DNA Projects – Joining My First Projects

I’ve spotted a lot of recommendations to join DNA projects and I have joined several, most through FamilyTreeDNA.

My first two projects I found through the FtDNA website. It has changed a little now, but there is a drop down menu under a heading ‘My Projects’ and in here are options to Learn More, Join and Manage. The option of Join takes me to the Project search screen and has a list of projects at the top that my provided details presumably suggest are relevant to me. They may not be relevant, these are just suggestions. For instance, the first project in this list is the 464xccgg project, which is for men only. Not being a man, I don’t feel that I have any place in this project, however, it covers a region where I do indeed have ancestry and some of my family names are amongst the listed names. Perhaps if I have my father DNA tested his kit could join.

It is worth looking through these suggestions, but I wouldn’t rely on them to locate the best projects. The most useful project that I have joined never did appear in this list.

There are a few different types of projects and some of them have evolved into more than they started as. The basic kinds are, unsurprisingly, based on the type of DNA test. There are YDNA projects and MtDNA projects.

YDNA projects came first and kind of set the uninformed world’s understanding of DNA testing, in a way which I think is detrimental to the present DNA Testing community. These projects test the paternal line only, can determine whether different families of the same surname originated from the same line, and enable the origins of a paternal line to be discovered. Once, this was the be-all and end-all of DNA testing. Back in those days, women’s DNA was useless for research purposes.

MtDNA projects are now out there too, and these are harder to use but have infinitely more potential in my mind. I have never seen statistics on this, but I’d bet that 66% or more of brick walls are women. I have three of these myself – all women. With men, you can locate a surname in a probably area and research all those people until your own ancestor pops up. Women are so much harder, even if you have her maiden name. They tended to go to where their husband came from and their name changed. Their husband’s family names were often used first for the children and if they died after the first few their own family names never came into play. Often their belongings became their husbands’ and they had no Will to leave.

When enough people have tested MtDNA Full Sequence, we may see some results. In the meantime, I and hundreds of others will wait, in our exclusive little groups of ten women to a subclade at a greater genetic distance. The connecting factors will appear for us sometime.

DNA TEST INCLUSIVE PROJECTS are also out there now, and some of the former Y or Mt projects are morphing into these. Autosomal DNA tests (eg Family Finder) are becoming more useful as the testing algorithms are improved, as more people test, and as the results are better understood. The blanket understanding that ‘it is only good for the most recent 5 to 6 generations’ has also been challenged by people finding MRCAs at a much greater distance. While that is still a good guideline, the tested community can identify many connections by (cautiously) stepping outside the box.

There are two main types of Inclusive Projects:

GEOGRAPHIC projects endeavour to investigate everyone in a specific region. I have great admiration for the courageous project leaders of these projects because I can’t really conceive a good methodology for using DNA to work out the groups. I guess with YDNA as a backbone you could use autosomal results to fill out the local families. I can see how it might work in a closed society such as early Van Diemen’s Land or Tristan Da Cunha, but for somewhere like Limerick in Ireland (as a random geographic region in which I have interest) I just don’t see how you can work with the comings and goings of generations of itinerants, merchants, regiments and religious refugees. Certainly, as a surname group it works nicely and some geographic groups are going very well.

SURNAME Projects look at the DNA of specific surname in any location from any test. Some have a starting objective, eg to identify all descendants of a specific historic figure or common ancestor. Others simply gather data and look for patterns, making conclusions as they go.

So – having located a likely project within FtDNA, it is simply a matter of reading the entry requirements and if you match, click the join button. Then, as every project reminds you, check the privacy settings within FtDNA to ensure you have given the Project administrator access to your data, because this is what joining a project is really about – so someone can gain an overview into trends and patterns across a range of relevant DNA tests. An email will be sent if you are approved – which will happen as long as the kit which is joining meets the requirements.

So – on to my first projects.

The Derwent River near Rosetta. This is a wide river and used to have regular paddle steamers and ferries. Some of my ancestors would have known it well.

The Derwent River near Rosetta, north and west of Hobart, Tasmania. . This is a wide river and used to have regular paddle steamers and ferries. Some of my ancestors would have known it well.

THE ULSTER PROJECT – A Geographic Project

This is a project for people with ancestry in Ulster. I joined this one because I have an ancestor couple from Fermanagh.

John McKinley and his wife Alice nee Bowles probably warrant a whole blog post and I’ll make one if (when) I confirm a DNA connection with them. I am pretty sure they are ancestors, the paper trial is quite complete and match family recollections and mementos. But in brief, they were a quiet, well-behaved couple with two children who suddenly committed a crime in January 1846. They stole some geese, together. John was sentenced to transportation, Alice was deemed to be acting under her husband’s instructions and received a very minor sentence – 8 days in jail. For each of them it was a first offence.

There have been reports of desperate Irishmen committing a crime in order to receive a free journey to the colony, considering seven years of servitude a small price to pay for the chance of living a full life complete with food and housing after the sentence was done. There is still debate about how much this occurred, but it would certainly explain this couple. I have plenty of convict ancestors – some of them were rebellious, some dysfunctional, some self-serving. John and Alice McKinley were none of these things and their crimes just don’t gel with the rest of their history.

If the plan was to obtain passage to the colony, then they had not achieved the desired outcome. They had simply lost the family breadwinner. If so, the only solution was to do exactly as Alice did next. She committed another offence. In March 1846, Alice was found guilty of stealing shoes and a shirt, and was also sentenced to transportation. Neither of them committed an offence again, in their whole exemplary and community-oriented lives.

