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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: plimmerian on Wednesday 11 July 18 11:22 BST (UK)
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I've had an ancestry DNA test and received the results - but no DNA circles have been created (I still don't understand that feature!)
I was hoping the DNA test would finally reveal my "unknown" ancestor, should his descendants have had a test.
Now I have lots of potential cousins listed there but no obvious names or connections that match.
Am I hoping too much that the "unknown" will finally reveal himself?
my 3X great grandparents are-
Paternal-
plimmer (of salop)
horrocks (of lancs)
leigh (of lancs)
mills (of lancs)
swift (of lancs)
kenyon (of lancs)
blundell (of lancs)
rylance (of lancs)
aldridge (of durham)
morrison (b. kent)
stubbs (of lancs)
healey (of lancs)
burnett (of scotland)
pearson (of scotland)
howard (of lancs)
stanton (b. france)
Maternal-
lane (of yorks)
gaines (of yorks)
holt (of cheshire)
taylor (of cheshire)
ogden (of lancs)
woodward (of lancs)
houghton (of lancs)
stockton (of lancs)
jones (of wales)
williams (of wales)
"unknown" (?)
vaughan (of wales)
naylor (of up holland)
walmsley (of lancs)
naylor (of ashton in makerfield)
garvey (of ireland)
my percentages are-
Great Britain 62%
Ireland/Scotland/Wales 15%
Scandinavia 6%
Iberian Peninsula 6%
Low Confidence Regions
Europe South 4%
Europe West 2%
Europe East 2%
Caucasus 1%
Finland/Northwest Russia <1%
Asia South <1%
the mind boggles!!!
:-\
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Just a matter of patience, hard work and a great deal of effort on your part.
No 'Unknown' is going to come out and jump at you in the face at 4th cousin level. You have to explore your matches, and are unlikely to find Unknown with any degree or confidence if you know nothing at all about him or her.
As for DNA circles, they are highly unlikely to help you in your quest. Ancestry looks at your tree and matches you with people who have the same ancestor in their tree, name, date and place almost exactly matching. They won't put you in a circle with Unknown.
Regards Margaret
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You could have a look at this Lost Cousins article:
https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/aug17news.htm#Masterclass (https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/aug17news.htm#Masterclass)
;D ;D
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Ian, over the last month while I've been waiting for my results, which came on Saturday, I have been studying DNA and genealogy in very great detail, after having spent 3 years researching my family tree. I have learnt a lot just using casual internet resources, and there are certain things that you need to understand such as SNPs and centiMorgans. It is a fascinating subject and I have scientific interests, but it is a daunting prospect and my big frustration is that I've spent the days since my results arrived using free access to Ancestry so I've hardly touched them, although I have had confirmation from my results that a cousin is definitely a cousin.
14:20 update. Be prepared to be thoroughly overwhelmed with statistical data. I am a statistician and I find the amount of data that I've had to be quite astonishing. The first thing to do is to decide which 90% of it you are not going to ever bother with.
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Just a matter of patience, hard work and a great deal of effort on your part.
No 'Unknown' is going to come out and jump at you in the face at 4th cousin level. You have to explore your matches, and are unlikely to find Unknown with any degree or confidence if you know nothing at all about him or her.
As for DNA circles, they are highly unlikely to help you in your quest. Ancestry looks at your tree and matches you with people who have the same ancestor in their tree, name, date and place almost exactly matching. They won't put you in a circle with Unknown.
Regards Margaret
FWIW I fully endorse this reply, especially the first sentence.
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Hello Plimmerian,
I have come to the conclusion that DNA test results might help illuminate one of the many dark recesses in my ancestral cupboard but more by luck than judgement. Like you Plimmerian, I have found it fairly straightforward to reach back to great-great-great-grandparents thanks to the online census resources. Also, there is more chance that the most recent pre-1841 church records have survived mice, damp and overenthusiastic vicars and are now being digitised. However, reaching back pre-1800 remains a much more difficult challenge.
And aye, there's the rub!
