In Memoriam

When I was growing up, Uncle Warner and Aunt Ona were the uncle and aunt I saw most often. Uncle Warner was my grandmother's brother and was 3 years younger than she was. (Amazing, when you think that my grandmother was born in March of 1897, Uncle Forrest in December of 1898, and twins Wardy and Warner in January 1900. Big Mom had four kids in less than three years.) I can say with certainty that we saw them more often than my other aunts and uncles, whom we saw often, because we saw Uncle Warner and Aunt Ona almost every day. We lived at Big Mom's old house at 3319 W. 38th St., and they lived within 5 blocks of us. We were the destination of their evening walk which culminated with an hour's conversation on the front porch before they strolled back home again. The grownups talked about everything, but my favorite stories were the ones they told about growing up in Kentucky.

Uncle Warner and Aunt Ona -- 1968

Uncle Warner discussing something very important with my brother Tim.

Uncle Warner and Aunt Ona had two children, Warner V. Castle II ("Little Warner") and Linda. Warner was 10 years older than I was, and Linda was a year younger than Warner. Because of our ages, I don't have a lot of memories of them as we were growing up. I remember that when Tim and I were in elementary school, Little Warner took us up on the hill, put us up in a tree, and then wouldn't let us down. I just remember that Linda was beautiful and was going to school at the University of Tulsa to be a teacher.

Warner lived south of Tulsa for a long time, and then he and his wife Anna moved into Uncle Warner and Aunt Ona's beautiful two-story house on 41st St. The house had been in the family for a long time, as it was originally the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Brooks, Aunt Ona's parents. By then, I had moved away, and I didn't see Little Warner except every once in a while when the family or cousins would get together. Linda moved away and lived in Missouri and California, so I didn't see her for years. Then, a few years ago she moved back home.

Two Christmases ago I got a Christmas card from her, saying that she enjoyed my blog. Well, that was a nice thing to know. Somebody was reading it, and she was interested in the family history, too! We started to get together for dinner and meet to discuss genealogy; she joined Ancestry.com and started talking about doing her DNA.

Then, one day it hit me. If we were ever going to find out the origins of Jacob "the Longhunter" Castle, somebody with the Castle surname was going to have to take a y-DNA test. A couple of male Castle cousins from my generation are still living, but the only male Castle from my dad's generation was Warner. I wondered aloud to Linda if he would be willing to take a DNA test. She asked him, and he joked that he wouldn't do it for anybody but me. But really--he was kind of excited. He started telling his family that they would have to call him Warner "the Longhunter" Castle. He ordered his y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA, and Linda and Anna ordered Family Finder tests from there as well.

Then, you know how things happen. Anna had pneumonia, and Linda had read that sometimes antibiotics mess with DNA test results. Everybody put off taking their tests, because they were all going to mail them at the same time. Then one day Linda called. This time it was Warner who was critically ill, first with pneumonia and then a stroke. He was in the hospital and on a respirator. Nobody was thinking about DNA tests.

Sometime in that next week, Linda realized that her big brother was not going to get better, and it occurred to her that he would be really disappointed if that DNA test didn't get sent off. She enlisted the aid of Carrie and Terri, Warner's daughters. (Terri caught the family history bug at a young age, when she helped take care of my grandmother.) Together, they searched Warner's house for the DNA kits.

My grandmother, Terri, and Warner--I have a feeling
Warner had just said something funny!

Here's the way Linda tells it: "We were sitting on Warner's hospital bed swabbing his cheek when the doctor walked in. He was surprised and asked us what we were doing, but when we explained, he thought it was a good thing." I told Linda that, according to the blogs of genetic genealogists that I have read, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. 

Warner passed away on September 20. Later, Anna was looking at her checking account statement and remembered about the DNA test. She was so distressed, thinking that Warner had been so excited about his test, that Linda felt like she had to tell her what they had done. She said that at first she thought Anna was going to be mad, but then she started laughing and said she was glad they had taken care of it. She and Linda both took their tests, and as originally planned, they mailed all of them together.

