Is there a 12 Step program for genetic genealogy? Maybe!

Oh, no! Another DNA cousin has popped up!

I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the connection to another DNA cousin at all. In fact, I welcome all of them. It's just that every time I see that "We might be cousins" subject in the email, I know that I'll be spending some bunch of hours trying to sort it out. Right now it seems there are so many people testing with the Big 3 and then finding GEDmatch that I have to hustle to keep up.

I didn't even realize that I had a "problem" until I saw this blog article, "The Stages of Genetic Genealogy Addiction", by Roberta Estes that it all sunk in. Houston, I have a problem!

https://dna-explained.com/2016/07/06/the-stages-of-genetic-genealogy-addiction/

I can check them all off but have drawn the line at #7 and refuse to spend any more to get DNA relatives tested! Can't do it. Won't do it. Seriously, I just about have come to the point where I don't need to because the cousins are shelling out their own money to buy kits!

Happily, I've not gone the whole route to number 10. Not in a cab going somewhere and thinking about the next DNA match. But I am at 9, at home, thinking about the next DNA cousin. Hmm. Thanks, Roberta, for pointing this out;)

Great grandmother Moretta Workman Zeller with Gustav Zeller and sons Charles, Bert, and Gus Jr.

(Photo thanks to cousin Brenda. She's a peach!)

What!? AncestryDNA isn't going to provide segment analysis?! Say it ain't so!!

I have to stop my posts about recent adventures with the NSDAR and say a thing or two about this  recap of the 2014 (and first) Institute for Genetic Genealogy conference in Washington, D. C. by The Legal Genealogist which you can find here brought to us by Judy G. Russell. This is longish excerpt and I would rather use shorter (and less copyright offensive) clips but this is real important, so Judy I hope that you don't mind. Here's what she said in the opening paragraphs of her post about the conference and AncestryDNA's recent decision.

The Institute for Genetic Genealogy — brainchild of Tim Janzen and CeCe Moore — opened Friday with registration and three overview sessions on the testing companies. Attendees got a chance to take a look at information from AncestryDNA, 23andMe and Family Tree DNA in general, with some good general background information being offered.

There weren’t any surprises in that general info — except perhaps the depth of the genetic genealogy community’s unhappiness with AncestryDNA and its decisions (a) not to provide segment data to its customers and (b) to discontinue YDNA and mitochondrial DNA testing and to discontinue even providing links to results of those tests taken at Ancestry. Let’s just say that the unhappiness was abundantly clear during AncestryDNA’s presentation.

OK, do you get that? AncestryDNA will NOT be providing segment data. I thought they were going to. This is a major problem and I really do not understand why they wouldn't want to. We need that segment data.

So it works like this. If you did autosomal testing then you see the list of "cousin" matches. On AncestryDNA you might get to see the other person's tree if they have one there and if you're really lucky you might be able to get a hint about where you and the other person match and who your common ancestor might possibly be. There are problems with this. It is only matching both of your trees.

Here's what I mean. The other person got on your match list because the DNA matched to some degree stated as a percent and a guess about degree of cousin you might be to each other. The tree match is a separate thing and simply a search function on trees and has nothing whatsoever to do with shared DNA. Nothing.

If you want to know which portion of your DNA you share or have in common, you need to look at chromosomes. And that's the "real deal" when it comes to this DNA for genealogy thing. If you can't look at and compare chromosomes then you're just taking someone else's work that your shared match is at that ancestor Ancestry found on both trees. There's no proof. So if one of you has a big error on the tree, and that can happen, you might get an entirely false match.

Chromosome matching is the very best tool when it comes to working with DNA for genealogy. And don't we deserve to work with the best tools available? Sure we do. AncestryDNA, get your act together, man!


The URL for this post is:

GEDmatch is coming back real strong!

GEDmatch.com is my all out favorite tool when getting down to the comparison of cousins DNA results to see where we match. Was recently in touch with one of Mom's strong matches on AncestryDNA and even though we both have good healthy sized trees to look at, neither of us - nor the Ancestry matching function - could see where we matched! 3rd to 4th cousin, and no match on our trees...? Huh? Obvious conclusion: a big fat mistake on one of our trees.

