Here is a sad genealogy story told to me by a friend:
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It was a damp Tuesday evening in Chula Vista, the kind where the marine layer clung low and muffled the sounds of the city. Elias, a man whose world revolved around the meticulous dance of names and dates, sat hunched over his glowing monitor. Thirty years. Thirty years he had dedicated to tracing the tendrils of his family history, patiently coaxing whispers from dusty archives and deciphering faded script. His digital family tree, a sprawling oak of over 90,000 individual profiles stretching back fifteen generations or more in some ancestral lines, was his magnum opus, a testament to his unwavering dedication.
He knew their stories – the farmer in 17th century Cornwall who lost his wife to plague, the seamstress in revolutionary Paris who witnessed history unfold from her window, the Irish immigrant who braved the journey to America with nothing but hope and a worn leather-bound Bible. Each entry was more than just a name; it was a life lived, a piece of the intricate puzzle that was his grand ancestry.
His own surname branch, the one leading directly to him, was particularly detailed. He knew his paternal grandfather's profession, his grandmother's maiden name, the street they lived on. He had even unearthed a photograph of them, a sepia-toned image of a stern-faced man and a woman with kind eyes. And then there was his father, Arthur.
Elias had always felt a certain distance from Arthur, a quiet, reserved man who rarely spoke of his past. What little Elias knew, he had pieced together from fragmented anecdotes and official records. Arthur's birth certificate, his marriage license to Elias's mother – these were solid facts, anchors in the sea of his research.
But Elias, driven by his insatiable curiosity, had dug deeper into Arthur's lineage. He had painstakingly traced Arthur's father, his grandfather, back several generations, uncovering a lineage of hardworking laborers in the Midwest, and before that in Germany. He had felt a profound connection to these people, seeing echoes of their resilience in his own father.
Tonight, however, Elias was revisiting his autosomal DNA matches, something he did periodically to see if any new information surfaced. A new match had appeared, a close one, sharing an unusually high percentage of DNA. Intrigued, Elias followed the digital breadcrumbs, the shared ancestors pointing in a direction that made his blood run cold.
The names were unfamiliar, the locations wrong. This DNA match pointed not to the Midwestern laborers he had so carefully documented, but to a family with deep roots in Southern California, a family his father had never mentioned. As Elias delved further, cross-referencing birth records and census data, a devastating truth began to crystallize.
The man Elias believed to be his paternal grandfather, the stern figure in the sepia photograph, was not his biological grandfather. The lineage he had so meticulously constructed, the stories he had cherished, the connection he felt to those distant ancestors on his father's side – it was all based on a fundamental error.
His father, Arthur, the quiet man of few words, had carried a secret his entire life. Elias didn't know the circumstances, the reasons behind it. Perhaps Arthur himself hadn't known the truth. But the undeniable evidence of the DNA and the corroborating records painted a stark and heartbreaking picture.
Thirty years. Ninety thousand profiles. And at the very root of his own being, the branch that should have been the strongest and most certain, he had gotten it wrong. The weight of that realization crashed down on Elias, heavier than all the dusty volumes he had ever consulted.
The glowing family tree on his monitor, once a source of immense pride and connection, now felt like a monument to a profound and personal misunderstanding. The faces of his ancestors, stretching back through the centuries, seemed to look down on him with a silent knowing.
In the quiet stillness of his Chula Vista home, surrounded by the ghosts of generations he thought he knew, Elias felt a profound sense of loss. He had spent so long searching for his roots, only to discover that the ground beneath him was not what he had believed. The vast, intricate tree he had so lovingly built now bore a fundamental flaw, a poignant reminder that even the most dedicated search for truth can sometimes uncover a deeply sad and unexpected reality. The story of his family was richer, perhaps, but also irrevocably altered, forever marked by the silence of a father and the unexpected whisper of DNA.
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This story was created by the Artificial Intelligence tool Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, at my prompt for a story about "...a genealogist who built a large family tree back 15 generations with 90,000 profiles who got his father wrong." "Elias of Chula Vista" is fictional, but the scenario is possible for every one of our ancestors.
The lesson here is "It Could Happen To Me...Or To You." I have tried to approach research on every ancestor with this concern -- "is this right or wrong? Does it all make sense?" Fortunately, I haven't found a close DNA match (yet!) that disproves my family history research back through my 3rd great-grandparents. I do have some unsolved elusive ancestors, and some mystery DNA matches, but none closer than 4th great-grandparents (I think...). In the past, I have had to change my "current thinking" when faced with indisputable evidence that my hypotheses and/or conclusions were incorrect.
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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.
Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver
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