Still Not Enough

While I’ve been chattering away about various topics that strike my fancy, here on A Family Tapestry, behind the scenes I’ve been feverishly working away at my Taliaferro family tree. You know how it goes: in order to document just how I connect with all those DNA matches I’ve acquired, I have to have a complete record of the family’s genealogy.

Right now, I’m up to seven hundred fifty matches for the “Family Finder” test—Family Tree DNA’s user-friendly term for the autosomal DNA test that can identify relatives up to the range of sixth cousin (sometimes even more).

My thinking was that if I could add the collateral lines to this family’s records on my tree at Ancestry.com, I could discover the surnames that married into the Taliaferro descendants’ history—which would then guide me to figure out how I match some of these seven hundred fifty other people.

Since I’ve had a go at this process for a few weeks—primarily using old genealogies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s—I thought it might be time to “harvest” some of the results. So, I pulled up my matches at Family Tree DNA and, using the company's search function, entered some of those newly-discovered surnames—like Lingo, Meriwether or Watkins. Some, admittedly, were too generic to be useful—names like Lewis, Jones and Greene. Some were so unusual as to yield no search results at all—so far.

Of course, even though it feels as if I’ve been feverishly entering data non-stop for the past few weeks, this particular database only contains fourteen hundred individuals. Small, admittedly, in the face of my desktop-resident database program, which topped fourteen thousand ages ago. However, that would be comparing apples to oranges, as my online tree is specific to my maternal line only, while the computer-based genealogical program encompasses the big splat of my whole family—my maternal and paternal lines, plus both my husband’s lines, and a few other diversions, as well. Still, fourteen hundred seems like a drop in the bucket.

Even so, trying to compare those fourteen hundred names to the multiple names on each of my matches’ trees has been a challenge. You simply cannot eyeball this, but neither can I jump to a spreadsheet program. Why? I’m just not confident with my abilities to scour the data correctly.

Of course, there is no time like the present to learn new tricks. FTDNA allows customers to download their results in a spreadsheet format. I should just give that option a twirl. Not that I’m terrified of a data dump or anything, but for some strange reason, I hesitate. Perhaps this would be the perfect time to search for a database management class—like Spreadsheets 101 for Genetic Genealogy. Why no one teaches a class like that at those fancy DNA conferences, I’ll never know. Seems like by the time everyone gets their head around the introductory science lectures, they are too brain-weary to attempt learning how to manipulate the data they’ve obtained from these tests.

In the meantime, it looks like lots of data entry is in my immediate future, before I can find the way to connect with any of my DNA matches. The score so far for confirmed matches hovers at a lowly five—not an impressive showing for those seven hundred fifty possibilities.

Guess I’ll have to type faster.

Above: Young woman typing, photograph circa 1906 by photography company, Underwood & Underwood; image courtesy United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; in the public domain.