Author Topic: DNA Success Stories  (Read 16771 times)

uneven

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DNA Success Stories
« on: June 05, 2011, 07:32:31 PM »
This weekend I was able to confirm my very first DNA match!

Well, I should say, we were able to confirm a DNA match. I recently tested with 23 and Me and got my results back. I was able to find a spot on Chromosome 8 that matched up with someone I didn't know who contacted me on 23 and Me with someone I met here. It turns out that Dusevoir and I (along with being Thompsons) are also Hathaways.

The magic of having your entire Genome to work with is that you can triangulate matches. My 23 and Me contact shared one specific area of chromosome 8 with me. Dusevoir shares many small areas on multiple chromosomes but also the same area on chromosome 8. The 23 and me contact had several lines going back to my 7th great grandfather Simeon Hathaway. With that clue we looked through Dusevoir's tree and found that her 8th great grandmother is Abigail Hathaway, aunt of my 7th great grandfather.

Once we had that under our belts Dusevoir found several other matching relatives.

What's nice about this is that I can look at that position in my genome and assign it to the Hathaways and their family. Those people are still stuck in here, all I have to do is find them.
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

Donna

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #1 on: June 07, 2011, 07:06:49 PM »
Wonderful !!!
This old world keeps getting smaller and smaller.

Donna
ANY DAY ABOVE GROUND IS A GOOD DAY !

Dusevoir

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #2 on: June 08, 2011, 06:34:21 PM »
It's been a lot of fun and energizing.  Thanks to Mike and Gedmatch, we found that we connect to three different lines......Hathaway, Paull (Paul) and Dyer.  We are still working on our Thompson families.   

Thanks Mike!


Old Genealogists never die - they just lose their census.

uneven

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #3 on: June 08, 2011, 06:54:55 PM »
Thank you too for doing the leg work and sharing out your tree. I think it was much easier because we were both willing to explore all the options. Hey along those lines. How many Smiths do you have in your tree?
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

Mary

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #4 on: June 11, 2011, 07:15:30 AM »
Good deal, you two!

OK - question. Tom has done the 67 marker with Family Tree Maker. Would there be any point for him to do a kit of 23andme? Is he going to find anything that he didn't find on FTM? I've never seen a report from 23andme, so I really don't know what you see/get.........

Thanks!

uneven

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #5 on: June 11, 2011, 08:08:25 AM »
If you already have an account at FTDNA I think you can order their Family Finder test and get equivalent information to what you would see at 23 and me as far as ancestry goes. Then You can load those results into Gedmatch.com and match up with people who tested with 23 and me to get a bigger picture.

One thing I did get that was interesting from 23 and me was the health assessment. So you can see (for instance ) that you might have decreased odds of colon cancer or that you are more likely to have slow or fast twitch muscles. Things I didn't appreciate at first but they kind of explain a lot of things.

One thing I dislike about 23 and Me's interface is the contact process. Because of the nature of the information out there (like your odds of different cancers) people obviously want everything very secure, but some of the settings are confusing. I have 623 matches on some level and only 20 of them have even a basic surname list. I can't even see how our genes match without contacting them first. So things take more time. I realize that it protects everyone's privacy but it is a pretty drawn out process.
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

Dusevoir

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #6 on: June 13, 2011, 06:46:32 AM »
Thank you too for doing the leg work and sharing out your tree. I think it was much easier because we were both willing to explore all the options. Hey along those lines. How many Smiths do you have in your tree?

I went to see if I had any Smiths in my tree and then I forgot.  Sorry.

I found two.

Karolyn Ruth Smith b. 1931 Milford, MA and d. 1999 in Arizona.  She married Donald Tinkham in 1951
Gertrude E. Smith and she married David Gordon Osborne b. 1905 MA.

My great uncle from MA sent me this extended tree years ago and I hope to add it to my tree soon.






Old Genealogists never die - they just lose their census.

rustycan

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #7 on: June 22, 2011, 06:12:33 AM »
In the last week or so I have had contact from another Cousin from the USA. 

My first major hit after a half dozen 12 markers and a couple of 25 markers. Some who wouldn't even answer my E/Mails.

Possibly they think 'how could we possibly have kin in Australia' . My line emigrated to Oz in 1844 (from Ireland) 

Well try a 37 and 65 marker (think I have those numbers right). This Thompson family had been in the Americas before 1800 and they have been trying to confirm an Irish or Scottish link by researching for fifty years.  I was able to forward many documents confirming our shared Irish links together with Scotts heritage.

Still a lot of dots to join but I am starting to have some success in Ireland particularly Donegal where many of the Scottish Border Clans found some peace and rebuilt their lives post 1610 AD.  For instance the Donegal Flax Growers and Linen spining indursties have significant numbers of Armstrongs as well as Thom(p)sons

rus t


uneven

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #8 on: June 23, 2011, 04:03:08 AM »
Wow that's great! I've also had a hard time getting responses back when my contacts aren't open to the possibilities. For others though, I'm the only person who ever contacted them and they are excited to hear from me. That's when things usually come together.
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

rustycan

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #9 on: October 17, 2011, 03:52:23 PM »
Well this was money well spent. I now have a forth group of cousins in the US that are 67 Marker Matches. Three of the names I have found in close proximity to where my direct line lived in Milford, Donegal, Ireland.
Two of these can trace their direct lines via their Grandmothers to Archiebald Diary Thompson a third still carries the T Surname and his line is pretty well established to Archie's brother George. The latest cousin is of a Gillespie line. I haven't ventured to far down that track as yet.

The common link to these Surnames, in Ireland, appears to be the Flaxgrowing and Linnen weaving industries which were the backbone of Donegal's commerce in the 17 th and 18 th Centuary.
 