Cousin Michael was the match. He's great to work with, replies quickly and with as much info as he has. When I told him about GEDmatch he popped on over and had his raw file uploaded in a flash. And now that GEDmatch is going again (and looks to be better than ever) his data was finished with the first phase of processing, called tokenizing, by days end and that means that our kits were available for one-to-one comparison. The full processing which allows one-to-many analysis will take longer.

Because that one-to-one comparison was quickly available I could see that his kit and Mom's kit had really juicy matches on three chromosomes. Here's what that looked like.

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
1	99733258	152971219	27.9	6363
6	1227564	9652130	21.3	2620
21	18580589	27602185	16.0	2435

Largest segment = 27.9 cM
Total of segments > 7 cM = 65.1 cM
Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 3.9

Then I took that information on over to my Farrell DNA Project spreadsheet and could see right away that he doesn't fit in there because there were no shared chromosome segments. My Farrell Project peeps do not match anywhere on chromosome 1 or 6, at all! And only one person even has even an inkling of anything happening on 21 and it's not on this particular segment.

So where does he fit? If not the Farrell line, which includes the surnames of House, Biggerstaff and Hartley too, then where on Mom's tree might he match. I went on over to Ancestry to check out Mom's Big Tree so that I could more easily visualize where the match could be and here's what I saw, with the candidate lines in the red box.

Click to enlarge.

The Williams, Price, and Whetstone lines are what we're after. Because Michael matches at about the 4th generation back, a list of the surnames and locations we're looking for is helpful.

Williams, Edwards, Price and another Williams are the surnames associated with Mom's paternal grandfather's line and they're all from Wales. None of Michael's ancestors are from Wales but that doesn't mean that there might not be a connection back before he can see, based on what's not on his tree. 

Mom's paternal grandmother's lines are from Wales - Thomas - but Mom's paternal grandfather's line - Price and Hill- are mostly form Virginia. Michael has a lot of folks from Virginia on his tree so this is a commonality that bears closer scrutiny.

Now we come to the Whetstones. They hail originally from Germany and then probably Switzerland and on to Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. I don't see anything hopeful there.

So it looks like we need to take a closer look at the Price and Hill lines from the earliest days of the Virginia Colony forward. And we especially need to look at any lines that aren't filled out to about the 5 generation mark.

Well that's the problem in a nutshell and how we'll proceed. Don't know how much luck we'll have but at least it's a way forward. What I need is some Williams DNA and I know where to find it. Cousin Andrew tested on 23andMe.com and so now I'm off to connect up again and ask if he'd be willing to upload to GEDmatch. It would be very helpful to have Whetstone DNA as well... but I have to figure out how to get that.

Hey, I just stumbled into another GEDmatch tool that helps me get an idea of Dad's DNA! Dad passed before all of this DNA for genealogy stuff got going. But now I see how to get it! I'll blog about that next time when I've had more time to explore this new-to-me GEDmatch tool.




The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/08/gedmatch-is-coming-back-real-strong.html

My top 5 DNA matching frustrations: a small rant to let off steam

Please excuse me but now I'm going to blow off some steam generated by frustrations having to do with DNA matches. Oh, yes, I understand that we all have frustrations in our lives and that in the big picture this is a minor blip on the old radar. But never mind because I need to rant for a minute. So here are my top five frustrations. Maybe you share some of them? All of them?

1. Private trees on Ancestry.com connected to AncestryDNA.
What the heck?! I see this beautiful match with 96% confidence (and maybe even a tempting shaky leaf) and the tree is private. I ask politely and cheerfully if we might be in contact, dear cousin, so that perhaps we can figure out where we connect... and then I never hear from them.
Here's what I'd like to suggest to these mystery cousins: put up a dummy tree with bare-bones data, such as names, years, and locations. No sources, no details. Direct line only. Then make only that tree public and let that be the tree you link to your DNA account. That way I can check to see where the shaky leaf is or, if there's no shaky leaf, I can try to see where we might connect.
I do have sympathy and a level of understanding for those folks who want or need to keep their trees private, really I do. My thought is that if you're going to do a DNA test on AncestryDNA, well it seems to me that the sole purpose is to connect with others and in the process check out each other's trees.
And don't be thinking that if you keep your tree private it will "force" cousins to connect with you. With so very many private trees connected to AncestryDNA it doesn't take long before others burn out on sending a request. And what if something happens to you? Others will never uncover that mutual connection! If you want to get you're going to have to give.

