The host of the Canadian Broadcasting Company program Marketplace has an identical twin sister. The two decided last year to try out all of the main DNA testing companies (Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and Living DNA) and compare their results. The newsworthy aspect of this story is that the ethnicity reports from the two sisters varied somewhat from one another, and, of course, the different companies did not agree completely with one another.
Of itself, the story was mildly interesting. Then other places got into it, with headlines like "Sorry, but those DNA tests you took are mostly bull@!$%." Ugh. It stems from my biggest complaint about casual DNA testers--people test and want to see the pretty breakdown of their ethnicity, and that's about it. So, I can understand that if people learn that their pretty graphs are subject to algorithm and sample quality, they may get upset that their results do not report 25% Irish ethnicity "like they're supposed to be." I'm grateful that these pretty graphs entice so many to perform the test, but I wish the DNA companies would make some more effort in linking autosomal DNA testing to family history. "Hey look I'm 90% Welsh" is a bit fun, but even better is "Hey look I'm 90% Welsh and my 3rd great grandfather fought in the Crimean War" (George James...details I may never be able to verify without a visit to the War Offices in the UK).
TL;DR: DNA tests are not bullcrap. They are powerful genealogical tools you can use to learn more about your direct heritage. In some cases, the only tool that gets you past a "brick wall."
For example! I dabble in my wife's family history from time to time. She has a couple of hardcore genealogist relatives, so I did not feel an urgent need to work it out. Her father's line goes out to old Ohio, with Sniders and Spruances. German sounding names, but the records don't go back to Germany yet. A few months ago I tossed out a request to the Custer County Historical Society in Nebraska to locate obituaries for George Mahlon Snider and Eva Celesta Spruance. They had published an obituary index, but I wanted the actual newspaper articles.
They suddenly got back to me this month. I had completely forgotten. They asked for $12 to reimburse their scanning and microfilm time. I didn't realize there was a fee when I had asked, but I was more than happy to pay it given the value of the information provided.
The big unknown for me was her immediate family. She married George Snider in Marshall, Ohio, but they moved off to Nebraska shortly after that. I could never find her in any censuses prior to her marriage. Knowing that she had two half-brothers helped me focus on them. I started reexamining all the previously saved data on Eva Spruance, when I found that one of her children listed her maiden name as VanZant, rather than Spruance. That was different!
Quickly, I was able to locate the VanZants of Marshall, Ohio in census returns. Sure enough, Eva was among them. In fact, the 1860 census listed her...with the surname Thurman! The Custer County society also gave me a family group sheet--it's unclear to me whether they had filled it out or if they got it from their records. It listed a Phoebe as her mother's name, which I couldn't verify until I saw the census.
My best theory at this point was that she was from either a previous marriage or she was illegitimate. No records exist to indicate this fact. But, my wife did take a DNA test. Turns out that she matches a descendant of Phoebe's father (a Spruance), confirming that Eva is Phoebe's daughter. And, she did have some matches with Thurmans who lived in the Highland county area of Ohio in the 1800s. I'm not sure yet how I'll identify who it was without either more DNA matches or a magical tell-all document, but a fascinating turn nonetheless.
Back on my family's side, I was sifting through my DNA matches when I found a couple of Danks. I had a quick lol, given the current usage of the word. What was more interesting to me was that they had relatively few matches on my father's side, except with my tree going back to my 2nd great grandmother, Matilda Russell. I had been trying to figure out what happened to all the Abters and Russells as of late, so this got me more interested.
Fortunately, these matches actually had trees, and I traced one back to Michigan. I wasn't expecting to find a common ancestor there, since none of my direct ancestors lived there, to my knowledge. However, this gem was shared on her Ancestry page.
The fact that really caught my attention was the note about her membership as a Latter-day Saint. To my knowledge, the Russell family was not part of the "Mormon" movement (unlike many of my other ancestors). The first possibility that popped into my head was that the family converted while in Scotland. It seemed inconsistent with other faithful members, however, that they would have not settled in Utah. The patriarch, James Russell, is said to have died in 1849 in Scotland. I know very little about him--neither his life nor his death. He wasn't very old when he passed away, too. Unfortunately, civil registration of deaths in Scotland didn't start until 1855, so sketchy parish records are all I have to go on, and if he was a member of a nonconformist church, bets are off.
My first theory is that the family converted to the church, James Russell met an untimely end, and without means of support, the family set out to America to earn money. Perhaps they couldn't afford passage all the way to Utah, which is why they stayed in Pennsylvania, where the sons began working in the coal mines there.
But, after doing more research, a second theory began to develop. Perhaps they had no contact with the Church in Scotland, and the family came over to Pennsylvania simply to settle. An offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Sidney Rigdon's group) flourished in southwestern Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Scottish immigrant Russell family adopted this local religion as a means of support?
As of yet, I don't have enough information to decide either way. But there appears to be interesting stories lurking in the background of my family without my realizing!