Nearly all autosomal DNA matches are fourth cousins or greater which, if you are as ancient as me, means people that lived in this pre-1800 period. So, unless you have a lot of these ancient connections already in your tree, then there is no match to be made with a name in your tree and so no family circle to draw.
I persuaded both a maternal and a paternal cousin to complete a test. This has enabled me to sort quite a lot of my "good" matches to one side of my tree or t'other. Quite honestly, most of the time all that means is that I now know in which half of the haystack to search for a needle.
Nevertheless, I have found (and met) two fourth cousins and am closing in on a couple more. I have also found many clusters of good matches with whom I probably share a common ancestor back in the (genealogical) dark ages in the 16th or 17th centuries.
I urge you to use the "notes" function for each match. Keep a note of the name of each "shared match" and soon you will start to see several results which at first glance were unrelated but in fact are connected to each other.
As ever, the ethnicity estimates are pleasant nonsense.
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Diplodocus, I fully agree with what you say about the usefulness of censuses, but remember people only put down what they were prepared to let other people know. DNA is not so unforgiving and secretive.
Martin
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Martin, Just a reminder to add 'Gedmatch' to your kit number.
diplodicus 'As ever, the ethnicity estimates are pleasant nonsense.'
What a lovely way of putting it. :)
Regards Margaret
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Margaret, do you mean "... to add 'Gedmatch' to your kit number". Or vice versa? Or under my picture?
It is on Gedmatch.
Martin
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Martin, You need to write something like 'Gedmatch Kit number H062246', or 'Gedmatch DNA Kit H062246' or something similar. Most people will know what you mean without it, but not all. :) :)
Regards Margaret
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Plimmerian,
To give an example of how it could help find your Unknown, though my example is at a slightly closer level than 4th cousin.
I have a predicted 3rd cousin who has no Ancestry tree. He knows the name of his grandmother, Smith (literally, not an example!), and thinks she was born in either Scotland or Liverpool. Nothing else. 1939 Register and death record give different years of birth, 1906 or 1909.
He is a shared match with my paternal cousin and a couple of other matches who I know to be connected to my Laversuch family, so a working assumption could be that he is connected through this family.
I know that one Laversuch sibling 'married' or cohabited with a Smith, and had several children, including 8 boys and 3 girls. I am unable to trace all of these children after 1901 census, but a daughter of one of them would make the estimate of 3rd cousins correct.
I have provisionslly added an extra 'Unknown' child of Smith and Laversuch to my tree, adding
'Parentage
Not A Smith, not B Smith, unlikely to be C Smith, not D Smith -- Possibly E Smith, F Smith, G Smith or H Smith, or one of the girls'.
And that's as far as I can get, without finding the birth record of grandmother of my match.
New records may become available, closer matches may turn up, but the likelihood of me finding out his 'Unknown' is pretty slim. And he isn't particularly interested.
It is different in your case, you have no idea as to which surname could possibly connect you to your matches, so it will make it that much harder. As I said in my first post, patience, hard work and a great deal of effort.
Regards Margaret
Modified.
You, looking for Unknown, would only have Smith to go work on. You wouldn't know about Laversuch, there isn't a Smith/Laversuch marriage to help you, there would just be the three shared matches, who you may or may not be able to tie together, as there isn't much to go on in 3 of the trees.
You are in fact looking for someone a generation further back, and it becomes more difficult, but not impossible.
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I highly suggest using a chromosome mapping tool such as dnapainter.com. With this you can group your matches and look for triangulations which are extremely helpful in finding shared ancestors.
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thanks for the replies and contributions
it's all getting too technical for my heat-waved brain!
8)
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Hi Plimmerian,
I'm also on one of your trees! as I'm researching the Aldridge line from Liverpool which goes back to Wickham/Ryton in Co Durham to a Richard Aldridge in the late 1700s.
I haven't got as far as a dna test and certainly I'm only a beginner compared to the people here with their IGI/Gedmatch!! but I do enjoy digging around albeit I get frustrated trying to track down the females in my tree as often the males registered the births etc.
