After Thanksgiving, I received another message from my “new” mystery cousin, Jessie.
She wished me a Happy Thanksgiving, and said that she sent a note to one of her cousins in NJ asking if any family members had been a med student in the 80s. It turned out that the only one who had been was female, so clearly that wasn’t the lead we were looking for. She mentioned that since she grew up in California, she had limited contact with the other branches of the family, and thus limited information. Jessie also mentioned that her father’s side of the family is Danish, which doesn’t seem to fit all that well with my predicted regional breakdowns provided by AncestryDNA, so that line was probably out, but that she saw some Canadian ancestry between some folks on her family tree and my Mom’s side of my tree. Aside from this, she suggested that I try filtering for our “shared matches”, and then shoot some of those folks a message. She gave as many details as she could throughout her message.
In reading her reply, I honestly just felt overwhelmed. I had been hoping against hope that Jessie would be the key to quickly unlocking this puzzle and finding the rest of my birth family, but when her response opened up more questions than answers (and the possibility that maybe this was a maternal match AFTER ALL), I was pretty bummed.
Looking back now (several months later), I realize that there are a lot more hidden gems of information in here than I originally realized.
At the time, I was still so new to DNA research and ignorant to how to conduct a search and put the puzzle pieces together. I’m still currently putting the remainder of my search on hold until I can catch up on writing/processing what has happened so far.
Also at the time, I was about to start a new job, a temporary but demanding (and soon-to-be-crazy-busy) position at a school through the end of the school year. I’ve never been very good at prioritizing my personal life over work life, let alone juggling the two, so, predictably, I feel into my old pattern of bottling up all the emotional shit I was dealing with and burying it to deal with at a later date.
Every now and again, I’d come up for air and conduct small late-night bursts of a search, usually when triggered by receiving some sort of notification from one of the genealogy platforms I was on. One such occasion was when I finally received my “23andMe” results, on December 17th.
The results were nothing shocking–according to this breakdown, I’m still 99.9% European, 86% “British & Irish”, 12% “Broadly Northwestern European”, and miniscule percents of random other things.
My new list of matches was definitely the most exciting part, although, still, I had no way of knowing which new matches were paternal verses maternal.