Welcome to my blog. If you’re not interested in genealogy, my family tree or the identity of my 4th cousin 6 times removed, then you’re not going to get much out of this blog.

Six months ago I had no interest in genealogy whatsoever. That all changed when I saw one of those banner ads for the ethnicity DNA tests offered by Ancestry.com. Having a parent, grandparents and great-grandparents with surnames like Utlaut, Duesenberg, Biesemeyer, Duewel, Wessel, etc., my German heritage was not going to be much of a surprise.

One tablespoon of saliva and five weeks later, my DNA results revealed that I was indeed mostly German. But the rest of “me” was unexpected. Despite my English or Welsh last name “Trantham”, I had not one drop of Great Britain in me but instead found Scandinavia, followed by the Iberian Peninsula and then Irish — plus a trace of Africa North, Italy/Greece and Middle Eastern. Scandinavia?

Faced with my new ethnic reality, I contemplated changing my name to something that better reflected my multiple heritages: Dietrich Olaf Joaquin O’Trantham, or perhaps D.O.J.O. as a nickname.

But instead I became very distracted by my DNA matches — my genetic cousins — who’d also taken the DNA test on Ancestry.com but whose identities were hidden behind user names like “H.H.” and “bmwpower9”. Other than my dad’s first cousin, who I recognized immediately as “lmills369” I naturally didn’t know any of the others. But I wanted to know all of them. (They may not want to know me, but that’s beside the point!) Who are all these people who share my DNA???

So I dug out the two exhaustive family histories my mother created after she retired and got to work building out my family tree on Ancestry.com. She did a phenomenal job of telling me who my ancestors were and that’s helped me positively identify 62 of my DNA matches who have the same ancestors. We know how we are related because our family trees intersect at the same people. I can only imagine what my mom would have accomplished if she’d had the DNA test when she was conducting her research!

I have about 11,000 relatives in my family tree now. Every now and then, I come across someone interesting, noteworthy or infamous who is a distant cousin. Instead of posting the information on Facebook or sending it around in an email, I now have a place to share the information with my (known) family and my (new) family.

So, here we go.