Author: Michael

Ancestry.com recently introduced a new feature called DNA ThruLines. The idea is to merge DNA evidence and people’s family trees to help you break through brick walls.

It’s interesting, but I have three reservations about the execution:

1. The DNA ThruLines icon shows up even when there’s nothing there.
2. The “hints” are, ultimately, just other peoples’ family trees, which are typically just copies of copies lacking compelling evidence.
3. It doesn’t help me break through brick walls by proposing connections that aren’t already there.

First, the DNA ThruLines user interface tosses up what I would consider false positives. Take a glance at my wife’s family tree. See that little blue ThruLines icons above Oliver Raser? I takes me three clicks to discover that there are no DNA ThruLines matches here.

Don’t waste my time, Ancestry.com. Hide the icon when you don’t have information to share.

Second, DNA ThruLines relies on other people’s family trees, and that’s a garbage-in, garbage-out scenario. To me, it feels exactly like getting hints from other peoples’ family trees, with no distinction between a profile with dozens of sources and one with no evidence at all.

Take my mom’s 2^nd great-grandfather, James Brown. I’m confident in this lineage, but the DNA tests from our many distant cousins confirms we’ve got it right.

I have no idea who James Brown’s father was, however. But Ancestry.com has a suggestion: John Edward Brown. But there are no DNA matches from his other children, that is, via James Brown’s siblings—that’s the kind of proof I want to see from DNA.

And when I click through to John Edward Brown on “Steve’s Tree,” what do I get? A profile with no supporting evidence.

Really, how is this any different from family tree hints? DNA ThruLines, despite the cool the marketing language of DNA, is little different from the family tree hints they’ve offered for a decade.

And I hate using tertiary sources like this because they can be so unreliable. I am so reluctant to use them I even recorded a video about what I think is the only safe way.

My third point is that DNA ThruLines is missing the big opportunity here: helping us break through brick walls by identifying siblings and cousins, aunts and uncles. Researching relatives is one of my favorite ways to break through brick walls, as one you see in this video.

Here’s an interesting scenario from my mom’s DNA matches: her maternal line, the Posses, seemed to come to the United States without friends or family. It’s like Charles Poss magically appeared in Pennsylvania.

Now, there’s this really fascinating DNA match with two other members who document their descent from a Jacob Posz who was ten years older than our Charles, who was also a Catholic, and who came from Germany around the same time…

There’s a common ancestor there, but DNA ThruLines isn’t helping me make connections because the trees aren’t already matched together.

Here’s how I’d like it to work. This is also my favorite example of garbage-in, garbage out for DNA ThruLines.

Let’s take Thomas Chew. The consensus opinion is that his parents were Andrew Chew and Anna Mariah Barthist. And look here, Ancestry.com is suggesting Anna Barthist as a match based on similarities between my mother-in-law’s DNA and that of another member who descends through Thomas’ brother, Joseph Chew.

The evidence is pretty complicated, so I won’t present it all here. But the nut of it is that Joseph Chew’s wife was also a Chew, and I think that she was a descendant of Andrew Chew and Anna Mariah Barthist, while Thomas and Joseph Chew were from a completely different branch of the Chew family.

In fact, when I look at my mother-in-law’s DNA matches, she actually has two matches with people who descent from a completely different Chew branch.

Confused? Yeah, I can see why. Put it this way: DNA ThruLines is suggesting that my mother-in-law had two distinct lines of descent. And not because there’s some oddity in her DNA, but because two different genealogists have different views of the evidence and put different lineages in their trees.

What would I like to see? Well, it’s right here with that Chew example. I created a person in my tree named Wild Speculation Chew and connected him to Joseph and William Chew.

I want ancestry.com to take common surnames—like in my earlier Poss example and show me multiple potential lineages, with estimated degrees of separation, based on DNA matches with people’s whose lines of descent don’t appear to converge with my tree.

That’s the real opportunity here: giving me ideas on where and about whom I should research to break through a brick wall.

The Ellis Island immigration officer lazily changing your ancestor’s name is an American story so enshrined in our collective imagination about European immigration to the United States, it even makes an appearance in the Godfather II.

There are some truths in that clip.

Notice how the future Godfather Don Corleone was accompanied by an immigration officer who spoke Italian? And how the other immigration officer’s accent showed he was born in Ireland. The U.S. government deliberately hired immigrants who spoke languages other than English to make sure there were no communication challenges.

Also, remember the tag around Vito Andolini’s neck with his name and place of birth? Well, I don’t know if those tags were a thing, but ship captains were required to provide detailed and accurate passenger manifests, or their passenger might be turned away. And those captains didn’t want to waste cargo space on humans when American goods and resources were far more profitable for the return journey.

