After Forty Eight Hours: Up the Ante?

It may feel like I've been wandering around in circles, trying to poke my way through a document brick wall hiding the story of Nicholas Schneider, but behind the scenes, I've been trying a different approach: DNA testing. Though my mother-in-law is no longer here to help verify the cousin matches descending from her second great-grandfather Nicholas, you can be sure her son did test—and I've been carefully sifting through those many DNA cousins' family trees since the start of this month.

One encouraging sign was to see the 268 DNA matches shared on this line of descent. I was also jazzed to read that, at least at Ancestry DNA, if I make updates to the family tree, Ancestry will generally update their list of matches within forty eight hours. Well, it's been forty eight hours (at least) since I began updating this Schneider/Snider/Snyder line on my mother-in-law's tree. Any increase in DNA matches?

Any time I update my tree based on information gleaned from DNA matches, it's a two-step process requiring not just the addition of DNA matches to my tree, but of documentation to support each additional person. Of course, what ends up happening is not just the addition of that one person, but of that one's spouse—and the names of the spouse's parents—and members of the next generation, too. Just in the past five days, I've probably added over fifty new names to my mother-in-law's tree, just by going through those DNA matches.

Surely the addition of fifty new family members to the tree should result in something, shouldn't it? After all, those fifty new names are just from the twenty four descendants of Nicholas' son Jacob that I've managed to complete. But after forty eight hours, not only did I gain absolutely zero new matches, but I actually lost one. How could that be?

From time to time, I've noticed the count on DNA matches has shrunk. This could be for a variety of reasons. I'm guessing one might be that some DNA customers could have gotten nervous about all the negative DNA news out there—right now, it's the backlash over news about 23andMe, but in the past, it's been about the Golden State Killer and other reactions to current events involving DNA—and withdrawn their participation in viewing matches. Another way could have been that the customer's tree was taken private and unsearchable. Or perhaps someone discovered that, whoops, that wasn't my parent's ancestor after all, and made a total change to that family tree.

For right now, though, that means there is one less DNA match linked to Nicholas' son Jacob—moving in exactly the opposite direction from what I had anticipated. Perhaps I need to up the ante and double down on adding descendants to Nicholas' tree to see what might happen in the next forty eight hour period. After all, Nicholas Schneider left a pretty robust family after all these generations. There are plenty more to add to this line.