Crucianize

Tag: DNA test

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.