Guest post by Jocelyn Brown
In his book, Ancestral
Journeys, Jean Manco of Plymouth University in the UK traced humanity’s
migrations and movements through Europe using DNA. It is a sign of how much the
technology has come along in the last few decades that such a book can be
written and a proper analysis of how modern humans and neanderthals might have
interbred to produce a 4% of our current DNA. However, for the family
historian, there has never been as much technology available to us to source
our own ancestors. For example, we have online platforms containing vast
records, we have cloud devices for communicating and sharing results, and we
have the fast developing DNA ancestry tests. However, are they all useful and
applicable?
Access to
Information
Prior to the rise of the Internet, family history research
meant first speaking to older family members to work out a current family tree
and to gain recollections from them, then going to various records offices and
painstakingly trying to work out using surnames a family tree. However, over
the last two decades records are being digitized as they are released, which is
making tracing family histories easier. The main problems faced by those using
platforms hosting this information is working out which one is the best and
most comprehensive and whether it is worth paying for one just to access a
single document you cannot gain elsewhere.
Making
Family History Collaborative
The above platforms are partly fueled by the rise of cloud
technology and storage. Families and photographers, for example, have found the
latter particularly useful for storing images and data on one service, but accessible from many devices. It’s also
allowed families to quickly share information and form a collaborative approach
to sharing both genealogy discoveries and ancestral photos and documents
gleaned from the above sites or through over methods. This means distant
families can work together still. That being said, some believe the technology
and social media make it more difficult for families to actually communicate. So with all tools, it’s about how
families use them which makes the difference.
DNA
Ancestries
Tracing the DNA journeys of our ancestors is fascinating.
They can confirm or discount ideas brought about through purely studying the
historical or archaeological record. For example, did the people move or did
their goods and cultures move? However, for you or me, the question is have our
ancestors always been from where we are now and where were they before our
oldest, traceable ancestor? Testing services such as 23andMe claim to be able to trace a person’s ancestors down the
ages. Many people have seen the adverts of shocked people finding out their
ancestry is quite different to what they suspected, however, it is worth
remembering that even a few generations past, most unique DNA is lost in a vast soup of the world’s ancestors, so it is difficult to firmly
discover our real past this way. It’s fun, but don’t believe it too much - our
ancestors will always be more varied than the results suggest.
