When Batting .500 Isn't Good Enough

 

I know there are some family history fanatics out there who are also baseball fans. While they may agree that batting .500 might be a great statistic for a baseball player, when it comes to genealogy, I am more often disappointed when that becomes my research average.

Right now, I'm working my way through my husband's DNA match list for Metzger cousins. He stands in as proxy for my mother-in-law, whose second great-grandfather Michael Metzger links my husband to seventy four other DNA cousins. After tackling that phantom son, John (or Johann) Metzger, my next move was to look at the six matches descending from John's brother Joseph. Supposedly, there are six descendants of Joseph who share a small amount of DNA with my husband.

While I say small—barely more than twenty centiMorgans for the best of them—I realize the combination of genetics and genealogical documentation can provide a more reliable link than such small numbers alone as I saw in those six matches descended from Joseph. However, when I looked more closely at those six matches, I found three of them for whom I could rustle up not one page of paperwork. For this quest, batting .500 wasn't really helpful.

The sticking point came in the listing of the sons of Joseph Metzger. Joseph was apparently married twice, so he had many sons. But the one name asserted to belong to the line of these three DNA matches—Clinton N. Metzger—was a name I could find nowhere in documentation for Joseph's family.

Looking at the problem from the opposite direction—following the line from the match to parents, then grandparents and upwards—I attempted to sketch out possible family trees to see where the trail missed a turn. After all, I've seen several times when a man was mistaken for a brother, or even for a cousin by the same name. In this case, however, I had no luck.

Sometimes, matches at Ancestry's ThruLines appear to be attributed to one ancestral couple when the match might turn out to be through another line in that family. I tried looking for other surnames as I built that quick sketch of a family tree. As it turned out, one of the daughters of this Clinton Metzger happened to marry someone whose mother was a "Rhinehart." Since my mother-in-law also has Rineharts in her ancestry, I looked for an alternate connection through that side of the family, but no clear path emerged.

It is indeed possible for matches hovering around that twenty centiMorgan range to be a mistaken connection. But I'm not quite ready to give up on those three cases quite yet. Once confronted with that impasse, I decided to take a closer look at the many Metzger lines descending from our Michael and his wife Apollonia to build out the lines of descent for each of them. At some point, that will become handy for connecting future DNA matches. Perhaps it will even untangle this maze leading from those three DNA cousins to our most recent common ancestral match in Michael Metzger.