When I logged on to the Ancestry.com account a week or so ago, and found an interesting item waiting.

It was from ThruLines, a tool Ancestry offers that reviews the family tree that you have compiled, compares it to others seeking overlaps, and then cross-checks against DNA results. In this case it notified me that I have a DNA with several people who also appear to share a common ancestor, my great-great-great grandfather, John Galt.

This seemed to mean that we are related on paper, according to our respective family trees, confirmed by DNA results.

The most interesting thing for me is that two of the three matches appear to be part Maori, and I’ve been searching for clues about how I came to have lots of distance Maori DNA cousins. So this latest item seemed to be a breakthrough.

I quickly sent off emails seeking to share info on what appear to be our family ties.

One person responded. According to our family trees, it appears that Amy’s mother can also trace herself back to the same John Galt, born around 1770.

Aha, I thought. This explains it. One of John Galt’s daughters, who would have been my grandmother’s aunt, married and ended up in New Zealand, and then over a couple of generations married into Maori families.

It seemed like I had finally identified a family path that accounts for at least some part of my present day Maori DNA matches.

But then my whole theory broke down.

In her next email, Amy explained that she and her mother had done the Ancestry DNA test. The test results confirmed that Amy and I are somewhat distantly related, as Ancestry’s ThruLines had predicted.

However, surprisingly, I did not match her mother’s DNA.

So this means that despite the paper trail leading from Amy’s mother back to John Galt, I must be related to Amy through her father’s side of the family. His mother (Amy’s grandmother) was half-Maori, similar to my grandmother, who was half-Hawaiian.

I don’t know if my search for an identifiable link to that Maori line is back to square one, but it sure feels like it.

It underscores for me just how tricky this DNA/genealogy business can be, and how tricky it can get when the paper trail diverges from the DNA record.