It's Still a Tapestry

 

Sometimes I forget how interwoven a family tree can get—until I return to work on my mother-in-law's family. Then I'm reminded that hers is not a pedigree chart—it's a tapestry. Those strands get woven together, over and over.

This past weekend, I was reminded once again that this family is still a tapestry. Working on the descendants of Nicholas Snider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather (well, depending on how you calculate it), I ran into a name which seemed vaguely familiar.

Make that déjà vu familiar. I'd seen that name before. Sure enough, checking the index for names already entered into her family tree, there were two entries for that same name, complete with matching details. Time to merge duplicates. 

No, make that times two. Soon, there were even more. Some duplicates had their roots two or more generations back. Who knew that the family line I built out a few years ago would develop loose ends that didn't find their family match until now?

And so, I weave in another branch of the family—or, more correctly, weave it back in, once again, to an unexpected place in the ever-bushier tree. With pedigree collapse, you come to expect that issue will pop up—once or twice. But with this "endogamy lite" tree, it is smart policy to keep checking for duplicates. After all, I can't be expected to remember everything about a family tree approaching forty thousand names.

This brings up a policy question. For such a situation, when I enter DNA matches by their specific relationships, such as can be done at Ancestry.com, which of two or more relationships do I note? At first, I tried listing both relationship pathways for DNA matches, but had given up when the process became tedious. However, if anyone is using such data to help hone DNA predictions for future use, my input might skew any conclusions drawn from my entries.

So many of the strands in this ever-growing tree can be tied into the bigger picture in more ways than one. I'm not sure why I find that humorous, but I do. This tree does not lack for unexpected connections.

With the break over the weekend for the Easter holiday now past, it will be back to work on Nicholas Snider's descendants to map out the DNA connections—the behind-the-scenes grunt work that embodies the entertainment value of watching sausages being made. But it is time to get back to exploring those old documents from his time period to see if I can pinpoint any other Snider relatives—or at least members of his "F.A.N. Club" who made the journey with him from his home back in Germany. Somebody out there has got to have a connection noted to our founding immigrant Nicholas Snider.