Blog Post Fourteen
Photo by Roman Kraft
Secrets: Part 1
DNA and Genealogy
In 1997, my mother and uncle were told by their aunt, my grandmother’s little sister, that my grandmother had a child before she was married to my grandfather. She was nineteen years old when she got married which meant that she was a young teenager when she had this child. Her sister said the father did some sort of work with the Cub Scouts in a nearby smaller town, and that anyone that knew was told to never talk about it. Her sister died in 2002 and my grandmother died in 2003; my mother told me about this child in about 2007 and felt like the possibility of ever knowing who this person was or who they became was unlikely if not completely impossible.
In the years following my grandmother’s death I continued to learn so much about how she treated people, how guarded and secretive she was, and how much she lied to other people to protect her secrets. I’ve come to realize she developed a lot of defense mechanisms after an unstable childhood full of rejection and blame, and I’ve uncovered where she learned to keep secrets and why she kept them to herself for over 55 years.
The DNA
In 2018, I took a genealogical DNA test to learn more about the countries my families came from and, with that, comes the DNA matches with other people. I was primarily interested in the places rather than the people, and for a long time the number of close matches I had were small and I knew most of them personally anyway.
In 2022, I took more interest in those DNA matches and started trying to sort through them; I had a small group of strangers that were close genetic matches, but I only knew which side of the family they belonged to and not how they were related to me.
In 2024, I worked on sorting those matches with a few online courses to understand the DNA matches and what to do with them. The most helpful class was a presentation for RootsTech 2024 from Diahan Southard with Your DNA Guide. The class was called “Light Your DNA Match List on Fire!” which is exactly what I did. This was the class that suddenly made those mystery matches something I could figure out. The small group of strangers suddenly made sense, but I was left with four people that I could not place. I realized they were all related to each other as siblings or parent-child. But who were they?
Only two real scenarios made sense:
1. My grandmother’s mystery child or
2. Her father who could have had children he may not have known about in his adult life.
I did the DNA math, and the second scenario did not make sense, but the first scenario did.
The Genealogy
With your list of matches, you can select one and see their user profile which will tell you how often they log in. Of my small group of mystery matches, only one of them logged in regularly and the others hadn’t logged in for at least a year. In my experience, people that aren’t logging in often are the ones that only did the DNA test to see their countries of origin. The ones that log in frequently are actively searching for something.
So, I sent a message to the one match that logged in regularly and asked if they had any adoptions in their immediate ancestry and explained how I thought we might be related. She responded and said her mother had been born in 1948 and adopted a year later.
If my theory was correct, in 1948 my grandmother was fifteen. Looking at her younger siblings, their ages ruled them out as potential parents of my match’s mother. My grandmother was the only possible answer.
If my theory was correct, I may have just found the child and the long-lost family members my grandmother never wanted me to find.
Next time, I detail how I found answers, which led me to more answers, and blew the doors wide open on my grandmother’s history.
If you’ve done the DNA and have a match list that seems super intimidating, do yourself a favour and check out Diahan Southard’s socials and her website, https://www.yourdnaguide.com/
#diahansouthard #yourdnaguide