Gedmatch/Ancestry DNA help needed pls

[Penninah]

Hi all,

I am hoping that someone may be able to help/offer advice. I am trying to understand gedmatch and how best to go about solving a family mystery using the DNA result of my daughter. All the technical jargon is giving me somewhat of a brain ache.. I would like to know how best I go about using DNA to make a connection to her paternal great grandfather who would have been born c1910-20? I have tried using the phasing tool to just get results from her paternal side but I guess I'm not doing something correct. There are quite a few hits on both Ancestry and Gedmatch but nothing closer than a 4th cousin.

Thanks in advance

[Eric Hatfield]

Hi

I’m not an expert, but here’s a few thoughts.

Have you done a DNA test as well as your daughter? From what you say, it seems maybe you haven’t, but this would be really helpful, for two reasons.

1. You are looking for your daughter’s paternal great grandfather, which must be your grandfather, if you are her biological father. Doing the test yourself gets you one generation closer, and that would be helpful. The fourth cousin matches to her should, in many cases, become 3rd cousin matches to you, which may make it clearer which matches to follow up. In my family history research, important relationships to me were not clear from the DNA, but became very clear when my aunt also tested.

2. It helps eliminate matches that she has that are from her mother’s side. I have never used phasing, but I understand it is a tool to identify the origin of parts of a person’s DNA when one or both of their parents have also tested.

If you are lucky, there will be a match that makes things very clear, but quite possibly your 3rd/4th cousin matches will not be clear without some paperwork. The only way forward I know is to try to find a paper connection between one of your matches and you/her. This will likely take some time, and lead up a few blind alleys before you find the one that works for you.

My suggestion would be to try to estimate which matches look most promising. The obvious starting point is people who have good family trees available, and who want to help (and so respond when you contact them). Then use a tool like “in common with” or the chromosome browser to examine some of your closest matches, to see if a group of matches match you/her on the same segment, thus meaning they may all be also related to each other. This isn’t certain without more information, but may help indicate a group that may have ancestry in common, and you may be able to use information from several trees to try to find the connection to your own.

Then I think there is no substitute for hard work, following your match’s trees backwards to a possible common ancestor and then forwards to see if you come up with someone in your own tree. I have tried this and found it a long and frustrating process, but it may be the only way, unless you get lucky or are willing to wait and hope that someone tests soon who gives you the breakthrough. In my case, it was a new tester rather than the hard work that gave me the breakthrough, but I’m still glad I tried tracing match’s trees rather than sit and wait.

Hope that helps.

[Yonks Ago]

Have you tested with Ancestry? on there there is a tool Search Matches..and works well if you know  another match of your's.
Yonks

[Penninah]

Hello,

Thank you for the replies!

Yes I have tested and yes with Ancestry. I am her mother and I uploaded her results as well as my own onto Gedmatch, I still haven't figured out about 50% I'm sure of whats on that site. I did try the phasing tool to weed out my hits from her paternal hits. When I use the kit number from the phasing it comes up the same as it would with the regular kit numbers? Neither her father or grandfather have tested and it is not something I can make either do. So what I have right now is all we have to go on, my daughters DNA. I have been emailing with the closest match at 4.1 in the U.S and have a little from that. They are names I am not familiar with which gives me hope that it may be the right line however as its a distant link it may well go back to the UK and tie in with one of the lines I have well researched.

I'd like to figure out what I am doing wrong on the phasing so that I can eliminate my matches and just see her paternal DNA matches. That would half the time its going to take.

I have used the search tool on Ancestry, it's incredibly time consuming given all the hits we both have and without her paternal DNA as a filter.. which is why I liked the idea of Gedcoms phasing.

Eric, could you give me an idea how you found your common ancestor?

Thanks again

[Pheno]

Sorry if I'm being a bit thick here - not much knowledge of DNA.

But I get the impression that you are trying to use the Gedmatch phasing tool on your daughter's dna to filter out the paternal results but a bit further on you say that her father hasn't tested.  Is that why it is not able to phase them out and just returns the same results as usual?  Presumably it phases out by filtering using the paternal dna test kit number and the matches associated with that but if there isn't a kit to use for the filtering ......................

Pheno

[familydar]

Ftdna has a stab at separating paternal and maternal matches, or in your daughter's case, maternal and other.  I think it's a process that only gets run every so often  - that's the impression I got with mine because it took a few days for them to appear, but it is useful.  You need to create/upload at least a basic pedigree tree and identify the mother daughter relationship linked to the results for it to work.  Although you tested with ancestry you can upload your raw data to ftdna for free and there's no ongoing subscription.

What dna won't tell you is whether your daughter's paternal matches are through her father's father or her father's mother, but you will probably be able to lop off a lot of branches by seeing who else matches and comparing trees.  There's no substitute for a well researched tree.  The way I'm reading your post, you have a big "unknown" branch but if the various matches can't be dovetailed into the known branches then perhaps they might be pointers to the mystery ggf.  Bear in mind that only a tiny proportion of the population have tested.  You are somewhat reliant on other descendants of ggf or his close relatives having tested.

Jane :-)

[Penninah]

Pheno, It does say in gedmatch to phase you only need one parent. I figured it could tell what shared DNA we have with each other and then one kit number would be maternal and the ones that don't match with me would be paternal. I'm not sure if it's fool proof, I have very little knowledge of DNA myself. But it seems to me the two new kit numbers just bring up the same as the regular kit number...  i'm just looking to lighten my workload a little by not having to go through all my matches and cross them off my daughters so that I know what are paternal connections.

Thanks Jane, I have uploaded our raw DNA to FTDNA! I know that the DNA won't tell me where on her father side the matches are coming from but I have done a lot of research on her paternal grandmothers side so that should help, it's when I get hits with people and I don't recognize any of the names in their tree going back into the 1700's that make be wonder if they could be connected in some way to this unknown great grandfather...

Needle in a haystack springs to mind.

[familydar]

The surnames may be unrecognised but what about locations?

[Penninah]

And the location!!
They are all in the U.S (though this doesn't surprise me given the story that the great grandfather was a U.S serviceman in WWII based in Essex, I think Airforce.)