I was presently surprised when looking over my AncestryDNA matches recently. I saw my second cousin Mike. Now due to the fact that I have many second cousins descending from James Hartley and Annie Snell, I don’t happen to know them all personally. Fortunately, I do know Mike and if I met him somewhere would surely say hi.
Mike at AncestryDNA
At AncestryDNA there is a button to push called Shared Matches. When I look for Shared Matches between me and Mike, I get a lot of people. I first get my 4 tested siblings. Then I get 11 second cousins. These are actually 2nd cousins by DNA. In other words, Ancestry looks at the amount of DNA shared and guesses that these should be in the 2nd cousin range. So Ancestry has the first four of my list of shared second cousins in the 1st to 2nd cousin range. The rest on the list are in the 2nd to 3rd cousin range. However, these are all actual second cousins that Mike and I share. These would be descendants of the 13 children that my great grandparents James Hartley and Annie Snell had. Actually, first on his list of 2nd cousins is Joyce. She is a first cousin once removed. I had her tested at the last family reunion. I wrote a Blog about her results here, and about Mike’s sister Holly here. Down in the Third Cousin Shared Matches there may be 2nd cousins once removed. There is also one non-Hartley Snell relative listed there.
Mike at Gedmatch
I asked Mike to upload his DNA results to Gedmatch. That is where you can find out more about your DNA. For example, here is how Mike matches his sister Holly on Chromosome 15:
I bring up this example, because full siblings match each other in a different way than any other relationship.
- We all get a chromosome from our mom and one from our dad. They in turn got one from their mom and one from their dad. That means there are four ways that we can get DNA from our parents. Those four ways are from our four grandparents
- The blue bar on the bottom shows where Mike and Holly match by DNA.
- The yellow bar above the blue means that Mike and Holly share the DNA from one parent only. And they get their DNA from only one parent of that parent. However, we don’t know which one right now.
- The green bar above the blue bar means that Mike and Holly share DNA from both their mother and father. Not only that, they share the DNA from one of the mother’s parents and one of the father’s parents. However, we don’t know which one yet.
- The red area is where Holly and Mike share no DNA from either parent. That is the opposite of the green area. That means Mike may get his DNA from a maternal grandfather and Holly from a paternal grandmother in that area. I’ll give some examples below.
Here are Mike and Holly’s grandparents:
Here is how Mike and Holly match each other on Chromosome 7:
Below the first green bar (which is called a Fully Identical Region or FIR), I have split this out for Mike and Holly. This is split to identify Mike and Holly’s maternal and paternal sides (but we don’t know which yet). Mike and Holly have two of the same colors. That means that they got the DNA from the same two grandparents. One of those grandparents is paternal and one is maternal. We don’t know which is which yet, but we can easily figure out the paternal grandmother. We can do that because all of Mike and Holly’s second cousin DNA matches on the Hartley side that I mentioned above.
The first match is Mike’s 1st cousin once removed Joyce. Then there are my 4 siblings. #6 and 7 are two other Hartley-descended 2nd cousins. That means that all this DNA maps to Mike’s grandmother Grace May Hartley. Put together, these matches go from 15.6M to 95.6M for Mike.
Here I assigned blue as Mike and Holly’s paternal grandmother. In the green area, Holly had to have the same DNA from the same Hartley grandmother. In the red area, Holly had to have the DNA from her Gifford grandfather because neither grandparent matches in a red area. Now let’s look at Holly’s 2nd cousin matches.
Above, Holly matches Joyce from 6-42M.
Because Holly gets her DNA from her Hartley grandmother before about the 16M mark, that must mean Mike gets his paternal DNA in that area on his Gifford side. Otherwise, he would have matched at least one of his Hartley cousins there. Then I moved some of the orange DNA to the left. This would be maternal DNA which is from either Jenney or Murray. This also meets the requirement of the first yellow area. That area is called an HIR or Half Identical Region. It is where Mike and Holly share the DNA from one grandparent but not the other. In order to know which grandparent that DNA is from, we would need to have a match to a Murray or Jenney. In order to do this right we would also need another color for the 2nd maternal grandparent.
This is also a lot easier when there are three siblings to compare because then we could find out where the crossovers are. An example of a crossover is on Mike’s DNA where the DNA he got on the paternal side goes from Gifford to Hartley.
Me and Mike and Our DNA
When I look at my DNA matches at Gedmatch, my match with Mike is the highest level shared between any of my second cousins – at least the cousins that have uploaded to Gedmatch. Mike’s sister Holly had the record before that. Here is what the specifics look like between Mike and myself:
At the bottom of the list is a number of 2.7 generations. That is how far back it looks like our common ancestors are based on the DNA match. They are actually 3.0 generations away. That means that we share more than the average DNA for 2nd cousins. Some of my second cousins will share more than average amounts and some will share less than average amounts of DNA. If I look at Mike’s match list, he shares more DNA with two of my sisters and another 2nd cousin than he does with me.