Linda's test results showed up on FTDNA within a few weeks, and it was fun to see a close cousin (1st cousin, once removed) with whom I share so much DNA--536.78 cM's. We had to wait a little longer for Warner's, as it wasn't available until December. All in all, he had 8 y-DNA matches. These eight men share a common ancestor, although not recently. Only one of them has the surname Castle. Here is the really interesting thing--four of them have the surname Harmon or Harman. Two of them list their most distant known ancestor, and in both of those cases the men are descendants of the Harman (Herrmann) family that came from Palatinate Germany and settled in Virginia. If you've read my post about Jacob "the Longhunter" Castle, you know that Jacob had a feud with his neighbor, Adam Harman--same family. You have to wonder if this was a family feud that spanned continents and generations.

Warner's haplogroup was R1a1a (R-M198), and in the Castle DNA Project he was placed in the same family group as two other men who claim descent from Jacob Castle (1749-1849, Jacob the Longhunter's son) and one who claims origins in Germany. His haplogroup is not the same as a group who claim Yelles Cassell as their ancestor, so it's possible that our Jacob was not the son of Peter Cassell or the great-grandson of Yelles, as has been hypothesized. He also is not related to the descendants of Elijah Castle, who also lived in Russell Co. VA. Does that mean there were two Castle families with different origins living in Russell Co. in the 1700s? Of course, the comparisons only have validity if the people who test really know who their ancestors are. More Castle men will have to take y-DNA tests before we can draw any conclusions.

Warner's funeral program

Have you ever sat through the biographies and eulogies of a funeral, wishing you had known the deceased better, realizing that you really had a lot in common? That's how I felt about my cousin Warner's funeral. He and Linda had grown up in the same neighborhood that my brother and I had, although 10 years apart. We had played the same way as kids, loved the same hill. Warner and I shared the same politics and the same priorities. Warner was a 28-year veteran of the Tulsa Fire Department; an animal-lover; a protective big brother, husband, and dad; a trusted friend. He was ornery, too. That's what I remember.

Laying Out the Facts

Okay, here's the thing--if there was a credible paper trail that proved a line of descent, you wouldn't need DNA to make your case. Sometimes you have a hypothesis and DNA proves it right or wrong; sometimes you don't even know what you don't know until DNA results guide you to it. In the absence of birth, marriage, or census records that connect an individual to a family, a genealogist has to lay out the facts, including DNA results, to make her case. And getting help from fellow genealogists doesn't hurt either.

Fact 1: DNA results posted to Gedmatch show that a group of testers from various companies match in fairly large segments on Chromosome 6

A couple of weeks ago I was playing around with Gedmatch's new Segment Triangulation feature. Gedmatch has developed this new tool to take the place of the old segment analyzer that let you find matches based on entering the position of a particular segment on a particular chromosome. The new tool color codes matching segments so you know when you have a matching segment with someone, and when you both have a match with someone else.

I emailed ten people who matched either me or my brother in the same place on Chromosome 6. One of them was Nancy, with whom I corresponded over a year ago. We each worked a couple of days back then, trying to make a connection, but we were never able to find an ancestor in common. She was the first person to reply to my new email, and she had two more names to add to the list that were recent matches to her--also on Chromosome 6.

One of those new matches was Linda--also a match to me--and in her tree she had a couple of names that looked familiar.

Fact 2: Given names and places of residence in Linda's tree and my tree match up

Linda's 3rd great-grandfather was Ira Bell and his father was Benjamin Bell. My great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Bell, had four brothers: one of them was Benjamin Franklin Bell, a common enough name in those days, but another brother was Joseph Ira--and Ira is not that common.

The father of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Ira was James W. Bell, who lived in Marshall Co., Mississippi. On the 1850 census James, age 9, is living there with his parents, Thomas and Elizabeth, and sisters Catharine, Mary, Elizabeth, Martha, and Winifred (also spelled Winniford in some documents and shortened to Wincey in others.)

Family of Thomas Bell, 1850 census, Marshall Co. MS

I had always based Thomas's birth year/place on his age of 44/North Carolina on this census (and had always wondered at the fact that his wife Elizabeth at age 52 was 8 years older), so I had always searched for him with a birth date of 1806. However, when I looked at the 1860 census, Thomas was 64, so I revised his birth date to 1796. Based on that small change in birth date, I was able to find Thomas on the 1870 and 1880 censuses in Marshall Co., information that I had not had before. (Apparently, Elizabeth had died, because his wife on these two censuses was Sarah, who was 24 years younger than he was.)

