Henry Louis Gates' "Finding Your Roots" is, as ever, riveting this season. A key takeaway: as DNA analysis becomes an ever more prevalent and powerful tool of genealogical research, we all need to prepare ourselves for surprising discoveries that may overturn everything we thought we ever knew about our family lines.
It truly is always a matter of mama's baby, but daddy's maybe.
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You can spend years doing research on "your" family, only to discover, as I have done several times, that the family you imagine is your family isn't your family at all. I spent years accumulating filing cabinet drawers full of information about Virginia Lindsey families I thought were my relatives, but which turn out to have no connection to my own family —
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Which turns out, with DNA work done, to be an Irish Lynch family whose surname morphed to Lindsey when our immigrant ancestor, an indentured servant, came from Ireland to Virginia in 1718….
And now I find that my "Snead" family, on which I've worked for years — to get past a brick wall I could never get past, which tells you something right there — isn't genetically a Snead family at all, but an Edgeworth family.
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So far — spoilers! — in this season of "Finding Your Roots," Julia Roberts discovers (DNA and daddy's maybe) that she's not a Roberts at all, and the adorable Niecy Nash discovers similar "dirty pots and pans" in her family tree, while Carol Burnett is on pins and needles to find out which of her grandmother's six husbands is her actual biological progenitor, after a cousin tells Carol that the one for whom she's named was not actually her real grandfather.
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William Lindsey 