The waiting....

Today I was reviewing 23andMe matches and there were new matches in*.  Even better, there is a new predicted 2nd cousin match to my paternal grandmother who also matches me, my father, my daughter, and a known paternal "cousin". Of course, I immediately sent out sharing invites, and now I'm sitting here, waiting....just waiting...for them to accept (because we all know they are checking their email at 1 am right?)

They did have some surnames, and in fact, I'm pretty sure I know who their parents are. If I am right, this will be a relationship discovered through DNA, because I did not have their parents before, only their grandparents, and I went searching for more based on the one surname being likely to be a 2nd cousin to my grandmother. If this person is who I think they are then they are actually 2nd cousins once removed to my grandmother. My grandmothers's great grandparents John Thomas Lloyd and Grace Elizabeth Slocum would be the matches great great grandparents.

A few things strike me as interesting about all this:

- It appears so many people are testing now that many kits are getting what I call "natural matches", ie. a close relative didn't request the person to test, who are fairly close matches. Many of my kits now have a "natural match" that matches over 1%.

- Even really filled in trees can get matches that aren't yet in their genealogy database.  As I wrote above, I had this matches grandparents, but not their parents or the match or their siblings. 

- This new match falls in a part of my tree which was not proven until I had a suspected "cousin" test.  Without that family story on the alleged paternity of  Lillian Townsend, there would be little chance I would have ever figured out the connection.  To date, I have never found a single paper record indicating the father, but the DNA evidence is fairly conclusive in support of the family story.  

- These matches are solvable. When we aren't finding the connection it is likely because we aren't building the descendants of our ancestors down enough generations or we are missing ancestors, or an ancestor is not who we think they are (NPE)

- Waiting sucks.  No, really, it sucks.  Alot.  I hate waiting.


* It is possible there are still more matches coming in as not all my kits received new matches and that usually means they are still coming in from this batch