Brick walls & DNA

[peter]

On the other hand I have spent 12 months trying to convince a 5th cousin, to whom I can prove my relationship with BMD records, censuses, poll registers, probate records etc, that we ARE related despite having no DNA match. Because up to 20 other trees on Ancestry have, like him, picked up (copied) the wrong husband in a marriage in early 1800s and I have the correct husband it has taken yards of correspondence to finally convince him I am right and 20 other people are wrong. But of course it was only one person who was wrong . . . 19 others copied the erroneous information.
Finally this weekend my 5C accepted any DNA was probably too remote and diluted and has agreed my correction to his tree! Phew!

Well done - we've all encountered situations like that, and it takes tact and determination to get people to accept that they're wrong.

If you're in a situation like that again then it's worth directing people to the table in my DNA Masterclass, which shows that the chance of two specific 5th cousins having a DNA match is just 32% (and quite probably lower at Ancestry now that they've increased their threshold to 8cM - the theoretical average DNA shared between 5th cousins is only 3.5cM).

In my tree I have two cousins who both match me, but don't match each other, even though they are more closely related - they're 2nd cousins once removed, and didn't match at Ancestry even when the threshold was 6cM. At first it was assumed that there was a NPE somewhere but the other matches that they both have prove that there isn't.

 

[JoyNor]

I think my 5C had been watching too many TV programmes where the miracle DNA produces instant family trees for orphans, foundlings and back to William the Conqueror. I kept telling him we might have a match below the 8cM threshold but I think this was like talking in Chinese. Attempts to guide him to upload to GEDMatch failed. Your Masterclass might have sent him over the edge! The power of gentle persuasion has worked and today he has amended his tree.

My 1C and I have small matches to a paper proven 5C of both of us in Texas, but only I match to that 5Cs full blood sister. DNA inheritance is a lottery and unless you accept that you can go crazy.

 

[Pauline]

DNA inheritance is a lottery and unless you accept that you can go crazy.

Even when you accept that I think DNA can still drive you crazy!

One issue I am having at present is that a cousin is convinced they have identified the unknown father of a shared gt gt grandmother from DNA and has added this person and his ancestors into their tree - from where it is now beginning to migrate into other trees.

I am somewhat unconvinced that there is sufficient evidence to make this assumption and have been challenged to disprove it, which inevitably I can't. There is nothing in our DNA to indicate that this person couldn't be our unknown ancestor, only that there are plenty of others who equally well could be.

The match whose ancestor has been appropriated is one of several matches (unrelated to each other) who meet the criteria to come under consideration here, and each of these matches of potential interest has quite a few possible relatives who were in the right place at the right time.

I also have a small cluster of unidentified distant cousin matches with forebears in the right place, who may be trying to tell me something, if I could only work out what!

 

[peter]

Pauline, I have a very similar issue in my tree - there is no proof which of three baptisms is the right one. Unfortunately in my case it's my 4G grandfather, so right at the limit of what it's feasible to achieve using atDNA. But i live in hope!

 

[Pauline]

Pauline, I have a very similar issue in my tree - there is no proof which of three baptisms is the right one. Unfortunately in my case it's my 4G grandfather, so right at the limit of what it's feasible to achieve using atDNA. But i live in hope!

I remember when I started out in family history, it was regularly suggested that if you can't prove something you should try and disprove it instead, and while it can sometimes be a useful approach, sometimes it seems to morph into "if you can't disprove something it must be correct".

However, as you say, when you have 3 equally likely baptisms from paper records (as in your case) or 20+ equally likely suspects identified through DNA (as in mine), you can't just pick one and then, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, claim it must be the right one. Yet plenty of people seem to do just that.

Like you, I live in hope that one day the answer will emerge from my DNA matches but it does require a degree of patience.

 

[peter]

Like you, I live in hope that one day the answer will emerge from my DNA matches but it does require a degree of patience.

The mother is the key - I'll get matches with the father's surname whichever is the correct birth. Unfortunately I can't find the marriage for one couple, one mother was Brown, and whilst the third has a rare surname it doesn't show up in the trees of any of my DNA matches (other than the ones who have assumed, without evidence, that it's the right baptism).

Very frustrating because there were only 3 babies with my ancestor's forename/surname combination baptised in that parish in the entire 18th century - but all occurred within a 2 year period.

 

[Vicky13]

Thought I'd share a DNA success story.

My mum was illegitimate, and not told who her father was. I'd long given up any hope of finding out out who he was.

I got my DNA tested about 3 years ago, more out of curiosity than any real hope of tracing him. I was a bit shocked, and extremely surprised, to find that Ancestry assessed my ethnicity as (initially) 19% Ashkenazi Jewish, from the Poland/Latvia/Lithuania region. None of the research I'd already done had indicated anything other than English/Scottish roots. It's since been revised to 22%, which indicates probably one Jewish grandparent.