Meanwhile, Nancy had found a Thomas Bell on the 1830 census in Montgomery Co., NC, in the same area where Linda's 3rd great-grandfather Ira and 4th great-grandfather Benjamin lived. Nancy and Linda had also been emailing each other and had discovered that they shared common Ledbetter ancestors. Linda is descended from both Bells and Ledbetters. On her father's side she is descended from Benjamin Bell and his wife Elizabeth Ledbetter. On her mother's side her 3rd great-grandmother is Winniford Ledbetter. Winniford married Benton Jones and died in Marshall Co., MS.

Fact 3: It's possible to place Thomas Bell as a son of Benjamin Bell and a brother of Ira Bell, based on census records and DNA

Circumstantial and DNA evidence suggest that possibly my Thomas Bell, father of James W. Bell, is a previously undocumented son of Benjamin Bell and Elizabeth Ledbetter and a brother of Ira Bell. Here I am relying on member trees posted on Ancestry.com, which I don't really like to do, but I don't know what original documents they consulted to find the names and birthdates of Benjamin and Elizabeth's children. 

Beginning in 1789, the Bells had children about 2 years apart except for a period from the birth of Charles in 1795 to Elizabeth in 1800. Using the revised birth date of 1796 for Thomas, he fits easily in this gap. In addition, several trees also list an "unnamed male" and an "unnamed female" in the list of Bell children. Of course, these could be children who died before they were named, or at some point someone knew that the Bells had had a certain number of boys and a certain number of girls, but didn't have the names to go with them. 

In addition, trees on Ancestry.com show that Ira Bell's early children were born in Montgomery Co., North Carolina, and later children were born in Carroll Co., Tennessee. Ira appears on the census in Carroll County in 1830 and 1840, then disappears there and appears on Marshall County, Mississippi censuses in 1850 and 1860.

Family of Ira Bell, 1850 census, Marshall Co. MS

As I mentioned before, a Thomas Bell is found on the 1830 census in Montgomery Co., NC, then my Thomas Bell appears in Marshall Co., MS, on the 1850 census. A Thomas Bell was in Marshall County as early as 1841, but as no family is listed, I can't conclusively say that this is my Thomas.

Fact 4: My DNA and extended family tree match Linda's and Nancy's BUT...

It's easier to explain my connection to Linda, and it seems reasonable based on our common Bell ancestors. Linda's 2nd great-grandmother was Melissa Bell, eldest daughter of Ira Bell. She married John Wofford in Marshall Co., MS, in March of 1850, so she is not listed in the census above with her birth family. I believe that Linda's Ira and my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas were brothers. That would mean that our most recent common ancestor is Benjamin Bell of Montgomery Co., NC, our 4th great-grandfather.

My relationship to Nancy of 3rd-5th cousin, predicted by FTDNA, isn't completely explained by our theoretical Ledbetter connection. Our most recent common ancestor would be Francis Ledbetter who was born in Charles City, Virginia, in 1653. He is my 7th great-grandfather, and although I haven't done the math, I assume he's just as far back for Nancy. It may be that we have another, as-yet-undiscovered connection that makes our relationship appear closer than it is. No wonder we had such a hard time finding our common ancestor last year!

Do I think that Thomas Bell is an undocumented child of Benjamin Bell and Elizabeth Ledbetter? Yes.

Do I think that Nancy and I have found our primary connection? No.

Do I think that there is more documentation that needs to be done? Yes.

Do I think that we have found Ledbetter DNA on Chromosome 6? Remains to be seen.

If anybody out there has proof for or against my hypothesis, I'd love to hear from you.

The Germanna Colony

In the last week I've discovered a whole new group of ancestors. Not only that, but they are connected to something historic, and that's one of my favorite things about genealogy. History comes to life when you know that your ancestors were part of it.

It all started back in August when my new Huff cousin Barbara heard from one of her DNA matches and discovered that she had ties to the surname Wilhoite (spelled in various ways, including Willhoit, Wilhite, Wilheit, and even Wilhoyte.) As she began to discover that more of her previously identified Huff matches had Wilhoite connections, she even set up a separate tree on Ancestry.com since she didn't know how they connected with our Huffs.