Because of this couple, I jjoined this project. I don’t really know what I expected. It took a few days – but only a few days – to be accepted. After a few weeks I sent an email to one of the project managers asking what we were learning. He responded promply and was very friendly, but forwarded my email to the other manage who apparently knew the DNA stuff. I have never heard from him. If anything is happening in this project, it is not apparent to the average member. But it doesn’t hurt me to be in it and maybe they are learning heaps.

THE ‘H AND HV’ PROJECT AND H2 SUBPROJECT – An MTDNA Project

‘H and HV’ and the H2 MtDNA projects have more to look at on the project page. I am listed on the table showing member results and the main page has some information about the H haplogroup which is interesting.

In the ‘H and HV’ project there are two of us with the subclade H2a2a1c . The other one does not show in my list of MtDNA matches so the genetic distance must be great. Which is a shame because the earliest known ancestress comes from Ireland in about the same time period as my Fanny/Annie Rice/Price, so I’d have gotten quite excited about it. As it is – I guess the relationship is far more distant.

In the ‘H2’ subproject, there are again the same two of us. I don’t really know what I’m doing in these projects but I’m sure my details will be useful to someone.

These projects are clearly happening and the pages change, details are kept very up to date. However, as a member I don’t receive much feedback on the progress. But I do like looking through the list of members and seeing how many there are in each subclade and where the earliest ancestress came from

Since this post became so long, I’ll make another post for the other projects.

My DNA Results – Triangulation

I was looking forward to using triangulation, a technique which was often discussed in the email lists.

My understanding is that if you have a confirmed match, and you have another match at the same segment, you can hopefully deduce the MRCA of all three of you. This, I believe, works as follows:

Suppose I have three matches – Match A, Match B and Match C. They are showing up in FtDNA or in Gedmatch or some such site. I have probably found them by using the ‘In Common With’ tool and discovered that these matches match each other as well as myself.

Suppose then, that I view them all in a chromosome browser and find that they all match on the same chromosome and basically on the same segment. Maybe one runs eg 5 to 13, one runs 7 to 10 and the other from 4 to 11. We have a segment from 7 to 10 which is matched on all three, same chromosome. This is what you need to start with.

If I have a segment 5 to 10, and another one 10 to 20, those segments did not necessarily come from the same ancestor. They are not relevant. The relevant portion is the exact same bit on each. However, in my segments above the longest – 5 to 13 – might be closer to me than the smaller ones.

I have many sections like this, and I have kept a note of them. However, I need more than this for it to be useful.

If I have identified my match with one of them, I have a good starting point. Suppose I have identified that Match A is a second cousin on the maternal side. Our common ancestor is one of my maternal great grandparents and I will be able to find them fairly easily. This gives me my first triangle – my own segment, my second cousin’s segment, and our common ancestor’s segment.

I have two other matches with that same chromosome, same segment. It’s time to look at their ancestors. Do they have our great grandparents in their tree? If so, it is easy. The triangle is much the same. If not, do they have an ancestor who lived in the same location as our great grandparents? If so, we need to build our tree and theirs at that point to find a connection.

If I find it, I have the MRCA and our match. If not, the next best thing is to take the other two matches – the ones who match each other and yourself on exactly the same segment, and see if I can find their common ancestor. If I figure out that both of them descend from John Appleyard of Onevillage in Sussex in 1830, then I can look through my own tree for an ancestor who lived in Onevillage at the same time. Failing that, an ancestor who lived nearby, an ancestor with a travelling job who went through that village, a runaway son or daughter who was located near that village … that type of thing. It is necessary to truly understand my ancestor’s lives to do this. It takes time, effort and concentration. Luckily it is enormous fun, but sometimes relies on access to the right resources.

This sounds so simple! Like everything else to do with DNA, I haven’t found it so. If a common ancestor or common location cannot be found, you can’t go any further. I have a confirmed maternal match for my example segment (the first pink segment) so the second match either matches the same ancestor on the maternal side, or it matches an unidentified ancestor on the paternal side. So the next thing to do, if we can’t find a link on the maternal side, is to look in the paternal tree for clues.

One thing that throws people out is when this match – as in my example – was an ‘In Common With’ match. This makes it seem likely that the match should be on the same side, but this really cannot be assumed. Communities used to be more isolated and people married the people they met. If all they met were the local families, you end up with a whole lot of interconnections.

Here is my diagram showing how I think it works. I believe this diagram will enlarge if clicked.

My simplified DNA inheritance diagram.

In my diagram, each colour represents the sequence of DNA from that ancestor. We each get two copies of each chromosome, one from the mother and one from the father. This is greatly simplified because I am interested in how DNA from one or two specific ancestors has carried down. In this case, the two sets of great grandparents in this picture.

Thinking of my earlier example, I have myself, I have Match A (the second cousin), Match B (the more distant maternal relative) and Match C (the aunt on the paternal side). My matching segment is the orange block for the aunt, and the first pink block for the maternal matches. Notice that this block is in the same position and will show as the same segment numbers (roughly) for each match. But I can’t tell in my match list that Match A and B are pink and Match C is orange. Having that detail would make it all straightforward. The only thing I haven’t added into this diagram is another connection between the two sides. Just imagine that the paternal grandmother is the sister of the lady who marries the maternal great grandmother’s brother’s son. Then Match C will show as a close match to Match B through a different common ancestor. This is why ‘In Common With’ can be a guide to which matches to gather into the investigation in the first place, but doesn’t really tell you anything more.

