’s a joyful process, anticipating the reuniting of two people separated by an entire lifetime. In another way, it’s a process with a conclusion rife with risks.

Whatever the adventure entails, it is a steep learning curve we’re mounting, not only in uncovering documentation as we press backward through as-yet-undiscovered generations, but in familiarizing ourselves with every nuance of what the DNA tests are telling us. There’ll be more testing. And more genealogical research. But depending on how far removed in time we are from our ancestral nexus, we may soon—or may never—learn the answer to this mystery of our common ancestor.