Charting the atDNA matches

I sent out a massive spreadsheet with charts of those who matched myself, my father and cousin Jeffrey hoping to spur further research and collaboration.  I tentatively called the spreadsheet "LeMaster atDNA", even though many of these matches will turn out to be cousins that share other uplines.  At the least, since the common ancestry of dad, Jeffrey and myself is Luman Cooper LeMasters and Barbara Isabel Wehrly we know that these matches are cousins somewhere in the upline.

My sheets had a page where all of the matches were listed, then a table showing how I had compared each match to each other and how many segments and centimorgans were shared.  Still another chart had the total amounts of shared DNA mapped out with the chromosome and the start and end point.  Each chromosome had its own separate sheet of data where I graphed out the overlapping segments.

At first glance, chromosomes 7 and 15 seem to have a lot of overlap amongst the group of people I've been able to compare.  I'm so thankful for sites like GEDMatch - i just wish more people would upload their results.

Only one email address from GEDMatch was a bounce, and I've already had a reply from someone who is helping, Danny, the gentleman who reached out to me earlier.  Danny's paternal ancestry is a unknown to him at this point, and that is where we match, so this will be an interesting journey.

Wordless Wednesday : William Lee Wright, 1933

Photo of my maternal grandfather, William Lee Wright, taken in 1933 (age 13-14).

Reaching out to close matches

Reached out this weekend to all of my close matches at AncestryDNA and encouraged them to share or link their results to a family tree.  So many people have tested there and haven't bothered to even enter rudimentary information about their family tree.  A couple of my matches had a family tree, but didn't link their trees to their DNA results.

I encouraged each one of those matches to upload their results to GEDMatch so we could compare chromosomes.

In addition, I reached out to matches that I shared in common with my cousin Jeffrey - so I know those matches should either match me on the upline from the LeMaster/Wehrly line.

So far, the only response I've received one response.  Danny, a man who is predicted to be a 4th-6th cousin, who doesn't know his father.  He has uploaded to GEDMatch, so I will try to help see where we have a match.