This makes sense when you see the whole diagram, but try covering the top half with a piece of cardboard and just looking at the bottom samples. It is very hard to see how they might connect.

The important point being that I need every element I can find in making this connection. I need DNA matches on each side, I need as solid a paper trail as I can get, and I need a cautious and inclusive methodology. However, once I have made the identification, this is very useful in identifying further matches on the same segments, so it is well worth making the effort.

Clear as mud? Usually. I’ve come to the conclusion that mud is nothing to DNA.

Genealogical DNA -My Understanding of Identical By Descent and Identical By State

By this point, two months after receiving my results at FtDNA, I was still finding new ways to work with my results, and I still hadn’t looked at all the matches. My list of Family Finder matches was now up to 30 pages and slowly growing by about about three distant cousins each fortnight. With two confirmed relationships under my belt, I looked for new ways to identify my other matches.

My cousin from Prince Edward Island had mentioned triangulation. This meant using the known details of two matching kits to identify the connection of a third definitely connected kit. I have used a whole lot of ambiguously defined words there which I need to keep clear in my own mind.

If there is a common ancestor, lets say it is a man born in 1800, he will have passed some of his DNA on to his children. We all understand this. Working from ancestor to descendant is easy. Those children will pass their DNA on to their children and some of that DNA will be have come from their grandfather, intact and unchanged. With each new generation, the chances are likely that less of that segment will be passed down. The segment will be smaller. Similarities do exist between generations but it is rare for a child to be exactly like their parent. They are a mix.

This is quite comprehensible and I don’t think anyone has trouble with this notion. We might get our brown hair from Dad and our green eyes from Mum. I have hazel eyes and my spouse has brown eyes, but two of our children have blue eyes. This is because my father has blue eyes and so does my spouse’s father. Those genes have come down through us to them.

What is hard is going the other way. We have inherited a whole lot from our ancestors and trying to work out which bit came from which ancestor is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with lots of shades in a few colours and no picture to refer to. It can be done, with time, trial and error and a good system to keep track of what you have tried and what you have not.

I tend to think of it as words. There are a whole lot of words made up of the same letters. STOP has the same letters as POST which has the same letters as POTS. The letters are the same but the order they come in matters. They are very different words.

This is how I think of DNA segments, in the privacy of my own mind. I’m sure a geneticist somewhere is having cold chills. However, it works for me. If my great grandmother’s DNA words are HORSE, TREE and RADISH, she might pass HORSE and TREE down to one child, and TREE and RADISH down to another. If those children each pass TREE on to their children, the children will be a DNA match for the segment TREE. This is Identical by Descent.

If a totally different, unrelated person has the words FOREST, BIRD and REEF in their DNA, they just might pass down FOREST and REEF. Placed side by side, this looks like FORESTREEF . Accidentally that DNA segment has the word TREE in the middle, but TREE isn’t one of their words. This one will also show as a match. It is identical by State.

In my own DNA test journey, with two confirmed matches, I knew I had to work out which words had come down from those two ancestor couples. A word is a segment. Segments can be viewed in the chromosome browser on either FtDNA or at gedmatch. My first step was to work out exactly where we matched.

My confirmed 6th cousin, for instance, matches me on chromosome 4 for segments 1272091102 to 139828852 which is 10.32cM. We also have a large number of smaller segments on other chromosomes which may be IBD, but the smaller they get the less sure one can be. That segment on chromosome 4 is the only one big enough to call a word.

I started a new table in a new document with a two rows for each chromosome (one for paternal, one for maternal) and I entered that segment on my chromosome 4 maternal row. I have a column for the name of my match, a column for the name of the MRCA and a column for the locality of the MRCA.

I then entered my chromosome matches with Sarah. There were three of those, big enough to be sure of. So now I had one maternal segment and three paternal segments identified.

One day, I hope, this nearly empty document will fill up. In the meantime, these successes had whetted my appetite and I went hunting for more.

Robert Lockley and Catherine Hingley – my 3 X Great Grandparents

Anyone who has researched ancestors in Staffordshire in the early 19th century knows they were doing it tough. Particularly the poor. It was bad enough for those with an income – the nail makers, the miners and colliers, the chainmakers – if they had a home to live in, it took three or four incomes to keep it and little left for food. The industry in Staffordshire was iron, in its various stages, and the employers of the district were falling into greater and greater debt. Wages reduced, men were laid off and dissatisfaction was great.

Some districts became very densely populated as families shared their homes, as adult children married and brought their spouse into the family home rather than move out, and as families sublet their rooms to boarders to gain that little bit of extra income. Violence was increasing and there were areas to which the police simply would not go, for fear of their lives.

The plight of those who had lost their job or their home was dire. They shifted from relatives to friends, slept out of doors in summer and wherever they could in winter. They stole, begged and swindled, doing what was necessary to keep themselves alive. Some found work on the canals but the canals were unofficially ‘owned’ by several families. Smuggling was common from Worcester into Leicestershire and the goods run was always worth a few shillings.

This was the world of the Lockley boys, born in the 1810’s to John and Eliza Lockley of Tamworth. The children were baptised in Kingsbury in Warwickshire but they called Tamworth their home. John Lockley’s occupation was given on different records as a labourer, a gamekeeper or a gardener. We know of five boys and one girl born to this couple, and John died fairly young. Eliza can be found in the 1841 and 1851 census as a widow. The boys scattered far and wide, finding and selling pig lead, and taking jobs with carters. This much can be deduced from court records.

