Crucianize

Tag: Ancestry test

  • Ancestry Updated Caribbean Communities

    Ancestry has released an update for their Communities in the Caribbean.

    I received an email telling me that I had two new Communities.

    As we add people to our database and keep developing the science behind AncestryDNAⓇ, we’re able to continue adding new communities to provide more insight into your family story.

    With more communities from African American Communities and Afro- Caribbean Communities, you could uncover new connections between your family story and other parts of the world.

    Email from Ancestry

    I couldn’t really tell you what they added because I haven’t been keeping an eye on the different communities just the two I had. They did remove the Afro-Bahamians and Afro-Bermudians which didn’t apply to my family history.

    I really didn’t notice what was updated at first but then I realized, they added Dominica.

    I was curious so I went through the feature where you can compare Communities with your DNA Relatives and saw that they also added Virgin Islands but I didn’t receive it. Which makes no sense to me as my father and his maternal line is from the Virgin Islands and has been for generations. I myself was born in the Virgin Islands and most of my DNA Relatives are from the Virgin Islands and have family still there.

    It is very similar to 23andme not assigning Saint Barthélémy to either my father, myself or our many cousins with ties to St. Barts.

    I guess all I can do is wait for their next update and see if either my brother or myself gets assigned to the Virgin Islands Community.

  • Detective Lynnette and the Case of the Mysterious DNA Relative

    Detective Lynnette and the Case of the Mysterious DNA Relative

    Let me tell you about this Mysterious DNA relative in my brother’s Ancestry list that haunted me for a few years.

    Mystery DNA Relative

    Shared DNA: 66 cM across 6 segments

    Unweighted shared DNA: 73 cM

    Longest segment: 28 cM

    This was a fairly close relative but she did not match with any of our other relatives, no matches with the hundreds of relatives on our grandfather’s side so I could cross that side out. No matches with our maternal matches so she wasn’t related to our mother. No matches with our father’s maternal grandmother’s relatives so that only left Alfredo who I wasn’t sure was our real great-grandfather because of the lack of DNA matches.

    The tree was no help because everyone up to grandparents was Private so I had no clues to go by but this was a mystery I was determined to solve.

    By chance, I happened to see this same relative on MyHeritage with a more open tree, and going through the tree I immediately noticed that her maternal grandparents were not from the Virgin Islands and I did not recognize any of the names. I started working on a mirror tree and everyone was born in the USA so I crossed out her mother’s family as being the connection, her father was Private but his father was not, it was just a name but one I know from the Virgin Islands.

    I was intrigued.

    I knew the last name but not the first name so off to Familysearch and Ancestry to do some searches, I was coming up empty, even looking through my DNA relatives I didn’t get any other matches with this surname in their tree, what could this possibly mean?

    It was scratching at the back of my mind but I didn’t want to answer it just yet, I wanted solid proof and that came a few months after I did my own DNA test at Ancestry, this match still was the only person connecting to both me and my brother until she matched with one other person.

    The New Match

    Shared DNA: 98 cM across 5 segments

    Unweighted shared DNA: 98 cM

    Longest segment: 38 cM

    This new match had a surname I knew but couldn’t place, she was instrumental in me finally connecting the mystery match to the tree and our family but the name was aggravating me with its illusive trail until I went back over my tree looking at the children of my great-grandfather Alfredo. There it was the name that was flirting with me, my great-aunt, the half-sister of my grandmother had married a man with the name of the new match. The new match was the granddaughter of my great-aunt.

    So if the mystery match also matches the granddaughter of my great-aunt that can only mean one thing, she was also a descendant of my great-grandfather Alfredo, but how? The last name of her grandfather, her grandfather was the full sibling of my great-aunt, they shared the same mother instead of being half-siblings like they were raised. So her grandfather was my great-uncle and that made her my half-second cousin.

    I honestly wondered if I should have even attached her grandfather to Alfredo but it seemed to me that maybe she was searching for her relatives, nobody takes a DNA test and uploads to multiple sites just for the fun of it. Oh yes, I forgot to mention I also found her on Gedmatch. So I put the information in my tree with the DNA connection and hoped she would see it and it would help.

    I have to admit though, Alfredo’s parents are still giant mysteries to me and I am no closer to cracking that particular nut just yet. I’m hopeful but the matches on that line are very few and far in between. At present count, I have just 3 matches excluding my brother. The two in this post and the granddaughter of Alfredo’s half-brother. With so many half connections is it any wonder that the DNA connections are on the smaller side?

