I’ve written a few blogs on my mom’s DNA. I did an initial look in December 2015 and wrote more in February 2016. These are listed under Rathfelder/Lentz/Nicholson DNA. This blog will look at my mother’s Lentz mother’s side of the DNA in a little more detail. This is the red side in the chart below. Since my last blog, there has been a newly found relative.
That new relative is Joshua. Unfortunately, he makes me feel a bit old as he is 2 generations below me. I made a distinction in my chart as there is a Joan from the Lentz Line shown as Joan(L) and a Joan (N) from the Nicholson line. I have a photo of Annie (Ann Eliza) Nicholson Lentz with Florence and Joan (L).
Joshua’s grandmother Joan(L) is the littlest girl. Florence is the girl behind her. Florence is Annie Nicholson Lentz’s granddaughter. Annie Nicholson Lentz is Joan’s great grandmother. So that makes Annie Joshua’s 3rd great grandmother!
Splitting the Lentz Family from the Nicholson Family
It would be interesting to try to determine what DNA comes from the Lentz family vs. what comes from the Nicholson family. That way, we will be able to tell which branch our DNA matches are on. At first, it looks like Joshua should not help as he is on the same branch as Judy. Both Judy and Joshua descend from William Lentz.
However, Judy has not uploaded to gedmatch.com yet, so Joshua does help. Plus he contributes different Lentz DNA than Judy does. Also he matches on the X Chromosome with my mom. In the above chart, Catherine, my mom, Judy, Joshua and Joan(N) have tested. Here is what their results show. Judy’s results are from her match to me.
It gets a little confusing as the peach colored regions can only be Nicholson. The red sections are Lentz, but the Lentz family is also descended from the Nicholson family. Note also that the red DNA (Nicholson) is one generation older than the peach colored Lentz DNA.
The X Chromosome
As I mentioned above, only Joshua and my mom share the X Chromosome. It appears that Judy or Joshua could have gotten the X Chromsome, but only Joshua, 2 generations down did. Joan(N) has 2 males in a row in her ancestry, so that means she would not have a chance to share the X Chromosome. There is one other point about the X Chromosome. The red DNA shown in the Chromosome map above on the X line. This DNA shared by my mom and Joshua has to be Nicholson DNA from Annie Nicholson (Lentz). This is because no X Chromosome is inherited male to male. So no X Chromosome was inherited from William Lentz from his father Jacob. Any time we can tell that DNA came specifically from one ancestor and not the other, it is a good thing, so I will change the Chromosome Map a little.
Here Annie is now shown to be the sole owner of the X match between my mom and Joshua. The match is shown in yellow, which isn’t the greatest color, but I don’t feel like changing the default.
Is the X Match a real match?
Sometimes small matches can be false. The match between my mom, Gladys and Joshua barely meets the thresholds. So let’s look at that. Here are a few considerations.
- Gladys and Joshua have a path to match on the X Chromosome. That is, they do not 2 consecutive males in their ancestry leading up to Annie Nicholson.
- Joshua’s X matches are more likely to be real as he is male. That means his matches are already phased. Joshua’s X matches can only be from his mother’s side.
If any of my mother’s children also match Joshua, that would also give weight to the validity of the match. When I ran Joshua against my 2 sisters and myself at standard thresholds, I got no match. But perhaps that is because my mother was already close to the thresholds. Let’s look a bit more closely at this. Below is how I have mapped out my X Chromosome and my 2 sisters based on how we compared with each other. The maternal matches are on the top in green and orange. I had guessed that orange may be my mom’s Lentz side which leads up to Nicholson.
S is my sister Sharon, J is me. H is my sister Heidi. Here is where Joshua and my mom match on the X Chromosome:
If I guessed right in my orange-green chromosome map above, then Sharon and I would not have inherited any X Chromosome in the region from about 5 to 10. My sister Heidi would only have inherited a tiny amount. This amount would be likely less than the lowest amount that gedmatch would allow. So that was inconclusive. I will just assume that my mom and Joshua are a real match.
Nicholson/ellis DNA
This is the easy part. Anyone that matches with Joan(N) and my mom has to be a Nicholson/Ellis and not a Lentz. I can find this using a utility at gedmatch called:
When I run that, the people who match both include myself and my 2 sisters, which I already knew about, so I do not need to consider those. Here is the list. The first three are myself and my 2 sisters. My mom is represented by the 1st 3 columns and Joan is represented by the 2nd 3 columns. My 2 sisters and myself are 1 generation away from my mom, so that makes sense as a reference. We are actually all 4 generations to a common ancestor with Joan, so my family members all share a bit more DNA with Joan than expected. There is nothing wrong with that.
