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Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing / Re: DNA to solve brickwalls?
« on: Sunday 14 April 24 18:00 BST (UK) »
So DNA does solve or help breaking down walls.
Yes, but that's very recent. Once you get further back, it's not so easy.
I have two groups of matches who match each other on my paternal side, and one on my maternal side. They are largely full of matches who don't have trees, or have private trees. The ones who have private trees don't turn up in any search for any locality my family lived in, and the few who have useful sized public trees usually turn out to be based in the States, and not have managed to cross the Pond yet.
And two of my paternal brick walls are in parts of the country which have no group of unknown matches to even look at. My great grandmother (an only child) came from Oxfordshire, and should have several matches of a reasonable size, but there's absolutely nothing from her locality at all.
Just not that simple, and very dependent on who has tested.
Hi
A lot of what you say is true about what you post about DNA, but you mention early further back usually pre 1837 census years and you talk of family trees as sources for pre known information on a family history.
What you have to remember if its hard for you to find & prove your family history it is most likely have been hard for them to have found it - so they copy other trees with the the notion that if a lot of trees have the same information, then it must be right. (Though there will be some accurate trees - they are very few provable, usually very rich family records or poor law records of the parish like overseers payments from the parish relief funds to the poor, or parish chest info and in between people of different classes like working or middle class folk - its pot luck on any information has survived.
Graveyard epitaph MI's help also deep research in archives and as an extra tool DNA helps also but its not an instant shortcut with info from family trees (But does help as a tool of many in the overhaul picture)
Added: With LDS religion ! the followers need to go back 6 generations of their family history out of necessity of their religious belief with family history DNA it is improving all the time for this for a reason