  • New Ancestry DNA update plus SideView

    I literally just received my Ancestry results and already they have been updated. If you hadn’t read my post talking about my Ancestry DNA results you can find them here My Ancestry DNA Results!

    Now let’s get into my new percentages and whatnot, but first what is Ancestry SideView?

    Ancestry SideView is simply Ancestry trying to tell you what DNA you inherited and which parent it came from, contrary to what people may have you think it is not the first of its kind, 23andme has done something for quite a while, you can find it in you Parental Inheritance Report and I’ve shared mine in a post before which you can read here Phasing My 23andme With My Father. As far as I can see the only difference is that with SideView you don’t need any parents to test but to me, it seems that might lead to some inaccuracies because I can’t fathom how they can pinpoint from which parent you inherited which gene if neither parent tested. I know this might seem to be biased because I have said again and again that I prefer 23andme to Ancestry but it just doesn’t seem logical to me, I am open to the fact that I might be wrong though.

    Here’s my Ancestry SideView, it really doesn’t seem all that accurate to me, just going off of what I got on 23andme where I am phased with my father, according to 23andme I inherited no French from my mother but Ancestry says I inherited 2%. Someone must be wrong and I’m leaning towards Ancestry being wrong just because my father is there to compare my results with.

    Now here’s my 23andme Parental Inheritance Report. The number here makes perfect sense when compared to my paper trail, I don’t really see how Ancestry arrived at the percentages they did.

    Before I forget here’s my update results from Ancestry. A bit of a shakeup, Nigeria decreased while Benin & Togo increased, Spain is completely gone or they changed it to Basque, Mali decreased, Ivory Coast & Ghane is increased, France increased, England & Northwestern Europe has decreased, I gained Senegal and most of the other changes are minor.

    Here are my results in comparison to my brother’s results, his France is still pretty tiny but it might just boil down to him not inheriting those specific genes.

    Ancestry has a lot of work to do if it wants to impress me, maybe including a chromosome browser or showing me how my DNA relatives are related to each other? 23andme has truly spoiled other tests for me.

  • My Ancestry DNA Results!

    On March 5 I finally sent in my Ancestry DNA kit and anxiously waited on the results. So many things went through my head, but my biggest concern was “what if it failed?”.

    A valid concern since my 23andme test failed the first time, my fears were unfounded this time as my DNA Results were finalized on the 30th.

    It was weird looking at it because I was so used to my 23andme results and looking at my brother’s ancestry results, my own made zero sense to me.

    Lyly’s Ancestry DNA Results

    As a refresher here are my 23andme Results. After going through this process I still prefer 23andme over Ancestry. The only thing Ancestry really has going for it is the family tree attached to it but I’ve gone through all of this before in my post The Reasons why I prefer 23andme over Ancestry DNA.

    Lyly’s 23andme Results

    It’s really interesting watching my results compared to my brother, the differences in the genes we inherited are not only fascinating but it has helped me to verify some lines in our family tree. I have a few DNA relatives that he doesn’t have and they were the links I needed.

    Comparing my results to my brother’s results.

    The first line that I was able to confirm was my Grandfather’s paternal line, my brother had 0 matches from that line and it made me very curious, was it that nobody tested, or were there more nefarious reasons? Were we not actually LaPlace’s? I was going through the Thrulines and saw that I had two matches when I was expecting one. My brother is the match I was expecting and the second match was the Great-grandson of my Great-grandaunt, this person is my 3rd cousin and I have never heard of them, I knew that my Great-grandaunt had married into the Olive family and my Grandfather traveled to the US Virgin Islands to stay with her but my 3rd cousin’s last name I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere before.

    The second line I had confirmed was my Grandmother’s paternal line, same as above I was questioning why there were 0 relatives in my brother’s DNA relatives but it turns out he just didn’t inherit those genes while I did. I matched with the granddaughter of my Great-grandfather’s half-brother which makes her my Half 2nd cousin 1x removed, the DNA we share is also on the small side with only a 14% chance of being a Half 2nd cousin 1x removed but given the fickle nature of DNA inheritance, I’m just lucky to have even inherited any DNA from my 2nd Great-grandmother Sarah.

    Right now my focus is to see if hidden within my DNA relatives or even in my brother’s relatives there is a clue to who the father of our 2nd Great-grandmother Maud is. I am almost certain that it will be linked to the three relatives with the surname Hynes.