Beyond this, their lives are not known but the boys started getting into trouble young, and John Junior was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. By all accounts John was rough, but we don’t know much about him.

Robert was either the third or fourth boy, and he found himself transported for a first offence in 1844, aged 17 or 18. He and a group of boys his own age had stolen from a house and were caught with the stolen property. He provided a character witness but to no avail. By that year, matters were dire in Staffordshire and Warwickshire and a civil uprising was feared. Robert was a chainmaker,a useful occupation for a colony with a shipping industry, and the idea was to send all that could be sent, for their own repatriation, for the good of the colony and for the good of the county that could not support them. Robert was brown haired and brown eyed and blind in one eye, and 5 feet 4 1/2 inches tall. He had scars on his fingers and arms.

On arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, Robert was not compliant. His convict record shows several misdemeanors and one escape. He refused to work and eventually ended up back on hard labour. Then something happened – what it was is not clear, the record is in poor condition, but by 1848 he was in hospital. Upon his release from hospital he seems to have settled and received his ticket of leave in 1850.

A ticket of leave is not freedom. It meant that Robert would receive wages for his work, and with a good report from his employer he might be recommended for a conditional pardon. But he was restricted to a district, he had to comply with a curfew and he was required to disclose that he held a ticket of leave whenever he conducted a transaction, be it purchasing goods, finding accommodation for the night, seeking employment or opening an account with a bank or shop.

Robert did not do this. His next few misdemeanors are being out after hours, misrepresenting himself as a free man and being drunk. It’s a common theme over his next ten years. He lied about who he was quite often. However, eventually he served out his sentence and became free by servitude in 1854 at the age of about 28, when he clearly made his way to Oyster Cove where his brother John was living.

Tasmanian Midlands looking much as it has always looked.

Tasmanian Midlands still looking much as it has always looked.

Catherine Hingley arrived in Tasmania in 1852 as a child of 7, travelling with her mother and her three young brothers. Ann Orton, Catherine’s mother, was a widow and the mother of six children. Like Robert, she was from the Staffordshire/Warwickshire area and the few scant references we have suggest she was struggling to make a home. My impression of Ann is a big hearted lady, not too bright, who continually made poor choices and experienced some very bad luck. She cared for her children but was not able to keep them. She would have done well, probably, with a husband to earn money and keep her in a home. She would undoubtedly have thrown herself into a small world of kitchen, babies and housework and been very happy in it.

We don’t know much about her life but a steady home and a husband were just a dream she constantly chased. She was already a widow in the first records we have, so we don’t know her maiden name. She stated she was born in Northampton but one court record calls her an Irishwoman and the most likely census reference gives a birthplace of Ireland too. She was a big woman with flaxen hair and a florid complexion. In 1852, Ann was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing. It was at least her third offence.

Ann’s eldest two children were left behind in England and I believe I have located them in an orphanage in Dudley, Staffordshire in 1851 – but no certainty yet. The youngest four came with her. On board ship they were given the surname Orton. Once in Hobart Town, Catherine and two of her brothers were placed in the orphanage under the surname Hingley, and the orphanage records give their father as Samuel Hingley. The youngest, John, remained with his mother for the next year. When he was eventually admitted to the orphanage, he came with the name John Orton.

My best guess is that Denis, Catherine and James’ father was Samuel Hingley of Dudley who was a collier, killed in an explosion in 1845. If so, James was born after he died. I have failed to locate a marriage for Ann Hingley with an Orton and I suspect no ceremony took place. John had a father somewhere, and maybe it was a Mr Orton.

Catherine did not see her eldest siblings again, that we know of, and she probably did not see her mother again for years. Denis left the orphanage to an apprenticeship but absconded. In 1858, Ann served out her sentence. Within weeks of receiving her freedom she finally married a man who lived as long as she did, and removed her children from the orphanage.

At what point Catherine met Robert Lockley is not known. He was about twenty years her senior and just might have known her mother back in Staffordshire. Catherine was about thirteen, maybe fourteen when her mother reclaimed her. In 1861, at the age of about 16, she married Robert Lockley in Kingston, south of Hobart. She was six months pregnant. On the marriage certificate, Robert gave his age as 29 and stated that he was a free man. He was actually closer to 35 and should have stated free by servitude. Catherine gave her age as 20 when she was really 16.

They settled at Gordon in the woody wilds of Tasmania’s southeast coast where young Honor was born (might be Hannah). Robert was working as a sawyer and his brother John lived nearby. Twelve weeks later, Catherine was gone. Why, we can only guess, but Robert had the usual notice inserted in the paper that he would not be covering any debts she might accrue. Honor died in Gordon in October, aged 3 and a half months, so Catherine seems to have returned by then, assuming she took the baby when she went.

Robert and Catherine went on to have nine more children, and in later years Catherine seems to have been fairly happy. Their third child, Elizabeth, was my great great grandmother. Their seventh child, James, was my newly found cousin Sarah’s great great grandfather. I note with interest that they had no child named either Ann or Samuel.

Ancestors in Van Diemen’s Land

Sarah, my DNA cousin at predicted genetic distance of 4.4 on Gedmatch, replied to my email.

She was very excited. She lived in England but was born in Australia. She had tested with a different company to me and her mother was a single parent. Sarah was seeking the father she had never known. In my email, I had given the locations of my four grandparents and my father’s father came from the same region as her father. It looked quite plausible.

However, I asked her to send the details she knew – her mother’s side – so we could eliminate them. She was not a genealogist and only had a handwritten page of notes from a great uncle. She sent me a copy and I found the match instantly. This was how simple I had originally expected it to be!