2. No tree on Ancestry.com.
Maybe you're looking for birth parents and really don't have any ancestors to put on a tree. I get that too. Then you have no choice and neither do I. Or maybe you're new to all of this and are just getting started. I get that too. And good luck to you!
(Here I am taking a moment to scream into my pillow.)
I just checked Mom's new DNA relatives on AncestryDNA and the vast majority have no tree. The rest are private except for about six or so who have the smallest trees you can imagine. (Rant going on over here.) Enough said. It's not you, it's me.

3. "Haven't uploaded to GEDmatch, don't know what that is."
A couple of weeks ago I read a blog post from someone who had grown weary of always being the one who needed to share the knowledge and educate the DNA cousin. I read the post with sympathy and understood that if I want to get the goods - and the goods are chromosome numbers - then I often have to do the education, which can be time consuming and long and involved. But I do understand her frustration, especially on an off day when I have way too much on my plate and need to take time to educate and get the matching cousin up to speed. Usually, because of my teacher background, I love helping out, but not every hour of every day.
Have figured out that it's just where the state of the art is at the moment and that if we all want to get to the point where we do not have to educate others we're going to have to do it now. When I do run into a DNA cousin that knows what's what, I just want to hug them!

4. Yikes, the hardest to explain: what's a chromosome, a chromosome browser, and a chromosome map?
Usually I skirt this issue and don't bring it up. Early on, I tried to be helpful and explain all of the above but I could tell that it was wTMI. Way too much information! So I just up and stopped trying to explain. It is easy for newbies to get under water fast what with all the technical info to digest.
And from my standpoint, once they upload to GEDmatch and the file has been processed it's my turn to work to get the information I want. All I need to do is bring them to the GEDmatch door, point out the upload instructions and offer to help further if need be. If we get that far, then I get to play with my spreadsheet and can report back later on what I've found. So I stopped knocking myself out trying to explain.

5. GEDmatch!! Your down for server upgrade!
So I've gotten over myself, had a good rant, screamed into a pillow a time or two, and now I'm just hanging out waiting GEDmatch to get going again. I have three prime candidates in the wings all waiting with me to have their raw data file uploaded and processed. Joseph will help settle once and for all the Biggerstaff mystery. He matches Mom and not Uncle Sonny, so what's up with that? He should match. Maybe GEDmatch will show us the chromosomes and the truth will be revealed. Cindy wants to know more about her Hartley connections, and matches Mom but again, not Uncle Sonny. And Jean is a Hartley descendant too, and she too matches Mom and not Uncle Sonny. And, get this, she matches Mom but not Cindy!
Why do these three match Mom and not Uncle Sonny? They should all match. But I can't begin to solve that mystery until GEDmatch starts accepting raw files for upload once more.
Does Mom have more Biggerstaff and Hartley DNA than Uncle Sonny? And does he have more Farrell DNA than Mom? Maybe time will tell. This is important and what it's all about!

There's so much work to be done and somehow I feel that it's a race against time. Will some of the big corporate players in this arena disappear? Will I? What's going to happen to GEDmatch? And will Ancestry tire of it's DNA project?

So here I am, and that rant felt good. Thanks for listening. (I promise to listen to you if you need it.)

The above photos are all of St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Little Orleans, Maryland, sitting hard on the Potomac River and the C & O Canal. It's the closest Catholic Church to where our Farrell ancestors lived. Perhaps it's where they worshiped and are buried? We don't yet know.

Photos courtesy Cousin Joseph, our Biggerstaff DNA connection. Thanks a bunch Joseph!

I can not wait to walk these grounds next week!

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-top-5-dna-matching-frustrations.html

A thought about AncestryDNA retiring products

Maybe you read the news on the blogs or news feeds? AncestryDNA is retiring both the Y-DNA and mtDNA products (along with a couple more products including one I particularly enjoyed, MyCanvas) and deleting all trace from their site, which will include content and matches. See what CeCe Moore posted to her excellent blog, Your Genetic Genealogist here. Below is part of what she wrote.

