Rubber Meets Road, Genealogy Style

 

When the ripple effect of copied family trees widens, what's the end result? Well, to borrow another couple images, here's where the rubber meets the road: when I have to untangle the spaghetti bowl of DNA matches which Ancestry's ThruLines tool attributed to only one of the two Metzger brothers we've been examining.

We talked yesterday about an editorial error in a hundred year old history book which caused one Metzger brother to be mis-identified as the other brother. It really only takes a very few people posting that error online for it to multiply to unexpected proportions.

Here's an example. Since my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather was those Metzger brothers' father, Michael, I used her son's DNA test to see what matches he had for the lines of all Michael's children. There are currently eighty one Metzger matches in all for my husband. But when ThruLines breaks down the results by each specific child of Michael, there are no results showing for descendants of his youngest son Henry. However, there are twenty matches listed for descendants of Jacob.

Really? Let's take a closer look. I went through that list of Jacob's supposed descendants, one by one. Since Ancestry's ThruLines shows the breakdown, generation by generation, from jointly-shared ancestor to test-taking descendant of that collateral line, I followed the trail for each one of those twenty.

Now, according to census records, I've been able to spot ten children of Henry Metzger and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Snider: Manaleta, Laura, Michael, Thomas, Mary, Robert, Charles, William, Hugh, and Bertram—enough to help me track which of those DNA matches attributed to Jacob might actually have belonged to Henry.

And guess what? Exactly ten of our DNA matches did belong to descendants of Jacob Metzger. But ten did not; according to documentation, they were actually descendants of his brother Henry Metzger. And the list didn't get redistributed in any even manner. Taking the list of my husband's DNA Metzger matches from the top—with the highest centiMorgan count shared—the first two results should have belonged to Henry, not Jacob as listed. But then, match numbers three through nine did belong to Jacob's line. Then everything switched back to Henry with matches number ten through fifteen. Then it alternated back to Jacob's line for sixteen and seventeen, put in one more for Henry with match number eighteen, then back to Jacob for one more, and ended with number twenty switched to Henry.

Bottom line: ThruLines, as we know, is only as good as subscribers' trees are accurate, which isn't always the case. But it is a tool—and a helpful one, at that. Where the rubber meets the road with this tool is in remembering to always check your work—and everyone else's, too. You never know when a hundred year old editorial mistake may otherwise catch you unawares.