I managed to identify matches to 5 out of 8 great grandparents fairly quickly and as I expected there was no sign of any AJ.
One of my grandmothers, who lived in London, remained a mystery for a long time - no identifiable matches to her father. I wondered if there was an NPE here, as I have several matches I can't place anywhere in my tree.

My closest matches with any AJ were 3 around the 2nd or 3rd cousin mark but didn't have trees. I've found many if not most people with Jewish heritage are only interested in having this confirmed, and aren't interested in their family tree and especially don't want to connect with distant cousins of mixed heritage. I have thousands of matches on the Jewish line but most are below 60cM, too far away to be much use, so this got put on the backburner for a while.

Long story short, I uploaded my DNA to MyHeritage and got a hit in the half 1C-2C range. Not much of a tree, so I set about constructing one. He didn't respond initially, and still hasn't given me any information, but at least I know he's alive. I've not wanted to pester him without something more concrete to go on.
But I could work out he connected via my mother's line - his grandfather's family were in the same place as my grandmother's at the same time, so this has nothing to do with my London grandmother.

As if all the pieces fell into place at the same time, I finally got a match to my London great grandfather on MyHeritage proving the paper trail is correct after all. Two generations of small families means not many cousins available to test.

And I finally got a response from one of the 2nd-3rd cousins on Ancestry with no tree. She's the administrator of the account but has been extremely generous sharing her knowledge. Turns out the DNA I match is her daughter-in-law, and the other two good Ancestry matches are her granddaughter and her daughter-in-law's sister. She didn't know much abut this Jewish line either, so between us we have constructed the tree back another couple of generations. It wasn't easy going as there were three separate families involved who all changed their names in the early 1940's. Thank goodness for the 1939 register cross-referencing the names. I found our link and identified our mutual great grandparents. They were from Lithuania, and married in Leeds in 1892. She also uploaded DIL's DNA to MyHeritage (with her permission) and this confirmed she is 2nd cousin to my match, as expected.

And if you've managed to follow all that, you'll know how my brain feels!

I still can't put a name to my mystery grandfather, but I've narrowed it down to one of three brothers. I know which one I favour. I managed to track down the descendants of one of the brothers and made contact with a lady who is his daughter. She has given me a lot of information about her father. Without me suggesting it, she has volunteered to do a DNA test! Hopefully this will finally confirm my suspicions one way or the other.

 

[Prussian]

I'm 5th generation English whereas my Y-DNA (haplogroup Q-BZ1234) is Native American. I have no matches. My earliest known direct paternal ancestor was born c1780 in Magdeburg, Prussia and came to England via France (gentleman's servant) about 1795 and joined the British Navy serving at The Battle of Trafalgar. A letter written by his son (born 1824) in 1879 says his father was a man of colour, spoke several languages flently and was a bit of a musician. I speculate that my ancestors were taken into slavery and assumed the surname of their master. Will I ever trace my roots in the Americas and find distant cousins?

 

[peter]

My first DNA test was a Y-DNA test almost a decade ago - it has told me very little. I would suggest focusing on your Ancestry DNA matches - these are more likely to knock down your 'brick walls'.

Were Native Americans enslaved?

 

[At home in NZ]

I'm 5th generation English whereas my Y-DNA (haplogroup Q-BZ1234) is Native American. I have no matches. My earliest known direct paternal ancestor was born c1780 in Magdeburg, Prussia and came to England via France (gentleman's servant) about 1795 and joined the British Navy serving at The Battle of Trafalgar. A letter written by his son (born 1824) in 1879 says his father was a man of colour, spoke several languages flently and was a bit of a musician. I speculate that my ancestors were taken into slavery and assumed the surname of their master. Will I ever trace my roots in the Americas and find distant cousins?

My speculation is that the ancestor born in c1780 is the man of colour and was perhaps the son of a slave.
Suggestion for research is this site called Slavery and Remembrance which is about the French slave trade. Or, Google 'Slavery in Prussia' which will result in a fair few sites to look at.
Of course, I could be totally wrong.

 

[peter]

Prussian, if you have any evidence that your ancestors were slaves you've yet to tell us about it.

Where did you get the information that led you to conclude that you have Native American ancestry? Haplogroup Q is thought to have originated in Siberia, and whilst it is common amongst Native Americans (presumably because their direct paternal ancestors crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska), it's not that rare in Europe (see Wikipedia).

Bearing in mind that there are many more Europeans than Native Americans and your ancestor was born in Prussia there's no obvious reason to suppose a connection to North America. Using Google the only references I can find to the marker BZ1234 refer to an FTDNA tree, presumably a phylogenetic tree. At this stage all I can say with certainty is that your ancestors came from Siberia: whether they travelled east via North America, or west may be determined by when and where that marker originated.

