DNA Study

Have you been exploring new tools or techniques to help with your genealogy research? Have they helped you overcome any of your brick walls?

Despite being told that Ancestry DNA might not help with my more distant brick walls, I decided to take Diahan Southard’s DNA Study Group course. Diahan emphasizes that autosomal DNA can be particularly effective for tracing ancestors as far back as 3rd great-grandparents. Unfortunately, my brick walls extend further into the past.

However, I’m not giving up. I’ll be applying the skills I learned in the course to dig deeper into my Crawford and Smith ancestry. My focus will be on my 3rd great-grandparents, Nelson G. Crawford and his wife, Martha Smith. Nelson and Martha had eight children, and six of them have descendants, so I’m hopeful that exploring these lines will help me uncover more about their lives and heritage.

The first step is to identify what Diahan calls ‘Best Known Matches’ (BKM). By using Ancestry’s ThruLines feature for myself and my two brothers, I can pinpoint potential BKMs to focus on.

Since each BKM can have up to 100 shared matches, I need to focus on one to begin with. Looking at the centimorgan (cM) data, two of my brother’s matches seem like strong starting points. One shares 20 cM across a single segment but has a tree with only seven people. The other shares 25 cM across two segments and has a tree extending five generations. Although both lines are in my tree, I’m more familiar with the Rasey line (20 cM). Therefore, I’ll begin by exploring the ‘Rasey’ shared matches to help identify any unknown connections.

My next step will be to ensure that all ‘Rasey’ shared matches are properly labeled with their Crawford connections. Those who share 20 cM or more with my brother have already been labeled.

Thanks to ProTools, the list of shared matches has expanded. It now includes those who share less than 20 cM with my brother but share at least 20 cM with the ‘Rasey’ match.

I’ll be sharing my progress in future posts as I work through these matches and gain more insight into the process.