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



Cousin Joseph's Good Genealogy Deed

 

 

 

 

That screen shot just above was my introduction to Cousin Joseph. Mom and he took the AncestryDNA test and he came up as a match with high confidence... and he had a big juicy tree that is public! You can read a previous post about our search for Farrell descendants and their chromosomes here in which Cousin Joseph is mentioned. We've been in touch, emailing and messaging back and forth. He has been very helpful and eventually lead Cousin Rich and I to an old church register that might unlock a lot of doors, if we can get to it. But that's another story for a later time.

 

So that's how I met Cousin Joseph. He is the proud owner and proprietor of Barn Dog Antiques and Country Treasures at 876 Main Street in Milton West Virginia. Here's a link to Barn Dog's Facebook page. He obviously has an eye for style and old stuff! The photos make ya' want to stop on by and take a look.

When I checked Joseph's personal Facebook page this morning I read this lovely and heart-warming story.

What a surprise we got today. Interesting, back in March we purchased this awesome signed coverlet from 1847 which originated from Lucas County Ohio. Purchased this coverlet from a lady on EBay who bought it in Iowa. Received a message from the seller of this coverlet stating a guy had been researching his 3rd great grandfather and googled the name and this eBay transaction came up from back in March. Just so happens this coverlet was made by his 3rd great grandfather and that he was a professional weaver in Lucas County, Ohio. The lady forwards me his info and I contacted the gentleman in Michigan and the guy has all his documentation and this coverlet was definitely made by his 3rd great grandfather, Joseph Rochte of Lucas County Ohio. He had no idea what a coverlet was until this came up. I am sending this coverlet back to it's family and the guy is extremely excited to get it.  Just a great story.

 

 

 

 

 

Now isn't that a genealogy good deed? Don't you just love stories like this? I sure do. Warms my genealogy heart:)


The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2014/05/cousin-josephs-good-genealogy-deed.html

Treasure Chest Thursday: The C&O Canal Workers

 

 

Was thinking about my Irish ancestors who came to America, all before the Great Famine. It's interesting because all of the families -- the Kellys, the O'Farrells, and the Corcorans -- came around the 1830s and landed first in Cumberland, Allegany, Maryland, of all places. Why?

 

There were three things of note going on in Western Maryland about that time that might draw these hard-workers in search of a new life: coal mining, the railroad, and the C&O Canal. I know something about the coal mines and miners as well as the railroad, because my Kelly people worked on both of those. But I was lacking in information about the C&O Canal. I went to one of my fav web sites for Western Maryland history, Western Maryland's Historical Library, or WHILBR, and you can see their page about the canal here and find a collection of maps and old photos too.

 

That was good for the facts of it but I sought more insight into the daily lives of those, especially the Irish, who worked on the canal. So I posted a question about where to turn on the Allegany County, Maryland, RootsWeb list. In a flash someone suggested these two books by James Rada Jr.: Canawlers, and Between Rail and River. And I'm glad they did.

 

Here's what the listing on Amazon.com has to say about the first book in the series, Canawlers:

 

Hugh Fitzgerald proudly calls himself a "canawler." He works on the C&O Canal transporting coal nearly 185 miles between Cumberland, Maryland and Georgetown. For nine months a year, he and his family live on their canal boat, working hard to get them through the lean winter months.

The year 1862 was a hard year to live on the canal, though. The Civil War was in full swing and the canal, which runs long the Potomac River, marked the border between the Union and Confederacy. To this point, the Confederacy has stayed south of the canal, but now the Confederate Army intends to go on the offensive and take the war into the north. Not only are the Fitzgeralds' lives endangered by the increased activity of warring army and raiders on the canal, but the Fitzgeralds' secret activity as a stop along the Underground Railroad only endanger their lives all the more.

Now you know this has got to be good! Both books are historical fiction so the history lesson goes down easy as the pages all but turn by themselves. I got what I was looking for on just about every page as a new detail of the hard life of those running canal boats were made all the more impossible by the Civil War. And this is a nice family whose story unwinds and I came to like them fast.

So what were my take away points from these two books that might guide further searching for my own wandering and mysterious Irish ancestors? And now that I have a deeper understanding of the canallers' life, what are the research questions based on these books?

1.) The dates are right for my Irish people coming in search for work on the C&O Canal. Now the question that pops to mind is, were they working on the Erie Canal before they came to Western Maryland? And if so, did they come in through Canada?

2.) Where are the records? Canal records are sparse. Good luck with that but sometimes records are hidden in plain sight so I'll keep looking. I did find some Kelly/Kelley people working in 1850s, and here's a link to the canal worker's document also on WHLBR. Look to the right of this image, below, to find the PDF files.


3.) Double-check the 1850 census for work records. That's late for canal builders but not those who made a living on the canal once it opened just about 1850 all the way to Cumberland. My John Kelly who came from Shannonbridge, Offlay (was Kings), Ireland, was listed simply as "laborer" in that census. Not much to go on. In the 1860 census John Kelly is listed as a carpenter while others on the page are listed specifically as miners or laborers. What can I make of that? Could he have been a carpenter in Cumberland building canal boats?

4.) Noticed a newspaper article on WHLBR dated 1846 that mentions that the work building the canal was halted due to lack of funds. My Irish ancestors, if they did come for work on building the canal, would have moved on to other work about this time. I'll be alert to that 1846 date in my tracking them down. Thanks, WHLBR.



Well, it's a start and now I know more about the lives of those who worked on the C&O Canal.

And then there's this: our Irish family has always been anti-slavery and for equal right in the extreme, as if it were personal or something. Now I think I have a clue as to why. The Irish who came here before the Civil War were escaping the type of "soft slavery" enforced by the British landholders who inflicted pain and punishment on the very people who once owned that same land. The family in both of Rada's books expresses this opinion and are a link on the Underground Railroad! There's my own ah-ha moment:)

Were my Irish ancestors canal workers after the canal opened?

 

All canal photos in public domain and come from WHLBR.

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/06/treasure-chest-thursday-c-canal-workers.html