Rathfelder/Lentz/Nicholson – Page 7 – Hartley DNA & Genealogy

July 31, 2016April 13, 2017

My German DNA Success Story

I recently had a breakthrough on my mother’s side with an autosomal DNA match. It was on her Rathfelder side which is the rarest as far as DNA matches go. Apparently there aren’t many Rathfelders around and very few that have taken DNA tests.

Here is the summary of my success:

My mom’s Rathfelder ancestors lived in Riga, Latvia. Based on this I did a search under my mom’s results at AncestryDNA for matches from Riga, Latvia.
I was fortunate to find someone with a large match.
I got in touch with the match and asked the administrator to put the results on gedmatch.com.
The administrator of the match put the results up on gedmatch.com. This is the step that happens rarely – to me at least.
I checked the results against a Rathfelder 2nd cousin’s DNA I had tested and there was a good match there also.
I did some genealogy and found where the match likely was.

The Ancestry DNA Riga Search

When I put in Riga, Latvia, under the AncestryDNA search criteria for my mom’s kit, I found the match. It was the largest Riga match she had after my my 2 sisters and myself. Here is a screen shot of the match with cM’s shared and my note that the match was in Riga.

I was a little surprised that AncestryDNA had the relationship at 4th cousin, based on the 6 segments shared. I would think that it would be closer than that.

The Match in Gedmatch

Here is the same match at gedmatch:

Note that Gedmatch shows fewer segments (4) but a higher total cMs. Gedmatch estimates 3.8 generations to a common ancestor. That sounds like a 3rd cousin to me.

All Roads Lead to Hirschenhof

My mom’s match had as the most distant Riga ancestor someone by the name of Spengel. I knew that all my mom’s ancestors lived in Hirschenhof, Latvia, prior to moving to Riga. That meant that the match was likely in Hirschenhof. I did a quick Google search for Spengel and Hirschenhof and came up with some results. I tried the match’s other ancestors with Hirchenhof and found no results. Here are my mom’s Hirschenhof 1st and 2nd great grandparents. They would represent 2nd and 3rd cousin matches:

Time for Some Hirschenhof Genealogy

Here is the Linden Evangelical Lutheran Church outside Hirschenhof where my mom’s ancestors got baptized, confirmed, married and had their funerals.

I like the photo because it appears to show people sledding down the hill by the Church. Also because it looks like this picture could have been taken in New England where I live as well as Hirschenhof, Latvia.

http://www.lvva-raduraksti.lv/

Raduraksti is the website I like to use for Latvian genealogy. That is where I was able to find the Linden Church records. They are listed under Draudzes, Liepkalnes. I had to look up draudzes. It means congregations. Liepkalnes is apparently the Latvian name for Linden. My mom’s match’s grandfather was Friedrich Spengel. I was able to find his birth and baptismal record here:

I could tell that Friedrich, Bernhard was born in 1859 based on the index and note at the top of the page. I could tell that his dad was Johanne Georg [something] Spengel married to a Rathfelder. However, I had no idea what the first name of Friedrich’s Rathfelder mother. I wrote to a Rathfelder relative in Germany named Inge for help. In the meantime, I discovered that there was a Wilhelmine Rathfelder in the index to the church records. Here is her birth record in 1844.

Now that I know it says Wilhelmine, I can read it. Before that, the ‘W’ looked like a ‘Dr’ or ‘Lr’ to me! Here I recognized Wilhelmine’s parents as my mother’s great grandparents: Johann Rathfelder and Rosine Schwechheimer. Here from my web page is the family:

This shows that in my research, I was missing Wilhelmine. However, there was plenty of time for her to be born between February 1843 and 1844. It seemed clear that my mom and her match had as their common ancestors Johannes Rathfelder and Rosine Schwechheimer. However there were a few problems.

the problems with WILHELMIne

There were 2 Wilhelmine Rathfelders
With the above scenario, my mom and her match would be 2nd cousins. Ancestry showed them as 4th cousins and gedmatch seemed to indicate that they would be closer to 3rd cousins, but not 2nd cousins.
If Friedrich Spengel’s father married this Wilhemine, then this Wilhelmine would have been 15 when Friedrich was born.

