Recently, I’ve been in touch with a new DNA relative on my mom’s Nicholson side. Sadie showed up at AncestryDNA as many matches do. Sadie, however, also showed up as a Shared Ancestor Hint. These are good. As long as the genealogy on both sides is good, this shows how you connect to your DNA match by common ancestors.
Emma above is my grandmother and Martha is Sadie’s great grandmother. That makes us third cousins once removed to each other. Speaking of Emma, I found a photo of her online that I hadn’t seen before. My cousin Judy in the chart below had posted it:
Emma is holding her Lentz niece. However, they are both Nicholson descendants. The niece was born in 1918.
Here is how Sadie fits in with some of the other Nicholson DNA-tested relatives:
I’ve chopped off some of my unrelated Rathfelder ancestors on the left. Sadie descends from Sarah who represents a new daughter of William Nicholson and Martha Ellis. Actually Sarah Nicholson is new to this DNA project and the eldest child of William and Martha Nicholson.
Sadie’s Nicholson DNA
Sadie matches me and my 4 siblings as well as my mom by DNA. She matches my cousin Rusty. She doesn’t match Judy and Joshua. She matches Joan and Joan’s sister Linda. She matches Carolyn but not Nigel. The largest Nicholson match that Sadie has is on Chromosome 6:
Here she matches:
- Joan
- Me
- My mom
- My sister Heidi
- My sister Sharon
- My Brother Jonathan
- Another Nicholson relative that hasn’t gotten back to me
- My cousin Rusty
- My sister Lori
It looks like a lot of people, but it could be reduced to Joan, my mom, the other Nicholson relative and my cousin Rusty. That is because my siblings and I got all our Nicholson DNA from our mom. These matches form a Triangulation Group:
The theory says that these four people got their specific matching DNA from either William Nicholson or Martha Ellis. However, because we don’t know which, I’ve circled them both. This doesn’t mean that the other people that didn’t match on Chromosome 6 don’t descend from William and Martha. However, it does give solid evidence that the ones that do match do descend from the couple.
A Chromosome Mapping Side Trip
In Sadie’s matches, I noticed that Sadie had a shorter match with my sister Lori who is #9
This means that Lori likely has a crossover where her match stops around 56M. Here is Lori’s match with Sadie:
It looks like chromosome mapping would go beyond the scope of this Blog, so I’ll address this later. My assumption is that Lori’s maternal Chromosome 6 switches from her Lentz grandmother (whose mother was a Nicholson) to her Rathfelder grandfather at about position 56M.
Sadie’s Nicholson X Chromosome Matches
The important rule about the X Chromosome is that it doesn’t travel down from father to son. That means if there are two males in a line going up from a DNA tester to a common ancestor, then there can’t be an X Chromosome match there. This applies to only Nigel in my chart. Nigel is from a long line of Nicholson males.
Here are Sadie’s top three X matches:
The first match is Joan. I don’t know who the second match is. Probably a non-Nicholson match. The third match is to Judy in the chart above. The pink zero means that Judy shares no autosomal DNA (Chromosomes 1-22) with Sadie but does share a sizeable X Chromosome match. Here are Sadie’s X matches with these two Nicholson cousins on the Gedmatch Chromosome Browser: 
#1 is Sadie’s match with Joan and #2 is her match with Judy. Again, we can’t know if this DNA is from William Nicholson or Martha Ellis. This is because Sadie, Joan and Judy descend from daughters of William and Martha. If one of them had descended from a son, then we would know that the X Chromosome they got would have to be from Martha Ellis.
My Chromosome Map
I almost forgot to update my Chromosome Map based on Sadie. This is the one based on all my identified cousins that match by DNA. Kitty Munson developed the software for this:
Sadie shows up on my map as maroon on Chromosome 2 and 6. The 2 is important as I had no maternal match on that large Chromosome prior to the match with Sadie. Here are the specifics of my match with Sadie:
