For today’s “In Remembrance” we celebrate the marriage on 5 Apr 1866 of Wesley and Isabella (Odom) Gordon, Michael’s 4x GGP on his mother’s side of the family. “West” (as Wesley was known) was likely born in Virginia around 1838, but his birth location is listed as Mississippi and Tennessee in various records throughout his life. Isabella was born around 1850, also likely in Virginia, although she’s listed as being born in Mississippi in some records.
West and Isabella were married in DeSoto County Mississippi just under a year after they took their freedom once the Civil War ended, however they likely were betrothed prior to that as their oldest child Cora was born also enslaved about 1864. By 1870 West and Isabella are farming a sharecrop just North of Nesbit, MS in the extreme Northwest part of Mississippi. In-fact their farm was likely less than 10 miles from both Arkansas and Tennessee (Memphis was only 8 miles away). All records for the couple indicate they lived in this area, if not the same rented farm, for their entire lives. West had passed away by the time of the 1910 US Census and Isabella is listed as still living on a rented farm with many of the same neighbors.
They had 11 children (we know of), 5 boys and 6 girls. Many of them stayed in the NW Mississippi/Memphis area, but many of their grandchildren moved North in the Great Migration, including Cora’s son Ira White who moved to Hartford, Connecticut.
West passed away between 1900 and 1910, and Isabella survived until 1923. She passed away in DeSoto County, MS.
A few years ago it was time to tackle the brick wall of who were the parents of Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place. The Place family history after they arrived in Wisconsin is well known to us. They were some of the first 50 or so Americans to arrive in the Wisconsin Territory during the summer of 1835, and their arrival and early experiences were documented years later by Charles Dyer in a 1871 speech to the for the Old Settlers Society of Racine County (Link). However, despite their Great-Granddaughter Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1960) being the first great historian of our family, she never documented her Great-grandparents.
Andrew and Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s descendants to Michael’s Great Grandmother Catherine (Morse) Leonard
Starting with Andrew Place’s parents
Andrew Thomas Place (1793-1837) was known to have traveled with his wife and 6 children by Ox cart from Greene County, NY, however not much before that has been documented. Searching for Place families and birth/marriage/death records for him produced no results.
The Hudson River valley in New York between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War is a well known dead zone for genealogical records (Suffering the Black Hole of Hudson River Valley Genealogy). For whatever reason(s) collection of church records are spotty at best, governmental records weren’t kept until later, and the Morman Church’s microfilm projects capturing this area’s civil records has large holes. Combine that with this area being very transitory over a few generations, with families moving in from Massachusetts and Connecticut soon after the Revolution, and their children/grandchildren moving West as they reached adulthood. Our ancestors didn’t leave as much of a paper trail in this region, and few of those papers have been digitized and indexed compared to other parts of the country.
Using Greene County as a jumping off point we built a table of each of the Place family entries in the 1790 US Census for there and the surrounding counties. Repeating the same process for the 1800-1830 census’ built a decent map of the original Place settlers and their children who stayed in the area.
The first item that popped out was an entry in the 1820 Census, in Greenville, Greene County, NY for Andrew T Place. The known birthdates of Hannah and their children matched the 1820 entry for Andrew, which was a strong lead that he was from the Greenville area. Assuming he might have bought his farm near his parents, we found a Thomas Place in Greenville, and these were the only 2 Places listed in Greene County. Searching the 1810 Census there was no entry for any Place family, but going manually through the entries for Greenville we found Thomas Place indexed under the wrong last name.
There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before…But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”
Now that we had a good lead that Andrew’s father was Thomas and they resided in Greenville, NY we searched Ancestry for records that match him. There were several hits for various parts of Thomas’ Will/Probate in 1848, but nothing that spelled out his children other than his son and executor, Jeramiah Place. Using those records, we went to FamilySearch and browsed the Probate records for Greene Co. We found his Will, but his wife and 2 surviving children were the only ones listed. It’s not surprising, but frustrating nonetheless!
Given that Thomas is a much more common name than Jeremiah, we tried a newspaper search on his name, narrowing down to 1848, and we hit paydirt! As a part of Thomas’ Probate process Jeremiah published a Notice of Hearing for the commissioner, calling out the heirs of Thomas specifically which included: “children of Andrew Place, a deceased son, all of Racine, Wisconsin Territory”. It also listed the other siblings of Andrew, which we’d established previously. With that we’d firmly proven that Thomas and Phoebe Place from Greenville, NY were Andrew’s parents.
It was on next to establish Hannah (Yeomans) Place’s parents, and while it took just a few weeks for Andrew, it would take over 2 years to break through and find hers.
Finding Hannah’s parents
Since we now knew that Andrew as raised and likely married in Greenville, NY, we started searching for Hannah’s parents in Greene County. There were 3 Yeomans registered in the 1810 US Census for Greene Co., and all 3 had a daughter Hannah’s age listed in the census. Next, as we did with Andrew, we built out tables for the 1790-1820 Census for every Yeoman in the counties bordering Greene, and tried to establish patterns of which children might be associated with which parents, and from that built 9 working trees to flesh out the people and families we were discovering.
Our makeshift pre-1850 US Census tables, used to align the generic numbers from the census to the known family members we’re researching, to visually identify the gaps and narrow down if there’s a match. Green means the census value matches a known family member, Yellow means the value is within 2 years of a known family member
Right away we hit that Hudson Valley wall and kept running into dead ends as we searched Ancestry and accepted as many shaky leaf hints as we could. We started searching for any Greene Co. Yeomans in member trees, and in a Public tree we found Elisha B Yeoman (1814-1850). The person didn’t have any facts attached in the tree but when we searched we found an index page for Greene County Probate Records from 1850, and we could see his probate was recorded on page 55. We switched over to FamilySearch, which had the Probate books microfilmed, and guessed which book to check based on his death year.
In Book H of the Greene County “Record of Wills” we found Elisha’s will recorded and it listed his location as Greenville, which puts him in the same town/time as Andrew Place…and likely Hannah. Unusually, his heirs weren’t just his wife and children. Elisha also listed 4 siblings as back-ups in-case his children didn’t survive to adulthood to collect their share: Leonard, William I, George C, and Catherine. We added the siblings to our tree and searched for birth/marriage/death records for each helped flesh out the tree, and it gave us more data points to track as we compared various Yeomans in the area to the families in the 1790-1820 US Census.
Still focusing on the 1810 US Census (knowing it should list Hannah in her father’s home for the last time), and breaking out all of Yeoman/Youman/Yumans in Greene and surrounding counties, 3 families came into focus: James and Jeremiah Yumans in Coeymans, Albany County and William Yeoman in Greenville. William would seem the most likely patriarch, being in Greene County, however the Coeymans and Greenville townships (Greenville is in New Baltimore) abut each other separated by the country border. The areas both families lived in were likely less than 10 miles from each other, which makes it reasonable Hannah could have been a part of any of them.
Map from 1875 showing the proximity of Coeyman’s Hollow and Green Ville, where our 3 target Yeomans/Yumans families were located
During this time we also found a cluster of Yeomans that could have been the father and siblings of Hannah, except they were in Delaware County, NY (about 55 miles west of Greenville/Coeymans). William Yeomans (1773-1857) census info matched what we knew for the most part, but it wasn’t a complete match. We found Delaware County William’s Probate and it listed 7 of his children. Those children didn’t overlap Hannah’s known siblings, but we couldn’t rule him out because at this time we only knew of a cluster of 5 siblings in Greene County that didn’t even include Hannah. FindaGrave had a record in Delaware for “William” that seemed to match William I, but that was the only record to go on.
All attempts to research the James and Jeremiah families in Albany County were a dead end. The few Albany County land and probate records are almost entirely unindexed, and most of them are missing from any online microfilm collections.
From Dead Ends to Breadcrumbs
Since we had run into dead-ends in Albany, Greene and Delaware counties we expanded our search for any Yeomans to surrounding counties, which is where we hit our next big breakthrough. We found the will of an unmarried woman, Emaline Yeomans (1806-1849), who died in Union Vale, Dutchess County, NY which is 75 miles from Greenville and across the Hudson River. She died with no heirs, but a substantial estate. Since she had no heirs-in-law she left her estate to her 8 siblings, including the 5 Yeoman siblings in Elisha B’s will, also Hannah (positively identified as “Hannah Place, wife of the late Andrew Place of Wisconsin”) and 2 new sisters: Lucinda and Annis.
Emaline’s will is probably our favorite probate document we’ve found! You can only glean hints at personality and family dynamics from dry vital records documents, but her will speaks volumes. First, she had 3 nieces name Emaline, and she bequeathed each $50 to be paid on their 21st birthday. To her 4 brothers (Leonard, Elisha, George and Williams) and her sister (Catherine, also listed in Elisha B’s will) she bequeathed to each of them one of her rocking chairs (their choice) worth between $12 and $15 each. The remainder of her estate was to be split between the 3 other sisters (Hannah, Lucinda and Annis), who each received about $250. There clearly was a schism between the two groups of siblings, as Elisha would pass away only a year later and leave nothing to the sisters who received the bulk of Emaline’s estate while rewarding all those who received rocking chairs. She also must have been beloved, with 3 of her sisters naming children after her…at least amongst one faction.
Armed with the entire, confirmed list of Yeoman siblings, we were able to confirm that both the Coeymans and Greenville patriarch’s 1810 Census entries still matched the ages of these 9 children. However, we were then able to eliminate the Delaware William as a potential father.
The trail went completely cold after this. Searching for the Probate records of each sibling lead to no new leads on their parentage. Even more frustratingly, even with a known death date for William I we could not find his probate/will.
This stalemate lasted for almost a year, and while we found more information to flesh out the spouses and children of the 8 of the 9 siblings (William I was still a mystery), there was nothing on the 3 possible patriarchs of these families.
Breakthrough!
Our focus had turned entirely to researching William I Yeoman, as he was the one sibling we had no records for. While searching for anything William Yeomans related in Ancestry one Saturday we found an image attached as a profile picture in a Public Tree that came from one of the vanity books published around the first Centennial that listed important people in a county. These books were largely self-sourced, where the subjects would pay a fee to be listed, so they often are nearly first-person family/history descriptions even if it overestimates the subject’s “importance”. Reviewing the image for William listed his wife as Mary and a son Henry J who lived in Dutchess County.
Searching Ancestry trees for Henry J Yeomans of Dutchess County, NY broke the brick wall down completely. Again, someone had attached an image to their Public tree as a profile pic for Henry J. It was an entry in another vanity book where Henry J was the subject, and it was a gold mine. It was much longer than most such entries, and it described details about his father Henry Ira who was born in Greene County and was a lifelong resident of Greenville. Just like that we’d gathered William Ira’s birth date, place, and marriage details!
But even more amazingly the write-up (which usually wouldn’t include parents information) went further and detailed William Ira’s parents! William Yeomans (1782-) and Lucinda (Blackmer) Yeomans (1762-1819) were William I’s parents, and through the transitive properties Emaline’s, and thus Hannah’s, parents was well!
Just like that, the wall was gone. We knew the identity of Hannah’s parents! 2+ years of research had paid off and we’d moved her tree back one generation.
There is that 3 minutes of bliss when you realize all those years of research just paid off, out of the blue, and you just made a link that no one has ever made before, even your ancestor genealogists who were researching 100+ years ago. But very quickly the bliss fades and you ask the inevitable question: “I wonder who THEIR parents were?”
We can report we have no idea who their parents were…yet. It’s the same issue as when we started: there are very few records from that area, fewer are indexed, and other researchers haven’t made the links we’d build off of yet. We searched on the text of Henry J’s write up, so we could properly identify and cite it, make sure we had all of the facts of what was a working tree cited and proper, and then attached it to our main tree so that anyone else who’s been struggling with this line can now build off our research.
Our final family tree after researching back one generation
Quite some time ago I was a guest on the podcast for Ancestor’s Alive’s (AncestorsAlive!) “From Paper to People” podcast, discussing the connection we can establish with our family tree by cooking our ancestor’s recipes (Episode 26: Emily’s Casserole). It was a pleasure to discuss culinary genealogy, and if you’re not listening to Carolynn’s show you should be (subscribe in all the usual places) as she’s one of the few genealogy podcasts that’s really caught our attention.
She came to our attention with a previous episode on a family recipe that helped tell a story from her family’s history (Episode 23: Johnny Mazetti, or is it Marzetti?), at the end of which she put out a call for others who had similar stories. While ours doesn’t trace actual family history, and in fact technically doesn’t come from our direct family per se, it really does tell a story, so we reached out and Carolynn invited us on.
The episode discusses a casserole that was made by family “friend” Emeline “Emily” Ott (1908-1992). Emily was “adopted” by Michael’s 2x great grandparents E.A. and Myra (Tradewell) Morse in Antigo, as told by family lore. Apparently E.A. owned rental properties and happened to see the conditions she was being raised in and brought her home to live with his family. She’s listed as as servant in the 1930 US Census and she would continue that role when E.A. and Myra’s only child Catherine (1911-1991) married, took over the Morse home, and have 5 sons. Emily was a key presence in Catherine’s home, essentially serving as a nanny for the 5 boys. She lived with Catherine long after the children moved out, and we all grew up with Emily as a constant in Catherine’s home. Each of the boys were deeply attached to her and we all visited her in assisted living apartment after Catherine sold the home and moved to her lake cottage in the 1980’s.
Emily’s Casserole
3 lbs. thin sliced potatoes
1 bad of carrots, sliced
1 medium-large sliced onion
1 ½ lbs. ground beef, browned*
1 can Cream of Celery soup
1 can of milk
Directions:
Butter dutch oven, and layer in potatoes, carrots, onions and ground beef. Mix soup with milk, and pour over top. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for an hour and a half.
Emily’s casserole was a staple for Michael’s dad growing up. It was a favorite of his father’s and mom got the recipe from Emily knowing it was always enjoyed, and easy to make. It became a part of his comfort food repertoire, just like it had been for his father, and it’s now a part of his children’s. (Editor’s Note: In the interest of transparency, the subject of this blog is not a big fan of this casserole and it’s not as regular in our family dinner rotation as it once was…but it we keep trying!)
Another historical recipe, taken from the boxes of recipe cards inherited when Michael’s Grandmother Mandy passed away, detailing her grandmother’s sourdough starter…with potatoes!
That a dish named for Emily was one of the comfort foods for Michael’s grandfather and great uncles when they were children tells us a lot about our family history. Emily was like a sister to Grandma Leonard, but never too much like a sister. She was always an employee from her first day in the household, first for the Morse family, and then for their daughter who was very close in-age. It was an interesting dynamic that wasn’t fully apparent to the grandchildren of Catherine, but it runs deeply through the fabric of today. She had a deep, emotional impact on us, but she wasn’t family…but she was, even if she was an employee.
We’ll feature Emily in more detail in a future post, but today take a listen to Carolynn’s amazing podcast, where she helps pull the details of this story out…and shows how sometimes a casserole isn’t just a casserole!
We’re willing to bet every family historian and genealogist has stories of areas where there isn’t the level of documents you’d find in other areas. Sometimes it’s a County where there was a devastating fire at the courthouse that destroyed every Vital Record and Probate/Property record before a certain date. Or it’s societal like if you’re searching for African American Vital Records in the South before 1905 or so, there was a concerted effort post-Reconstruction to focus on white records only. Other times it can be the “Manifest Destiny” states had European settlers long before any Federal/State government was established, and then when the States were formed formal Vital Record collection often lagged.
For our family there is no area in the United States that’s a more pernicious, more complete, black hole than the Upper Hudson River valley of New York from 1780-1840. When you’re looking for records in Greene, Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Albany, Rensselaer, Schoharie and Delaware County, every one found can feel like a miracle.
as Grandpa Ken Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
Contributing factors
There’s not a lot of empirical research on what causes this gap. It’s known to other researchers, but there’s no consensus on why. In our experience, there seems to be several unique factors that created this void of information:
Late collection of Vital Records on the County/State level
While the area was partially settled by Europeans going back to the 1600’s, when the Dutch left and Americans started their migration around the Revolutionary War. Migration picked up with the Mohawk Wars pushing Native residents off their land in the late 1700’s, but you see counties like Greene not collecting birth and death information until it becomes a statewide requirement in 1880. That’s true for most of these counties, and they didn’t capture all “required” records until 20-30 years after that. By then they had over 100 years of settlement with no centralized record collection. By comparison, our home county of Racine in Wisconsin was first settled in 1835 and Marriage records were collected by 1837, Deaths by 1853, and Births by 1876.
The area was often a migration waypoint
A pattern we see repeatedly is a family born in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Downstate New York migrate to the region around 1780-1800, establish a farm and then several of their children (or Grandchildren) migrate further West to Ohio, Michigan, or Wisconsin and establish their family histories in the new location. Almost invariably their records like oral histories, family bibles, etc. omit details of their Eastern families and the few church records, etc. will maybe list a birth/baptism record in an area in New York, but nothing further because marriages and deaths occur in other states.
Churches were numerous, and consolidation of records seems rare
New York in the late 18th and early 19th Century was a hotbed for the Second Great Awakening in American religion (Link), and while it doesn’t seem that “new” churches/denominations were as prevalent in this area as Western New York, it does appear that every village had it’s own congregation of each of the more established faiths (Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist, Methodist, etc.) but as these communities grew and contracted, the local church seems more likely to end than to merge with a neighboring congregation. This leaves a lot of records that were lost to history, or which were locally held and not collected in larger Church records. The Family Search library is full of these small congregational records, often collected by amateur family historians and published locally…which limits their availability.
An example of the fragmented church records from the Hudson River Valley: a list of Vital Records from two Schoharie County, NY churches, collected in 1918, typed and indexed in 1999, and only available at the LDS FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City, Utah
The interest in genealogy by the public at-large started a Generation after the children/Grandchildren of the original European settlers in this area had moved on
Many of the self-published Family Histories that become more common in the mid-1870’s (tying in with the US Centennial) and remained a Genealogy staple into the 1940’s. These were compiled long after many of the children/grandchildren of the late 1700’s settlers had moved out of the area. The popularization of Genealogy as a hobby really kicked off with the ubiquitous “vanity” publications that became a staple starting around 1876. You start to see books like “History of Greene County, New York : with biographical sketches of prominent men” (published in 1884) which were collections of publicly available Vital/Historical records, knitted together as a narrative (often by local historians hired by the publisher), and included biographies of any “notable” family that paid the requisite fee to have their family history published (that they themselves drafted and submitted to the publisher). Because the biographies were self-submitted, they are often a wonderful almost first-hand listing of parents, marriages, and children but only for the families of means that stayed in that area. Similar books were published in the locations these New York children/grandchildren migrated to, but they rarely list more than the county of their birth (at best) and we’ve never found one that listed details on their parents of siblings back home.
Another way this manifested is that during this rise in interest of family histories, there’s numerous examples of individuals who dedicated years to collecting various local records into what now might be the only surviving data on birth/marriage/deaths. Lists like the Barbour Collection and James Arnold’s 21 volume “Vital records of Rhode Island 1636-1850″ largely don’t exist for this region. Part of that is because there are no central collections to reference, part of that is because by 1880 most County local historians don’t have the experience or people to provide pre-1840 information about the area. Additionally Vital Records were just starting to be gathered by governments.
An example
Many of our most stubborn brick walls are related to families that migrated to Wisconsin from this area of New York, and we have little to no information on them before the migration. Our Tradewell, Yeoman, Place, and Blackmar lines all dead-end in the Mohawk Valley and have resisted our best efforts.
Our most recent example is the Blackmar line, which we discovered after we were able to prove our Yeoman line back one generation after 2 years of research (story coming soon!)
Once we broke through the Yeoman brick wall and first identified William and Lucinda (Blackmar) Yeoman from Greene County, New York as our 6th GGP we celebrated for about 3 minutes before we wondered “who are their parents?”.
Given the pain we had on the Yeoman line, we knew breaking down William’s parents was going to be a major challenge, but we decided that “Blackmar” was unique enough of a last name to take a quick look and see if we could identify her lineage. But, we’re searching in the Hudson River Valley Black Hole so of course we found literally nothing.
The only Blackmar from New York in right timeframe was Cain Blackmar who is in the 1790 US Census living in Dutchess County. We found Cain in the 1800 US Census, as well as the Federal tax records for 1801 and 1802 and that’s it. There is no records of his family, his wife, or his children in New York. It’s a hot lead that Lucinda likely is Cain’s daughter, but it can be nothing but a guess.
Searching Ancestry for Cain Blackmar immediately brought up one of the self-published family histories that, as we mentioned above, were pretty common in New England. We eventually found two, both published in the early 1930’s, whose authors both traveled the region and found 1000’s of local records from Massachusetts and Rhode Island then published detailed (but unsourced) family trees. Just like that we were able to back from Cain to his ancestors going back to arrivals in 1630. We can go back 6 generations from Cain in Rhode Island, but we have essentially nothing on Cain or his children in New York.
We had a complete line back to Hannah Yeoman (1796-1865) as soon we started charting our family tree. But getting from Hannah to her mom took 10 years, including 2 years of intensive research given the limited resources from the Hudson River Valley. After another 6 months of research we have only a guess on her father. There are zero records relating to that father’s wife (FamilySearch’s global, single Family Tree has his spouse listed as “Mrs. Cain Blackmar”), but since he’s from Rhode Island we can effortlessly trace him back to his English ancestors in the 1590’s.
This does not meet the Genealogical Proof Standard
This leaves us with a new brick wall merely because this family was in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1800’s. Just one generation in upstate New York and this branch became impenetrable. But, as Grandpa Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
[One quick note: As always, we receive no financial benefit or consideration for any product or service we review/recommend/discuss here. Everything we discuss is our opinion alone, and we talk about it because we use it.]
Ancestry has recently made a major update to their Ethnicity estimates, and combing how their notion of “ethnicity” changes with the cultural wariness of the “accuracy” of consumer DNA tests makes one thing clear: as a community of serious researchers, we need to be the voice of reason when it comes ethnicity/genetic admixture and call it out for dubiously valuable, largely inaccurate parlor trick that it is.
Here’s why we say that:
Ethnicity cannot be tested for. Ever.
Ethnicity is a social construct. Period. If we look at any test, any genealogical tree or other determination it will not build a social link to ones ancestral background. Using his father as an example, despite being able to trace 12.5% of my 3xGGP to Ireland, and despite Ancestry’s admixture pointing to an Irish background, I am not Irish. I visited Ireland as an American…a very obvious American. As will Michael when he visits. Nor will he be mistaken for Beninian when we visit Benin. We are Americans, all with European ancestors, some with African ancestors as well, but even with a perfect admixture that could pinpoint our ethnic ancestors exactly…we’re still not German, or Cameroonian, or English/Irish, etc. You can’t scientifically test for it, and DNA gives you no indication of how someone identifies ethnically. And that’s important, because Ethnicity is only about how someone identifies themselves and/or how others identify them…it’s not based on a gene. Neither is race, but that’s another rant for another day.
We need to voice a supportable, honest, accurate narrative of what commercial DNA is, and what’s valuable in it, to drive continued testing. A narrative that will continue after the “ethnicity” emperor is shown to have no clothes.
all of the major providers target who your genetic ancestors were 800-1000 years ago. Even those of us with great trees rarely go back to 1000-1200 AD…and we doubt there would be much value in anyone researching our 28th great grandparents
It’s not honest
All DNA testing companies, especially 23andMe and Ancestry, are for-profit enterprises that have a strong incentive to grow their number of DNA tests. The larger the test database, the more money the companies charge to sell access to your data. This isn’t to say they are selling personally identifiable data, the data is largely de-identified and aggregated, but it’s YOUR data…and it’s very, very valuable. 23andMe survives almost entirely on the revenue generated from your data, and it’s likely Ancestry is generating a large amount of their revenue from your DNA data as well. And no one’s advertising “come test with us, we are selling to great causes like Michael J. Fox Foundation” [23andMe], they are basing their sales pitch on the shiny bauble that gets the tests in the door: Ethnicity and pretty graphs. The more we play into the ethnicity pitch, the less credibility we’ll have when the public learns ethnicity is a sham.
It’s not a genealogical tool
Ethnicity (as determined by genetic admixture), has almost no genealogical or family history value, and the results will never break a brick wall or significantly add to your family’s stories. First, all of the major providers target who your genetic ancestors were 800-1000 years ago. Even those of us with great trees rarely go back to 1000-1200 AD…and we doubt there would be much value in anyone researching our 28th great grandparents. We have over 1 million 18th GGP’s. Admixture doesn’t rank even among the top 20 tools we use to build our trees, and it doesn’t deliver us any value.
