Trying to figure anything out by using my DNA and people's family trees was pretty much like looking for a needle in a haystack. If I had a predicted second cousin match, for example, I would have to try to figure out who on that person's family tree (if they had a family tree) could possibly be our common ancestor. For a second cousin, assuming the relationship prediction is correct, we would share a set of great-grandparents. We all have two sets of grandparents and then four sets of great-grandparents, eight sets of great-great grandparents, and sixteen sets of great-great-great grandparents. The number of sets of grandparents doubles for every generation you go back. So the further away a relation is to you, the more possibilities there are for you to choose from when looking for that common ancestor. It would get complicated at times, because a person who shares the same percentage of DNA with me and is predicted to be my second cousin, could actually be a first cousin twice removed or a half-first cousin. This is why 23andme originally thought my relationship with Jessie was a grandmother-granddaughter relationship. We share close to 25% of our DNA so I could have been her grandmother/daughter or a half-sibling. I know that this is a bunch of nerdy talk, so I hope that you are able to follow me as I keep going.
I would sit and take every relative, starting with the closest related to me, who I knew was related from my birth father's line and try to find that common ancestor. I would go back however many generations I needed to for that predicted relationship and then once I found all of the however many great grandparents, I would then sit and try to construct a tree made up of all of their descendants. Can I just say that a lot of these people that I was researching had large families with lots and lots of children?? It took forever. If I was fortunate, someone on Ancestry.com had a public family tree which made researching so much easier. But then to complicate things even more, if a person is currently living, Ancestry.com does not publish their name on any family tree. They are just listed as private. I found myself googling in hopes of finding obituaries or websites that would help give information as to who those living people might be.
I spent hours and hours and hours, looking at family trees and names, just hoping that somehow, somewhere I would come across names that would match on people's trees that would give me a clue. If I could just figure out one common ancestor between a couple of people who matched me, that would at least start me in the right direction. I did find lots of people who lived in the Ohio, Indiana and midwest region. I spent more time pouring over those trees and trying to see if there was any connection between them. One of those people was a second cousin match, the closest match through my father's side on Ancestry.com. He had a tree and by the time I was done studying it, I could tell you all about the Brown family that lived in Ohio, but alas, nothing was found that was of any significance to me.
You might be wondering what exactly I was looking for and how I would know when I had found it. Do you remember the two paragraphs of non-identifying information I had on my birth father from the adoption agency? I talked about it back in this blog. It wasn't much, and I wasn't even sure whether it was true or not, but I was trying to find a family that somehow matched this description - a family with five children, where the father and son were in business together. I figured if I could find that, then maybe some of the other descriptors would match too.
After months of searching, God sent the key that would unlock the puzzle. Meet cousin Anne. Anne is a sweet lady in her 60's who also happens to be my 4th-6th predicted cousin on Ancestry.com. She first contacted me on November 30, 2015 to see if by chance I knew how we were related. I had been contacted before by many "cousins" and I had even contacted a few myself. It seemed that many times when I mentioned I was adopted that people were suddenly no longer willing to help and just didn't respond anymore or there was nothing that they could offer to really be of assistance. But this time was different.
Anne had noticed from my profile that I had said part of my family was from Findlay, Ohio. She said that could possibly be a clue. She suggested that I begin researching one of her sixteen sets of great-great-great grandparents who had descendants who were also from that area. She was very helpful and gave me some tips on how to make mirror trees and figure out where my strongest DNA matches were on a family tree. We were in contact for a couple of months, trying our best to figure this thing out. I was slowly researching that line when suddenly, one day in very early February, I stumbled across something....
Until next time. ;)
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