Q: Will the entire Y-DNA and mtDNA site interface be retired? Will you be able to view and contact your matches?
A: The entire interface will be retired, including the match lists and the ability to contact your matches.

My comments: If you have tested there, I strongly encourage you to contact your matches before September 5th (and so does Ancestry.com) because you will not have another opportunity to do so.  You can download your raw data (CSV file) until September 5th by going to www.DNA.Ancestry.com and upload to other services like Family Tree DNA.

This is scary stuff if you ask me. If you tested with these products your stuff is gone as of September 5th. Just gone. So of course, as CeCe suggests, you need to get on over there and download your stuff soon if you want it.

The reason I find it scary is that some folks paid for a service and aren't going to get it anymore and to me that's a big ol' black eye on Ancestry and calls into question their commitment to products. It's not about the money and paying for a service that one would assume is offered indefinitely, but about it calling into question Ancestry's commitment to those of us who chose to use it. How hard would it be to leave that part of the AncestryDNA web site up and running? What would that cost them? Peanuts, I'm thinking.

But my own take-away is that when we buy a DNA testing service we are depending on that company's commitment to a business model that is dedicated to DNA testing. Ancestry is a gigantic corporate entity with fingers in many pots. It's revenue stream has many sources and a very small part of that is likely the earnings from AncestryDNA's Y and mt testing. If they were making money on it they'd just continue on offering it, wouldn't they? How serious can their commitment be if a product isn't earning as hoped for? It must go... is that what they're thinking? Is their priority the revenue stream and not users? It would seem so, at least in this case. Makes me wonder what will eventually happen to all the Member Trees if revenues from the main site ever falter? Sure, genealogy is real popular now but what's going to happen in 50 years? Will that tree I've been working so hard on with all the photos and documents just up and disappear? For the first time I'm thinking, yeah, maybe.

I don't know about you but I am so far into this DNA matching thing that if either 23andMe, AncestryDNA for autosomal DNA testing, or GEDmatch went away, I'd be a hurting cowgirl! Sure I've downloaded everything you can, but now I depend on the interfaces and how they work, and that point has been driven home recently now that GEDmatch is down for service.

When we buy a DNA product we're buying into a corporate philosophy and commitment... or lack thereof. To us it's not a product so much as it is a tangible connection to our ancestors.

My great grandparents and Mom's grandparents on her mother's side. Gone now but their DNA lives on in Mom and me... and at 23andMe and AncestryDNA.

 



Catherine Elizabeth (House) Whetstone 1865 - 1947
and Joseph Hampton Whetstone 1858 - 1939.

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-thought-about-ancestrydna-retiring.html

The Thomas and Judah Farrell DNA Project: First try at chromosome mapping and GEDmatch is down

I love GEDmatch and my most serious DNA analysis work is done there. Sure, it's fun to contact DNA cousins at 23andMe or AncestryDNA but I really need a good chromosome browser and GEDmatch is the ticket. But today it's down and right at a critical junction when I badly need the use of its tools and it's going to be down for a couple of weeks. Grrr.

Now that I've moaned and groaned a moment let me tell you what I'm up to. Cousin Rich and I have about a dozen or so people in various states of DNA match. Mom and Uncle Sonny are the most solid match and share the most DNA. They both descend from the two oldest daughters of Thomas and Judah Farrell. (You can read the overview of the Farrells and this project here.) Mom tested with 23andMe and Uncle Sonny and his sister Aunt Mary tested with AncestryDNA. Mom has now tested at AncestryDNA too. Rich and I have kept a list of DNA cousins and some have good trees and some don't. One guy is adopted so we don't know how he fits in. But they all have some matching segments shared with Mom and Uncle Sonny.

Mom and Uncle Sonny are our "benchmarks" because they share the most DNA. Here's a look at the chart GEDmatch whipped up for us showing exactly how they share their DNA. Nice, huh?

Chromosome browser from GEDmatch.

