Dime a Dip

 

Yesterday's summer cleaning adventures—both of the real-life and genealogical kind—brought to mind some unexpected memories. On the real life front, cleaning projects unearthed an unused gift certificate for one hundred dollars—an impressive gift when it was received years ago, though just enough to purchase a decent restaurant dinner for two nowadays.

A day's worth of such discoveries, going through old files in the summer heat, was enough to prompt our family to head to our favorite ice cream shop after dinner. That, in turn, put me in mind of the dime-a-dip ice cream parlors of bygone years. Perhaps it was owing to the many projects unfolding during the day in our family—our daughter was helping a friend explore potential real estate projects, comparing prices today with original purchase prices on eighty year old homes—that put me in mind of an entire world of dime a dip life.

Meanwhile, on the genealogical front, I was delving into my mother-in-law's Jackson roots, a reach so far removed from today's generation that I barely can find matches who reach a mere ten centiMorgans of shared genetic material. As rarified as that "dime" of genetic material may seem in today's inflated economy, just like the dime-a-dip of the ice cream world, it can yield some useful results. 

This was my day to chase those "shared matches" of Jackson descendants to help build out that family tree. Simply by using the ThruLines results for Lyman Jackson, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, I used as a next step the "Shared matches" option from Ancestry's ProTools to find close relatives to each Jackson DNA match.

One after another, those mystery matches who shared such dime-sized genetic results helped guide me to build out that Jackson branch on my in-laws' tree. Yes, of course I used documentation to verify connections; it's just that without that chain of discoveries, I would otherwise not have known to even look in those directions.

Such small DNA matches are often lost in the myriad results at the bottom of the pile. They otherwise would have totally stumped me—if I even bothered to try connecting them to the family tree. But with the right tools, and a huge helping of patience added to the mix, it is possible to let each match find a place in the family tree, no matter how small.