The biggest red flag from Ancestry’s last update was this: in 2018 they increased the reference samples from 3,000 tests to 16,000. Today they are using just over 56,000 samples. They have literally spent the last decade selling “ethnicity” to the general public as a great reason to build Ancestry’s test database, even though the entire house of cards was built on as little as 3,000 reference samples. Even at 56,000 total samples, some of their localities have just a handful: Ireland has 794, Korea is 280, and Nigeria is 569. There is little statistically valid data that be gleaned from a handful of total samples as they relate to our genetic ancestors 1000 years ago. Again, we each had MILLIONS of ancestors 30 generations ago…and to use this few samples to map “all” genetic admixtures just demonstrates the shoddy science that underpins this process. Even as Ancestry has grown to 56,000 samples, it’s a ridiculously small sample…assuming those samples were each perfectly tied to a region/culture 1000 years ago. “Ethnicity” is just enough science to seem valid enough to be scientific…and just scientific enough to justify the pretty graphs that facilitate the selling of more tests.
It’s hurting genealogy, and it will ultimately turn the public off of genetic DNA testing
YouTube is rife with videos of the general public discussing their “inaccurate” DNA tests, with the testee going into great detail about how they know their Ethnicity and when they see something they don’t expect the test must be wrong. There are now new discussions everywhere with people questioning the entire testing process when the “results” can be changed so dramatically by a change by Ancestry. Ancestry is aware of the strain this update is having on the general public, and we can see the efforts they’re making to try and calm people as they go through the update. There are explanations, surveys, etc. to try and make sure the public doesn’t freak out about these changes. It’s all just adding more weight to the idea that these tests aren’t accurate/reliable. Since the entire business case for the public taking these tests has been “ethnicity”, once that’s being exposed as the subjective “art” that it is, the reason people are testing will be questioned. We will hit a tipping point where our relatives are going to think of DNA testing as a “scam” that’s of no value/dangerous, and it’s going to make the process of getting tests that much harder.
So, what can we do? What impact can we have? Honestly, not much…at least not immediately. But, as the people serious about genealogy we can start being the voice of reason and begin to lay out a better justification for why the public should test, even if the focus of the commercial testing companies is only on adding more samples to their databases. If the thought-leaders and respected voices in the communities turn their back on genetic admixture, that will eventually drive the discussion.
To that end, here’s our suggestions:
Stop discussing “ethnicity” as a testable value – Push back on this basic premise and start to educate the public on why DNA tests have no value as it relates to how they identify ethnically.
Don’t give genetic admixture a place at the table – We should no more engage in admixture as a point of genealogical value as we phrenology. They both sound scientific, and their proponents would like them to be seen as science, but neither are science. Even making an anti-admixture discussion elevates it to a “con” in a pro vs. con debate. We need to stop engaging in a debate of equal positions with admixture.
Develop other reasons the general public, and our relatives, should submit tests – The tens of millions of tests in various databases have a HUGE value to the genealogical community, and we all benefit as more tests are added. We need to voice a supportable, honest, accurate narrative to drive continued testing…one that will continue after the “Ethnicity” emperor is shown to have no clothes.
Be honest with our relatives as they test and help them, and the general public, understand how these tests play into the for-profit world – Those who take tests aren’t purchasing a product, they are the product. 23andMe and Ancestry needs those tests to make a profit, and it’s the only reason why they offer these tests. Let’s discuss that, and what we get in return, to level set everyone’s expectations. If we don’t set these expectations, some scandal will do it for us, and when negative public opinion sets in, we likely will lose the value of having non-experts testing. All genealogy is a trade off of what you’d like to get from the research and what the people providing their services want to get from your research (see our piece Dancing with the Devil: The Tradeoffs of Modern Genealogical Research), so let’s be honest with those who trust us.
Bottom line is that we can see how the reality of DNA testing doesn’t match the perception of the testing public, and all eggs are in the “ethnicity” basket. As that basket starts to fray, we can either be a part of the rational message that keeps this testing world moving forward, or we can be reactive and wish we could go back to the “good old days” when people were testing without us having to fight for each one.
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