About Discovering New Ancestors
About Discovering New Ancestors
About Discovering New Ancestors
The DNA Story
Talk to any professional genealogist and you'll likely as not encounter a tale of "What I did before I did what I do now…" — and my story is no exception: Graduate studies in classical music composition at two of New York City's elite institutions lead to twenty years of corporate consulting, running my own Information Technology firm in Manhattan.
While some might perceive a disconnect amongst composing modern music, business process management, and genealogy, their common denominator for me has always been abundantly clear: problem solving! — the principal differences being in the balance of analytic to creative thinking employed in each field.
My genealogy journey began in the mid-2000's, when I realized that the people and places of my youth wouldn't necessarily be present in the same way for my son. My sense of wonder, which ultimately became a personal addiction, increased each time I learned something about my family which no living person knew — and the thrill of rescuing and aggregating these diatoms of information adrift in the tide of history turned a casual interest into a full-time hobby, culminating in the authorship of a history of my maternal grandmother's family — a labour of love which continues to this day.
Like many genealogy enthusiasts, I tested my DNA soon after Ancestry introduced their testing service, and have noted with pleasure an increase in the number of tested participants in their DNA roster. The abundant matches to my own kit eventually began to yield tangible results: connections which augment and extend my tree beyond what might be obtained using conventional document-based research.
Of course, another function of genetic genealogy is to expose the discontinuities in one's ancestry, where documented lineage diverges from biology, and my own experience has borne this out: stray, unaccounted-for matches to my test kit eventually accumulated to the point where they could no longer be ignored, or discounted as errors in the research of others. Ultimately, these genetic points of light became constellations which revealed truths about my ancestry that none of my cousins might have ever suspected — revelations which transformed my relationship to both my ancestral family and with the field of genealogy itself.
It was this transformative process which lead me to establish Discovering New Ancestors : to bring the wholistic methodologies developed in the course of my own investigations to bear upon the challenges faced by others — and to develop new tools in the emerging fields of Bioinformatics and Genealogical AI. To this end, we have filed patents for three proprietary processes: CMA, AASK, and SMD — with more on the way!
Many of us bring to genealogy an essential and undying curiosity, only to lose our way when besieged by billions of records or amongst a sea of DNA linkage. Nevertheless, while the answers we seek are often staring us straight in the face, finding the right answers begins with asking the right questions!
I welcome you to the next part of your journey — with a little help from your friends at DNA.
In fellowship,