Just before Christmas we both got a new match named Pickler. Now this seems random, but believe it or not, it's all going to come together in a minute. Barbara emailed Mr. Pickler who sent her the name of his ancestor from McNairy County, Tennessee. Tennessee sounded promising, so I looked up the ancestor's name on Ancestry.com. I found a tree posted by someone whose name I had seen as a match on Family Tree DNA. I emailed her and found out that two more of my matches were her mother and brother, and another was someone she had matched who had similar surnames. Five matches accounted for!

Using some of the tools on FTDNA and Gedmatch, I verified that all the Pickler matches indeed had DNA in common with my Huff matches. Still didn't know how, but it was definitely there. I looked at the family trees posted by my new Pickler relatives and was confused by the fact that the surname changed from Blankenbaker to Pickler in one generation. I thought it might be a mistake, until I found out that the Pickler surname was originally Blankenbuhler or Blankenbaker. Pickler apparently was a more easily pronounced translation and contraction. I came across a great explanation of how that happened, but of course, I can't find it now. And yes, Kellie Pickler is a descendant of this family.

Doing research on the Wilhoites and Picklers, it's hard not to stumble across the Germanna Colony, because those two surnames are associated with Germanna, especially what they call the Second Colony of 1717. At about the same time that I found Germanna online, Barbara heard from another Wilhoite match who told us about the many books and articles that have been written about the Germanna Colony.

I'm certainly no expert on the Germanna Colony. Heck, I'd never heard of it a month ago. What I know I've learned online on Wikipedia and websites like www.germanna.org. What I've learned is that Virginia Governor Alexander Spottswood brought 42 colonists from Germany in 1713 to create a mining industry in Virginia. He named the colony Germanna, combining "German" with the name of Queen Anne, the ruler of Britain at the time.

The so-called Second Colony arrived in 1717, and their story is truly bizarre. The ship's captain they hired to bring them to America used their fares to pay off his own debts, then sold the passengers (who thought they were headed to Germantown in Philadelphia) to Spottswood as indentured servants. The surnames of the 20 families, who came from the Palatinate region of Germany, include Wilhoite, Blankenbaker/Pickler, Clore (originally Klaar), Broyles (originally Breuel), and Yager. Once we knew to look for them, these names popped up everywhere in lists of surnames from our DNA matches. Using the Chromosome Browser feature on FTDNA, I think I have found the point at which dozens of us match on Chromosome 7 from position 86131629 to position 87246282. The colored lines below represent five of my brother's matches who have Germanna surnames. They line up exactly at these positions on Chromosome 7.

Since so many Huff cousins from different branches seem to have these same matches, we think that perhaps the Germanna lineage came into our Huff family with Susanna or "Sookie," the wife of William Nathan Huff. For years and on many Ancestry.com trees, Susannah was given the maiden name Toney, but no-one ever seemed to have any proof of that. We know that branches of the Wilhoit and Broyles families lived in Greene Co., TN, and so did someone that eventually ended up in Jackson Co.--Barbara's ancestor Enoch Carter. He was a neighbor to the Huffs in Jackson Co. and had a relationship later in life with Sookie. Barbara thinks that Sookie may have been a Wilhoit or Broyles who came to Jackson Co. with Enoch and his wife, perhaps as a servant. There she met and married William Nathan Huff.

Some of my new relatives also match in much larger segments on Chromosome 19. Remember when I said I had found a dozen new cousins who matched on Chromosome 19? Well, it turns out they are also Germanna descendants.

We still have ends to tie up and further data may bring us to different conclusions, but we would never have known without DNA that we had any connection to Germanna's Second Colony. My brother and I even plan to modify our trip to North Carolina this summer and travel north into Virginia to visit the site of the Germanna Colony, about an hour and a half south and west of Washington, D.C. 

Germanna Visitor Center
from www.germanna.org

Simmons or Soles or (Maybe) Mansell DNA, Part 1

Back at the end of November I got a match on Family Tree DNA with a man named Leo Pentney Gaines. I actually know how I am related to him. If you haven't jumped on the DNA bandwagon yet, you might not realize how seldom you actually know how you are related to your matches. I think some people assume that DNA testing will answer every question they have about their family trees, but unfortunately, that's just not true--at least not yet.