Within the Flax Growers records is also the majority unification of the spelling of the T name with the wet (p).  Donegal was Scotts province of Ulster during the Plantation times.  The 'Plantationers' who originally carved up the Irish landholdings in Donegal were all Scotts with a couple of Irish (Loyal to the Crown for the time being) in the southwest. Zero English. So either a larger bunch of English T's migrated to Donegal to take up farming during the Irish Uprising which lasted from 1641 to 1685, in which between ten and twenty thousand Plantationers and their support staff were murdered or an English educated scribe/clerk decided to add the P. The Irish tried pretty hard to get their country back and it was not untill Cromwell reduced a couple of Townlands to dust before they were finally subdued (well for a while). It is was more complicated than that........

The reason Donegal held up better than most during the 1641 rebellion was due to the ability of the two Scotts Stewart families to raise a significant milita. One Stewart from Ramelton and the other from Mt Stewart (near Newtowncunningham).  A long winded story but suffice to say they dealt the native Irish some serious grief.

What has this got to do with DNA Studies ? Nothing actually except I have been able to establish the concentration of the Thom(p)son name in Ireland in the 1600's. There were only four Thompson names (that made the 1650ish Census) in Donegal and the bulk of their surviving descendents migrated to the American Colonies in the 1700's. Therefore I figure the present day DNA Study and the macro recorded history are symbiotic. 

uneven

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #10 on: December 23, 2011, 10:33:36 PM »
It's good to see some Y DNA success. I've had little, but I hold out a lot of hope. Some day, one of my Thompsons will accidentally fall onto a cheek swab...I'm sure of it.
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

uneven

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #11 on: December 23, 2011, 11:43:05 PM »
It's been a while, and I've had a lot of successes recently so I thought I should report. Sorry it's a book.

With a lot of help from  Dusevoir and a DNA test for my dad, I've been able to use Gedmatch.com and 23 and me genetic results to find and verify a dozen or more people in my family tree. Since most of my confirmed matches so far have been in the mid to late 1600s and early 1700s..it really validates quite a chunk of people downstream.

Ironically, my closest matches haven't been very good about getting back to me, and I find that my biggest struggle is getting family tree information to compare to. Still, it's been invaluable.

Here's a "for instance". My dad and I seem to have a lot of Virginia genetic relatives, although my tree only contained a single branch from Virginia, my Finks family. I followed several genetic relatives trees (built a lot of them myself) and kept running into different VA Thompson families. I began working those down. (in genetic relatives you often get the destination first, then you have to figure out the road to get there). So every spouse and child matters. Eventually I worked my way down from the 1600s to the mid to late 1700s where I found a record for Isabel Thompson who marries Alden Williamson.

Ironically, that sat for weeks while I filled in other parts of my tree. Eventually I got back to it because I was contacted by a member of my Williamson family from Madison Indiana. I've been stuck on the parents of Henry Williamson since I started making family trees. Henry's father dies before the 1850 census so he never appears named with Henry. Henry's mother lives, but the children are bound out by 1860 to multiple families. 

So what I had in my tree was "No name" Williamson (possibly Joseph given the 1840 census) who is from Kentucky and marries a woman in Indiana named Susannah. Since there are no marriage records, I've been pretty good and stuck.

So back to Alden Williamson from VA. He has a son Hammond Williamson. Hammond moves to Kentucky, where all his children are born. The kicker is that Hammond born 1783 dies in Madison Indiana in 1874. He has multiple sons who die in Indiana between 1840 and 1850. Some tragedy befalls this family as several husband-less Williamson women show in the census.

I had a red palm print on my forehead because Hammond Williamson appears in the 1850 census, in the same town, one page before the Widow Susannah Williamson and her son Henry.  DOH!

I can't be totally faulted though, there is another Williamson family active in Madison at the time, from Maryland.

So yeah, I went the really really long way around, but I feel more confident about it and the extended family tree is already built. I started looking for my Thompsons..and in a way I suppose I found them..just not the ones I was looking for.

Henry Williamson is bound out until 21, leaves Indiana to serve in the Civil War in Iowa, his brothers serve and die in and for Madison Indiana along with Levi Thompson (my other 3rd great from PA). Henry moves back to Indiana, marries a widow also named Susanna (like his mom) and has two daughters. Ida Williamson marries Albert Thompson (Levi's son) in Alexandria Indiana and there's my family.

Now I have two Thompson families. These new Virginia Thompsons have some quirks but the consensus seems to be that they're from Ulster Ireland in the early 1700s.

What makes this a good genetic example is what happened after I found my Williamsons. I was able to connect them to the family trees of two genetic relatives at 23 and me, because having mapped out all the wives and siblings, I know that just as I'm also a Williamson, my Williamsons are also Stewarts from New Kent VA and Billingsleys from Maryland. Those family connections still show in my DNA.

Here's the thing that always floors me though. As many times as I've done this, it's always amazing. A person I didn't know existed until a couple of weeks ago, Elizabeth Stewart, born in Perthshire Scotland in 1718 is alive and measurable in Michigan nearly 300 years later.

When I tuck in my kids at night, I'm tucking in her kids too.

Merry Christmas Everyone.
Mike Thompson from Michigan..then Indiana..then Pennsylvania and further...probably somewhere there are sheep. Call me Legion for I am many.

Mary

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Re: DNA Success Stories
« Reply #12 on: January 04, 2012, 09:16:55 AM »
Good saga, Mike! And it's NOT too long  :)

You've worked for so long on this, it's really good to see you finding some success. The more familiar we get with DNA and it's possibilities, the better the research is going to get.  I wish the Family Tree DNA info could be submitted to 23 and me for a fee. I hate paying $200 (incl the newsletter) just to be entered in their database when Tom already has 67 markers done...............

Congrats!!!!