YOURDNA WORKSHOP IF AT FIRST you don't succeed
DNA Advisor Karen Evans loves helping fellow family historians piece together the puzzle of the past using DNA. To follow Karen is going to share some of the mis-steps and mistakes she made when she first began exploring her DNA test results and she hopes this will help to make your DNA journey quicker and smoother as a result.
Making DNA work FOR YOU
I like to think that us family historians have some amazing qualities.
We are smart, resourceful, tenacious and enjoy the puzzles our ancestors left us. We will spend hours searching for one piece of information, (and are ecstatic when we find it) and lose hours following the line of our two times great-grandmother’s brother who emigrated to Australia. However, many people are ‘afraid’ of DNA.
When I was teaching I worked with an extremely intelligent and experienced colleague
who was terrified when our school introduced interactive whiteboards – she worried needlessly that one press of the wrong button would blow up the expensive technology. Your DNA results, similarly, are impressive, but they are provided to you in a robust format: so, go ahead – try out all the shiny things your DNA testing site offers, and you will not be able to break it.
The groups you create, the filters you apply, the notes you make, the hypothetical tree you build to try and work out how you and your matches ‘fit’ – all these tools and facilities can always be cleared or reset.
When I first received my test results several years ago, I did so many things that didn’t work, wasted time and confused me! Here are some of my fails, but also what you can do to use these situations as a stepping stone to move your research forward.
“My DNA results are in and I just don’t get it”
There are lists of names and no surnames you know, with lots of numbers with new terminology. It is tempting to look at the ethnicity estimate and then step away. You don’t want to spend precious time learning ‘science’ when you could be using the resources you know and love so well. But that’s the point.
When you first looked at a census document it would have been a list of names and numbers and, worse still, names and numbers which may not have been relevant to your family at all. However, you started at the basics, understanding more as time went on. With DNA you don’t have to understand it all, you can start with the basics of your test results.
What can I do?
• Explore: Give yourself time to look at the test. I tend to dive in a