Two Wilhelmine Rathfelders

I’ve heard it said that you learn something new every day. In looking up information on Lutheran Church records, I discovered that it would be normal for a child to be named after the godparent. This was certainly true here. Friedrich Spengel was named for his godfather Friedrich Niclas.

Here is what Inge tells me concerning her reading of Wilhelmine’s baptismal record:

You found out yourself, that no. 58 of the Linden churchbook is an entry like follows

I am sure, you still are knowing:

Wilhelmine Rathfelder,(born July, 2nd, baptized July, third (dritten)

Vater Tischler Joh(ann) Rathfelder, M(utter) Rosina geb. Schwechheimer

Taufzeugen Jungfer Wilhelmine Rathfelder, Tischler Heinr(ich) Lütken und Fr(au) Philippine geborene Rathfelder

A Jungfer is an unmarried female.

So what I get out of this is that Wilhelmine Rathfelder had an unmarried godparent with the same first and last names that she had.

So Who was Friedrich Spengel’s Mother?

Prior to writing this blog, I was leaning toward the younger Wilhelmine as being Friedrich’s mother. Now I am leaning toward the older godmother. This is based partly on the DNA results. I am guessing that the godmother could have been Wilhelmine’s Aunt. Here is what I have for Johannes’ family. I think that he actually had other siblings that I don’t yet know about. Perhaps he had a sister named Wilhemine.

That’s as far as I got on the genealogy. There is more work to do.

The Spengel Match Helps With My Chromosome Mapping

I have mapped most of my chromosomes and my 2 sisters’ chromosomes to my 4 grandparents. This shows for each chromosome the portion of DNA my sisters and I received from each grandparent represented in 4 different colors. I used a method developed by Kathy Johnston. For example, here is how I had mapped out Chromosome 17:

My sisters are S and H. I am J. Note on my mother’s side (on the top of each bar) I have maternal grandparent 1 and 2 because I could not tell who was who. Now with the known Spengel descendant match, I can tell which is Rathfelder (my mother’s father’s line) and which is Lentz (my mother’s mother’s line). Here is how gedmatch shows the Spengel match. Remember that Spengel had a Rathfelder mother, so will indicate the Rathfelder line.

Above, #1 corresponds to my sister Heidi (H) and #2 corresponds to my sister Sharon (S). My mom is #3. Note that The green matches for daughters #1 and #2 shouldn’t be larger than the mother #3, but they are. I show no match to my mother’s match on this Chromosome. Due to the the location of the Spengel matches above, this tells me that MG2 above has to be Rathfelder. That leaves MG1 as Lentz. Now I can add the real names of the grandparents that my sisters and I got our maternal DNA from on Chromosome 17.

That means if my 2 sisters have a maternal match with anyone after 9 or 11 on their Chromosome 17, it would be with someone who is a Rathfelder or Rathfelder ancestor. If I have a maternal match with anyone in that area, it would be with a Lentz or Lentz ancestor. This is quite helpful to know.

My mom’s Spengel descendant match will also help in updating my family’s Kitty Munson Chromosome Map. However, before I do that, I will want to confirm which Rathfelder is the common ancestor between my mom and her new match.

Summary and Conclusions

I’m grateful that this Rathfelder match showed up as one of AncestryDNA’s 2 million customers
I may have been able to find out the same information in the first part of the blog leading up to the Rathfelder common ancestor without using gedmatch.
Gedmatch gave me more confidence in where to look. I knew I needed to look for Rathfelder ancestors in Hirschenhof.
I wouldn’t be able to map any DNA without gedmatch. AncestryDNA does not tell me on what Chromosomes that I match. For me, this is where a lot of the fun is in genetic genealogy.
This genetic match has pointed out a some holes in my genealogy. In order to nail down these DNA matches, one has to also nail down the genealogy and include many siblings.
I didn’t have either Wilhelmina Rathfelder in my genealogy, so this helped improve my Rathfelder genealogy.
The Spengel descendant didn’t know of any Rathfelder or Hirschenhof ancestry, so that has helped my mom’s match learn more about their genealogy.
I am grateful for AncestryDNA in supplying the match; I am grateful for the match in posting to gedmatch; I am grateful for gedmatch; I am grateful for the Raduraksti web site; and lastly I am grateful for my German cousin with Hirschenhof Rathfelder roots for helping me to understand the Church Registers.

