Understanding Your DNA,
with Dixie Hansen
Dixie will share details of a handful of her most interesting projects, including:
- A grandson’s search for the parents of his grandfather, who was an 1897 orphan train rider
- An adoptee’s discovered bio-father whose photo, when discovered, was a scary-looking mug shot
- The answer to the question of whether the parents who raised one of my clients might actually have been her grandparents
- The happy research shortcut which occurred when an adoption agency accidentally forgot to redact the full name of an adoptee’s birth mother from the “non-identifying information” we requested.
- The time that an anticipated missing half-brother of a client strangely turned out to be a half-sister
- More often than you might expect, using DNA to answer a client’s specific question about one ancestral line (e.g., “Can you confirm that I have Cherokee blood?”) and, along the way, uncovering a more unexpected and astonishing answer to a never-in-a-million-years-asked question about their much more immediate family.
In the course of sharing DNA stories, Dixie will introduce many of the strategies, techniques, and resources involved in genetic genealogy research. On the side, she is more than happy to receive referrals for new DNA-related probes. Feel free to reach out. Dixie says that although she works on a strictly volunteer basis, she admits that she has occasionally been known to accept a bottle of generic three-buck-chuck wine to celebrate the successful conclusion of a search.
Dixie Hansen is a long-time member (and former secretary) of the Norwegian-American Genealogical Association and is a family historian who, especially since retirement, has fully embraced the hobby of a volunteer DNA-focused research for others… helping friends, family, and external word-of-mouth referred “clients” to identify missing family members (sometimes generations back) who are unknown due to closed adoptions, mystery fathers, untraced grandparents, and any number of other family structure complications.
Her research involves detailed genetic genealogy scrutiny of a client’s DNA match list always paired with tried-and-true traditional family history research methodology and lots of downward tree building.
To date, Dixie has conducted 44 such family-mystery investigations, usually to successful conclusion (if not to a complete solve, always at least “closing in”). The stories that she’s uncovered in the process are often fascinating, both in pulling back the curtain on the sometimes-secreted complications of “broken” families as well as in the convoluted research paths traversed to uncover biological truths.
Dixie is necessarily respectful of the many ethical and privacy issues of conducting this kind of research - especially because missing family members are often real “living and breathing” people as are most DNA matches. Digging in is not for everybody. She is very careful before undertaking a new project, to make sure that her potential client understands the process she uses, is aware of (and is willing to accept) the emotional risk of unexpected DNA discoveries, and knows that she will leave them in full control of the decision on what to do (if anything at all) with the information learned.
This will be a hybrid meeting, available in-person and via Zoom. N-AGA members will be sent a Zoom link prior to the meeting.