Out of my first page of matches on Family Tree DNA (in order by number of cM's shared), you can see how many I actually know by looking at the table below.

Match	Shared cM's	Suggested Relationship	Do I know how we are related?
My brother	2282.00	Brother	Yes
Miller	134.68	2nd-3rd Cousin	No
Huff	122.26	3rd Cousin	Yes
Leo Pentney Gaines	111.60	2nd-4th Cousin	Yes
Castle	83.96	3rd Cousin	Yes
Coy	74.33	2nd-4th Cousin	No
Dexheimer	70.23	2nd-4th Cousin	No
Hay	69.83	3rd Cousin	Yes
Stroud	68.35	2nd-4th Cousin	No
Childress	68.26	2nd-4th Cousin	No

Those who have been tested have the opportunity to list family surnames and download a Gedcom (their tree) to FTDNA. Some take advantage of that opportunity, and some do not.

• Miller is my closest match next to my brother. At a 2nd cousin level I should probably know who he is. We do not have a single surname in common, including Miller.
• Huff is one of my Huff cousins. I happen to know that he is deceased. Neither his surnames nor his tree is posted on FTDNA. I know how I am related to him because I have made contact with a couple of hard-working Huff cousins who are finding and encouraging other cousins to test and keeping track of the matches.
• More to come on Leo Pentney Gaines.
• As you might have guessed, Castle is one of my Castle cousins. Our great-grandfathers were brothers.
• Coy has not posted surnames or a tree. I've investigated a little but have been unable to determine how we are connected.
• According to her posted tree, Dexheimer and I have a couple of locations in common: Russell Co., VA, and Morgan Co., KY. I haven't determined exactly how we are connected, but I have a number of ancestors who migrated from Russell Co. to Morgan Co., so I hope to eventually find our common ancestor.
• Hay and I share Huff and Roberts ancestors.
• Stroud posted both surnames and a tree. We have some surnames in common, but I have not been able to determine the exact connection.
• Childress did not post surnames or a tree.

Out of my second page of 10 matches, I only know how I am connected to one match. (As the number of shared cM's gets smaller, the common ancestor gets farther away and harder to trace.) So you can imagine how excited I was to be able to figure out my connection to Mr. Gaines.

I don't want to discourage anyone from DNA testing because it will only get better as time goes on and more people are tested. I do want to encourage those who test to take advantage of all the tools you have at your disposal. If you can't download a tree, at least list your surnames and reply to email queries from your matches. It is easy to go into your profile on FTDNA and add surnames and locations. In fact, adding locations to my surnames is a goal I have added to my genealogy "to-do" list.

If you do have some information to work with, you can sometimes figure out your connection to a match, as I did with Leo Pentney Gaines. It actually was pretty easy, and I was equally as excited that an existing paper trail on my Smith side has now been validated by DNA.

First, I searched for Leo Pentney Gaines on Ancestry.com. Even though I didn't know a birthdate or location, I thought I would try because he had a fairly uncommon name. Depending upon the age of the person tested, it might be possible for you to find one of your matches on the 1930 or 1940 census. Sadly, the first result I got in my search for Mr. Gaines was his obituary. He died in October. His home was in Texas, but he was buried in Oklahoma. If I had Googled his name, I would have gotten the same result, and if you don't subscribe to Ancestry.com, that is an option.

A second result was the 1930 census for L.P. Gaines, which included the names of his parents, Harry Leo and Mamie Gaines. They were living in Fitzhugh, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, which is where, according to the obituary, Mr. Gaines was buried. So I still had the right family, and living with them in 1930 was Mamie's mother, Joanna Webb. Here was a name I recognized. Her father was Daniel Monroe Mansell, the half-brother of my great-grandmother Fannie. 

Questions and More Questions

My brother and I--about 1960

My brother and I don’t look anything alike. I certainly didn't inherit his athletic body type. According to Family Tree DNA, however, we are full siblings, not that I had any doubt. It has been most interesting to compare our matches with cousins from different branches of our family. I had even wondered how productive it would be to have him take the Family Finder test, because I assumed our results would be pretty much the same. Not so. While we match many cousins to the same extent, we have found that his matches with some are much greater than mine.

