In Hot Pursuit of DNA Cousins

 

It's fascinating how quickly a family tree can blossom out into a bushy creation, once we add genetic genealogy to our family history toolkit. While some people may be the ones with a tip-of-the-tongue answer to the question, "How far back have you gone," my goal in building that family tree is quite different. 

It's been years now since I first added DNA testing to my genealogical research tools—since 2014—but I still can't help but wonder, "Who are all these people?" There are thousands of matches for my tree and for the trees of extended family members I have also tested. My only solution since the shock of receiving that huge number of initial results was to grow my tree out, not up. That meant extending each branch of the tree by adding collateral lines, then tracing each generation of their descendants.

Now that I'm working on my brick wall third great-grandmother Delaney Townsend, I'm not only tearing my hair out over the lack of records connecting her to parents or even siblings, I'm using DNA to do something about this research roadblock. First, I added Delaney's assumed parents to my tree—flagging them with all the bells, whistles, and warning signs possible—then added the supposed children to the line. And then, I cut the whole bunch off from my tree, forming a Townsend "floating branch" on my tree.

Now, floating in the outer space of my family tree, each of Delaney's supposed brothers have their own line of descent added in, bit by bit, guided by the 125 DNA matches currently attributed to John Townsend of South Carolina, Delaney's alleged father. As I find possible brothers for Delaney from this list—especially the ones living in the same county in Florida as she did following her 1841 marriage in Madison County there—I pull together documentation to trace their lines forward in time.

This, of course, is the likely explanation for how I managed to add 346 more names to my tree in the last two weeks. Yes, it's been a busy time adding possible nieces and nephews for Delaney. Tracing each of their descendants has so far grown that tree to 39,480 people—and there's more "bushiness" to come.

As I keep up this pace, the count has increased in the past two weeks by a few additional matches credited to the ThruLines readout for this Townsend line—no surprise, since I now have 2,615 DNA matches at Ancestry.com, and more at the other major testing companies, too.

It will take quite a bit of time for me to confirm with documentation the DNA connection between these Townsend descendants and myself. After all, we're talking about 125 matches flagged as Townsend connections. But if the paperwork looks good for a majority of them, that may give me something positive to consider about the true identity of Delaney's missing parents.