It's Easy — After all the Hard Work is Done

 

There is no doubt that preparation makes a job flow much more smoothly. If I had any doubt that planning and preparation had any place in working through the thousands of DNA matches I've received, I'm a firm believer now. Building out a "bushy" family tree, including collateral lines—and all their descendants—may have been a lot of work, but it paved the way so I wouldn't get swamped with all the matches that piled up in my family's accounts over the last twelve years.

Right now, as I work my way through the ThruLines list of the forty—no, make that thirty eight as of today—DNA matches descending from Nicholas Snider's son Peter, I'm finding it to be a smooth process if I had already attached that line of descendants to my mother-in-law's tree. See? It's easy, at least after all the hard work has been done.

There are other descendants of Peter Snider whom I had missed the first time I did the preparation work on this tree. That meant, of course, that I had to stop and hunt for documents to verify the assertion being made by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. After all, a mistake repeated in hundreds of family trees would still be a mistake, so I don't just want to copy what everyone else had said, even though ThruLines picked it up, too. I want to see some verification that the connection is so.

Yes, it all adds up to hard work, but that is an investment in time well worth the effort. Now, when I receive a new DNA match, especially one outlined on Ancestry's ThruLines or at MyHeritage's Theory of Family Relativity, I've already got the basic structure laid in place, and can just follow the map the genealogy company has outlined for me.

The whole point behind using DNA for genealogy is not just to build a bushy tree, of course. It's to help us figure out a way around those brick wall ancestors who have us stumped. I've already seen that while working on other lines in our family, and I'm hoping that will stand me in good stead for this pursuit of Nicholas Snider's roots. He was my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather. While I am testing her son's DNA for these purposes, a third great-grandfather's descendants are still somewhat within reach to hopefully glean helpful information about the Snider roots. More than halfway through the process of examining all these Snider DNA matches, we should have the verdict on this project soon.