It’s happened again: I’ve found a whole slew of DNA matches on Ancestry.com that are the result of an extramarital affair by someone back in the early 1900s or the 1800s.
This is the fifth time. At least.
I color-code my DNA matches on Ancestry.com. It was my COVID pandemic project. I started with giving a color to every DNA match where I knew exactly how they were a match. Each of those matches got a color based on which branch of the family they were a part of, based on one of my great grandparents or one of my 2nd great grandparents. Once you do that for a lot of your matches, you start to see rather quickly how close but “who are they?” DNA matches are related to you, and as you look at their family trees, yours start to get further filled out. I did it because I hit so many brick walls so early when trying to fill out my tree.
As I did this, a group of DNA matches would start to emerge that I knew are related via a particular branch of my tree (because we share matches that I know how we’re related) but I couldn’t figure out exactly how – there’s no shared ancestor indicated. So I started color-coding these batches with their own color as well.
Sometimes, as I stare at the trees of these mystery matches (those who have filled out and shared their trees), I see names repeated: I see that multiple people have Ruby McMillingsworth in their tree (I totally made that name of and checked on Google to make sure there is no one called that, BTW). And then I look at Ruby’s sisters and parents and what not… and, oh, look, there’s my great great uncle married to Ruby’s brother-in-law’s sister. Which would NOT make me a blood relative, but yet here we are and… oops.
I’m not jumping to conclusions. I check and double check where people were living and what their jobs were. I double check dates. I check neighborhoods according to the census.
I’ve read about people discovering that their siblings had a different parent, or that they themselves had a different parent than they grew up with, because of a DNA match. In my case, all those closer-to-me circumstances were revealed long ago, before ancestry.com. But this stuff I’m discovering, from more than 100 years ago… in different parts of rural America… this I have not read about. This I was not expecting. At least not this often. And I’m not entirely sure how to sit with the information. It’s different than when I saw a lot of DNA matches with black folks and, once I figured out how we were related, I reached out to one of them because I could see that she was trying to find out who her white ancestor was, and I had the answer. I was relatively sure my info was going to be welcomed (it was).
This time… I doubt any of these folks know that, say, their great-great-grandmother had an affair (or something more nefarious). Therefore, I will NOT be reaching out to any of these DNA matches. But if one of them contacts me and asks how we’re related, I will tell.
These discoveries also make me think about the circumstances back in the day that led to this and what the story is. Did these two people know each other from church? Were they neighbors? Was it consensual? Was someone walking around terrified of The Big Secret – or was there just silence around what everyone knew? Was anyone shamed or harmed? I’ll never know. But I wonder. I find myself feeling sympathy for unmentioned, unrecorded pain and difficulties.
These discoveries also make me wonder why we are told that everything is SO different now in terms of human relationships versus 100 years ago or more. We’re told that people use to be so much better behaved now, and more respectful of society’s rules, than they are now. Were they? The more I do ancestry research, and the more I read history, it seems to me that there have ALWAYS been families with more than one baby Daddy. There have always been scandals. No one has a morally pristine family.
I buy an ancestry subscription just once a year now, for a month, because my tree is already mapped in such great detail. I buy the subscription only to look at the latest, new DNA matches and see if, at long last, I will solve three of my family’s mysteries (the Beasley / Cauthen mystery, the Emma Smith (my 2rd great-grandmother) mystery, and the mystery of who one of my third great grandfathers was…). That’s down from six very big mysteries, thanks to Ancestry.com.
I’ve given up trying to figure out exactly which family members came over from England, Scotland or Western Europe and when, because most came over in the early 1700s or 1600s and the records are questionable, and those origins just don’t seem that exciting. I will never know where they came from, not exactly, and I doubt I’ll ever know the exact circumstances that brought them here. I go back 10 generations on more than one line. And that far back… unless someone has a book written about one of my ancestors, I’m not sure what there is to learn.
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