And more DNA testing

[dragonfly]

I spent some birthday money getting my mother tested at AncestryDNA. My own ethnic percentages had almost no surprises, so it was kind of, I dunno, boring. Turns out, if a parent gets tested, there are tools that can separate out your own matches so you know which side of your own tree a match is on (it's called "phase matching"). Cool! Also, any new ethnicities that show up in her, I can claim, too, even though they weren't detected in me. Sure enough, she has some "trace" ethnicites that are much more exotic than mine. :-) Plus, she's a whopping 6% Finnish, which is a juicy mystery for me.

I petered out on doing the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. Partly I was dislodged by the shock of learning, through YDNA testing, that my Coffman line never came from German-speaking Kauffmans, as I posted about here. Instead, it was originally Irish Coughlins. My relative's YDNA is a perfect match for a man named Coughlin, and all the men who are a nearly perfect match have Irish surnames. I have still not identified the ancestor(s) who immigrated, but there was a name change involved, and probably a religion change, too. Coughlin is a Catholic name and I see no evidence that any of my Coffmans were Catholic.

Anyway, I've gotten very involved in genetic genealogy, and I volunteered to moderate what FamilyTreeDNA calls a surname project. I am now officially in charge of the Bixby surname project.

And I now make Finnish yoghurt called viili on my kitchen counter every night. :-) What are you finding out?

Comments

[rainbow]

huzzah for having a parent to test! i'm still trying to get anyone within 2 generations of me interested with no luck.

that's fascinating about the coughlin/coffman change!

i've found some 5th cousins that i can place neatly in my tree -- i contact folks on ancestry.com who had my people in their tree to see if they'd tested and would be willing to compare, which seems to work better for me than trying to figure out where people who match me fit in.

and i found a double fifth cousin on my other side, where siblings had married siblings.

do you use gedmatch.com and dnagedcom.com? i love the charts on the later and the breakdowns on the former (i especially love comparing with archaic dna at gedmatch *g* )

[dragonfly]

Cool. So you just ask people if they have tested? How often do they say yes? I do use gedmatch.com, but I find the long list of people there daunting. In order to compare trees I'd have to contact each one and ask to see it. I prefer browsing the trees of my matches at ancestry.com. Though someone on gedmatch contacted me, and as a result of that conversation, broke a brick wall of mine that I didn't know I had, yet.

I've never heard of dnagedcom.com! Thanks, I'm off to play with a new toy, now.

I know! Isn't the archaic DNA stuff neat?

I have been immersing myself in the YouTube posts of the slide presentations at the ISOGG conferences in Ireland. All the 2013 and 2014 presentations are up and I learn SOO much about the kinds of things you can do with genetics for genealogy. One of the presenters, who is the ISOGG rep for Ireland, shows up in my uncle's list of YDNA matches, too. We probably had a shared ancestor about 1000 years ago, heh.

[rainbow]

when i msg them, i introduce myself first with something like "i saw [person x] in your tree. [person x] was my [relationship] through [lineage]; are you and i related? if so, i've had my dna tested at 23andme and familytreedna and my results are up at gedcom.com; i would love to compare results!"

that way i'm not just a random stranger asking and they can pinpoint me in their tree before deciding whether or not they'd like to compare.

oooh, that's very cool about the brick wall!

i'll have to check out the isogg stuff on youtube; i didn't know about it.

[dragonfly]

The YouTube material is on this channel. The link is to a 2013 presentation by my ever-so-distant cousin.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCQQtwIwAWoVChMIlOSPioSbyQIVwpkeCh0X0gLY&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Df6rO2yNSDJI&usg=AFQjCNHzHunCgk0v52eK6dYEmrqqxnq5qQ&sig2=5L4RsFSLfEu9ohnQZ8zODg