What is fiction is the idea that an immigration officer would change Vito Andolini’s surname to Corleone, the name of his village. Immigration officers were trained and paid to be accurate, and they had the linguistic resources to get it right.

So if your family has a story about an immigration officer at Ellis Island or Castlegarden unilaterally changing your ancestor’s name, it’s almost certainly fiction.

But surnames did change, and for four main reasons:

1. Other government clerks couldn’t manage the foreign name.
2. Literacy and government standardization formalized more flexible spelling.
3. Cultural pressures prompted your ancestors to anglicize their name.
4. Your ancestor changed their name for a reason.

The first two are tough to provide examples for, because the change can be gradual, and vary from place to place. My wife’s surname, Raser is a decent one: the original 1600s immigrant to Pennsylvania was a ship captain, and thus literate: he spelled his name Roeser. Over the course of the following centuries, though, his descendants ended with several different spellings, including Raser and Roser.

Regardless, the story is one of increased government record-keeping which began in the 1800s, and ended when governments provided social benefit programs and collected taxes on income.

The third, cultural pressures, are much easier to identify, and fall into two big groups.

The first group is that, in moments of nationalist fervor (and the bigotry that often came with it), people anglicized their names.

For example, around World War I, German-Americans were the targets of bigoted nationalist fervor in the U.S. You’ll see quite a few names such as Schmidt and Mueller change to Smith and Miller between 1910 and 1920.

The Revolution saw a similar shift: for example, the Dutch Van Vliet family, which first appeared in New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and had spread across New Jersey, New York Virginia and Ohio in the subsequent four or five generations. The entire extended family spontaneously changed their surname to VanFleet by 1800.

The second imposition of cultural pressures were more subtle: having a name that’s difficult to pronounce. I like the example of Jay Yantosh, my first cousin once removed. When his paternal line came to Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, they carried the Czech name of Yantoshik.

That may have been a mouthful, however, and one branch of the family dropped the final ik, while others retained the full name. I saw a similar pattern in the Zuckschwerdt family: one descendant of the immigrant changed his name to Sexworth while the rest kept it the same.

But in the end, the idea of personal renewal in America may have prompted your ancestor to change their name before they reached Ellis Island or a precursor.

Take Jim Bigej, a relative of ours: when his Bigej ancestor came to America from Bosnia, he wanted an American-sounding name, and decided to abandon whatever his family name, traveling as Bigej.

And the practice stretched back to the earliest days. I was fascinated by the surname of a co-worker, Dana Rambo. I had encountered it while researching an ethnic German surname in my wife’s tree.

I had assumed that Rambo was ethnic German as well, but when I looked it up, I was shocked to discover that the original Rambo arrived with the first Swedish colonists in what later became Pennsylvania. But Rambo wasn’t his surname: he’d made it up.

Maps change. It happens today, but it happens so slowly, we don’t really think too much of it unless the change was accompanied by headline grabbing events, such as the civil war that resulted in the disintegration of Yugoslavia into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro & Kosovo.

Most changes are subtle, though: for example, if you were researching Sidney Kidd in Princeton, New Jersey, you wouldn’t be able to find his street address very easily on modern maps. Google maps points you to Jackson Avenue in nearby Rocky Hill, while Bing Maps would land you in the town of Nutley where Jackson street is a block over from Princeton Street.

Why can’t you find Jackson Street in Princeton, a town founded in the 1700s? Well, Jackson Street was renamed to Paul Robeson Place in 1976 after the famous African-American civil rights activist & thespian who was born in Princeton.

Of course, a change in street names doesn’t have much genealogical relevance, but changes in boundaries do, especially county boundaries.

In this video, I’ll cover four topics around map changes.

1. When county boundaries change, the records don’t move.
2. Use web resources such as mapofus.org to understand geographic boundary changes.
3. Remember that places can disappear as well.

First, and most basic: Court records remain in the original county courthouse. For example, if your ancestor bought land in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania before 1799 and died there in 1801, you would find property records in York County registers, but probate records in Adams County.

Why? In 1800, Adams County was carved out of York County but older records weren’t moved from the York County courthouse to the new one in Adams County. Remember that records were typically transcribed into large bound ledgers, so you couldn’t break the ledgers apart and easily separate records geographically. But even if the records were stored loose leaf, it would take a lot of effort to sort through the records for little reward.

How do you track county changes? I find Wikipedia the most convenient source: most entries will tell you when the county was formed and how in the summary.

If you want to visualize it, check out mapofus.org, which will show every county formation and boundary change for every state in the union.

You can also do an image search on bing or google for county maps for a particular year.