At Family Tree DNA you find out right away how many total centi-Morgans (units of distance along a chromosome) you have in common with your match, how long your longest stretch of identical DNA is, and their estimation of how many generations away the two of you share a common ancestor (MRCA—Most Recent Common Ancestor.) You can then upload your results to Gedmatch and compare with cousins who tested at other testing companies, such as Ancestry.com or 23 or Me.

For both my brother and me, one of our very closest matches is to a Castle cousin. But while I have a total of 83.33 cM’s in common with her, my brother has a whopping 127.71. My brother’s longest strand with her is 51.61; mine is 55.03. I’m finding out that’s a large strand. FTDNA and Gedmatch identify longest strands down to 7 cM’s as being from probable relatives. The fact that we have such large identical strands with our Castle cousin shows that we are pretty closely related. In fact, I know that we are 3^rd cousins. Our great-grandfathers were brothers.

It hasn’t always been so easy to figure out how I am related to my FTDNA matches. I have even shared emails with a couple of my matches, and we finally gave up when we couldn’t figure out where our families link. My largest match at 129.91, estimated to be a 2^nd cousin, is Herbert Archie Miller. I have absolutely no idea who he is, and at a 2^nd cousin level, I really should know him. Not only is his name not familiar, but I also do not recognize a single surname in his list. Another of my largest matches at 118.34 is a Huff cousin. My brother does not match him to this extent, but he matches another Huff cousin at 103.21 total cM’s, and a longest strand of 39.25. Interestingly, my match with this cousin does not even show up on FTDNA because nowhere do I match him at more than 7 cM’s.

With the very hard work of my Huff cousin, Barbara Joiner, we have been able to use our FTDNA and Gedmatch results to test some family relationships. For example, we know that our great-great-grandmothers, both probably raised in the home of William and Susannah Huff and identified as sisters on many trees, are not. How do we know this? Because Barbara, great-great-granddaughter of Ellender Huff, has a mtDNA haplotype of J; my mtDNA haplotype, inherited from my great-great-grandmother Elzina, is T.

I also know that somehow I have Pharris DNA that Barbara does not have, because I match several Pharris cousins from Jackson County on FTDNA and Ancestry.com. Is this because Elzina’s mother was a Pharris, perhaps an earlier wife of Sam Huff whose marriage to Lucinda Hardcastle occurred when he was 38? Or was Elzina’s mother a Huff who was never married to the Pharris man who became Elzina’s father? The answers in DNA only lead to more questions.

It’s amazing how many Huff cousins have tested their DNA—probably because, like me, they have come to a brick wall with the Huffs of Jackson County. Barbara has made a chart, which now includes at least 30 cousins, and compares everyone’s total cM’s, longest strand, and MRCA. Most of us have a MRCA of 6 generations back, so we think we may all have common ancestors in Leonard Huff, born 1721, and his wife Elizabeth Stout.

Both FTDNA and Gedmatch will let you compare your DNA with your cousin’s, chromosome by chromosome. The task now is to chart all these matches. Eventually, with enough cousins from different branches, including the families that married into the Huffs, and enough work, we should be able to identify exactly which stretches of DNA on which chromosomes are Huff DNA, or Pharris, or Roberts.

That’s why I’ve been especially excited that I have discovered two new cousins that descend from Caleb Roberts and his wife Sally Huff. You can easily see that they are related to my brother and me on both the Huff and Roberts sides because it looks like our MRCA is closer than it really is. (A little factoid I learned from my more DNA-educated Huff cousins.) The task now is to chart our matches from Chromosome 1 to Chromosome 22 in an effort to find areas where we all (my brother, me, and our two new cousins) match, but areas that do not match Barbara and the other purely Huff cousins. Maybe we can then say that this is Roberts DNA.

Where in the World Am I From?

I’ve been waiting a couple of months to upload my Family Finder results from Family Tree DNA to Gedmatch.  Gedmatch lets you compare DNA results from several companies, as well as offering you different tools to help you interpret your results.  Gedmatch exists on donations and has been down for a while upgrading its server to handle the ever-increasing numbers of DNA results uploaded by eager researchers, trying to understand what they mean.

