Monday, August 22, 2016

Contacted by the match of a match

Was contacted by April, who is helping work out the ancestry for Danny, the man who reached out to me but didn't know his paternal ancestry.  April's husband is also a DNA match for Danny.

In looking at his GEDMatch number, her husband didn't match me, my dad or my 2nd cousin, so this leads me to believe that we are both related to Danny on different lines.

Danny's connection to me is estimated to be at 4.4 generations to the most recent common ancestor at GEDMatch, we match at chromosome 6.

Hopefully, some of the other matches at chromosome 6 will overlap with Danny and provide some clues as to who the common ancestor might be.

I know that it is possible, as I have read about these cases being solved on various DNA discussion groups.  We just need more to test.


Sunday, August 21, 2016

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.


Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Wordless Wednesday : William Lee Wright, 1933


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