Now these matches are in general out about 5 generations from my mom and 5 from Joan. That doesn’t make total sense as Joan is one generation away from my mom which would translate to one half a generation further out when considering a common ancestor. I’ll take a worse case scenario and look at ancestors 5 generations out from my mom.
Remember, they have to be on the Nicholson Line. No Lentzes allowed. Ann is my mom’s grandmother, so we are starting here at 2 generations. That means that 5 generations is out to the 1700’s and I am missing 3 last names.
traceability
I chose those people that matched both my mom and Joan at Gedmatch. Then I chose the Traceability Utility. This gives me 3 things. It gives a chart of how the people match each other, it gives a physical representation of how they match and then show on what chromosomes and at what level they match. Here is the chart. I see probably 2 ancestral families represented here. I’ll call them Family One and Family Two.
The last 3 on the list may belong to Family One or Two, but not have the DNA match to show it. Or they may belong to another family. The DNA is inconclusive. Based on my mom’s Ancestry Tree, chances are these two families could include the following families: Nicholson, Clayton, Ellis or Roebuck. That is assuming I did my genealogy right. All of these families were from the Sheffield, England area, so that is also a clue. Here is how the physical representation looks. I call it the Globe.
My mom is at the bottom and Joan is to her right. The yellow lines show a Triangulation on Chromosome 5. Unfortunately, this utility doesn’t always work well. There should be a gray line line between the close relationship of A324950 and A793540. Also there are too many yellow lines. Here is my correction:
So that exercise gave me some new names that I may follow up on.
My Mom’s Lentz DNA
My mom’s Lentz DNA should be trickier to find. As I mentioned, the Lentz family is descended in part from the Nicholson line, so how do we separate the two? Here is what I will try. I will look at my mom vs. Joan(N) as above, but this time, I will take the comparison between the two and then look at the names that don’t match Joan. This will be quite a long list. Then I will look at the list of people that do match between my mom and Joshua. This is the Lentz list which could include Nicholsons. Hopefully, the names in common with both lists will tend to be Lentz.
I took the first list of 348 matches and put them in a spreadsheet. Again, these were the ones that didn’t match Joan aka those that don’t match the Nicholsons. The second list was very short. There were only 2 people in it when I took out myself and my two sisters. Hopefully, these 2 will match the people in the other list. It turns out that they did. So was it a waste of time finding the 348 matches? I don’t think so. The correlation in the two lists gives me extra confidence that the 2 in the second list are Lentz rather than Nicholson matches.
The other good news that the 2 matches triangulate with Joshua. Here is a part of my mother’s DNA match spreadsheet, so these are matches to my mom.
These are matches on Chromosome 6. Pink means my mother’s mother’s side. Green means a match of over 15 cM. Joshua is the first match and the other two below him match each other. This gives more credence to a common ancestor that is on my mother’s Lentz side.
crossovers
While I’m on Chromosome 6, I’ll mention crossovers. On any particular Chromosome, we get half our DNA from our mother and half from our father. Here we are looking at my mom’s mother’s DNA. Further when my mom got her DNA from her mother, her mother’s parents’ DNA mixed in alternating segments. I showed that in my orange and green map above of my sisters’ and my X Chromosome. Here is part of my mom’s chromosome map based on her cousin matches:
Notice on Chromosome 6, the segments turn from red to peach on my mom’s Maternal side. On Chromosome 9, they turn from peach to red. That is where my mom got her DNA from her 2 maternal grandparents. The red should represent the DNA my mom got from her grandfather Jacob Lentz and the peach should represent the DNA my mom got from her grandmother Annie Nicholson (though through Annie’s 2 parents). If my mom had more cousins tested, more of these crossovers would show up.
Summary, Comments and Questions
- My analysis only turned up 2 potential Lentz matches. That is the question part. I’m not sure why.
- There were more leads on the Nicholson side, even though, or perhaps because of, the common ancestor was one generation further back
- Both lists resulted in good leads.
- My best lead had nothing to do with DNA. While I was writing this blog, someone saw my Nicholson Web Page and informed me they had the Nicholson family bible showing the exact time of day and dates when many in the Nicholson family were born in the 1700’s!
- Chromosome mapping can be fun and educational
- X Chromosome matches can be helpful. One needs to know the inheritance patterns of both the matches to see if an X Chromosome match is even possible.
- A Chart showing relationships like the one I have at the beginning of the Blog is very important. That way one can know which DNA matches with which common ancestors.
- Everyone says the more known relatives that test, the better. Everyone is right.