Watching the Trees Grow

 

What do you do with all your DNA matches? I don't just sit there and wait for the numbers to pile up. My goal is to find a place for each new match in the family trees I'm growing. Those trees may not be growing very tall, but they are certainly getting wider. And that helps.

Lately, while working on my research goals concerning the Laskowskis of Żerków, Poland—the ancestors of my paternal grandmother—I've been tracking the seventy nine DNA matches from Poland who have shown up in my account at MyHeritage. Of course, some could be people from my father's paternal line, which I'm not tracing this month. Some, though, are beginning to shape up as possibilities.

Consequently, the focus of that research goal meant that my tree grew by 277 documented names in the past two weeks, and now that tree includes 30,098 individuals. Not all are from Poland, of course, but that is where I'll be honing my focus in the upcoming weeks remaining in this month.

While Laskowski is not exactly a rare surname among the Polish diaspora, some of the other surnames which have married into that line are somewhat more unusual. Coupling, say, a search for Laskowski with one for Gramlewicz—Antoni Laskowski's mother's maiden name—helps me hone those DNA matches at MyHeritage. And that is exactly what is leading me to decipher those DNA enigmas among my matches.

Though I've focused on a research quest for my paternal grandmother's Laskowski roots this month, I haven't forsaken work on my in-laws' tree entirely. I try to balance my efforts equitably. Thus, a modest increase of twenty more names in the past two weeks brought that tree up to 30,210 individuals. Eventually, I will be back to focus on that tree in my research goals, and it helps to keep everything spruced up by adding details—births, deaths, marriages—to the tree as they occur.

Now that I've laid out the basics of my paternal grandmother's Laskowski line, I'll devote time next week to exploring the tree of my most likely match found last week at MyHeritage, cross-checking this person's documentation. The match looks viable, but you know how it is: we all need to check the verification for ourselves before adding another branch—or even a twig—to our own family tree.