Happy is a Kind of Stress, Too

It’s been a wonderful month—in everything, that is, except genealogy.

At our home, we’ve had loads of company, visits from out-of-state family members, celebrations and graduation and end-of-school-year and c’mon-summer-vacation highs. What more could we ask?

When I look at all the good times, good food and good company, I guess I can’t complain too much about my lack of progress in research statistics. Besides, I did get something done. In the past two weeks, I nudged my maternal family tree head count up from 3,444 to 3,727. The rate of progress is slowing, admittedly, but I’m still pressing on. I know “slow and steady” is an admirable goal; perhaps slowing but steady could count, too.

Things seem to be slowing down at Family Tree DNA, as well, for I only received an additional four autosomal DNA matches in the last two weeks, bringing my total to 833. As FTDNA tends to offer sale pricing for their tests around Father’s Day, here’s hoping that will bring on another surge of matches.

I did, however, manage to send one contact email to a distant match, so we are mutually muddling over how, exactly, we might be fifth cousins—a discussion unlikely to bring us to any resolution in the foreseeable future, but at least we are trying. This DNA testing does spur us on to hone our researching skills, if nothing else.

On the mtDNA front, however, the good news is that the “computer glitch” which told my exact match mystery cousin that he had an exact match—but failed to record the same for me—has been amended. All is now right with the world again; the “a” that equals the “b” that equals the “c” now reciprocates nicely to demonstrate that “c” will also equal “a.” I now have two exact matches—and both of them were adopted. Nothing is ever easy.

With the abrupt conclusion to my new attempt at unraveling my paternal line’s mystery, numbers there were stunningly unimpressive, as well. Actually, that is putting it optimistically; in reality, I accomplished absolutely nothing in that line. I’m still hovering at 148 names in my paternal tree, with twenty two matches through my autosomal DNA results.

Since last week brought a renewed connection with a distant cousin in my husband’s Tully line, it may be time to begin keeping stats on his DNA results, as well. Because some of my husband’s lines were also in this country for a couple centuries, it has been relatively easy to document connections back through several generations. This is the type of fertile field where genetic genealogists must like to frolic when they need encouragement—which, at this juncture, might not be a bad idea.