Saturday, June 9, 2012

More Genetic Comparisons

Another useful function of the expanded comparison abilities at 23andMe is comparing people who match both my father and his third cousin.  The most recent common ancestors were born around 1830 in New Jersey, Calvin Cook and Mary Neil.  Calvin's lines were in New Jersey and New York several generations before Calvin, while Mary was likely of recent Irish descent.

In the above graph, P. M., who lives in Ireland, matches David and David's third cousin, as well as T. R, who is also from Ireland.  T. R. matches both David and the third cousin (not shown).  Mary Neil represents David's only Irish branch.  Thus, P. M. and T. R. likely match David through one of Mary Neil's lines.  The question remains:  which of Mary's ancestors was also an ancestor of P. M. and T. R.?

Friday, June 8, 2012

Royal Genealogy?

Someone found this interesting handwritten genealogy at a garage sale in New Jersey.  It's interesting, though a bit difficult to follow the lines.  Ancestors include Charlemagne and several Kings of England.





This seems to be the area of more recent people.


Thursday, June 7, 2012

DNA Update: 23andMe

A new feature at 23andMe is the ability to compare matches to one another, as long as they are "sharing genomes" with you.  I compared my father's 250+ matches.  (Took about eight weeks.)  Most matches matched a few others, usually with a very tiny segment.

In the above graph, my father (David) shares genetic material with all three of these people, though not on the same chromosome.  This could indicate a shared ancestry among all four of them.
In this graph, David matches all three of these people on the same area of Chromosome 12.
The limit of this DNA testing is that you are not told which side of the chromosome holds the match.
In other words, you have 23 PAIRS of chromosomes; one side from your mother, the other from your father.
All three people could match on the side from David's father, or from his mother, or one is on the maternal side, the other two on the paternal side.  We do not know from this comparison alone.
The new ability to compare matches against one another enables us to see that C. W. matches N. P, but not R. M.
In addition, N. P. does not match R. M.
From this, we can proceed with the hypothesis that N. P. and C. W. match David on one side of the family, while R. M. matches on the other.  We just have not figured out which one is which (yet).