Daisy Chain, DNA Style

 

Take one DNA match—any match—and build out the collateral lines in your family tree to see where that match fits into the big picture. Then, once the relationship is pinpointed, look at the other matches you share in common with that DNA match. One by one, they fall into place in your family's picture, much like you'd weave a daisy chain, one flower at a time.

While I've nearly given up hope of completing my research quest for this month—finding the Irish origin of immigrants James and Mary Kelly of Lafayette, Indiana—I've taken to building out my father-in-law's Kelly line in hopes of finding a distant cousin who might have been the lucky one to get all the family "stuff." Hey, I'd even be happy to learn about a family legend of their origin. At least that would be a clue.

That process of adding descendants for those collateral Kelly lines is apparently paying off. As I attach records to each of James and Mary Kelly's children, then grandchildren and beyond, behind the scenes at Ancestry.com, the ThruLines tool is realizing how many of their other Kelly customers actually match up with this line. 

Last weekend when I looked—yet again for what seems like the kazillionth time—I noticed there was an additional name showing on ThruLines as a descendant of Ann Kelly, James and Mary's youngest child and sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Catharine Kelly Stevens. Wonderful! And I actually had that person already listed in my father-in-law's tree, someone I had added in that process of noting all the descendants of collateral Kelly lines. I just hadn't realized the person already took a DNA test.

Connecting that DNA match to the proper place in our tree, I then clicked on "Shared Matches" to see who else might be a relative in common with that Kelly line. No surprise: there were more. Thankfully. After all, searching through all one's DNA matches for a surname like Kelly can be daunting. Even looking for Ann Kelly's married surname, Doyle, doesn't make the process much easier.

Then comes the daisy chain weaving. Shared match by shared match, I find documentation to support adding that person to the correct place in that same tree, then attach the name in the tree to the report in the DNA match list. In that way, I easily connected several more names this weekend. Next, I'll let Ancestry's algorithms do their work behind the scenes to dredge up any more possibilities among their countless customers who share a Kelly surname in common with my father-in-law's family. I expect to find more results to follow up on in a few more days.

In the meantime, I've been reaching out to those DNA matches in the slight chance one of them just might be the lucky one who got all that fabled family "stuff." Who knows? Sure, maybe my efforts will pull up a null set. Yet if I don't give this a try, I'll never know. In the meantime, bit by bit, I'll weave all those Kelly daisies together into a family circle of relationships among what are, to our generation, essentially fourth cousins and beyond.