I enjoy a good genealogical mystery book and have kept up with M. J. Lee’s Jayne Sinclair series. I was surprised to find The Salford Sioux is the 11th in the series – I’ve read them all but I haven’t done a review in a while.
Jayne Sinclair is a solitary Manchester-based genealogist who hasn’t much interest in hobbies or a personal life. She’s a workaholic and drinks too much coffee. In this book, she’s so intrigued by the prospect of a sibling pair having Native American DNA that she is willing to take the case on for free* and work on it in record time because the clients want to know before they go on holiday!
Spurious premise aside, I enjoyed the story. Martin Lee always does good research for his books and this one is no different. There’s a brief exploration of Irish ancestry and he makes good reference to the correct sources. However, as a professional genetic genealogist, I find it mad that Jayne would ignore the clients’ Ancestry results and match list in favour of uploading to Gedmatch and only using that for the DNA part of the research. Never mind the working for free part!
I like Martin’s books and they’re a fun, easy read. You can get them on Amazon.
*Lots of genealogists including me do take on pro-bono cases or offer advice for free but generally want to earn enough money to live on too! Sometimes people email me with a request that is so simple for me to fulfill that I couldn’t bear to charge them.