It all started a couple of
years ago, when my sister suggested I sign up for one of these DNA
tests, for genealogical research, she said.
Bonnie inherited our mother’s genealogy gene. She also inherited boxes and boxes
of my mother’s notes, compiled
before computers streamlined much of the
tedious process of
tracing
a family history.
Bonnie’s added her own meticulous
research tracing my
dad’s Lind family in
Scotland, and she hoped
my DNA
test would help confirm some
guesses and resolve some issues
dating back a number of
generations.
Here’s her theory in a nutshell, from a email to a person
believed to be
a very distant cousin.
I have
been researching our Linds since the early 1990′s
and
have a theory that all the
Linds in
the villages straddling
the
West Calder/Carnwath line
(also the county
line between Lanarkshire/Midlothian/West Lothian — yes, time to get
out your map of Scotland) are
related somehow. There are some gaps where the link
comes a generation before those who died before
Civil Registrations
began in
1855, but
in general
the theory holds.
There’s
lots more, but you get
the idea. Bonnie even contacted the
moderator of a forum for sharing DNA results
and
information
from
people with presumably related surnames–Lind, Lynn,
Linn, etc., and arranged
to sign me up with them in advance.
So after months of
stalling, I finally paid my money and got
a test kit from Family
Tree DNA. You just
scrape
the inside of your cheek,
send in
the sample, and wait several
weeks for the test results. The
company then notifies you of
every
genetic match. Don’t
get too excited. A lot of these are
very distant matches and
of little interest, unless, as one commenter put it, you’re interested in your caveman
relatives. There are varying degrees of
genetic matches,
from extremely distant to the
kind
used for paternity testing.
We
expected that I would soon
be
getting the names and
contact info
from a bunch of distant Lind family cousins.
But here’s
where the science threw a curve
ball. At last count, I’ve been notified of more than
1,200
genetic matches found within the
Family Tree DNA database. Just two of them are
named
Lind, and one of those is John
Lind
from Hana, and we are pretty sure we know just
how we’re related (my
paternal grandfather and his grandfather or
great-grandfather were first cousins who left Scotland independent
of each other and came to the U.S.).
So now we have this mystery. Why
aren’t I linked by DNA
to any other Linds in the
database? Actually, I don’t know how many there are, but
there
are
enough to sustain one or
more of these discussion “projects” through Family Tree DNA.
We’re left to figure out how to
account for the negative
finding.
Bonnie had one theory:
In looking at
the list of surnames associated with R-M269, the
Glinn/Glynn/Glenn sequence
leaped out at me. I can
see that GL sound getting
slurred
into LINN or LIND. Think
how it SOUNDS, not how it
looks. Think how it
sounds based on variations
in dialect and accent.
Our Grandmother Lind’s
mother was Janet Greig. In
tracking
the Greigs I had
a terrible time until I found the baptismal entry
with
the surname spelling GARIG. Irish priest in Ayrshire??? Or a
priest from farther north or
east
in Scotland? Someone
whose ear was not
tuned to the guttural Ayrshire
brogue and I can
hear it happening. Glinn to Linn
to Lind is not
a long
jump.
Of course, another kind of jump
is
a possible
explanation. Someone might have “jumped the fence,” as they say. Or
maybe one of
my male
ancestors was adopted, raised by
a grandparent, or raised in
a hanai family, as was
common
in Hawaii.
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