Of course, this isn’t much good if a place actually disappeared. Take a look at this old map of Oregon City, Oregon (above). Across the Willamette River is a town called Linn City. Look on a modern map, and Linn City doesn’t exist. There’s a West Linn, but no Linn. What happened? Well, in the fall of 1861, relentless heavy rainfall flooded the Willamette River and destroyed the town.

Again, Wikipedia is a great resource to research a place that you can’t find on a modern map.

Brick walls are frustrating. I’ve broken through dozens, but I have even more that I’ve been staring at for years. In this quick video, I’ll share one method of breaking through a brick wall and provide an illustrative example.

Quick version: if you run into a dead-end with your direct line, research their siblings, or even people you just suspect might be their siblings. Records associated with the sibling may help you make new connections.

If find this useful in a few different scenarios.

One is trying to determine an ancestor’s maiden name: sponsors or witnesses at baptisms tend to be family members, especially before the 1800s. If a surname crops up repeatedly, it’s a good guess that those are the mother’s siblings, aunts, uncles or even parents.

Another scenario is trying to bridge geographical gaps. It was the rare exception before 1900 that someone immigrated alone.

Ethnic Germans, for example, tended to immigrate to Colonial Pennsylvania in a group with others from their village. If you can’t trace your ancestor directly, their family in Pennsylvania may have a better trail back to Germany

Irish Catholics migrated in chains, so even if only a couple individuals were on a given ship, they already knew someone at their destination, whether it was a sibling or cousin or even a former neighbor.

Let me give you an example: a George Schlauch who died in Pelham, Ontario in early 1812. His will listed his children clearly, and a variety of evidence indicated that before moving to Canada, he lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania where he married a Catharina Gieg and started his family.

But George Schlauch was otherwise a brick wall. In 2015, one of George’s descendants, Liz Tice, asked me to help figure out who George’s parents were. There were quite a few hypotheses, and all of them could easily be disproved.

Trying to find a baptismal record for George was a pointless exercise. You can speculate that he was born between 1736 and 1740 by assuming he was in his mid- to late-twenties when he married in 1764. That also put him in his mid-70s when he died in Canada—a reasonable age for the time. But there were at least three men with that name born in Pennsylvania around then, even more in Germany.

Still, any birth year between 1720 and 1745 would fit those marriage and death years as well. And there were dozens of baptismal records for George Sloughs in Germany and Pennsylvania in that twenty-five year period.

Liz had a new hypothesis, though. That George was somehow related to a Michael Slough because of this property map which showed the two living close to each in Brecknock Township.

We couldn’t find any records tying George and Michael together, but there was a third person that seemed to connect the two: a Barbara Schlauch. When she married in 1761, her father was named as Michael Schlauch. When her son was baptized in 1783, the sponsors were the George and Catharine Schlauch we were researching.

Of course, there wasn’t much about Michael or Barbara to indicate who their parents were or where they were born either. Michael’s death in 1808 suggested he and George were of about the same age, but that was it.

But Liz had found a June 1808 record of Michael’s death and burial, which noted he was seventy-seven years and about eight months old. See the “etwa” there? That’s German for “about.” That put his birth in the fall of 1730, late October-ish.

And in the village of Gomaringen, near Tubingen, Germany, there was a record of a 2 November 1730 baptism of a Michael Schlauch born to Michael & Maria Schlauch. There were plenty of other baptismal records for Michael Schlauch in Germany, but none in the fall of 1730.

Michael’s father had several other children, including a George born in October of 1738, and a Barbara born in 1744.

Finally, in 1747, a Michael Schlauch immigrated with his family to Pennsylvania aboard the Restauration.

We couldn’t find a way to trace George’s ancestry, but by following the document trail of a potential brother, we could put the entire family story together.

Of the dozens of potential George’s, his brother led us to the right baptismal record in Germany, and broke us through that brick wall.

When you have a bunch of people with the same name living in the same state and you can’t figure out which records belong to which person, find all the records, associate them with people based on location, and then consider the reality of distance for the period.

Consider colonial Philadelphia and Manhattan: two major cities about 90 miles apart. Amtrak’s Acela train can make that trip in 90 minutes, a car can do it in two hours. But in colonial times, a horse was the more likely mode of intercity travel.

Now a horse walks at around four or five miles an hour, making the journey take about twenty hours if you canter now and again.

Ninety miles was a huge deal. In reality, before the automobile, your ancestors’ family, friends, associates and neighbors were probably all within a two-hour radius—six miles on foot, ten on horse. If you see records for what appears to be the same person in towns twenty or thirty miles apart at about the same time prior to 1850 or 1860, you can bet they are actually two different people.