It takes Gedmatch a few weeks to chart all your matches, but while you’re waiting, you can play with some of the tools.  You can match one-to-one with someone, as long as you know his/her kit number.  Since my brother’s Family Finder results have just come back, and I’ve uploaded them to Gedmatch, I could compare where we match on each chromosome.  That’s not so useful with my brother’s results since I already know how we’re related, but it does help me become familiar with how Gedmatch works so I can use the tools when my other matches come up.  I’ve got a couple of DNA gurus among my Huff cousins that I hope will teach me how to use all the tools, once they are all functional.

What’s really been fun is working with the Admixture (ethnic percentages) tools.  I’m not an anthropologist or a mathematician, but I’m guessing that the creators of the different admixture models are.  It’s really interesting to see how they differ with each other.  I’m guessing that the differences exist because the creators of the models compared against different populations or used different mathematical formulas to determine the percentages of ethnicity.  What’s fascinating is how closely they do match.

In every model, I’m at least 50% Northern/Northeastern/or Western European and from 26 to 30% Mediterranean.  The Mediterranean is sometimes further differentiated as Neolithic, which doesn’t surprise me, as my mitochondrial haplogroup, T2, came from northern Italy in the Neolithic period.  As most of my known ancestors can be traced back to England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, or Germany, the North/Northeast/West Europe percentage does not surprise me either.  I was excited to see on most models that I am at least 1% Native American.  Combined with other Asian percentages, as Roberta Estes does in calculating Native American heritage, it is even more.  On one model it is broken down as .49% American, .53% Beringian, and .23% Siberian.

Ancestry.com also does its own "Genetic Ethnicity Summary."  Mine shows 44% Central European, 33% British Isles, 21% Scandinavian, and 2% Uncertain.  Again, not too surprising, except for the large percentage of Scandinavian.  This appears to be a flaw in the Ancestry.com formula for calculating ethnicity, as has been discussed online by Roberta Estes and other genetic genealogists.

In my next post I’ll talk about comparing my brother’s Family Finder results with mine and using FTDNA’s Chromosome Finder to pinpoint the chromosomes on which relatives with particular surnames may occur.  I hope when we are both fully up on Gedmatch, we will find even more to help us extend our family tree.  

Will the Real Ancestor Please Stand Up?

Two years ago I gave my brother a DNA test for Christmas.  In my defense, 1) it wasn’t his only present, and 2) even though it seems like I bought a gift for myself, we really do have a mutual interest in finding out more about our Smith line.  I was born a Smith, and my brother is still a Smith, making him perfect for yDNA testing.  

I have always loved genetics.  I remember learning in school about Gregor Mendel, the monk who tracked the inherited traits of peas and became the father of the science of genetics.  I even liked doing Punnett squares, those little graphs that predict the traits of offspring of a particular set of parents.  When I became interested in genetic genealogy, I had to do homework again--about what tests are available and what they can tell you about your family tree.  The field of DNA testing has new developments all the time, and I’m still learning about testing and interpreting test results.

The first test I took myself was a mitochondrial (or mtDNA) test.   Mitochondrial DNA passes from mother to child, uncombined with the father’s DNA.  Only daughters can pass it on to their children, so what mtDNA does is trace your matrilineal line, your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, back into the distant past.  Since a woman’s surname usually changes in each generation, it can be difficult to use mtDNA to find ancestors by name.  What you get instead are haplogroup matches—others who show the same mutations from the original mother of us all, who the geneticists call “mitochondrial Eve.”

My haplogroup is T, one of the 7 or 8 groups that are really common in Europe.  One of the first companies to test mitochondrial DNA for the general public was Oxford Ancestors.  You may have heard of its founder, Dr. Brian Sykes, because he wrote The Seven Daughters of Eve, in which he explains mtDNA testing and describes the seven clan mothers from ancient Europe who still have descendants today.  My clan mother is Tara, who lived about 17,000 years ago in northwest Italy.  (Geneticists look at how Tara’s ancestors dispersed and how many mutations have occurred in her line to help them estimate where her clan began and how long ago they lived.)  Really cool, but not especially useful in helping you fill out your family tree.

