Cousin Rusty and Our MtDNA Match – Hartley DNA & Genealogy

I had written a draft of this post in February 2021, but had not posted it. I want to post this now as an update. Here is a link to my previous post on mitochondrial DNA (also posted after a hiatus).

I recently had a nice email from my first cousin Rusty. He told me he tested for MtDNA which is mitochondrial DNA. This is the type of DNA that goes from mother to mother to mother. As we are maternal cousins, we have a perfect match. Our common ancestor is our mother’s mother who was Emma Rathfelder born in 1900. Here is Emma holding her youngest:

Looking at the photo, Rusty’s mom is on the left of Emma and my mom is on Emma’s right. My Uncle Bobby in my grandmotheHere r’s arms was born in April 1933, so the picture must be in the Summer of 1933. My mom was born in December 1921, so she would be 11 years old here. Rusty’s mom, my Aunt Muriel was born in September 1924, so she would be close to 9 years old.

The MtDNA – Haplogroup H5’36

Here are all my MtDNA matches at a genetic distance of zero:

Rusty is the first person with whom I have a MtDNA match and I know our common ancestor. Looking at the last name of my matches are not much help, because with the maternal-only line, the surname generally changes every generation. Even looking at the Earliest Known Ancestors can be misleading. I’ll look at some of thse matches earliest maternal line only ancestors.

Rusty and Me

We go back to the Shefield, England area on our maternal side. I have my first known female line ancestor as Ann Scott:

Ann’s mother Ann Roebuck was born in 1795, so we’ll say Ann Scott was born around 1770. That is fairly early. Russ has Sarah Staniforth which cannot be right as she has two male Nicholsons in her line between her and us. Men are not allowed in the MtDNA line. They are only allowed at the end of the line where Rusty and I are.

Other Matches: Gallagher 1833

I can’t figure out this tree, so I’ll try to recreate it at Ancestry. I actually started one previously:

In doing these matches, I am intersted in where these maternal ancestors lived, because I am trying to match ancestors and places those ancestors lived. Margaret Campbell lived in Ireland. It appears from a preliminary review that this maternal line came from County Tyrone in Ireland.

McLaughlin

My fourth match has Helen McLaughlin with no date. When I build out this tree, there is also a Campbell from County Tyrone. Coincidence?

Bridget McKelvey

This is from my sixth 0 GD match. This family was also from Ireland. My MtDNA match’s tree is missing Bridget:

I think that the box marked ‘Private’ is meant to be my match’s grandmother Bridget, but he may have left out her death date, so the program decided to keep this person private. I see another tree at Ancestry which I will borrow:

This gets us one generation beyond Bridget or Biddy reto Ann/Nancy McGee.

So far, all road lead to Ireland (except for my ancestors). Here is Drumnaha:

Here is Ann or Nancy:

Elizabeth Jennings

My last zero GD MtDNA match has as his most distant female line ancestor Elizabeth Jennings. Unfortunately, he has posted no tree. He does post this information:

I assume that Elizabeth Jennings was his maternal grandmother and that she was from Ireland.

MtDNA Results at FTDNA

Here is one page of my results:

I am supposed to be able to download my results using the FASTA file buttom in orange. However, I’m having trouble doing that. Apparently FTDNA has an issue with this. Someone on Facebook corrected the error that was on the FTDNA site, so I was able to get the FASTA file. I uploaded this to YFull and to something called James Lick’s web page.

This is what I get at the James Lick MtDNA page after uploading:

Dating mtDNA Results

This is a topic that confuses me. I see this graphic at FTDNA:

I can make a few assumptions based on this graphic. One is that this applies to perfect matches only.

I can build a very simple tree that has Rust and me and our grandmother:

Even though this is a simple tree, it useful nonetheless. We have two generations to our common ancestor. I was born in 1956, so I’ll round that off to 60 years. The next most recent perfect match was frorm 2019 and this person has the maternal ancestor of Annie Gallagher born 1833 in Tyrone, Ireland.

Here is what I see at YFull:

The only number that matches FTDNA is the 125. I posted a question at the mtDNA Facebook Page, and got this answer from Rosario:

First, in order for you to have any verifiable and substantive genetic matches with mtDNA, one MUST have results from the FMS. Anything short of that is useless from a practical sense as full haplogroups and mutations can only be defind through FMS.

Second, once FMS results are obtained, a match with a genetic distance of 0, will lead you to a possible shared ancestor within 2200 years. Yes, you have read that correctly.

I have matches with a gd of 0 from all over the place and there is no way that we can all connect within a genealogical time frame, it simply isn’t possible. Why the company would choose to mislead us with this chart boggles the mimd.

Summary and Conclusions

I was glad that my first cousin Rusty tested his mitochondrial DNA as that gives me a match that I know
I looked at a few other mitochondrial DNA matches.
I noted that generally, mitochondrial DNA matches could be very distant – within 2200 years.
My mitochondrial roots (maternal only ancestry) appear to be in the Brithish Isles over the past several thousands of years.