If you want to know more about my Aldridge line then let me know as I suspect we are related !
Sue
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I'm bumping up this post be ause there are some really good answers
Plimmerian did you get any closer to identifying unknown or potential surname ?
I totally disagree about ethnicity being
"Pleasant nonsense"
definitions are more and more specific and even identify regions
I have a Scottish father. 2 Maternal Welsh ggparents 1/English mixed with Welsh + Scottish) /+ 1Jewish
Now have access to DNA from 3 generations ,above + below me .
+ 2nd + 3rd cousins including a Jewish one.the amounts reflect my family very accurately.
+ Unrelated in law's
It's easy to compared ethnicity of my DNA matches to identify which line they probably come from . Lack of matches can also be edifying .
Ancestry now does the ethnicity inherited from parent 1 and 2 which is also helpful with unknowns.
My mother only has 1 Scottish great grandmother Mary BROWN is almost impossible to pinpoint but DNA matches from with Scottish ethnicity on her maternal side
Have come up with a cluster of surnames + locations which helped decide between 3 likely candidates .
Good luck to anyone looking for unknowns
Congratulations to anyone who.s found one .!
Hopefully you LL share your story of how you found out
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thanks for the replies and contributions
it's all getting too technical for my heat-waved brain!
Buy yourself a copy of Tracing Your Ancestors Using DNA, edited by Graham S. Holton. It is an excellent and comprehensive book, which starts with the DNA basics for beginners and can be used as a reference in various other chapters as, when or if you need to progress to the more complex concepts and research they involve.
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What a blast from the past this thread is.
With ref to reply no 10, I have now worked out the connection between me and this match, and have found that his grandmother was born in the Wirral in 1909 (so not Liverpool or Scotland in 1906!). The name my match had for her was incorrect as well, which certainly didn't help.
My original assumption was correct, descended from John Smith and Fanny Laversuch, but also from another sibling of hers. This was after someone else had tested, and knew a bit more about the family, enabling me to work through it all.
As I said in reply no 1 - 'Just a matter of patience, hard work and a great deal of effort on your part.'
Regards Margaret
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Hello!
I've not made progress with finding the unknown and since the "split" results on ancestry, I'm even more confused, as the paternal paper trail conflicts with the DNA results for the paternal side.
I was advised to join up to the Gedmatch website but I'm not comfortable with uploading sensitive details to a site I'm not sure about.
If the "Finding your roots" programme makers are reading this, please consider including non famous people in your show lol
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Hello!
I've not made progress with finding the unknown and since the "split" results on ancestry, I'm even more confused, as the paternal paper trail conflicts with the DNA results for the paternal side.
I was advised to join up to the Gedmatch website but I'm not comfortable with uploading sensitive details to a site I'm not sure about.
If the "Finding your roots" programme makers are reading this, please consider including non famous people in your show lol
An NPE could be involved if they are very big matches i.e. 80cM plus with trees that don't match yours. I wouldn't expect say, all gt x 3 grandparent lines to be proven by DNA matches. Some lines are much more prodigious than others so you are statistically more likely to find DNA links on such a side than another that was less so. Americans are also by some margin more likely to have DNA tested so if you had relatives who went there, they might be a bit more likely to show up. Also be aware that any match under about 35cM could be a very distant connection i.e. 18th century or before (but conversely could be from a relatively recent lived common ancestor).
I assume the Iberian, Southern Europe and Asia etc. have disappeared from your ethnicity estimate? This was a common bug in many providers early ethnicity estimates for people of British descent - actually MyHeritage still has this 'bug', although its communities have improved.
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Hello!
I've not made progress with finding the unknown and since the "split" results on ancestry, I'm even more confused, as the paternal paper trail conflicts with the DNA results for the paternal side.
Where do you think the break in the line could be? It could be an NPE or it could be a chance there are two men of the same name and they have got mixed up in the research, and you have been lead up the garden path by this.