Information and Connection

A few weeks ago my daughter’s biology teacher asked if I could give my presentation on DNA for her honors classes. It required putting a bit of a different spin in things and it got me thinking. The talk is meant to give genealogists a basic understanding of DNA so that they have the background information needed to learn more. With the students, it was almost the reverse. They had been studying DNA for weeks but probably knew nothing about genealogy.

With fellow genealogist, I point out that when we use documents, we need to go out and find them, then ask ourselves if the document is relevant, or if maybe it is only about a person who is somehow similar to the person we want. Once we’re reasonably sure that we have a relevant document, we can extract names, dates, and places from it. The students needed to understand that just because a genealogist has found documents, doesn’t mean they know how the documents fit together. Documents are often rich in personal information but poor when it comes to connections. (Not so surprisingly, I got questions about what kinds of documents genealogists use.)

DNA  complements those documents. At least when first starting out with DNA testing, we don’t need to go looking for DNA, it is something that we already have. We don’t need to ask if it is relevant, it is ours. What about information? DNA can’t tell us an ancestor’s name. It doesn’t come with a date. DNA doesn’t have a village name encoded into it. DNA doesn’t carry any of that information. Documents can be information rich but connection poor. DNA is all about the connections.

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