Back to my brother’s Christmas gift.  His paternal line consists of our father, Jack Francis Smith; his father, Weaver Harris Smith; his father, Stephen Albert Smith (for whom my brother is named); and his father, John A. Smith.  Yes, that’s right—John Smith.  That’s as far as we know, and all we know about John A. Smith is that he was born about 1805 in Virginia and died about 1850 in Pike County, Alabama.  We hoped that my brother’s yDNA test would help us differentiate our John Smith from the many others with the same name and lead us to his parents, grandparents, etc. 

While mtDNA traces the matrilineal line of both men and women through mitochondrial DNA, which both sexes have, yDNA traces a man’s patrilineal line, his father’s father’s father, etc. through the genetic information encoded in his Y-chromosome.  While a man can take an mtDNA test, a woman cannot take a yDNA test for the very important reason that she doesn’t have a Y-chromosome to test.   yDNA is a lot more useful for identifying ancestors because surnames remain the same from generation to generation. Hopefully, we would connect with another Smith (we joined a surname project called Smiths Worldwide) who matches my brother genetically, and maybe he knows who John A. Smith’s father was.  Mystery solved.

Except my brother’s closest yDNA matches—he matches one of them on every one of 37 markers—are three men named Banks.  What??  I assumed the worst—what genetic genealogists call a non-paternity event (NPE).  I figured that sometime, somewhere, a female married to a Smith was unfaithful with a Banks man, and the result of that union took the surname Smith.  I even looked for Banks families that lived near our Smith family in Pike County, Alabama, although I don’t know that that is where the alleged NPE took place.  (There actually was a Banks family in Pike County, but now what do I do with that information?  The family tree of that Banks family doesn’t match the family trees contributed by the Banks men who matched my brother on the yDNA test.)  So, there the results sit, on the Family Tree DNA site, just waiting for additional information that makes sense of them.

Until this week, when one of my Internet cousins suggested I read a blog by genetic genealogist, Roberta Estes, at www.dna-explained.com.  In fact, I have read the entire archive of her fascinating blog posts, but one post, “Surprise Y Matches—What Do They Mean?” has been especially helpful.  According to Roberta, there is more than one reason that one man might have matches with another man with a different surname, and this occurrence is not that uncommon.

The fact that my brother and Mr. Banks match at 37 markers means that they have a common ancestor at some point in the past.  However, it’s possible to test 67 and even 111 markers.  If my brother and Mr. Banks were to upgrade to more markers, some mutations might show up that suggest that their common ancestor is not recent but way further back in time.  Testing of other cousins might prove either line and show that what we are dealing with really is an NPE.  Roberta also suggested what I had already done—look for Banks families in proximity to our Smith families in locations where we know they lived.

Other reasons for the mismatch in surnames?  1) Someone just decided to change his last name.  (What better name to change to than Smith?)  2) A step-father raised a boy that took his name, rather than his biological father’s.  3) A boy took his mother’s maiden name, perhaps because he was illegitimate.  4) Someone was unfaithful.  And something I actually had not considered—that the NPE, for whatever reason, might have occurred on the Banks side, not the Smith side.  Before DNA, those circumstances might never have been suspected, and the answers would never be found.

The recent sale at Family Tree DNA ($99) has encouraged my brother to purchase the Family Finder test.  I’ve already had the FF test done but have yet to find any conclusive Smith or Banks cousins.  Family Finder finds matches through a third type of DNA—autosomal.  This is the DNA that most of us are familiar with from those Punnett squares, the kind that is contributed by both father and mother and combines in different ways to make each of us the unique person that we are.  

The test produces a lot of data that I am still learning to interpret, but Family Finder does a lot of the work for you by listing your DNA matches, typically cousins and their suggested relation to you—2^nd-3^rd Cousin, 4^th Cousin, etc.  Our hope is that my brother’s test may give us some more options to trace our Smith line.  Because of the nature of autosomal DNA, my brother may have inherited more on our father’s side and will show up with more conclusive cousin matches that will give us some clues about the ancestry of John Smith (or, I suppose, prove that we aren’t related to him at all.)