*SUCCESS* Autosomal DNA Test - my experience

[DevonCruwys]

The problem is that few people are able to document all their ancestors for five generations let alone 10 generations which is the timeframe covered by autosomal testing. It therefore becomes very difficult to find the connection. It does help if you can test other family members (parents if available or cousins on either side of the family) so that you can work out which side a match is on. Many of the more distant matches will be false positives. If people have lots of cousin marriages in their family tree then segments will survive for longer and the predicted relationships will be closer than they actually are.

[Redroger]

But in some ways that might be an advantage in proving a relationship? My mother came from a small village near Cambridge where there had been close cousin marriages over many generations to such an extent that I am my own 4th cousin. This, whilst I appreciate the fact that it would make relationships look closer,  might make it possible to go further back than usual.

[DevonCruwys]

The close cousin marriages would indeed work in your favour as you would pick up some of the more distant matches. The difficulty would be in trying to determine which of the multiple ancestral lines you match on.

[Redroger]

Understood, I and other researchers have difficulty in untangling the earlier ancestry, specially as names are often repeated along different lines. I have at least 5 different but intermingled lines. i have wondered whether rather than a one name (or one extended family) study a one village study might be helpful?

[DevonCruwys]

I've found the one-name study approach very helpful for sorting out my trees but the one-name approach works best in conjunction with a Y-chromosome DNA project. If lots of your ancestors are from the same parish then a one-place study would certainly be very interesting, especially if combined with autosomal DNA testing. There's a very nice little project for the parish of Ravonstonedale in Westmorland:

http://www.adamthwaitearchive.org.uk/#/ravenstonedale-dna-project/4564205388

[Redroger]

Thanks, although I have had the Y chromosome DNA test I can't help as my descent is on the female side. Hopefully some of the Ayres/Cornwell etc. researchers who have a direct male line will be able to take the test. When that gets cracking I am willing to have the autosomal test.

[DudleyWinchurch]

Hi,

I would have thought that Autosomal DNA used on a village study would be very effective, providing you could find enough representatives of the established families willing to take the test.  However, I would think that you would have to be prepared for the fact that the relationships that show, might not be very accurate in distance, due to multiple inputs from same DNA sources over the centuries!

Getting back to the original topic, I have been trying to fathom out the usefulness of X-matches in allocating matches to strings.

Using a 6-generation ancestor chart, I went through blocking out all the spaces where no X-DNA can be passed on for each of a male and a female descendant.  This leaves only 13 out of 32 possible ancestral lines at GGG grandparent level for the female, and only 8 for the male.

This sounds like an amazingly useful way of pruning the possibilities, until I spotted the one inherent flaw.  Because these are inevitably dominated by the female lines going back, there is a change of name on each generation!

However, it did help me to spot one or two areas where it might be possible to target further brick-walls in my tree now.

So, if there are any living direct descendants of Edward Boden (b. about 1745) and Lucy Hodgkiss (b. about 1753) of Madeley Wood, Shropshire, out there, who have taken the FTDNA Autosomal test, I'd love to hear from you!

Sheila

[DudleyWinchurch]

Well - the number of my "matches" is gradually creeping up without any further major breakthroughs.

Has anyone had any success with the X-matches feature that has now been added?

I have about 40 X-matches, noticeably almost all female, with the exception of my brother, which is to be expected.

However, my brother has only 4 X-matches so far, including myself.

I used ahnentafel charts to block out the impossible lines of descent and, although there is a bias (of about 3:5?) in favour of sharing on the female lines, it doesn't suggest that the comparative numbers would be as different as found here!

has anyone else checked their X-matches and if so, are these numbers typical?

Quite separately from that, and using the chromosome browser, and comparing with my brother and 2 known cousins, some of my closer matches seem to have shared DNA with both the cousins, so I suspect they are coming up as matches due to shared DNA on both maternal and paternal lines? and thus appear much closer than any actual shared relationship (both families have connections back to Mayo 4+ generations ago).

Any new hints or tips on how to understand all these potential matches?

[DevonCruwys]

I've now had my first success with autosomal DNA testing. You can read the story here:

http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/my-first-autosomal-dna-success-story.html