As each new DNA cousin popped up an idea kept forming and reforming in my noggin. I could see the relationships and the stream of chromosomes, but a pattern wanted to form but just couldn't. Ever have that happen? Now let me tell you how I stumbled into exactly what I needed.

First, I saw that there were two terms and that I might have confused: chromosome browser and chromosome mapper. What you see above is a chromosome browser. It is a tool that lets you compare the DNA of two or more individuals to see exactly which segments of DNA are shared. You can then introduce a third person into this mix and that's called triangulation. If you have three people sharing exact (or very close) chromosome segments, that's called triangulation and with solid trees for all three and only one shared most recent ancestor, it's a sure bet that the chunk of shared chromosomes came from the shared ancestor.

A chromosome mapper is a spread sheet that shows you which segments on which chromosomes are shared between many people. In this way you can determine which chromosome segments came from which ancestor with even greater confidence. With any sort of luck, you can then know that anyone with those exact segments descends from that same ancestor. Yes, that's right. If an adoptee who knows nothing about his ancestors also shares those specific segments they descend from that common ancestor.

Chromosome mapping spreadsheet using a Kitty Cooper template with our DNA matches.

Thank you, Kitty Cooper!!!

 

 

You need to know that I have never used Excel before, and it kinda scared me. Looked too complicated. Never mind, because I wanted to do this mapping thing so bad I just jumped in the Excel water. I went on ahead and downloaded a template from Kitty Cooper which you can find here. It's the CSV one. I googled how to use Excel and played with it for a while and found out that I could enter any value in a column and then use Sort and Filter on the Home bar to get the numbers in numerical order. Sounds way, way harder than it is. (Cousin Rich is a whiz at spreadsheets and he'll have a good laugh at my expense reading this! He's in Scotland with family playing golf so maybe he'll miss this post.)

 

Next step was to decide what the column heading should be. You can see the ones I chose but now that I've played with it, think I'll add "number of generations to MRCA" or most recent common ancestor. See post before this for an overview of our requirements and that should tell you why this is important. There are two columns that you don't see here and those are GEDmatch kit number and email. And obviously you can see the attempted redaction of surnames. Not pretty but it works. 

 

There are two names that don't have any MRCA or most recent common ancestor info and they are Stephen and David. One is adopted so he came to our DNA matching party with no tree. What we can now tell him is that he shares some of the DNA that came down to us through the Thomas and Judah Farrell pairing. It could be DNA that came with them from Ireland and thereby came from ancestors "upstream". Or it could have come to him from one of the other of Thomas and Judah's children. We just don't know. But he's real family to us.

 

The second name without a MCRA has a nice tree and ancestors who lived about 10 to 15 miles from where Thomas and Judah lived in what's now West Virginia. We have yet to find our shared ancestor and connect our trees. He's one of us but we don't know exactly how.

 

There's more to this spreadsheet than you can see here. I have some names and GEDmatch kit numbers but not too much more than that ... because GEDmatch is what I need right now and it's down. Again. GEDmatch, I love ya but you're about to drive me crazy!

 

The GEDmatch web site says that they are moving to new servers and once that's done the world will be bright and new because the new servers should increase reliability. It's going to take a couple of weeks. Ugh.

 

The old railroad overpass on the Potomac River near what was once Magnolia, Vest Virginia, home of the Farrell, House, Hartley, and Biggerstaff families who are the subjects of this DNA study.

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-thomas-and-judah-farrell-dna.html



DNA with 23andMe and now AncestryDNA for Mom

Mother's Day is coming up and what do you give the mom who is 95 and has it all, and is an avid genealogist? Another DNA test, of course!

Just in time, the results are now in for Mom's AncestryDNA test. Mom got a 23andMe test for Mother's Day last year and we've had so much fun with it that it seemed like a good idea to do it again this time with Ancestry. Cousin Rich with whom we've been working on the Farrell DNA Project, highly recommended AncestryDNA. He was a newbie when he started but he's experienced now and likes it a lot. And now that Mom's results are back I can see why and I'd like to share a few observations and thoughts about its advantages as well as a place or two where they could tweek it.

First, and this isn't news to anyone, is the ethnicity profile, also called in common parlance, ancestry composition. Here's the AncestryDNA screen for Mom's ethnicity.

