Crucianize

Tag: DNA

  • Half Cousins galore!

    Half Cousins galore!

    This month has actually been pretty active for DNA cousins, I had one of my cousins pop up, they are actually my half 1st cousin but in my family we don’t really use “half”. I also had the child of one of my cousins pop up, again they are half relation but we don’t use those terms.

    Itr is actually interesting to see the shared relatives between both of my cousins. I was expecting to see just relatives of my grandfather but sprinkled in there were relatives from my grandmother’s side and my father’s paternal and maternal side!

    This is interesting to me because my grandparents were from different countries. My paternal grandfather was from Saint-Barthélemy in the French caribbean, my paternal grandmother was from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands and my maternal grandparents were from Dominica.

    I’m trying not to get ahead of myself while speculating on the relationships of all these dna relatives and what it means that they show up in my shared relatives in common with my cousins. It is entirely possible that I am related to this person on their paternal side and my cousin is related to them via their maternal side. I have no idea how I’m actually going to prove these lines though, Dominica genealogy is the most frustrating one I have ever had to deal with, if I could find my way to a family history center and view the records on, FamilySearch I would be so happy but I have no way to gain access to one. I hope that the records for Saint George parish will be made available one day and I’m able to search whenever I want.

    Here is my Half first cousin, their parent is my mother’s half sibling. We share 7% of our DNA, 485 cM across 22 segments. My cousin and our aunt who is my full aunt share 1031 cM across 34 segments while I share 1808 cM across 60 segments. My cousin actually share a little more DNA with my brother than I do and I don’t like it lol, my brother actually shares 594 cM across 20 segments, it doesn’t really change the fact that this is our cousin but in my mind it’s like they are more his cousin than mine and it makes me a little sad. It’s an illogical thought but my mind travels down these paths frequently.

    Now, here is my half 1st cousin once removed, we share 4% of our DNA, 301 cM across 11 segments, their shared DNA with my aunt is intereting, 223 cM across 10 segments, I share more DNA with them than they share with my aunt, I wonder if it means that my mother shares more DNA in common with this half sibling or maybe their other parent is somehow related to me through my father. This cousin’s parent is my half 1st cousin which means their grandparent is my mother’s half sibling.

    So here is a little chart showing piece of my family tree, I have way more aunts and uncles than is shown here, I just wanted to show where my cousins are located in the family tree.

    I wish some of my cousins on my father’s side would test so I can see how much DNa we share and what relatives they might be related to that doesn’t show up for me or my brother. They don’t seem to be interested in it but one can only hope.

  • Ancestry Pro Tools

    Ancestry Pro Tools

    Ancestry has really been on my last nerves for a while now. They did an update a while back where you can’t view your DNA relatives in common with someone or view their tree unless you have an active subscription, and I find that move left a sour taste in my mouth. Even without a subscription, I could separate my DNA relatives into groups to figure out how they are related to me. But it gets even worse – groups, even my custom groups that I had created over many years, are now paywalled. I swore that I wouldn’t pay for Pro Tools, swore that I would not pay for another subscription, but Ancestry kept enticing me with $1 subscriptions, and I cave every single time.

    In June, I decided that I would take the bullet and pay for Pro Tools. I parted with my €11.25 very reluctantly. Oh, I was punching the air and saying if it wasn’t worth it, I would be so mad. I’m even more pissed off that it has proved very useful. The one feature that I bought this subscription for was the Advanced matching. Basically, it does what 23andme and MyHeritage both do; it shows you the cM your DNA match shares with your matches in common and how they are possibly related to those matches. Angry, I am so angry because it immediately proved that my theory about a half-second cousin was correct. I had guessed at the connection to our shared DNA matches, but I really did not know how much DNA she would share with our shared matches, and now I know.

    I actually wrote a post about this match and how I went about proving that she was a half-second cousin. I just have the information about how much DNA she shares with my known half-second cousin 2x removed.