We shared the same 3x great grandparents, Robert Lockley and Catherine Hingley. We were 4th cousins. This match was on her mother’s side and my father’s side. I had her great grandmother’s birth in my tree but had not discovered what became of her, as she married after 1900 which is always harder to research in Tasmania.

We also shared a slightly more distant common ancestor couple, Thomas Wilken Cowen and his wife/partner Mary. Through this couple, we were fifth cousins once removed. Once again, this was on her mother’s side and my father’s side.

The state of Tasmania began as the colony of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803. In its earliest years it was just a penal colony and no one was allowed on or off the island without letters of introduction and recommendation. This changed quite early on. England had an overpopulation problem and Van Diemen’s Land needed workers.

The colony had a rough start and everyone nearly starved. The convicts roamed free, under threat of death if they attempted to abscond. However, in the days of starvation it really wasn’t hurting anyone if some were gone. They weren’t eating the meagre supplies, they weren’t adding to the burdens. Later, farmers arrived and worked out how to use the climate and the soil. Little settlements began to pop up all over and the convicts were confined again to keep order. The worst were kept way down the east coast at a place called Port Arthur.

Port Arthur as it is today. This was the penal colony for the more dangerous convicts, but it always was described as a beautiful place by free visitors.

In the early years of free settlement, prejudice against the convicts was quite strong. However, this had to change. Convicts -either still indentured or now free – held necessary jobs in the community. They were carpenters, teachers, nurses and farmers. Quite a few were constables. Some of them never offended either during their period of servitude or afterwards. Others were unable to change their ways. But in the colony, convicts were only one of many groups to be concerned about. There were aboriginal groups, who generally treated others as they were treated, there were sailors spending a week or two onshore with their wages to spend, soldiers who were often little better than thugs who liked violence and drank way more than was good for them, escaped slaves from the West Indies, deserters of all kinds, bushrangers, sealers and whalers who so often had a sadistic streak and felt no loyalty to their fellow men ….. it became necessary to judge people by what they did now or would do next, rather than by what they had done in the past.

By the 1840s, there was a lot of pressure on England to end transportation and allow the colony to establish itself respectably. It was flourishing – it had a strong shipping industry, farms were producing enough for the colony and more to export, and the pubs were doing a roaring trade. There were fetes and regattas, musical performances, public picnics and formal dinners. As New South Wales suffered a depression in a time of drought, Van Diemen’s Land was able to profitably provide. However, even Van Diemen’s Land was beginning to feel the economic pinch and viewed the continuing influx of convicts with great disfavour.

Even today, there are some who prefer not to find convicts amongst their ancestors. However, most now cherish and parade their dubious past. Those early Tasmanians are a pleasure to research. They had spirit and a strong opinion which they had no reason not to express. Their personalities come through very clearly in the records. The inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land worked as hard as they needed to, partied just as hard as modern man in their leisure time, and involved themselves in everything that went on around them.

This was the new world of Robert Lockley and Catherine Hingley.

The Derwent River viewed from Mt Wellington. Hobart Town began at the far right where the wharf area can just be seen (east), and settlers followed the river westward and inland.

A Closer Look at my DNA Results – My Origins

Reading the emails which came through the lists, I began to wonder what I might learn from my spouse’s family. He is a man who loves his privacy and I respect his desire to have a very minimal internet presence. I have Buckley’s chance of getting him to test his DNA. Given his disinclination, till now I had also resigned myself to leaving my children untested too. However, my eldest son, aged twenty, expressed a desire to be tested. I reminded him that his father wasn’t keen and he did some research, deciding that his DNA was not going to be the same as his father’s anyway. So we did it! As it turns out, my spouse has handled the news quite well, as long as it doesn’t become a main topic of conversation.

It was rather exciting to purchase another kit. I uploaded my son’s gedcom, added his ancestor names and looked forward to what amazing discoveries it would lead to. Having set up his account, there was nothing more to be done for it so I returned to my own.

This time, I looked at the ‘My Origins’ page in the Family Finder section. It had recently been improved into a map showing the ancestral regions of the kit. I knew I was going to be strongly British Isles and indeed I was – 98% European in the British Isles with no further breakdown. As expected.

The other 2% was Central/South Asian with the indicator centred over Afghanistan. This was not expected. 2% is pretty small, but I’m still curious about it. How far back is this branch of my tree? Who was this exotic person and their many ancestors which I share? How far back? 2,000 years? 10,000 years? One day, maybe DNA testing will be advanced enough to tell us.

The other interesting thing was that I could see the origin percentages of my matches, which I guessed might give me a clue. Jennifer the Unresponsive was 100% European. John my 2nd-4th cousin, however, was 97% European and 3% Central/South Asian. Hmm, I thought. Was this a clue? My three cousins in Prince Edward Island show as ‘In Common With’ matches with John my 2nd-4th cousin but actually match him on a different chromosome to the one he matches me on. I guess that’s Scottish families for you. Of those three, two were 100% European and one was 97% European and 3% something else but not South Asian. The page only tells me which matches share my own origins so if it is different I can’t see it.

My 2nd-4th cousin was the only one in the list – which did not show everyone – who had South Asian ancestry so I think we must have an MRCA couple where one spouse is related to the Prince Edward Island group and the other spouse has the South East Asian inheritance. However, it might just be luck of the draw and whoever inherited which genes from the same ancestor. Hmm, I think again to myself, what if I can talk my parents into testing? Who knows what a generation closer might show.

