LivingDNA Test

I took another DNA test.

LivingDNA.com is a DNA testing company based in the United Kingdom.  The analysis will include a breakdown of ancestry into eighty different regions of the world, 21 of them specific to the United Kingdom.  I will share my findings with you.

My kit cost $159 (US Dollars) and shipped in three days from Kentucky, United States.

Cheek swabbing is the method of collection.

My mother's ancestry is of recent origin from Ireland.  I am hoping that this DNA test may reveal geographical areas of prevalence in my DNA and link me to close cousins in the United Kingdom.  If customers are primarily from the same country as my mother's ancestors, LivingDNA could be a deeper pool of potential close cousins than other companies whose customers are overwhelmingly from the United States.

I'm not a fan of ancestry results, finding them widely varied, and prefer to see DNA cousins to figure out the common ancestors.

Patrilineal DNA of Five Duryea Cousins

New York County, New York, Wills and Probate Records, 1658-1880 (New York State Archives) for Joost Deriew (#787) at Ancestry.com.  J0038-92: Probated Wills, 1662-1827.  Wills, 0621-0820, (1662-1761).

Duryea is one of the most researched names in my family tree.  The patriarch Joost, whose surname was spelled in different ways, removed from Mannheim (Germany) and settled in New Utrecht, Kings County, New York, around 1675.  Today thousands of people can trace their descent from Joost.

Although Joost is long gone, his Y chromosome survives in his direct male descendants, passed from father to son through the generations, identical unless a mutation occurred.

My grandmother's first cousin, Bruce, supplied his Duryea Y chromosome for testing at Family Tree DNA to further research into the Duryea family history.  (Bruce passed away in 2015.)

In the database four other descendants of Joost are identified.

Below is family tree demonstrating the relationships of the five tested men among themselves and to their common ancestor, Joost.

Person 3 is Bruce (my first cousin, twice removed).  He was in the ninth generation, making him nearest Joost.  He tested 111 markers.  Person 1 tested 37 markers.  Persons 2, 4, and 5 tested 67 markers.

Persons 1 and 2 descend from Joost's son Joost.  Bruce and Persons 4 and 5 descend from Joost's son Charles.


The 67 markers of Persons 4 and 5 are identical.  They differ from Bruce by a genetic distance of two out of 67 markers and from Person 1 by a genetic distance of 1 out of 37 markers.

The outlier is Person 2.  His closest relation, Person 1, also a descendant of Joost's son Joost, more closely matches the descendants of Joost's other son, Charles.

We could say that the patriarch Joost's Y chromosome was likely the marker values seen in Persons 4 and 5.

This is my first opportunity to compare Y-DNA among testers who are related by a paper trail.  Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Thank you to Roberta Estes for her illustrations and explanations of Y-DNA and to Jim Owston for his case study.

Duryea Cousin

A Duryea cousin has been found through DNA testing!  "C J" and I are fourth cousins.  Our common ancestors were our third great grandparents, Stephen C Duryea (1814-1887) and Mary Evenshirer (1842-1916).  I descend from their son, Abraham Brewer Duryea (1878-1944), who married Nellie Cummins (1879-1965).  C J descends from their daughter, Fannie Duryea (1875-1943), who married Judson Cooke Drake (1877-1938).

This was as far as we can go with our DNA tests at Ancestry because Ancestry does not let us see where the shared DNA is.  C J kindly uploaded Ancestry's DNA file to GedMatch so that we can utilize our DNA tests.

My father and his siblings are on GedMatch, as well as two cousins from the prior generation from this Duryea line.  Below is the table showing the amount of shared DNA with this cousin cluster.

Notice that the person in orange (my aunt), shares only one segment above 7 cM with C J.  A lot of people prefer to not work with small, single segment matches, as the most recent common ancestor could be very far back in time, or otherwise not discoverable.  The shared DNA of the other matches demonstrates the variability in the amount of shared DNA and that this is a workable match.

Dropping the threshold of the size of the shared segment to 3 cM, a visual graph of the shared DNA on the chromosomes was created thanks to Kitty Cooper's Overlapping Segment Mapping Tool.

Note:  Chromosome 11 is altered to reflect that all six cousins match C J here.
The Mapping Tool accommodates only four.

Some of the segments shared with C J were not previously attributed to Duryea/Evenshirer.  As seen in the current family tree, the parentage of John Evenshirer remains a mystery.  Some of his DNA may be represented in the shared segments with C J.

Everyone in my group matches C J on a segment on Chromosome 11.  Three other people also match on this segment with a size of 15 - 30 cMs.  We explored that the common ancestor was Abraham Riker, also known as Abraham Rycken Van Lent, who in 1654 built a house that still stands, with the family graveyard in the back, in what is now East Elmhurst, Queens County, New York.

The last Lent in my line was Mary Ann Lent (1796-1875), wife of James Brewer (1798-1849).  Her parents were Abraham Lent (1772-1851) and Margaret Mann (1773-1844).  Could a segment of DNA from the original Lent immigrant still be in descendants 350 years later?  He was my 11th great grandfather.

Last census for Abraham Lent.  He died in 1851.
He was neighbors with the author, Washington Irving.
They are also buried near each other in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.