How am I related to all these people?

During RootsTech last month, I watched as many online classes as I could about using DNA and analyzing matches. But that wasn’t enough, so I hired my friend Jennifer Zinck to walk me through applying the techniques to my own DNA results. Actually, we looked at my father’s DNA results and lately I’ve been working with my mother’s matches. I was lucky enough to test both parents’ DNA eleven years ago before Mom died, and I usually look at their test results rather than my own since they’re one generation closer to any common ancestor than I am.

Today my father has 80,771 DNA matches, which is a crazy, unwieldly amount to work on. Mom has only 23,208 matches, but no matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of people. Many of them share only a little bit of DNA, which indicates the common ancestor is many generations back. The ones with lots of shared DNA make sense to me from what I know about them – and they rarely have anything new to share. Tons of matches don’t have any trees available at all, which makes sense if they really took the DNA test to find out their ethnicity background instead of finding cousins.

Just “doing the DNA” isn’t enough. To figure out the connection on these more distant cousins we have to do the work of documentary genealogy. One step I took about five years ago when I began getting questions from DNA matches was to build out my tree to figure out who they all were. To do that, I started with my recent family and checked to see if I had all of my grandparents’ siblings in the tree already. Who did they marry? Who were their children? Who did they marry? Children? Then going back one more generation to the great-grandparents. Who were their siblings? Who did they marry? Who were their children? Etcetera. It took a long time but I’m so glad I did it.

Dad’s early North Carolina ancestors and Mom’s Irish and Scots immigrant ancestors are much more difficult because I have no idea who the siblings were for that generation. The DNA helps when I look at their matches to guestimate the generation of commonality based on the amount of shared DNA (measured in centimorgans). I also look at their trees if they have them to see if I recognize a surname. Then I build a floating tree unattached to my own (yet) to see if I can research backwards to find a promising lead.

I also plug the amount of shared DNA into The Shared cM Project 4.0 tool v4 using DNA Painter to get the best estimate of where our ancestors intersect. I get headaches trying to figure it out myself even though I know how; this is just a nifty tool that helps. The closer your relationship is to your match, the more DNA you share.

Here is a section of the Shared cM Project 4.0 tool. You can see that you and your first cousin (1C) share grandparents. You and your second cousin (2C) share great-grandparents, and so on. As you go back in time for that common ancestor, you share smaller and smaller amounts of shared DNA. Then we get into the pesky “removed” relationships, which basically means up or down by a generation. My first cousin once removed (1C1R) could be one generation older than I am (my parent’s cousin) or one generation younger than I am. Just look in the little blocks to see the range and the average number of shared cMs between relatives:

So how is any of this going to help me?

One of my goals is to identify siblings and parents for my mom’s Irish and Scots ancestors. So far most of the matches that show promise are with my Irish Leighton line and my Scots Morrison line. I researched both lines back to my immigrant g-g-grandparents, but using DNA matching and working on trees for the matches I can build out some siblings and possibly parents. Much more work is needed, mind you, but I have a Layton cousin in New Zealand and another in West Virginia who are working on that line as well and we’re sharing bits of info.

My goal on my dad’s side is to find one generation back for my g-g-grandfathers James Keel and William Myers; both surnames are part of my own name. The sheer number of DNA matches is daunting and I need to spend much more time triangulating shared matches and building some trees backwards to see how many of the shared Keels may also be shared Woolards, Stalls, or Peals. It was a small county; they’re all connected. I was delighted to realize that I do have a small number of Myers matches that trace back to Thomas and his wife Minney Myers in Chowan County, NC, in 1800. Now I just have to figure out how to prove that connection.

I’ve been doing this for 54 years but there are always new records and new things to learn. Keeps me out of trouble, too.