Monday, November 15, 2010

Oh cousin, who art thou?

23andme has a thing called Relative Finder which allows us to discover, among all the people who had their DNA analyzed by them, which are our "genetic cousins" - and also gives us the estimated proximity of that family relationship. But, for obvious privacy reasons, they don't reveal those persons' identities, and we are required to send them an invitation if we wish to contact them. Once we know who they are, we can proceed to try and compare paper trails and see if we have any known ancestors in common.

That's what I did with the one person estimated by RF to be my second cousin
(which would mean we have a set of great-grandparents in common): I sent her an invitation to contact me. She replied saying she accepted contact, but still didn't tell me who she was (did she forget to do it, did she not know how to do it, did she not wish to do it? I really don't know). But I still only know about her that she is a female and that her maternal haplogroup is N1b2. And I have no way to do anything else. I wrote her back several other messages, the last one on November 8, but still no answer. It's frustrating.