*taps mic*
Is this thing on?
Seems to be.
All right. Let's get into it.
Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. I went offline long enough for my entire site to go down for quite some time. I'm currently getting things fixed up and running again. It will take some time. I have a huge backlog of messages and issues on various platforms to address. I'm working my way through them and I appreciate your patience while I do so.
Where have I been?
Dealing with a lot of the issues I talked about in my last post on family fragmentation and revisionism. That post was autobiographical. The 2016 US election and COVID-19 have done permanent damage to several relationships in my family. Doing genealogy, in light of those conflicts and fractures, became incredibly painful. For my own health, I had to step away.
Healing has been slow to come, so my reentry from that hiatus has been gradual. But in the short time I've been back, I've started several new projects and made a major discovery on one of my longest standing mysteries.
Let's talk about it.
MyTreeTags
That is, until now.
Ancestry's MyTreeTags added custom tagging at some point, which means I now have tags for all the testing companies and matching services where my DNA exists. I can now tell, at a glance, which matches are from which services, and which ones are available on multiples services.
My Access database was born out of a desire to have this information from all of the various testing services in one place. Ancestry has made the tree I work in the most the ideal place to store and handle this information now.
Documenting Slavery and Freedom using MyTreeTags
Additionally, Ancestry has added more Life Experience tags, including ones for slave holders. I spent an entire weekend documenting the slaveholders in my tree across the American South. It's the most comprehensive effort anyone in my family has ever taken to accurately document slavery. Because the slave schedules in the US censuses of 1850 and 1860 provide only first and last names of the owners, these records need to be cross referenced with other records to positively identify both the enslavers and the enslaved. It's an ongoing project that took me through wills, vital records, and various other record collections in the communities I research, trying to figure out how to identify the names of people enslaved by my family and to make that information accessible to researchers who need it.
On deck, I have other Ancestry default tags to utilize, including for the Free People of Color in my tree. I've been slow to circle back around to it because the tree tags aren't accessible on the Ancestry app, which is something I definitely need future updates to address. These tags are so much a part of my work process now, it's a huge inconvenience not to have access to them on my phone.
Other Opportunities to Use MyTreeTags
Other tags I will eventually use: Immigrants, Military Service, the Adoption tags, and the ones that indicate when a person Never Married or had No Children. There are several places in my family where aunts raised generations of children in my family that could easily be mistaken for their own.
I think it's also worth creating and documenting the LGBTQ+ folks in my tree with their own tag or tags. How to implement that is something I'm going to put more thought into and explore with other researchers before implementing it to make sure I do it in the most respectful way possible. It's a feature I'd love to see Ancestry adopt themselves to remind all family researchers that LGBTQ+ people have always existed and they deserve to be identified correctly and remembered for who they were and who they loved.
Using ThruLines and Common Ancestor Hints to Trace Private Trees
At some point, these ThruLines got good enough to document relationships to cousin matches with private trees. I have had cousin matches on my AncestryDNA match list that have been there for years, never being positively identified. Using the Shared Matches tab, I had a pretty good idea how several of them were related to me. But I recently discovered that once these relative matches have a Common Ancestor hint, clicking on View Relationship enters a space that uses public trees to provide match details to aid in identification.
When working on documenting matches from my DNA about a week ago, I saw multiple instances where my own descendancy research in my tree filled in the blanks on the Common Ancestor page. I was able to work down to the relative match, with the assistance of the algorithm, then use public records to identify them and add them to my tree. I've operated for years off of the assumption that the more information I fed to the algorithm through my own tree, the more heavy lifting it would ultimately do for me. I'm seeing now that this is coming to fruition in how I can now process matches with private trees.
I'm not entirely sure how this works. But based on the information that was being filled in for me, it appears to use a combination of other public trees, as well as information in my own tree, to populate the lineage from the Common Ancestor hint to the cousin match. It's especially effective, however, when the information is in my personal tree. In one instance, I knew I wasn't going to be able to deduce the mother for one of my relative matches on my own. I added all the siblings for that generation of the mother's family to my tree anyway. I was surprised to see the Common Ancestor match filled in which of the siblings was the match's mother. The algorithm gave me that confirmation simply because she was in my tree, even though the cousin match was not.
I'm fairly certain that the anonymization of living people applies in these cases, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also unsure how much of what I was seeing was the algorithm using the information in my own tree to help me identify this match locally, without necessarily sending that confirmation to other people on the platform. I do have questions about this because there were instances where the lineage the algorithm was populating for me was pulling information from other public trees. Does it do that with my public tree and all of the descendancy research I've been feeding to it? If I input this person and their connection to me into my tree, how much of that information gets fed to other AncestryDNA users via their Common Ancestor hints?
I'll be honest: I'm not asking because I care. But there are a lot of people with private trees connected to their DNA who definitely care about these answers. I don't think it's clearly understood how much the algorithm is working around their privacy settings right now. The only thing that seems to be off the table, from what I've seen, is an actual positive ID of the match themselves. But depending on what information they provide about themselves on their AncestryDNA page through their username, personal details, and location, even that's not a guarantee.
I identified at least half a dozen matches this way that have been sitting unconfirmed in my match list for years. Maybe this isn't news to anyone else and I'm simply the last one to know. But somehow, I don't think so.
To target these kinds of matches, activate the Common Ancestor filter and the Private Tree filters at the same time. Since the layout on these Common Ancestor hints is identical to the ThruLines interface, I suspect the two of them are connected and they work together to make this happen.
What does this mean? It means having a private tree attached to DNA results can be functionally meaningless in certain situations. And while I find that to be incredibly convenient and exciting for me and my purposes, it's pretty important for folks who think they're keeping secrets and protecting privacy in their private trees to realize it doesn't work that way once you connect them to your DNA results.
The Major Discovery
I started doing genealogy when I was 14 years old. I still have the first pedigree chart I ever made, handwritten, in the back of the journal I kept at the time. That pedigree chart had two blanks on it, which I've been trying to fill for eighteen years.
I filled the one years ago when I identified my maternal grandmother's birth father. My paternal grandmother's birth father was the only one who was still missing.
That is, until a couple weeks ago.
Because of DNA matching, I had my paternal grandmother's birth father narrowed down to four brothers in a family from Ontario, Canada. I had matches to three of the four brothers on AncestryDNA and had been trying to narrow it down further from there. With my own match, the centimorgans were inconclusive, being indicative of too many possible relationships to be useful by itself.
Then my sister tested. Her match to the daughter in Canada was significantly higher than mine. But before I tried to call it confirmed, I wanted to be sure.
A couple of months ago, one of my cousins in Canada took an AncestryDNA test. His match was high enough that it became clear that this woman was our grandmother's half sister. It's physically impossible for any other relationship to align with our centimorgans, age differences, and generational compositions, which is why the technique of triangulation is so valuable. While there were many explanations for my singular connection to this woman in Canada, there is only one that explains the relationship between her, me, my sister, and my first cousin.
After eighteen years of searching, the blank in our tree has been definitively filled because of DNA testing. At 32 years old, I can fill out a four generation pedigree chart accurately for the first time in my life. That may not be a big deal to some people, but it's a tremendously big deal to me. It's what 14 year-old me set out to do at the outset of this journey almost two decades ago.
I'm proud of her for taking the first step, and I'm proud of me for sticking with it for as long as it took to make this happen.