Mapping My DNA By Cousins
I showed one way to map DNA from your grandparents comparing siblings’ DNA. Another way is to directly map your cousins’ matches to a chart. Kitty Munson has developed some software to do this. Right now my map looks like this:
The darker blue maps to James Hartley and Annie Snell. That would be via my 1st cousins once removed and my 2nd cousins with the same ancestors. Mike’s DNA fills in a few blanks in my map:
I guess the changes are subtle. The Hartley side should only ever fill up about one half of my paternal chromosomes. The other half for me would be for Frazer and Frazer ancestors.
Mike’s X Chromosome Matches: No Hartleys There
Mike’s biggest X Chromosome match is with his sister Holly:
Mike, like me, won’t match any Hartley relatives on the X Chromosome. That is because a father never passes an X Chromosome down to a son – only a Y Chromosome. The big match between Mike and Holly is from their mom. She got her X Chromosome from some combination of Jenney and Murray.
Mike’s Lancashire DNA Match
These matches above represent Lee’s DNA matches on Chromosome 13 with 5 siblings in my family, our two 1st cousins once removed and Mike in the green.
I have mentioned in a previous Blog about Joyce, that Hartley descendants have a match with Lee at AncestryDNA and Gedmatch. Lee shows all his ancestors as being from England.
In this match, Lee’s ancestors are in orange and mine are in blue. When I zoom in to Trawden, where the Hartleys were from, I see Lee has ancestors in this area:
At the time our ancestors were in Trawden, they had to go to Colne for baptisms, weddings and funerals as there was no Church of England Church in Trawden. Colne is represented by the orange to the NW of Trawden.
The Snells came to this country in the 1600’s and the Hartleys in the 1800’s. That means that Lee’s matches would be on the Hartley side vs. the Snell side. Lee has two interesting people in his ancestry. One is Margaret Hartley b. 1836 and another is Mary Baldwin b. 1836.
- Although these two women were both born in 1836, they are in different generations from Lee
- Margaret Hartley is on Lee’s paternal side and Mary Baldwin is on Lee’s maternal side. If Lee were to ever test his mom, we would know on which side the Hartleys match.
- Lee doesn’t show any parents for Margaret Hartley or Mary Baldwin
I have our Trawden born ancestor Greenwood Hartley with a Baldwin grandmother:
This is really on the edge of my knowledge. I chose Betty Baldwin and James Hartley as the most likely parents for Robert Hartley out of many potential candidates.
Lee had a dead end for his Margaret Hartley ancestor. Here are some potential parents I found for Margaret:
This was the same issue I had for finding parents for Robert. Was Margaret the daughter of John and Susan Hartley, John and Hannah Hartley or John and Margaret Hartley? Or perhaps even someone else? At least one of the Margarets died young.
Greenwood is staring at me from the past and saying, “You can’t figure out who my are grandparents are? They are _______ and _______”
a look at Mary Baldwin b. 1836
Due to a problem finding Margaret Hartley’s parents, I’ll take a look at a less common surname in Mary Baldwin. Based on this scrawly writing, she was baptized a Wesleyan in Colne:
This baptism was outside the Church of England. A Wesleyan, perhaps what we would consider Methodist was considered a non-conformist church. Here is some information on Mary’s dad Eli:
And here is a brother of Eli:
I still need to get back a ways to get to our potential ancestor, Betty Baldwin who was born perhaps around 1780. Any potential shared ancestor would likely be Betty’s parents or before. We’ll say that Jane Baldwin was actually Jenney Spencer:
Again, we get a multiple choice for the father of this James Baldwin. Here is a batch of them from around 1790:
Here I will choose the James from Barrowford for a few reasons. One is that his dad was Elias and two, he was from Barrowford. Here is the 1851 Census showing that this James Baldwin was born in Barrowford.
This also shows James son David b. in 1812. That gets us back to the old-timers: Elias and Peggy Baldwin. Unfortunately, it looks like Elias didn’t do too well:
He died of decline at age 35. Betty could have been his daughter, but it would have made for some tight time frames. She would have had to have been born perhaps late 1783. Then she would have been only about 17 at the time of her marriage. So the genealogy is the difficult part of the genetic genealogy.
Summary
Well I looked at some aspects of Mike’s DNA:
- How Mike and Holly have Fully Identical Regions (FIRs) in their matches with each other. Normally, these FIRs only occur between full siblings.
- I looked at how to use the matches between Mike, Holly and their cousins to map out which grandparent they got their DNA from on certain parts of their chromosomes.
- I looked at another way of mapping DNA developed by Kitty Munson.
- I looked at a DNA match Mike shares with some other Hartley cousins. This DNA match is from an English man with Lancashire ancestors and probably represents deep Hartley ancestors that haven’t been identified yet.
My goodness this is so interesting! You are so smart to be able to understand it.
I feel like I am reading Greek!
Thanks, I’ve been researching DNA for a long time now. In this Blog, I didn’t explain some of the basics, which may have made it more difficult to understand. So this would be more than the basic DNA Blog.
Hi Joel, do you have anyone birth approx Sept 1900. My partners grandmother had a younger brother on the 1901 census he is listed as George Jackson 6 months old. Then he disappears so does his Mother his Father William John Jackson is listed as widowed. We have been told his Mother died in childbirth and George was given to the Hartley jam family. You seem very knowledgeable regarding Ancestry. I cannot find a birth certificate for George. His name was most likely changed and adoptions were not registered. Thanks.