June 15, 2016April 13, 2017

Nicholson DNA

Great news. My 3rd cousin, Joan, who is a Nicholson, posted her 1st cousin once removed, Carol’s DNA to Gedmatch.com. Carol is also a Nicholson descendant and my mother’s 2nd cousin.

This does 3 things:

Improves my Chromosome mapping a la Kitty Munson
Identifies my DNA by grandparent that I have mapped as per the Kathy Johnston method
Creates a great link to the Nicholson side of the family that has been lost over the years.

In addition, these matches between Carol and my family are all higher than average. So even though my sisters and I are 2nd cousins once removed to Carol, we have about the amount of shared DNA to make us look like 2nd cousins.

William Nicholson born 1836 Sheffield England and Martha Ellis His Wife: Our Common Ancestors

The common ancestors between Joan, Carol, my mother Gladys, me and my 2 sisters are William Nicholson and Martha Ellis.

Judy and Joshua have tested also, but they are from both the Lentz and Nicholson side. Joan and Carol are helpful in that our only connection is Nicholson. That is the advantage of testing 2nd cousins. They usually can limit your matches to one of your 4 grandparents – or in this case, one of my mother’s 4 grandparents.

A Brief Sketch of William Nicholson

I am happy to have a photo of William. William was born in Sheffield, England in 1836. Working conditions were deplorable in Sheffield at this time. William’s father died in 1840 when William was 4. According to the newspaper, “On Thursday the 30th April, after a severe indisposition, aged 41, Mr. Matthew Nicholson, late of Suffolk road, leaving a numerous family to lament their loss.” The family was numerous with 12 children. William was number ten. William’s mother Martha made some money operating a beerhouse. Beerhouses were promoted at this time in England to counteract the effects of drunkenness due to gin consumption. This article was written about a year and a half after William’s father Matthew died:

William married Martha Ellis in 1854. William didn’t manufacture pen knives like the older generation but manufactured saws. He had 4 children in Sheffield, England between 1860 and 1869. After the Nicholson’s made the big move, he had 3 more children born in Philadelphia between 1871 and 1879. In Philadelphia he continued with his saw making skills. William’s wife Martha died in 1887. William married Emma Gardiner and had 2 more daughters. William died in 1919 in Philadelphia at age 83 – more than twice the age of his father when he died in Sheffield. I think William made a good decision to leave those unhealthy work conditions in Sheffield.

Updating My Chromosome Map

Here is what the DNA of my ancestors looks like mapped out:

My mother’s side is on the bottom of each chromosome bar. The DNA I got from the Nicholsons only is in light yellow. The light yellow also represents the DNA matches I have with Joan and her first cousin once removed Carol. Note on Chromosome 18 that the color goes from orange to yellow. There, the DNA I got is switching from my mother’s father’s side (Rathfelder) to my mother’s mother’s side (Nicholson).

Mapping My Chromosomes a la Kathy Johnston

I have also mapped my chromosomes using a method developed by Kathy Johnston. This method compares the matches that I have with my 2 sisters. From this, I can figure out how I inherited each of my 4 grandparents’ DNA. However, to distinguish the 4 grandparents, I need to have reference points. Carol’s DNA matches with me and my sisters provided many of those reference points for my mother’s mother’s side of the family. Where before on many chromosomes, I only knew I had maternal grandparent 1 or 2, now I know that they are Rathfelder or Lentz. [My Lentz grandmother’s mother was a Nicholson.]

For example, here is the same Chromosome 18:

My Chromosome is the bottom one. The other two are for my sisters. I match Carol from 71-74. So that confirms that the orange segment on the bottom right is from my mother’s Lentz side. And then more specifically through my mother’s mother’s Lentz mother’s Nicholson side. This change at positions 71 from green to orange on my mother’s father’s side to my mother’s mother’s side corresponds to the actual previous Kitty Munson DNA map where the color went from orange to light yellow.