 

Now here's the one for her Ancestry Composition from 23andme.

 

 

You'll be noticing that the AncestryDNA chart shows Mom as having 49% Irish DNA, and she'll like that! It also shows her Great Britain ethnicity as 6%. 23andMe breaks it down into Non-specific Northern European as 45.1% and  British and Irish as 38.9%. That's a bit different but similar enough that I'm satisfied with it, and see it as indicating that Mom mostly descended from a whole lot of Irish and British folks (including the Welsh) and not so much from the Native American population. And that's what we expected. But that said, have to note that 23and Me does have a more detailed breakdown of ancestry categories.

 

Mom and I don't have too many mysteries about who our ancestors were, but the role composition of ancestry can play got underlined for me recently when a DNA match contacted me and was searching for their grandfather. All of her DNA tests showed a largely Portuguese heritage but there were no Portuguese people on her tree. We're all about the Irish and British - and have no Portuguese going on - so we couldn't help her. At least she was able to eliminate us and our ancestors from her search.

 

The bulk of the work for me in using DNA for genealogy has been contacting matches. This is where AncestryDNA excels. Just look at this, below.

 



There ya' go. It's all I need in order to evaluate a match. No more waiting and hoping that the person you match will be interested in genealogy as has been my experience on 23andMe. There is a lot of information on this screen and let me point out a few of the features I particularly enjoy.

 

First and foremost, look at the trees! Whoop-de-do! The middle column tells us how big the tree is, if it's private which is indicated by the lock, and if Ancestry has already spotted a shared ancestor indicated by a leaf. I really like that.

 

The look of the screen is visually intuitive, I think. 2nd cousins are grouped together with a color band separating them from third cousins. You can see right away if the match is male or female and you can also tell if the match is in an account managed by someone else so you know what you're getting into when you send a message.

 

The real pay-off for me is the little green leaf that indicates that Ancestry is taking a shot at matching us up and showing me and my contact where they think the shared ancestor is. Take a look when you click through and review the match. Now this is cool.

 

 

I have to say that this is way better than playing "do you have a tree online" which was my least favorite game over at 23andMe. At AncestryDNA when there's a match and both of you have a public tree on Ancestry then all the work is done for you.

 

Where I run into problems is people who don't have a tree on Ancestry even though they did a DNA test there. (Why would you do that? Oh, wait, I take that back. They might if they were adopted and have no clue as to who their parents were.) Then there are the people who have a private tree so I have to message them pleading for a peek at the goods. What if they fell off the edge of the world just yesterday? How's that gonna' work? It's not. Just put up a bare bones tree with only direct ancestors on it and make it public. That would work for both of us.

 

The second cousin match that I contacted for Mom knows her real well and is in frequent contact. We went back and forth a bit chatting about relatives and holes in our trees and documents we'd just love to have. It was just plain fun. And of course Rich's Aunt and Uncle were there on the list of third cousins, as expected and should be.

 

I'd like a chromosome browser on AncestryDNA. That would be very useful. But overall, we're real happy we tested with them.

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/04/dna-with-23andme-and-now-ancestrydna.html

The Thomas and Judah Farrell DNA Project: Now for the DNA part

If you're now jumping on board this fast moving train, you might want to go read the previous post and get caught up. It's about one of those family lines that you start thinking about and then they move right in and inhabit your entire brain to such an extent you feel genealogically possessed. Know what I mean? Yeah, you do, I can tell;)

So last year both Mom and I did the 23andMe DNA test in hopes of finding relatives. There was a learning curve but it really wasn't too painful at all. I had an easy time moving around the 23andMe web site and locating my connections and contacting them. Oh sure, some people didn't get back to me and one even declined my invitation to share. That was to be expected because at that time 23andMe was busy advertising their health results, which they no longer offer. But some good connections were made and one of them - that's Ed and his father Harold - lead right back to our ancestors Thomas and Judah Farrell. That was very exciting!

Funny thing about working with autosomal DNA results is that you don't pick the line you are going to be exploring. Instead, it sort of picks you. You hear from matches or reach out to them and it's simply the luck of the draw as to weather you'll make a good connection and which ancestral line you'll be digging around in. There's much that's not in your control, or at least that's how I feel.

