You’ve hit a brick wall – say with an ancestor who flourished (don’t you love that word) in the early 1800s. You have excellent evidence connecting he or she to their spouse, children, neighborhood and a couple of migratory stops in their earlier life. But they seem to have been dropped by space aliens into Kentucky, Vermont, Illinois, Georgia or wherever that first bit of evidence was recorded. Their F.A.N. is hard to trace and doesn’t appear to give any solid leads to a point of origin. Their kinship groups are non-evident. Their F.A.N. in this first location is not the same as in their next historical location. What to do….what do to?
Well for many genealogists in today’s world there is DNA testing. And often there is a real break through. But DNA testing isn’t a brick wall busting miracle. Each of the tests has limitations, drawbacks and strengths. The most successful “Brick wall destruction by DNA testing” scenarios that I have seen are those where there is a possible set of ancestors – a kin group with at least a couple of brothers or sisters or possible uncle/son/nephew groupings. And leaving aside King Richard III (because after all, how many of us have an exhumed body of an ancestor we can test and compare to their known siblings known descendants) the most successful cases seem to range within about 4-5 generations or roughly a brick wall question in the 1850s or later 1840s. There are only a handful of situations where I’ve seen evidence provided for older brick wall questions and those are usually proving an already postulated connection that had shaky documentary evidence.
Of course I haven’t seen every DNA test result ever. And I am not a DNA expert. But it seems to me as if DNA is an excellent tool for a limit range of applications and not the equivalent of a Swiss army knife. And of course I am simplifying because y-DNA, mt-DNA and at-DNA are all useful in different ways and for different problems with different layers of complexity. And those uses are always being refined. But how could DNA help when you have a man who appears to have no kin – no brothers or uncles who would leave descendants to test and compare y-dna? How do you test mt-DNA when the first female ancestor you have is the brick wall and you already know her descendants pretty well. And what do you do with at-DNA when your brick wall is 250+ years in the past – at least 7 generations behind you?
Finally what do you say when cousins insist that “the DNA test has already solved this problem – just look at what XXX person posted on their DNA results page – pointing to a page where someone unknown but related via a y-DNA result has uploaded their “speculative family tree” with a suggested undocumented ancestor on the other side of the brick wall (see y-DNA comments in above paragraph.) Suggestions anyone?