DNA, Ethnicity, Matches & More.

Pocahontas
Credit: Three Lions/Getty Images

Much history can be learnt by exploring your DNA results, like the story of Pocahontas! When I first receive my DNA results, like everyone else, I looked at the ethnicity to see if there were any surprises and then onto the thousands of matches I had. DNA can open up a whole new world to explore, learn, verify and add details to your family history story, but it can also be quite overwhelming. You have to work hard to understand and interpret these results meaningfully. I am at the stage now after lots of reading, attending talks, watching YouTube, uploading to other sites and using other tools like Genetic Affairs, Gedmatch & DNA Painter, that I have managed to break several brick walls and work out a lot of matches, but there are a lot more matches that I will probably never work out. That is okay too, as you can learn from these unknown matches too. They can give you an insight to where some of your ancestors lived, where some may have migrated too and other valuable context to your family history story.

I have broken the majority of my matches above 15 cMs at Ancestry into maternal and paternal matches, giving them an appropriate pink or blue dot. Now it starts to get tricky and requires a lot more research. Firstly I have just over a hundred matches that I can't allocate to either maternal or paternal. DNA is only one tool used to help you discover your ancestry and unless you have an extensive tree to start with, you will find it quite difficult to recognize names in other trees and place your match in your own tree. Your matches themselves are never wrong, but their trees or your own may be wrong, so you need to be prepared to uncover surprises. For many reasons you may not have been able to extend certain lines of your family. I am 77% Irish and  Irish records are very limited. With some family members going to America and other coming to Australia and very few remaining in Ireland, DNA may help link these families again. My paternal grandfather was the only member of his family to come to Australia and his line links back firstly, to Ulster Scots, a lot of whom went to America and secondly to Wales, with the common surnames of Jones and Powell, so DNA is an invaluable tool to try to sort this out too. Once you have worked out the easier matches, it is necessary to take the analysis up a notch.

With plenty of time on my hands at the moment, I have decided to make a concerted effort on my paternal line. My paternal grandfather, John William Graham was born in North Yorkshire, his father, James and grandfather, John were both born in Glasgow, Scotland. When the elder John Graham married Mary McMullan in Glasgow in 1862, both sets of parents were deceased. John's parents were John, a hand loom weaver and Elizabeth Graham ( Elizabeth's maiden was given as Graham) and Mary's parents were James, a gamekeeper and Mary Stewart. James and Mary were married in Ballymoney in County Antrim in 1834, suggesting they were Ulster Scots. That is the extent of the information I know about my great grandfather's parents.

The key to sorting DNA matches, is to be systematic, using what you do know to help sort the unknown. Clustering tools are an invaluable step, whether it is the Leeds method, Genetic Affairs, My Heritage or just using pink, blue and other dots at Ancestry. By knowing where one person in a cluster fits into your family this enables you to to know where others in this cluster must fit, although  a little more research may be necessary to work out where exactly. By only using my paternal matches from Ancestry on Genetic Affairs I was able to work out the clusters related to three out of four of my paternal lines, my paternal grandfather's father and mother and my paternal grandmother's mother, but nothing related to my grandmother's father.

My paternal grandmother, Annie Edith Walmsley, was born in Adelaide and I was hoping DNA would verify the work I had done on researching her ancestry. It did on her maternal line with numerous matches, however, her father, William Walmsley from Lancashire, for whom I have an extensive tree, nothing and for her mother's father Edward John Rodgers, born to Northern
Ireland parents in Hampshire, nothing. It is possible that no one on these lines have survived or taken DNA test, but it is possible that the paternity in each case is different to what was put on the certificates. Are the 117 matches that don't match either side of the family the answer to this conundrum? Something I will have to look at more deeply.

At the moment I have started building trees for the matches in the largest cluster, which I believe are related to my paternal great grandfather and that line, I know least about. This cluster has 48 matches (16.1 - 35.5 cM). About 20 of these have no trees, 8 have large trees and the rest have trees that need expanding to be of any use. I have expanded 6 of these trees further, but as yet have been unable to find the connection. However I have learnt a lot from this exercise about my ancestors who ever they were! All the ancestors of my matches in this cluster are concentrated to three areas of early settlement in Canada and America, namely Nova Scotia, Virginia and North Carolina. While expanding trees I learnt about the isolation in the early days of these settlements, slavery, the pride of being a descendant of a revolutionary soldier and the intermarrying within these small early communities, which may skew some of the DNA results. I read wills, family stories and histories of small communities. Many of these early settlers came from Northern Ireland and Scotland where my great grandfather's ancestors came from.

Emblem for Sons of the Revolution Organization.

One of my matches is a coloured lady and on expanding her tree I found that several of her ancestors were classed by the now derogatory term "Mulatto" of mixed race. One match tells of a story handed down, that an ancestor had changed his name in order to marry a coloured woman, as mixed marriages were frowned upon, whilst in another, a family line could be traced back to Pocahontas, an Indian woman, the daughter of an Indian chieftain, in the very early days of settlement. Pocahontas supposedly had a relationship with John Smith, one of the first settlers. It bought back memories of watching the TV shows like Rin Tin Tin and Daniel Boone as a child.

The message I want to send from this blog is that DNA matches take a lot time to unravel, but can lead you to a lot of stories and information that will add meaning and context to your family history stories even if you don't know the name of your ancestor. An added benefit is that you get to correspond with people in other parts of the world that you are related to, so enjoy the adventure and if you find the connection to that elusive ancestor it is a bonus!