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



Vacation Over!

This girl is getting back to work here under the Nut Tree! Summer is over and I woke up this morning ready to write. Was watching Anthony Bourdain's show, Parts Unknown, new season on CNN, and heard him talking about how his basic objective is to tell a good story. Yeah, it is. That's what I love about doing genealogy most, and I've always said it: I'm just in it for the stories.

My first step into the world of genealogy when Mom dragged me into this was to learn all the stories, many of which I'd heard all my life. The story of the Eckhart's land lost to the coal mining company was the first one I remembered. But this time around, and with Mom's research as a platform, I really dug in. My take is that it remains a dandy story and it's no wonder that the ancestors passed it down through five generations and still counting!

Did I tell you the story about my finding out that the Eckharts owned slaves? And before that I believed that none of our ancestors had owned slaves! No? I'll have to write about that and the other slave owners, all on Dad's side.

Now, through DNA testing Mom and I found out that we have .1% Sub-Saharan African DNA in exactly the same location on chromosome 10. There's got to be a story about how that got there. The Eckharts are on Dad's side but this Sub-Saharan African DNA show up through Mom.

And so the stories pile up around me, as I collect the threads that make up their whole cloth. I try to be patient as I hunt for particular records, or for cousins to pop up and share a hidden bit. Cousin Rich, for example, shares our passion for a group of ancestors who lived out on the frontier in the mountains of West Virginia. Now, because of his excellent work, he has evidence that our Hartley ancestors as well as the Biggerstaff ancestors helped supply the Revolutionary War.

A fellow from Australia just contacted Mom about a possible connection on our Williams line. We have been blocked there and not able to find out where my great great grandfather Daniel Williams' family went when they came from Wales to American in about 1870. This is a family of miners and our Daniel was a coal miner in Western Maryland, so that's a clue. But we've never been able to find his family. Perhaps this branch goes all the way to Australia. You can read about our search and the Mystery Photo here.

Meanwhile, I'm working putting together some stories Mom wrote about growing up in the town of Frostburg, Allegany, Maryland. She's 95 now and sharp as a tack, aren't you Mom! And still writing. Got some of the pages laid out and realized that every time I needed to insert a photo, it was hiding from me! So I'm re-organizing my photo file... again. Now it will be easier to make blog posts that include pictures of Mom's aunts and uncles.

I do hope that your own summer was fun and that you enjoyed your time with family... and took lots of photos that you'll organize very well;)

Mom's Aunt Grace Whetstone Knowles (1893 - 1959), Uncle "Tad" Clarence Whetstone (1891-1976), and their mother Catherine Elizabeth "Kate" House Whetstone (1865-1947).

Aunt Zoe Whetstone Powell (1864-1948), Christmas morning, 1942. She was sister to Mom's grandfather Joseph Hampton Whetstone (1858-1939).

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/09/vacation-over.html