Doing some genealogy tonight…

Father of an aunt has always been mysterious, he disappeared without a trace. I probably found him in a WWII draft record, but after that he disappears again. Someone attached a record to him of a man by a different name - yet another case of someone who was trying to not be found?

Some people do not want to be found.

Other people may have wanted to be found but they were too poor and illiterate.

DNA matches can always be a source of surprise and confounding counterfactuals: my mother gets matches that are undoubtedly from her colonial Scottish immigrants. Some of these people are just not well documented. After the English cleared the land of the Scots of actual Scots, so many of them ended up in the colonies.

If said people were not somebodies in the Scottish clans, they just don’t have records by which to sort them out.

So many of these people are the ancestors of the white folk of the US South, and not only explain the Southern accent(s) but also the deep rooted culture of not trusting outsiders.