As suggested previously, your Ancestry DNA matches and ethnicity estimates are likely to tell you more than your Y-DNA test.

 

[Prussian]

It is speculation on my part that my direct paternal ancestors were slaves. The family letter (above) refers to my ggg grandfather Charles MARTIN which says he was a French gentleman's servant who was left to his own resources when his master's property was confiscated i.e. the French Revolution? I recognise this is a tenuous link to slavery or servitude.

It is the experts at FTDNA, YFull, LivingDNA and numerous Facebook DNA groups who tell me my direct paternal ancestry is Native American. My roots are from somewhere in the Americas, which includes the Caribbean.

My first Y-DNA 25 marker test with FTDNA was many years ago which said haplogroup Q-Z780. Other tests followed including the BigY which the Haplogroup Q administrators funded because they were so intrigued by my earlier results. My haplogroup Q subclade has been changed by FTDNA on numerous occasions and was until most recently Q-YP910; YFull says Q-YP1109. I'm the only one on FTDNA's MARTIN Project who is Haplogroup Q! My results have featured in more than one Y-DNA study.

My AncestryDNA's autosomal ethnicity results do not register the Americas which I'm told is no surprise since that line of my ancestry is too small to be recognised. However, a female cousin one generation younger that myself strangeley has American ethnicity. GEDmatch (MDLP K11 Modern) does recognise my autosomal results as 0.16% Amerindian.

 

[peter]

It is speculation on my part that my direct paternal ancestors were slaves. The family letter (above) refers to my ggg grandfather Charles MARTIN which says he was a French gentleman's servant who was left to his own resources when his master's property was confiscated i.e. the French Revolution? I recognise this is a tenuous link to slavery or servitude.

Napoleon invaded Prussia in 1806, and that may have been the event that the letter refers to. Perhaps you could upload the letter (or provide a link to the source if it is copyright)?

It is the experts at FTDNA, YFull, LivingDNA and numerous Facebook DNA groups who tell me my direct paternal ancestry is Native American. My roots are from somewhere in the Americas, which includes the Caribbean.

They may be right but I would suggest examining the evidence critically - it is a fast-changing area of research.

I'm the only one on FTDNA's MARTIN Project who is Haplogroup Q!

Martin is a surname of European origin, so it may not go back many generations in your tree - it was very common for migrants to adopt surnames that fitted in.

My AncestryDNA's autosomal ethnicity results do not register the Americas which I'm told is no surprise since that line of my ancestry is too small to be recognised.

You have 32 3G grandparents, so on average each has provided about 3.125% of your DNA, which is not insignificant. But ethnicity estimates are unreliable at the best of times - it's your matches that are most likely to provide useful clues.

 

[Prussian]

I'm not permitted to share the family letter as it is the copyright of the Berkshire Record Office. There is also a photograph of his son Charles Alfred MARTIN (1824-1913) who wrote the letter that is also copyright. The photograph clearly reveals his dark complexion.

 

[Prussian]

Samuel MARTIN (1694/5-1776) was a slave owner on Antigua but have been unable to connect him with my ancestors.

 

[peter]

I'm not permitted to share the family letter as it is the copyright of the Berkshire Record Office. There is also a photograph of his son Charles Alfred MARTIN (1824-1913) who wrote the letter that is also copyright. The photograph clearly reveals his dark complexion.

It's strange that the son would say that his father was 'a man of colour' when that description seems to have applied to the son as well - is he, perhaps, telling us that his mother was a white European?

 

[Prussian]

His mother - Priscilla nee SHERKEY - is presumed white who was from Frome, Somerset.

His mother told him of his father (e.g. man of colour) as Charles snr died in 1824 when he was an infant.

 

[peter]

His mother - Priscilla nee SHERKEY - is presumed white who was from Frome, Somerset.

His mother told him of his father (e.g. man of colour) as Charles snr died in 1824 when he was an infant.

That's interesting, because it means that what the son wrote in the letter about his father is hearsay. To what extent is what you've told us so far backed up by records?

I found a tree on Ancestry which has a photograph said to be of Charles Alfred Martin, but since he doesn't seem to have a dark complexion it might be someone else:

 

[At home in NZ]

His mother told him of his father (e.g. man of colour) as Charles snr died in 1824 when he was an infant.

Call me cynical if you like but we have all heard the embellished stories that cover up illegitimacy.

 

[peter]

Call me cynical if you like but we have all heard the embellished stories that cover up illegitimacy.

That was my first thought, but the tree I found at Ancestry lists a marriage and several older children. The baptism entry for the oldest child describes him as 'a foreigner'.