Having a fully built out tree, to the best of your ability, and having it accessible online is very important in this work. A goodly number of those contacts we've made over the last year didn't know where to start, but that's changing rapidly as more people get tested and become knowledge about terms and tools and how to use them.

Now, let me introduce you to cousin Rich. His wife is a descendant of Thomas and Judah Farrell so he's technically not a blood relative but we like him anyway and are glad to call him cousin because he's passionate about genealogy and finding out about the ancestors, just as Mom and I are. Mom has been in touch with this couple for years, first emailing his wife and then when Rich took over the search emailing Rich. He even visited Mom last summer to get copies of her files in his seriously dogged search for one court document. He's a good solid researcher and very organized too. And he likes spread sheets. How cool is that?

Don't quite remember how it came about but Rich's wife, our blood cousin, had her elderly aunt and uncle tested. They are both in their 90s, and so is Mom. Now we had four individuals in our informal grouping who were tested and two well researched trees we knew to be accurate. When the results came back we could see a lot and it has to do with shared chromosomes. This looking for shared chromosomes is often referred to as chromosome matching.

What we're looking for in chromosome matching is segments of DNA that are greatly similar - so-called sticky chromosomes - because they are passed down through the generations relatively intact. And if you can identify folks with a specific known lineage descending down from one couple and no other connection, that share those sticky chromosomes, then you've really got something. And if you find even more people with those same chromosome segments as well as the same ancestors on their tree, and no other shared ancestor, then you're really cooking.

When Rich and I looked at the DNA test results, Mom and I having tested at 23andMe and both Uncle and Aunt having tested at AncestryDNA, we needed to meet in the middle so to speak so we uploaded our raw files to GEDmatch. At GEDmatch we could do some chromosome matching and then look for others who match both Mom and Uncle. Let me show you the results and you'll see what I mean. Here are Mom and Uncle's results. I used the One-to-one matching utility which is great as a way to see where a match exists.

As you can see, Mom and Uncle share a bunch of DNA on seven different chromosomes. I find this practically mind blowing when you consider the nearest common ancestor. Look at this, below, to find Thomas and Judah Farrell, back four generations.

There on the bottom row you'll find Mom and then just follow her female line back to Thomas and Judah Farrell. Uncle's Farrell ancestor was through the second born daughter of Thomas and Judah while Mom's was through the first daughter.

Another anomaly is that Uncle shares quite a lot of DNA with Mom but Aunt doesn't share quite so much. Just shows me how strange and mysterious are the ways of autosomal DNA.

The next thing we did is go see who matched both Mom and Uncle, and here's what that looked like.

Once we had that, and I've cropped out the email addresses there on the image above, off we went to contact them. As of right today we've heard back from all. That's right, ALL.

And so that's pretty much where we are at the moment. From the nine on the list three are our group, and one person has a parental mismatch and is playing a round of who-da-baby daddy so we'll find no answers there. Four don't yet show Thomas and Judah on their trees even though we all suspect that the connection traces back to Ireland. And that leaves one person we're still working with. He knows that his mother's people come from Paw Paw, West Virginia and that's the next town over from where Thomas and Judah lived in Magnolia. He can't email back fast enough for us!

Rich did a work sheet with each of the players, their GEDmatch kit number and which chromosomes they matched each other on. For some reason that I don't yet totally understand, Mom, Uncle, and Harold and Ed all matched heavily on chromosome 13, and the rest only matched on chromosome 9. Fascinating.

My exercise now is to go through each of these matches and do a one-to-one comparison with Mom and Uncle looking for shared chromosomes and then see if that tells us anything at all. Maybe I'll write about that soon. But first, and next time, let's look at Rich's Great Idea: the Thomas & Judah Farrell Connections tree on Ancestry.

And this is funny: not one of my matches so far from either 23andMe or GEDmatch is from Dad's side. What is that about?! It's all Mom's people.

Along the old road to Magnolia, Morgan County, West Virginia, now gone but not forgotten by her descendants. This is in the general vicinity where Thomas and Judah Farrell had their farm and raised their family. The town is gone, most of the homes are also gone, but their memory lives on in us.

 

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