Fascinating Connections through DNA

When my friend read about our recent AncestryDNA results, she mentioned how interesting it would be to see how many connections were made for someone who had well researched family tree. Being an adoptee, her research for her birth family has been a struggle. While my personal database still has much work to done on it, our online information at familysearch.org is the result of forty years of work. As mentioned in the last post our family tree database has not been placed on ancestry.com. Now that we are finally jumping into the DNA tool for advanced genealogy and family tree work, there are very few copies of my work for our family posted online. Finding DNA connections is fascinating and many of the people matching our results are found in my personal database. Viewing their family trees present some very similar links, but some have been totally different than our known ancestors.




Since my husband's results arrived just after posting the previous post, here are his and mine by comparison. This is very interesting.

Mine                                                   His
100% European                                  100% European
62% Scandinavian                                 8% Scandinavian
10% Ireland                                          16% Ireland
9% Great Britain                                   56% Great Britain
8% Italy/Greece.                                     5% Italy/Greece

5% Europe West                                     1% Europe West

5% Iberian Peninsula                             12%Iberian Peninsula

<1% European Jewish                             2% European Jewish
                                                                <1% Europe East

Our children sure have an amazing DNA background. It will be interesting to see what their test results will show.  My husband's top match is one of his cousins. My top match is one of my mother's cousins. That is what fascinates me most about the connections, as it truly defines your ancestral relationships.

Of my fifty top matches through the fourth generation there are eight that can be located on my family tree. Then there are two trees which connect to the Brosius and Johns families and we have no clue who they are. My favorite connections are to the Straw, Shuey, Reed families for my paternal grandmother's paternal line; the Anderson family for my maternal grandmother's paternal line; and the Strong and Rounds families for my maternal grandfather's maternal line. Those results came from viewing the family trees of those DNA connections. Twenty seven of the fifty matches had family trees, eighteen did not have family trees and five had private trees. The largest tree had 13,032 people and the two smallest trees had two people.

The main frustration is that my time for reviewing the results were limited this past two weeks. It will be interesting to return to the website and note any new additions. Then there are the pages of distant cousin matches. Realizing that this is all subject to being able to review one another's trees, it may become essential to place my tree online at ancestry.com. This feels like doing a jig saw puzzle with many serendipity moments waiting to be discovered. Then there is the moving on to uploading this information to FTDNA and see the matches to be found there. Once that is completed then it is on to GenMatch. This all feels like being on an exciting journey where there are so many possibilities for discovering our ever expanding family trees. This week our family tree grew to 9,702 people.

Have you done DNA testing and discovered some fascinating connections? Like my friend who has struggled with finding her birth relatives, those discoveries are crucial to really knowing who we are and where we came from, and will help chart our future and the future of our extended families.