    Here’s the post if you haven’t read it: Detective Lynnette and the Case of the Mysterious DNA Relative

    I want to say I don’t know if I will renew, but I am still undecided because I have not done everything I wished I could do with this new tool, and I will no doubt continue to get more DNA relatives and I’ll need to figure out how they are related to my other matches. I will probably stagger my subscription because I cannot pay for this every single month.

  • Is knowing your Maternal Haplogroup helpful?

    It depends.

    In my father’s case, because he was adopted and we don’t know much about his family, matches on the X are pretty helpful for me.

    In my case they aren’t very useful because I have two Xs and any match on my X will need thorough research to figure out which side of the family this match comes from. I inherited an intact X from my father which is a recombination of his mother’s mother and her father. I also got a recombined X from my mother. Let’s take a little look into what this will look like in terms of DNA relatives.

    Matching with my father.

    As you can see, I share 50% DNA with my father including the X.

    We have different Maternal Haplogroups.

    Even though we share an X we don’t have the same Maternal Haplogroups because it is inherited strictly from the mother. My Maternal Haplogroup is L1b which came from my mother, her mother, her mother, and so forth. My father’s Maternal Haplogroup came from his mother.

    Matching with my maternal aunt.

    This match is my maternal aunt and as you can see I share 25% DNA with her including an X, in case you didn’t notice it’s not an intact X because I inherited DNA that my aunt didn’t.

    Sharing the same Maternal Haplogroup.

    Because this is my maternal aunt, the fact that we share the same Maternal Haplogroup tells me that she shares the same mother as my mother. I can also look at the number of cMs we share and 25% indicates a full aunt meaning she shares both parents with my mother.

    Matching with my mother’s first cousin.

    Here’s my match with my mother’s first cousin, we don’t share an X because he inherited his X from his mother and I’m not related to his mother. This tells me that I’m related through his father who was the brother of my grandmother.

    We don’t share the same Maternal Haplogroup.

    The interesting thing about this cousin is the amount of DNA we share. I thought I had just inherited more DNA from my grandmother than I thought but I recently learned that my grandparents were possibly related. I have not found any actual evidence that this is true but like most Islands Dominica is small and it shouldn’t surprise me that there could be some endogamy going on.

    I hope this was helpful in understanding how Maternal Haplogroups can help you in your genealogy research.

  • 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.

  • 23andMe – New African Groups Added to Ancestry Composition

    I know I am late to talk about this but that’s because I’ve been waiting to see if they were doing staggered updates. It seems that everyone who was going to receive this update already received it.

    If you have no idea what I’m talking about back in January 23andMe added new Ethnolinguistic Groups to their Ancestry Composition, basically they were able to narrow down where in Africa your ancestors might have come from based on the number of Africans you matched with. This is very important to the African diaspora because the majority of us have no idea where our ancestors came from.

    The Groups added include Fula & Wolof, Mandinka, Temne & Limba, Mende, Yoruba, Igbo, and so many more, you can read the full blog post from 23andMe here.

    When I saw someone post their updated results on Reddit I immediately went to 23andMe to check both my father and my accounts. My father’s results were the first I saw, I was hoping to see where in Ghana our family came from but he did not receive a match for there even though it is his largest percentage. Instead, he received a match for the Yoruba people.

    My Father’s Nigerian update

    I clicked over to my account but I didn’t seem to have any matches. I assumed they were rolling out the update to newer accounts first but it’s been a month later and I still have no update. I honestly don’t know how they match the profiles because my father has only one full African DNA relative and he is from Angola, not Nigeria. On the other hand, I have three Nigerian and one Ghanaian DNA relative with direct ancestry from Africa.

