My sister takes a drag on her cigarette and lets out a deep sigh of smoke, “So…I have no roots”. “You have very deep roots. They just aren’t here”, I say. “Here” is a rural cemetery outside of Mesick Michigan. We’re cemetery hopping to get pictures, but we aren’t related to anyone here. We’ve got …
AncestryDNA seems to be the hotspot for matches for me right now, but I’m still digging up things at 23 and me as well. Another Elmore Match at AncestryDNA I had another fairly large match come in at AncestryDNA. A person related to Halsey Orton Elmore through his daughter Blanche Pearl Elmore. A new second …
Continue reading ‘Autosomal DNA Updates and My Wife Sets Me Straight’ »
In Genetic Genealogy the Hard Way I finally had a close Elmore relative walk right up and bite me. After the invisible hand of fate did me a solid and showed me his last known Elmore, I was left with couple of questions. I have focused on the Elmores in Peoria because of their proximity …
So I told you you’re related to my Finks family. Do not be afraid! That likely means you overlapped and matched with a known Finks relative from a 23 and me, FTDNA or AncestryDNA test. Or it means our tree match is so strong that you’re on your way to becoming a known “Finks” relative. …
Now that I have many maternal and paternal segments worked out I thought it would be good to put up some graphics of the general map. Again using Kitty Munson Cooper’s segment mapper utility to get great visual representations of the segments using my dad as the base person. To be clear, this won’t represent …
The results are in for my grandfather’s Finks cousin (his cousin through his mother’s family) and I took a few minutes to look at the tools in FTDNA for general analysis. My Origins is the tool FTDNA has for this. It’s the broad overview of your genome with some hints on geographic location. Since this …
Having just bought a Family Finder test from FTDNA for my grandfather’s maternal Finks Cousin and having a nice long phone call with her to talk about the kit, I decided to go back and look at the Finks family records again to get a handle on things. The mythology among people related to the …
For reference here is a nice visual from ancestry.com of my paternal tree. This constitutes my “Thompson family” really starting with my grandparents Charles and Elizabeth Thompson. I like this view because it shows the two “halves” of my dad’s family and gives you the idea of what we’re talking about with the two halves …
At 23 and me, you’ll often get an idea of Cousinship with a match request. It will say something like “estimated 4th cousin with a range of 3rd to 5th cousin” or “5th to distant cousin”. So far, I’ve been lucky enough to gather one second cousin 1x removed and one 4th cousin 1x removed …
To date, I’ve learned much more through regular paper channels about my family. Getting documentation is actually helping me solidify DNA testing, not the other way around. It’s probably because it’s so early in this game, there just aren’t enough people who know enough about their trees to make any educated guesses. When I contact …
Continue reading ‘Defining Boundaries…or the Blind Men and the Elephant’ »