I have no idea how I might talk my parents into it. They live in another state and I suspect it would be easier face to face. I put that tantalising thought aside and looked again at my own details.

At this time, I had gleaned all I could out of it. I was back to the fact that I couldn’t identify a common ancestor with 279 of my 280 matches (new people coming in each week). I realised I had more work to do on my tree.

1) Verify the names I had

2) Get another few generations back – I needed to reach 1700 on all sides to do this properly

3) Build down. Add siblings, find out who they married, see if I can identify some cousins that way.

I had bought myself a $300 puzzle that I simply could not put down.

John Burleton of East Harptree

In an earlier post I wrote about my maternal grandfather’s family, the Dunstalls. My maternal grandfather married a girl from the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales. Her father was Burleton Herbert Wookey Peard and I met him when I was quite young. My mother was quite attached to him and he died when I was five years old, only a year after I met him. We lived interstate and when I was aged four we went on long visit, staying on their property at Mannus. My mother’s pleasure at my spending time with him was still fresh in my young mind when he passed away the following year, and I remember my mother’s sorrow equally well. It was one of those pivotal moments which gelled my understanding of family, and also my awareness that the elderly would not be with us forever.

The family property at Mannus where this family have lived for several generations now. Picture taken circa 1954

To me, Burleton Herbert Wookey Peard was known as Pa. I never knew his full name until our next interstate visit when I was ten years old and we went to visit his grave. He had been a successful farmer and had a green thumb like no one else around. There was a plaque in Mannus commemorating his efforts at eradicating St John’s Wort (calling him Burleigh Peard) and a whole series of prizes from agricultural shows and produce fairs.

This visit to the property of Orana at Mannus was the one which turned me into a genealogist. At the age of ten, I wanted to know all about Pa, about how he got that crazy name, about where he learned everything he knew. His wife Stella (Ma) was tickled pink, and brought out the family bible. I diligently copied all the entries into an exercise book. I was shown Boer War medals, photographs, doilies embroidered by long deceased aunts and uncles, and I heard a multitude of stories. I was also promised the family bible when Ma passed on, but a promise to a 10 year old girl can’t be expected to be kept. I have no idea what happened to the family bible and the medals, but at least I have my transcription.

I learned that Burleton was named for his mother’s family. His mother was Mary Ann Burleton and she had been born in East Harptree in Somerset. Her parents were Francis Burleton and Fanny Eliza Wookey, both of East Harptree. His name was the surname of each maternal grandparent. I’m not sure about ‘Herbert’.

Francis was the son of William Burleton and Elizabeth Dudden and to date I have only located three children in this family. William was a merchant who fell on hard times, he was forced to bankruptcy in 1824. William’s father, John Burleton born 1744, was a man of standing in his community who had a successful farm called Eastwood. John Burleton in 1777 married Sarah Fry, a girl of a very good family from Witham Friary in Somerset. Her family posted announcements in all the Gentleman’s Magazines around. She came with some money of her own, and John Burleton it seems came with some very good farm management skills. Together they made Eastwood a place of local importance. Seventy five years later, John and Sarah’s grandson Robert entertained his neighbours the Earl and Countess of Waldegrave at Eastwood. It was a big event and a story which came all the way to Australia.

I had been quite unable to get any earlier than John Burleton and had only found his marriage through the family he married into. However, looking through my DNA 4th-Remote cousin matches I found someone with the surname Burlington in Somerset amongst their ancestors. No gedcom was provided but an extensive surname list. I spotted no Wookeys, Duddens or Frys, but I did wonder of Burleton and Burlington might be connected. So I wrote an email, giving the details I had.

It took about three emails back and forth, but finally I had a confirmed cousin. It seems Elizabeth Burlington from the other tree was the daughter of Joseph Burlington born in 1738. Joseph’s name had undergone a change. He was the son of John Burleton born 1700. A burial existed for John Burleton senior and his wife Elizabeth is believed to have been Elizabeth Lush but another verification of this would be nice.

John Burleton born 1700 died 1775 in Witham Friary had several children and my cousin had viewed the baptisms for them all. Amongst the children were a son John Burleton born 23 Dec 1744. All the family names were amongst them and witnesses and sponsors show that my John belongs amongst them. After comparing all our documents, my distant cousin and I agreed that we had the same family.

I had a confirmed 6th cousin! I had also added a few details to my family tree.

The other very nice thing about this was that I had verified a branch. The thought had honestly flitted across my mind that maybe I was adopted and that was why I was finding no matches (apologies to my parents, I now have ample evidence to the contrary). I also have an example of how DNA matching can work. It’s quite straightforward when the pieces fall into place.

My Genealogical DNA Test – 4th to Remote Cousins

Now over a month since I tested, I noticed that I had 24 pages of matches rather than 21. I’d set my notifications to inform me of all new matches from close relatives to remote, but maybe, I thought, this was only referring to confirmed matches since I hadn’t received notification of the new ones. This was when I first noticed the different ways I could sort my matches in FtDNA. Nowadays, one of the first things I do when I log in is sort by Match Date to see if I have any new matches, however remote.

Sorting categories for Family Finder matches at FtDNA

Noticing these new ones reminded me that I had heaps of matches that I hadn’t even looked at yet, so I decided to look through. Advice on the forums was that the more distant matches might be accidental matches and not due to shared ancestor, but advice also disagreed over the exact amount to consider worth pursuing.