    No updates for me

    Interestingly enough, one of my aunts did 23andMe and her results came in just as they released the new groups. She is my maternal aunt and received two groups. Igbo and Yoruba. She’s also mostly African with a small bit of European which further cements the idea that we had Indigenous DNA from my maternal grandmother a tall tale. All my life I’ve been told we had Kalinago ancestry and the fact that there are Kalingao people in Dominica made it seem not unlikely, why would my mother, grandmother lie about such a thing, when I showed my results after phasing with my father my mother told me that one of my aunts said it wasn’t Kalinago but some other Asian, this can’t be true either since it would have shown up in my results, my aunts results, or even my mother and aunt’s first cousin. Both my aunt and their full first cousin show no trace of Indigenous or Asian DNA. So what’s the truth? The truth is more than likely a biracial child they tried to pass off as Asian.

    Aunt Nigerian groups
    Comparing my aunt (left) with her full first cousin (right)

    I honestly thought my mother’s maternal first cousin would help separate the DNA relatives and he has in a way but like all small Islands, there are overlaps so I’m still stuck trying to figure out how some of these people are related. All I can do at this point is hope that someone who knows more than I do is willing to share what they know.

  • From Africa to the Caribbean: Links To Our Past

    From Africa to the Caribbean: Links To Our Past

    In June my father received a request to share DNA and this isn’t anything new or special because some people do request to share so they can compare their results with yours, I’ve done this myself so I accepted the request but the person that requested the share was surprising.

    This DNA relative was predicted to be a 5th cousin at 10cM but that wasn’t the surprising aspect, what intrigued me was the fact that they were 100% African.

    I know I shouldn’t be so surprised about this since my grandmother was Afro-Caribbean. This is a highly interesting match simply because I had hopes of finding a Ghanaian relative being that my father’s highest African percentage is Ghananian but this person was not Ghananian, they are Angolan.

    My Fathers results vs his DNA relative
    23andme DNA results of an Angolan

    Being that it is such a small match there’s probably no way I’ll ever be able to discover which ancestor was fully Angolan. I assumed that this match would be from my Grandmother’s side since she was the Afro-Caribbean but the shared matches point to my French Grandfather’s side. There are seven matches between my father and his Angolan relative. Of the seven only one is not open to sharing their ancestry composition.

    Of the six relatives open to sharing I was able to view the DNA segments my father shared with these relatives. That particular segment in my father’s chromosome painting is identified as “African Hunter-Gatherer”. Our Angolan relative only has 0.2% African Hunter-Gatherer but people from the Congo Basin are Hunter-Gatherers of South Central Africa. There’s a very good reason why Angolan and Congolese are part of the same category on 23andme, I’ll explain that below.

    Angolan relative is purple
    Photo by Thijs Boom on Unsplash

    Now for a little history on Angola, before the Portuguese colonized Angola, there was a pretty sizeable Kingdom located in central Africa. This Kingdom called Kingdon of Kongo comprised of northern Angola, the western portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the entirety of the Republic of the Congo, and the southernmost portion of Gabon.

    This Kingdom was a highly developed state and had an extensive trading center, frequently traded with neighboring kingdoms were natural resources, ivory, copperware, metal goods, raffia cloth, and pottery.

    In 1483, the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão landed in the Kingdom of Kongo when he sailed up the uncharted Congo River. Cão left the Kingdom with some Kongo nobles and brought them to Portugal. The Kongo nobles and Cão returned to the Kingdom in 1485. The ruling king, Nzinga a Nkuwu, converted to Christianity. In 1491, Nzinga a Knuwu was baptized and changed his name to João I. Christianity quickly became the religion of the Kongo nobles.

    In the decades that followed, the former traded goods were quickly replaced by human trafficking also known as slavery. The Kingdom has a long history of slavery, one that predates the arrival of Europeans. It’s my belief that this fact is what made it a favorite source for Portuguese traders and other European powers.

    With this little bit of history, we know why on my father’s DNA painting his DNA segment shows up as African Hunter-Gatherer and our Angolan relatives show simply as Angolan & Congolese.

