The DNA Doesn't Lie — And It Just Turned Everything Upside Down
I've been chasing the parentage of my third great grandfather, Michael Oliver Jenkins, for nearly twenty years. Twenty years! And if you've followed along here at all, you know this particular brick wall has had me banging my head against it more times than I can count. I even wrote a book about him — a book where I had to be very upfront about the fact that most of what we thought we knew about his origins was conjecture. That's how uncertain everything was. Well. Things have changed. A while back, a lovely young woman named Amanda Jenkins reached out to me on Ancestry. She'd found my dad's DNA results and all the research I'd posted, and she was curious about the family and all the rumors swirling around M.O. Jenkins' birth. When I looked at her tree, I just about fell out of my chair. Her father, Michael D. Jenkins, was a direct male descendant of M.O. — and he was still living. I explained to her that what I really needed more than anything was a Y-DNA...
