DNA Results for My Cousin Cindy: Part One

On a regular basis, I go to AncestryDNA to check my new 4th cousin matches. I was surprised not too long ago to find a first cousin match. This match was with my cousin Cindy. When I was younger, Cindy lived in Cherry Hill, NJ. The family moved to Florida and we lost touch a bit. We have been in touch though on and off since then. If I looked around long enough, I’m sure I could find some photos of Cindy as a child. My mom also used to take home movies.

Here is a classic couch photo from the archives:

This looks like Cindy’s brother Rob, Cindy, my sisters Sharon and Lori and me. I was the old one in the group. The four on the right have been DNA tested. We need to get Rob’s YDNA for the male Rathfelder line.

Cindy’s Genealogy

Cindy and I share two grandparents and her dad was my mom’s youngest brother.

I don’t know much about Cindy’s mom’s side. Here is a picture of Cindy’s dad Bob on the left with his two older brothers:

Bob as well as my mom were about 3/4 German and 1/4 English from what I can tell. Rathfelder and Gangnus were from Latvia but of German origin. Lentz goes back to colonial Philadelphia, but before that they were in Germany. Nicholson was from Sheffield, England before moving to Philadelphia around 1870. I won’t get into the DNA ethnicity estimates as they are complicated and not very accurate beyond broad areas of the continent.

Surveying the Previously DNA Tested Landscape

I have a chart showing some of the people that have tested and match on my mom’s side:

I squeezed Cindy into a green box. Yellow is Lentz. Blue is Rathfelder. Red is Nicholson. Orange is for those who descend from Nicholson and Lentz. I also had a DNA match with a Rathfelder descendant. I wrote a Blog on that match here. Eventually, I will split off the Rathfelder Line to make this chart more clear. So I need to check Cindy against all these people. That may be more than one Blog.

Cindy and the Rathfelder Connection

I already mentioned the Rathfelders, so I may as well start there. It turns out I already had a tree. I just had to add Cindy:

Since I did this tree, my sister Lori also had her DNA tested. When I did this tree, I was having a lot of confusion. According to my records, Hans Jerg Rathfelder had two sons named Johann Georg. I also found two Wilhemine Rathfelders. Here is Cindy’s match to Astrid:

For some reason, Cindy matches Astrid on a different Chromosome than my mom, Rusty, and Catherine. As my siblings and I got all our DNA from our mom, I didn’t add our duplicate or less results. So if Cindy were mapping her DNA, that segment on her Chromosome 16 would map to her Rathfelder side. It appears to be DNA that came down from the 1750’s. So Cindy adds another piece to the puzzle of ancient Rathfelder DNA.

More of Cindy’s Rathfelder DNA

To get more of Cindy’s Rathfelder DNA, I just need to compare her to 2nd cousin Catherine:

This is not all of Cindy’s Rathfelder DNA. This is just the DNA that she shares with cousin Catherine. Even though I am calling this Rathfelder DNA, some of it is actually Rathfelder and some should be from Maria Gangnus. Cindy’s number of generations to the Rathfelder/Gangnus connection is 3.3 based on DNA alone. The actual should be 3.0, so she shares a little less DNA with Catherine than average. Actually of Cindy’s 1st cousins, her match to Catherine is about average. Cindy is listed as 4th out of seven on Catherine’s list of 2nd cousins. Cousin Rusty had the highest match, but even his estimate to a common ancestor was 3.1.

Cindy’s X Chromosome

Cindy technically has no Rathfelder X Chromosome. She did get one X Chromosome from her dad, Bob, which you would think would be Rathfelder, but it was actually Lentz DNA from his mom. That is because an X Chromosome is not passed down from father to son. So Bob never got an X Chromosome from his Rathfelder dad. In fact, one interesting thing is that if Cindy’s sister gets her DNA tested, they will have a perfect X Chromosome match with each other on their father’s side.

Here is where CIndy could have gotten her X Chromosome from:

That means that whenever Cindy matches Rusty or my family, it has to be in these circled areas and not on the top part of her father’s tree.

Here are some of Cindy’s X Chromosome matches with:

1. my mom
2. Jon
3. Sharon
4. Lori
5. Joel
6. Carolyn
7. Heidi

Cousin Carolyn’s X Chromosome Match with Cindy

I haven’t mentioned Carolyn yet. Carolyn shares more X Chromosome with Cindy than my sister Heidi does with Cindy.

Carolyn is my mom’s 2nd cousin and Cindy’s 2nd cousin once removed.  From Carolyn’s point of view, here is how she matches us. #2 is Cindy.

This shows that Carolyn does not match me or my sister Heidi on the X Chromosme. Here is a somewhat messy map I made of the X Chromosome for my family showing from which grandparent we got our DNA:

I am J on the map. S and H are repeated for Sharon and Heidi. I don’t match Carolyn on the X, because I have Rathfelder X on the right side of the Chromosome. That means I cannot match Carolyn there as she would be on my Lentz side. Cindy only has Lentz grandparent on her Chromosome X, so she matches my siblings only where they have Lentz DNA and not Rathfelder DNA. So for example, my sister Heidi had the smallest X Chromosome match with Cindy. That is because at the time of recombination, Heidi only got a tiny bit of Lentz DNA (shown in orange above) at the beginning of her X Chromosome.

Summary of Cindy’s DNA: Part One

• So far I looked at Cindy’s genealogy and how she fits in to others that are related to her and have had their DNA tested
• I looked into a match that Cindy had with Astrid that appears to go back to a 1700’s Rathfelder ancestor. Cindy has a different match than other close relatives have with Astrid.
• Cindy matches Carolyn on their X Chromosome. This represents DNA from Sheffield ancestors Nicholson or Ellis.
• Cindy’s dad gave her the same X Chromosome that he got from his Lentz mom. That means that Cindy’s paternal X Chromosome is all Lentz. As Rusty and my family are related through our moms, we get both Rathfelder and Lentz X Chromosome. As a result, Cindy only matches us on the parts of our X Chromosome where we have Lentz and not Rathfelder DNA.
• Cindy matches my mom all along her X Chromosome as my mom got a full X Chromosome from her Lentz mom.
• In the next Blog, I’ll look at Cindy’s matches with her Nicholson relatives.
• I may have another photo of Cindy from the archives for the next Blog.