There was a nice chart floating around for a while which has also popped up in various Youtube DNA videos saying that a matching block of over 11 cM was pretty well definite, although biological beings are capable of confounding science still. Below 10 cM, I gather, the likelihood begins to reduce. But even here, there is debate over the figures. Some sites will say that you can be pretty confident of any block over 5 cM, some say over 7 cM and others place it higher still. But there seems to be consensus for the 11 cM segment and greater. This is, 11 cM in a consecutive unbroken block, not 11 cM total. I have many of these, including nearly all my 4th-Remote cousins. This means, I deduced, that the relationship was quite distant but likely to be genuine distant cousins.

My hopes were not high, given my experience with the closer cousins. But why not try?

About the same percentage had provided gedcoms as the closer cousins, but since I had several pages of these I had more to look through. However, I couldn’t hold all the names in my head. I’d get to a new gedcom and see a name, for example Joanna Harris born 1843, and I’d remember that I saw that name just a few gedcoms back. So back I went, looking, and just couldn’t find it anywhere.

This is when I took the advice of emailers to the DNA lists and began using a spreadsheet. Actually, I began with a table in a word document and later evolved to a spreadsheet. Once again, some common locations began to appear. Most gedcoms were giving a state but nothing more detailed, so when I have ten cousins with unrelated gedcoms, all matching on chromosome 7 on the same segment, I began to notice that they all had an ancestor in eg North Carolina (which state is still featuring very strongly in my cousin’s gedcoms) or Virginia or more rarely Tennessee. South Carolina is also there. I used the chromosome browser extensively to do this. Many of these families are ‘In Common With’ matches with each other, so I’m guessing they are trying to identify their brick wall ancestors who most likely descend from the same very elusive US immigrant who was probably a sibling (or great great uncle) to my Australian immigrant. Or aunt – this is actually more likely as she probably arrived in the United States as a Mrs Someone with the maiden name unrecorded.

However, I’m not sure how big these states were back in the old days. In the Australian colonies there was often movement between. From my home state of Tasmania, for instance, it was very common for unmarried mothers to cross Bass Strait to have their babies in Victoria, where the shame would not be known. Often they’d find themselves a husband there, stay for two or three years and come back with a proper respectable family – husband and two children. Only the records knew that the first child was born before the wedding and actually wasn’t the full sibling of the second child.

Did this happen in North Carolina? One day, when I need to know, I’ll go do the research.

In the meantime, I knew better than to send such a highly speculative email to such a remote cousin. I needed something factual and all the facts I had were related to Australia and England. I went looking for matches with English ancestry.

Pretty quickly, I found it! Using my word table, I began to collate location statistics and likely names. This highlighted a few distant cousins descending from very familiar parishes in the county of Somerset. I finally had something to look into.

Genie DNA Test – Gedmatch

One thing which my new cousin asked in one of her emails was whether I had uploaded my autosomal DNA results to Gedmatch. I hadn’t, so I googled it to see what was involved.

As luck would have it, I picked a time when it wasn’t accepting new kits, but after a few days it was back and I registered. I found myself in a ‘Log In Profile’ screen which I now know contains everything I need to use Gedmatch. I found the section called ‘File Uploads’ and followed the instructions. The trickiest bit (not really tricky) was downloading my raw data from FtDNA. The option ‘Download Raw Data’ was on my matches page, but in there I had to choose between Build 36 and Build 37. Gedmatch, however, very clearly told me to use Build 36 so I downloaded both the Build 36 Autosomal and the Build 36 X . Then I uploaded one after the other. It took at least fifteen minutes before the upload completed, a few times I was concerned that it had hung. But it hadn’t! Soon enough, the upload was finished. I sat there on that screen for a while waiting for a button to appear to proceed, but it seems you just ‘x’ out of it, or use the back button to return to the previous screen.

Then was a waiting game as the uploaded data needed to be tokenized which took several days. Finally it was done and I could run a ‘one to many’ matches compare, keeping the default to 7cM.

This is still fun. I do it every few days now to see if anyone new has turned up. New people have their kit number in green so once I had run it a few times I can easily see if there is someone else. I really like Gedmatch for a few reasons. One, everyone there has gone out of their way to upload their data and actively seek contact, so I feel much more comfortable about emailing them. Two, it isn’t just people who have tested at FtDNA. For an Australian this doesn’t mean as much since Ancestry won’t test Australians anyway and 23andMe are very expensive to use from overseas. However, there are some cousins for me at both and there are also some smaller companies around the world whose customers just might upload their data.

I also find their presentation very easy to understand. I’m fond of lists stripped of bells and whistles. Just plain text without unnecessary line spacing, a sea of letters which I can speed-scan for relevant details. I found it quite intuitive. \

The first column is a list of kit IDs and you can tell by the first letter which company they tested at. While your uploaded kit is new, every kit ID is highlighted bright green. As the weeks pass the green fades until after a month they are all white. The second column (type) I have never used. The third column is ‘L’ for list and by clicking this you get a list of that person’s matches in a new window. This can be useful for seeing how close an in-common match is to that match of yours.

The fourth column is a selection check box, the fifth is gender, the sixth and seventh are the Mt and Y Haplogroup, if provided.

One of the first things I did was search this column for others of my mt Haplogroup and came up with no exacts, one H2a2a and one H2a2. This is from a list showing 1,500 matches of whom about a quarter have MT tested. I was just curious.

The next column, ‘Details’ has an A which is a link. This does a one-to-one compare with that kit to show which chromosomes the match is in. This is fun. I generally select the option to show graphics because I like to see what might be hidden – where we absolutely don’t match, where we nearly match, whether there are a thousand little fragmented matches which might add to the total match length but not be relevant. However, the non-graphical version gives the salient details.

