On this DNA day, I sat through a webinar hosted by “Your DNA Guide” and Diahan Southard did warn us that this will have lots of advertising of their products and services. I enjoy her webinars and decided, that was okay I would stay.
She did review her Dot System for sorting matches and how
her products/services help along each step of the process. Anyway, she was
talking about Best Know Matches (BKM) and how we should identify one BKM for each
of our great-grandparents. This is four different people for four different branches. Something
just clicked for me.
I decided to look at my matches and see if I can identify a best-known
match for each of my great-grandparents. This is a 2nd Cousin who descends
through of the siblings of my grandparents. Since I use the note field on
AncestryDNA, I put who my Most Recent Common Ancestor and my actual
relationship to this match in that note, it was very easy for me to review if I
have such matches.
As I was going through my list, as usual, I became distracted by a match to possibly my 3rd great grandfather, Johann Wolter. I say possible, because my ancestor, his daughter Dorothea Louise Wolter death certificate listed a Johann Wolter as her father, but I haven’t been able to find anything else about him. Until one of my unknown matches who was matching one of my known Dorothea Wolter descendants, had a male Wolter in his tree.
Dorothea Wolter’s youngest child was born in Beaver Dam,
Dodge County, Wisconsin and my matches Wolter was also born in Beaver Dam. I
did some old fashion genealogy research to build back my match’s tree. The Wolter
in my matches tree, appears to be the nephew of my Dorothea. I say appears to
be, because the nephew’s father is a couple years younger than my Dorothea.
When I add the nephew’s father to my tree as the sibling of
my Dorothea and then build down the tree to all the twelve matches who are a
close relationship to my unknown match; the suggested relationships shown by
AncestryDNA matches the actually relationship that my genealogy program says we
should be.
Of course, I still need to prove Dorothea’s relationship to
this assumed brother. Some might say
that I jumped the gun adding the assumed brother, however, I am hoping that the
AncestryDNA system, will help identify more people who are related to this
brother and perhaps I will find more siblings.
Remember to have fun and Just Do Genealogy!
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