Looking At French Canadian Pouliot DNA

My wife’s great grandmother was Emma Pouliot b. 1874 in Quebec. The exact location was St.-Étienne-de-Bolton, Brome, Quebec. According to her death record, she was from Eastman, Quebec. Could it be possible that she was born in Brome and later moved to Eastman?

The place with the stick pin is Brome, while Eastman is a few towns to the Northeast. The line below is the U.S boundary. This is what Emma Pouliot looked like:

I’d like to look at Pouliot DNA in this Blog. One reason that I’d like to look at Pouliot DNA is because of my wife’s Aunts. I had them tested at AncestryDNA and most of their Shared Ancestor Hints (SAHs) were from the Pouliot Line.

The Pouliot DNA Project

I’ve been involved in two other DNA projects. Both of them have been in populations that intermarried. On my grandmother’s side the Frazers intermarried as they usually looked to marry someone from the Church of Ireland in an area that had mostly Roman Catholics. On my wife’s mother’s side the Dicks intermarried with other Newfoundlanders. French Canadians have been known to intermarry due to the colonial nature of the area. There were only so many original settlers. Here are some of the Pouliot descendants I have so far:

I have been in touch with Robert in the left column in the past due to good DNA matches. Those on the right are closer relatives to my father in law Richard. They have all had their DNA tested. One group has for a common ancestor Emma Pouliot. Fred and Sleuth who are second cousins of my father in law Richard have the common ancestors of Joseph Pouliot and Josephine Fortin.

Pouliot DNA

Here is how the testers compared. I didn’t include my wife as all her Pouliot DNA is from her dad.

This shows that everyone matches – except for Fred and Robert.

Triangulation Groups

I like to look at Triangulation Groups (TGs) as these indicate common ancestors. Once we find these, we can confirm existing genealogy and suggest new genealogy in some cases. To do this, I can compare the segments of the nine that tested above. I’ll look at Robert as he is most distantly related. He is a 4th cousin, twice removed to those in my father in law’s generation.

In order for Robert to be in a TG, he would have to match two people within the same segment. Those two people would have to match each other. The other rule is that the two people that he is matching don’t count if they are siblings.

Here are my nominees for potential Robert TGs:

In the first highlighted box, Richard and Virginia are siblings, but Patricia as a 1st cousin can be a potential third in the TG. In the Red TG, we see Patricia and Joseph as siblings but their relative John makes the third with Robert. Finally Robert, Joseph and Sleuth may be in a TG.

Chromosome 3

In order for this to be a TG, Virginia and/or Richard must match Patricia in that area. Here is how Patricia matches Virginia, Richard and Robert on Chromosome 3:

Clearly they all match around the area of 130M. Here is how I think the Chromosome 3 TG would look like on the genealogy chart:

Chalk up one TG for Robert, Richard, Virginia and Joseph. Without Robert, we wouldn’t know if the common ancestor for Richard, Virginia and Patricia is Pouliot or LeFevre for this segment of Chromosome 3. Now we know. This will come in handy once I map Chromosome 3 for the Richard, Virginia, and Lorraine.

Chromosome 5

This potential TG is interesting as none of the matches are in my in law’s direct family. Here is how John matches Patricia, Joseph and Robert:

I’d say that is a match. As they say in Star Wars, “The force is strong within you”.

Chromosome 15 TG

If we could find a TG here, that would include Robert in all four of the families above. Actually, it may not be obvious above, but Jake, Richard, Lorraine and Virginia are all siblings. Marie is my wife and Richard is my father in law.

I’ll check to see if Joseph matches Sleuth around 95M.

#1 is Joseph’s match with Robert and the one we are looking for is #2 which is Sleuth’s match with Joseph of 26 cM. This should be of interest to Fred, who is Sleuth’s brother. He has done a lot of work on Pouliot genealogy.

Joseph and Sleuth can know that their Chromosome 15 matches with Robert come by way of Pouliot and not the Fortin side. With just the match between Joseph and Sleuth, we wouldn’t have known that.

I have covered all the families with TGs. That means that all these families have a paper trail and a DNA trail to a common Pouliot ancestor. Actually the common ancestors are Pouliot and Gobeil, but in the next generation down, they have the Pouliot name.

Any Potential Problems in This Analysis?

The only problem that I see would be that if we picked the wrong common ancestor. Perhaps there is another common ancestor that we don’t know about. Then this could mess up the analysis. However, my assumption is that our genealogies are fairly complete. If there were other potential common ancestors between Robert and Virginia in our Ancestry Trees, then AncestryDNA would have picked that up in the Shared Ancestor Hints. Other people in this group may want to check other lines to see if there are any other shared common ancestors that have been missed just to make sure.

Future Plans

As Lorraine and Virginia seemed to have about 80 Pouliot Shared Ancestor Hints, it seems there must be others with Pouliot ancestry that have uploaded their DNA results to Gedmatch. It would be good to find further TGs to validate existing genealogies and perhaps even find some on the Pouliot tree that did not know they were there.