The total cM shared and largest block are next and this is where it gets useful. The match screen is sorted so that the biggest match is at the top – that is, the closest predicted relation.

In my gedmatch list was my adoptee cousin from South Carolina who shares the Prince Edward Island matches, the three matches direct from Prince Edward Island, my adoptee cousin from New York, and the 3rd-5th cousin who felt our match was too tenuous to pursue. I also recognised many other names from my ftDNA cousin list, ones without gedcoms who I had assumed were not really family tree people. I was a little surprised to see them here.

Cemetery in a forgotten town. Alma used to be a real town with a school, a church and a cemetery. A vital memory hiding in an empty landscape. A bit like my DNA test results!

Then comes the column where Gedmatch predicts your genetic distance. Here, I notice, it differs from FtDNA.

My closest cousin, John, has not uploaded to Gedmatch at all. Nor has my second closest, Jennifer. The two adoptee cousins show as my next closest matches on FtDNA but here they are in positions 4 and 10. Cecilia with the PEI link is fourth. Jacqueline from New York is tenth.

The big surprise for me here was that in pride of place, the number one closest position was the man who felt we were too great a distance to follow up. Let’s call him Bill. Like the others, this is not his real name. With a genetic distance of 4.4, he was my nearest relation. Just out of interest, I clicked the ‘L’ to see what his list looked like. He had heaps and heaps of genetic distance 1’s, 2’s and 3’s. I was so far down his list it just wasn’t funny. I had to scroll down to find myself! I showed at the same genetic distance, but he had so many at a closer distance that 4.4 meant nothing to him. I now understood why he sent that email.

I then looked at some other people and it was exactly the same for them. Even my two adoptee cousins had heaps of closer matches! It was a bit flattening. I was back to feeling like an alien.

I should mention, the same happens to me on family tree sites too. Hardly anyone smart matches with my family names. Even though a lot of Australians are into genealogy, not so many will put their details out into the world. I went back to looking through my closest relations, this time looking at the ones from other companies, the new ones.

Second on my list was someone with the same contact email as Bill’s so I would guess his sibling. The genetic distance was equal. Third was a new name – I’ll call her Sarah. She was equal genetic distance to Bill and his brother and we shared 31 cM with a longest block of 12.2 cM. Running the one-to-one compare showed that we matched on three different chromosomes with blocks of over 9 cM. Clicking on her list, I found that I was her nearest relation – in her number one spot. This boosted my spirits so I sent her an email. I also sent an email to the lady in Prince Edward Island to tell her I was now on Gedmatch. I felt like an old hand.

Genie DNA Test – Back to 3rd-5th Cousin Matches

I received an email back from my anticipated Waller/Warren cousin within a day. He was friendly, but felt that any possible connection was too tenuous to work with. That was it.

Tenuous? A 3rd-5th cousin who shares a total of 40.5 cM with me, with biggest segment 16.4? He’s on my first page! It made me wonder what kind of matches other people were getting if this was too tenuous to follow up. I guess 3rd-5th cousin means our common ancestor would be about 5-9 generations back and I don’t have that sort of data in my tree anyway for some branches. But there are some which I have back to the 1600s with reasonable confidence, barring non-parental events.

Then I received an email from the other one, the lady managing three kits with whom I have a roughly similar connection but no names in common. After the previous email, I had a feeling I knew what was coming.

But no! This was the beginning of better times.

This delightful lady had pulled up her three connected kits and deduced which branch I was matching with. She sent me a pdf of their family tree and although we had no common names, she felt I probably connected to a branch of Scottish settlers from a place called Cape Breton. She suggested I look at the surnames Morrison, Campbell and McEachern which in her tree come from a place called Benbecula in the Hebrides in Scotland. I noticed how close this was geographically to Isle of Harris and felt she may be correct. It was definitely worth considering. I pored over the tree she sent me with the greatest pleasure and noticed that the name McIsaac featured in the tree also, on the same branch as Morrison, McEachern and Campbell. Since I was still pondering on a McIsaac connection with my other cousin, this seemed even more promising. I just had to find the parents of my Annie McLeod and I had a feeling it would all fall in place.

Over the next few hours I received six emails from this lady, giving me some history of Benbecula and the Scottish emigrants to Nova Scotia. She also CC’d someone else researching the same line and I felt very welcomed.

Ardrossan South Australia – One of the coastal areas settled by Scottish immigrants (amongst others) in the 1850s

I knew something of Scottish emigration already, through researching the exodus of the McLeods en masse to South Australia in the 1850s. They’d been doing it tough in their native land and the landowner arranged for their emigration so he could run sheep which was a more suitable use of the land. The Highland and Island Emigration Society handled the removal of emigrants from Scotland and sent most of them to South Australia.

What I hadn’t realised till now was that the removal to South Australia was just the last stage of a series of Clearances which had begun around 1800, and that the earlier emigrants went to Prince Edward Island and I think Newfoundland. The chances of our emigrants having kin over on Prince Edward Island was very great, since they were of the same status, the same clan groups, the same occupations.

This new information explained so much! An Australian descendant of Scottish emigrants from the Hebrides, Uist and Benbecula was going to have cousins in Nova Scotia. Many settlers in Nova Scotia eventually emigrated to the United States so I could expect to have some cousins there. To find this link, I should be looking at anyone in their tree who came from Nova Scotia or at least Canada. At least one of my adoptee cousins was descended from one of these Scottish people.

My confidence was growing at last.