    One of the DNA cousins my father shares with our Angolan relative has two grandparents from St. Vincent and it might mean nothing but in the mid-1700s we had French relatives living in St. Vincent and this is probably where our Angolan ancestor ended up in slavery. It’s just a theory but I know which lines were living there and I’m conducting a little experiment to see if everyone from that line carries a little bit of Angolan & Congolese in their Ancestry composition on 23andme.

  • The Reasons why I prefer 23andme over Ancestry DNA

    So many times I’ve been asked if I prefer Ancestry or 23andme and which one would be the best to buy. In answer to the first, personally, I prefer 23andme. In answer to the second, it depends.

    Ancestry is always touted as being the best but for who?

    People with ancestry that is mainly from the United States. If you have ancestry from the Caribbean or Europe you might have more matches with 23andme, MyHeritage, Geneanet, or any of the other lesser-known DNA sites.

    To show you what I mean I’m going to show you my brother’s DNA map from Ancestry.

    *Not all Relatives opt into sharing their location so there could be some from the locations I’m talking about.

    As you can no doubt see there is 1 DNA relative from Canada, 17 from the Caribbean, and 3 from the UK. All our ancestry is from the Caribbean: US Virgin Islands, Dominica, and Saint-Barthélemy. We should have way more family in the Caribbean, the UK, and France but those testers are just not here at Ancestry. I can find some who moved from those areas to the United States but the ones who never moved are unaccounted for and quite frankly they are the ones that can probably help me break my brick walls.

    As a comparison, I’m going to show you my father and my 23andme DNA maps, what I love about 23andme’s map is that it tells you exactly how many relatives did opt into sharing their locations.

    463 out of 1500 DNA Relatives
    458 out of 1501 DNA Relatives

    First, we’ll look at my map.

    Do you see the difference already? 14 DNA relatives in Canada, 40 in the Caribbean, 1 in Mexico, 1 in Central America, 3 in South America, 34 in Europe, and 1 in Australia.

    So, here’s a closer look at my European relatives. 1 from Ireland, 1 from the Isle of Man, 4 from Scotland, 23 from England, 1 from Switzerland, 1 from the Netherlands, and 3 from France.

    Now let’s look at those from the Caribbean, 1 from the Bahamas, 1 from Bermuda, 1 from the Dominican Republic, 1 from Barbados, 4 from Dominica, 5 from Anguilla, 1 from Puerto Rico, 1 from the British Virgin Islands, and 25 from the US Virgin Islands.

    Now let’s take a look at my father’s map, 10 in Canada, 1 in Central America, 1 in South America, 40 in the Caribbean, 24 in Europe, 2 in Australia, and 1 in Japan.

    Let’s zoom in on his Caribbean relatives, 1 in the Bahamas, 1 in the Dominican Republic, 1 in Trinidad and Tobago, 1 in Martinique, 3 in St. Lucia, 1 in Guadeloupe, 2 in Saint-Barthélemy, 3 in Sint Maarten, 1 in Puerto Rico, and 26 in the US Virgin Islands.

    Another aspect of 23andme that makes it much better than Ancestry is the Advanced DNA Comparison to several other DNA relatives to see what DNA segments we have in common, Ancestry doesn’t have a similar feature.

    The only issue I have with 23andme is that it doesn’t have a good family tree, there is a family tree option but it is very limited, I can’t do much with it because of all the intermarrying within my family and there is no way to indicate that in 23’s current tree. So, I will usually look at relatives on 23 and then go to Ancestry to try to place them in my tree over there.

    In conclusion test with both if you can. With those two tests, you can upload to the other Genealogical sites and cover all your bases. You will no doubt run into some of the same matches but you might be surprised with some new ones who are not on the major sites.

  • My husband’s 23andme results

    Sometime last year I mentioned to my husband that 23andme was having a sale if he was still interested in doing one. His response if I remember correctly was “Hmmm”, I despise that response because I never know if he was actually listening or not, I guess this time he was because in January he walked in with the 23andme box-like “look what I got”. I had a lot on my mind so I didn’t really pay attention to when he did the test or sent it in but I do remember asking to see it when he got the results.

