Finding DNA matches who confirm my connection to Larkin Laws, the possible brother of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws, was encouraging. My goal is to determine whether Larkin's father William was also father of Sarah Catherine. But I can't just assume that the one line's connection is enough. After all, regardless of how unusual a name like Larkin might have been, there could be another sibling set out there paired with the same names.
To bolster my confidence in this conclusion about Larkin and his dad William, I decided to look at DNA matches who descend from Larkin's brother with the equally-unusual name, Pine Dexter. Although Larkin gifted me with seventeen DNA matches according to AncestryDNA's ThruLines tool, there were only four matches for Pine Dexter—but four, I thought, would be enough. Enough, that is, until I surveyed the situation more closely.
Starting from the top of the list—a DNA match who shared only forty two centiMorgans with me—it didn't take me long to realize the ThruLines lane that led from Pine Dexter to my match had a big road block two generations in. Pine Dexter I could document, and his son I could find records for, but the suggested grandson in this match's proposed line of descent was not one I could replicate through documentation.
Sometimes, we miss details about a family's immediate family. As I saw yesterday, it can be easy to miss one child out of the family, if changes are made mid-decade between census enumerations. But try as I might, I could not locate this person ThruLines claimed as being Pine Dexter's grandson.
Since the entire line of descent is usually diagrammed in the ThruLines tool, I decided to reverse research directions. Instead of looking down the line of descent from Pine Dexter all the way to my DNA match, I looked the other way. Starting from the first person listed in the line of ascent with dates of both birth and death, I looked for documentation to confirm that relative, then move upwards from there, building my own tree.
There was a second reason for trying that approach: the second DNA match identified as a descendant of Pine Dexter also claimed that undocumented person as an ancestor. For this second roadblock, it was far easier to trace upwards, based on documentation. There, I could clearly see which line of the Laws family this DNA match should be claiming as an ancestor: someone named Aaron Laws, son of Erwin, who like my William also was born in North Carolina.
Whether these two DNA matches descend from a sibling of my William or one of William's cousins, it is clear that the matches—if the connection is based on this part of their family tree—are much more distant than are those descending from Larkin's line.
I'm not sure I'm ready yet to grapple with that relationship tangle. This exploration, however, did remind me not to rely too confidently on my past tree-building work. The reason I've developed such a broad, "bushy" tree is that I purposely include all collateral lines in each generation, then chart all their descendants.
With a tool like that, my natural inclination is to trust using what I've built to look downward through the generations, when in reality, I still need to be prepared to look upwards from the current generation's identified parents. That, of course, means building trees for matches from a reliable starting point, but with the ThruLines assist, that is easily accomplished, even for those subscribers with private trees who have opted in to sharing with matches.
Yes, for a tree like mine, it is easy to look up matches in one direction: from ancestor downwards. But I need to look at this as a two way research street, and look both ways. Sometimes, we need to look backwards in time from the present, to double check the work of our DNA match.
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