There will be more time to look at Nicholson DNA in the future. For right now, I am glad that DNA has brought back together a family that settled in the Philadelphia area from Sheffield, England in 1870. My mom has only mentioned fond memories of her Nicholson grandmother. Those included Annie Nicholson Lentz’ cooking abilities and bringing my mom to church as a child. I expect other Nicholson branches have similar great memories.

April 30, 2016April 13, 2017

My Mom’s Autosomal DNA on the Lentz Side

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.

February 16, 2016December 30, 2022

All My Mother’s DNA

A lot of my writing has been on the Frazer DNA Project. That Project involves DNA on my Father’s side. I’d like to focus on my mother’s DNA in this Blog.

Mitochondrial DNA

I have had my mitochondrial DNA tested in myself, so it would be the same as my mother’s. mtDNA is interesting as one can trace the mutations down from genetic Eve. My haplotype (and my mom’s) is H5’36. I like the fact that there is a prime [‘] in the designation. I think this is because they ran out of room in the place where it belonged among the other haplotypes. I have 2 exact mtDNA matches. Both of their ancestries trace to Ireland. This is interesting as I have not traced my mother’s maternal line back to Ireland. As far as I know, her maternal line went back to the Sheffield, ENG area or just outside of it. However, the focus of this blog is not mitochondrial DNA.

Autosomal DNA Testers

Unlike mtDNA, which goes up the mother’s mother’s mother’s line, atDNA can go in any and all directions up the ancestral ladder. It is much less focused. Sort of like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). In analyzing atDNA, it is best to have known testers that can be used as a reference point to sort the scattered matches into the right families. The testers I have with known genealogies are:

Catherine – She is the lone 1st cousin once removed representing my mother’s father’s Rathfelder/Gangnus side.
Judy – She is also a 1st cousin once removed representing my mother’s mother’s ancestral grandparents: Jacob Lentz and Annie Nicholson. Judy is my 2nd cousin. She tested at 23andme and matches me there but has not uploaded to Gedmatch yet for more comparisons.
Joan – She tested at Ancestry and is my mother’s second cousin once removed. Her common ancestors with my mom are William Nicholson b. 1836 and Martha Ellis b. 1835. Joan is also 3rd cousin with me and my 2 sisters which I have had tested. She is 3rd cousin to Judy through the Nicholson line but not the Lentz line as she has no Lentz ancestors.

Here is how the relationships look in a chart:

Here are 3 of my mom’s grandparents: Maria Gangnus; Jacob Lentz and Annie Nicholson. The last is her great grandfather, William Nicholson.

Ancestor Chromosome Mapper – Kitty Cooper

Kitty Cooper has developed a popular Chromosome Mapper. We should be able to map my mom’s paternal side from her DNA matches with Catherine and her maternal side from her matches with Judy and Joan. Judy has not uploaded to gedmatch, so I just used her match results with me at 23andme to represent her DNA matches with my mom. The actual DNA Judy shares with my mom is much more than shown for Jacob Lentz and Annie Nicholson.

Some observations:

There are 8 autosomal chromosomes with no matches from these 3 cousins
The map phases the results into paternal (top part of the bar shown in blue) and maternal results (bottom part of the bar shown in red and peach)
Chromosome 9 – On the maternal (bottom) side the 2 close segments indicate where my mom, Gladys, has a crossover point. the color goes from red (the DNA she got from her Nicholson grandmother) to peach (the DNA she got from her Lentz grandfather)
Chromosome 9 and 14 – Here we see results stacked up on top of each other. Without our testers, we would not know which side the results my mom’s matches came from. In these areas, at least, we will know for sure whether the matches are on the paternal or maternal side
All other matches – We will know if the matches between mom and anyone in these areas are maternal or paternal.
If anyone matches my mom in the red areas (and also matches Joan), we will know it is not with an ancestor of the Nicholson family.
Anyone who doesn’t match the people mapped out above in the area where they should match probably represent a match from the other side. For example, a large match along the area of Chromosome 18 that doesn’t match Catherine (who is on the paternal side) would likely be a maternal side match. The only other option would be a false match (Identical by State IBS or Identical by Chance IBC).
In the areas where there are no matches, it is a guess as to whether those are paternal or maternal matches. If someone has a tree showing that all their ancestors have been in Germany, that would be a hint that the match should be on my mother’s father’s side. He was German and born in Europe.