    I was always interested in what his results would look like. I assumed something similar to my own since his father’s family is from Guadeloupe and my father’s family is from Saint-Barthélemy, Guadeloupe, etc. My mother is from Dominica while his mother is from Benin. 23andme doesn’t have a category for Benin so most of it would probably fall under Nigeria.

    I tried using 23andme’s Predict my ancestry tool to see what his results might look like since there was no Benin category I used Nigeria for both his mother’s father and mother and Guadeloupe for his father’s mother and father. Here’s what his predicted results look like:

    These results are not very convincing. I’m unsure why his European would only be 2%. The Nigerian is way too high, the South Asian, and WANA are both plausible, and everything else looks possible.

    His actual results kind of shocked me. I have to admit I am not well versed in the history of Guadeloupe but his results are very interesting. Here’s what his results are:

    Did you see what shocked me?

    No?

    His French and German are nonexistent. I really shouldn’t have been surprised as the most recent update hasn’t been very good for people with ancestry from the French Caribbean. I have no idea what the Ashkenazi Jewish is about, my father and some of our other French Antilles relatives have tiny amounts so my next adventure is to learn a bit more about Guadeloupe’s history. I knew the Native American was possible so it’s not surprising. The Recent Ancestry in the Americas did surprise me though. Haiti and the Dominican Republic, one would assume it’s from a French ancestor but I’m unsure since he has a lot of DNA relatives from other Spanish-speaking countries. He does have a few relatives from France, and we are not directly related as I had feared. There was one relative from Guadeloupe with my mother’s maiden name. I know my mother had family that moved to Guadeloupe so he might not be related to me through my father but maybe very distantly to my mother?

    Just because here is a compilation of My father’s results, My results, and my husband’s results:

  • New MyHeritage Genetic Groups

    This being the first day of the new year I thought it only fitting that I write about MyHeritage’s Genetic Groups update that dropped on December 24. They are free to anyone who has taken a test at MyHeritage or uploaded it there. I have three uploads, my 23andme which was uploaded in Sep 2018, my brother’s Ancestry which was uploaded in Mar 2018, and my father’s 23andme which was uploaded in Aug 2020. Since my brother and my uploads were done in 2018 we were grandfathered into having access to most of the DNA tools without having to pay. It’s interesting how both our uploads perform, my brother’s upload has 520 DNA relatives while I have 500. Our father on the other hand has 1,006 DNA matches!

    Here’s my Ethnicity on MyHeritage, I didn’t receive any Genetic Groups, unfortunately, these results don’t really make much sense to me and have never changed since I uploaded them.

    Here’s my brother’s Ethnicity, he has one Genetic Group in, the Netherlands, which makes sense since I knew we had relatives in the Netherlands.

    My father’s upload was stuck behind the paywall because it was uploaded after MyHeritage stopped allowing the free uploads but I never really thought about paying for it since I could see his ethnicities by comparing his account with mine or my brother’s, I have to admit though, seeing that he had 3 Genetic Groups and I had no way of seeing them unless I paid made me very curious. I ended up paying 34,80€ to unlock his DNA results.

    I’m not sure if being able to change the Confidence level of the Genetic Groups is part of the paid DNA account or if it’s due to the fact that there is more than one Group.

    Puerto Rico and USA Genetic Group make perfect sense as my father has a lot of families that moved to Puerto Rico and then their children later on moved to the USA.

    The other two Genetic Groups I wasn’t expecting if you read the About this Genetic Group section it’s mostly British and some Irish and German settlers, on my father’s paternal side we have a few Irish/British lines so this makes sense.

    In conclusion, the Genetic Groups have been a pleasant surprise just waiting on an update to the Ethnicity because I’m not really sure what could be contributing to the South Asian in both mine and my father’s composition.