Andrew McKnight's Ancestories: Coaxing Family Stories Out of the Past

The last week of February has become an exciting time for genealogists each year, coinciding with the big RootsTech annual conference in Salt Lake City. It seems to have become customary for the big players in the business to roll out new products and features to maximize the splash with their target audience. This year it was two of the DNA companies that made big announcements, which might loosely be termed as "advances in big data analysis". Ancestry.com unveiled two new advances in their DNA matching service that clearly are taking the next steps in trying to connect dots between DNA evidence and records searching. While their new ThruLines feature is far from highly accurate in its connection suggestions, it generated some new clues for me that led to some exciting new discoveries. ThruLines were generated for most of my ancestors back to my 5-x great grandparents - literally nearly 60 sets of new specific clues to examine. The numbers were much smaller for MyHeritage...

Yeah, we've all got them. Those tales that grandma used to tell about being descendants of Robin Hood, and my grandfather's steadfast insistence that we were of Clan MacNaughton, are the ones that stick out for me. Most every family has its narratives, and many of them include myths and legends that are nearly impossible to verify. And as with most myths and legends, there is probably some kernel of truth somewhere within it, but what that truth is and how much its been obscured in the countless tellings and retellings... What those tales really are might be best described as identity totems. They are part of what we hold in the fabric of our family memory and story, and help us in how we describe ourselves. And as we dive into the deeper research of genealogy, we run the risk of unraveling that tapestry. It is important to realize that we are still who we are, whether or not those stories are 100% factually accurate. Learning that an ancestor was not all they were cracked ...