More on Joan and the Nicholson Matches

I have already written about Rathfelder matches in a previous blog. I haven’t yet addressed Joan’s Nicholson matches. I’d like to do that now. One way to look at how my mom and Joan match is through Gedmatch. They have a utility that will show the people that match 2 other people. I ran that and came up with myself and my 3 sisters as well as several others. One spot that looks like a Triangulation Group is found on Chromosome 5:

#1 is Joan. I didn’t include myself and my 2 sisters, but I know they match Joan here. In fact, here is Joan’s match with me, my younger sister, my mother and my older sister on the same Chromosome:

Now, back to the previous image. In order for my mother’s green matches above to be in a triangulation group (TG), they have to match Joan and each other. I’ll check:

Joan matches green #2 above at around 11 cM
Green #2 matches green #3 at about 10
Green #3 matches green #4 at about 15 cM
For comparison Joan and my mom match each other at about 30 cM

I didn’t do all the comparisons, but did enough to suppose that this is a TG. Technically, I’m supposed to do every comparison. I didn’t check the pink match as it was small and didn’t line up with the other matches.

What Do the Green TG Matches Mean?

A TG should indicate a common ancestors. Likely this common ancestor will be one of the ancestors of Annie Nicholson:

All I have to do now is write to the 3 green matches. Then hope that the common ancestor isn’t too far back and that they have good family trees. Hey, it could happen.

December 17, 2015April 13, 2017

My Mother’s Rathfelder DNA: An Initial Look

My mother is a Rathfelder. That is a fairly uncommon name. According to forbears.io, it is the 413,549th most common name in the world. By comparison, my last name, Hartley, is in the 6,000’s. My mother’s father Alexander grew up in Latvia. He worked on a ship and jumped ship in New York City in the early 1900’s. So he doesn’t have a lot of relatives around here. My mom’s family tree at Ancestry.com looks like this:

On the bottom left, are the Nicholson and Lentz families. Ann was born in Sheffield, England. The Lentz family was in current day Philadelphia by the time of the American Revolution.

Here are the DNA testers:

Me – tested at all three DNA companies for autosomal DNA. I also tested for mitochondrial DNA. This covers the line on the bottom of the chart only.
My 2 sisters – Tested at AncestryDNA and transferred to FTDNA
My mother – tested separately at FTDNA and AncestryDNA
Judy – a second cousin. She tested at 23andme, but hasn’t uploaded her results yet to gedmatch.com for comparison. Our common ancestors are Jacob Lentz and Annie Nicholson.
Catherine – a Rathfelder second cousin in England. Our common ancestors are Joahnn Rathfelder and Maria Gagnus.

I have also test results from my father’s side. When I put all my known test matches together, it looks like this:

The matches we are looking at here are on my Maternal side, so that would be the red (Lentz/Nicholson) and flesh colored (Rathfelder/Gagnus) segments at the bottom of each Chromosome. Note that we receive DNA from both our parents on each chromosome. This means that if someone matches me and Catherine on the same segment of Chromosome 13 that is colored in, I will know that person matches us on my mother’s side. And more specifically, the match will be along one of the ancestors of this Rathfelder/Gagnus couple.

My Mother’s Rathfelder/Gagnus DNA

My mother will have more Rathfelder/Gagnus DNA than I do, because my DNA is watered down with my father’s DNA. If I look at cousin Catherine’s DNA matches with my mother, me and my sisters, this should show us the DNA the 3 of us got from this Rathfelder/Gagnus couple that were born in the mid 1800’s. That’s what I did, and it looks like this:

Here, my mother, Gladys, is in orange, I’m in blue. My sister Heidi is green and sister Sharon is pink. On Chromosomes 2, 8 and 14, some of the Rathfelder segments didn’t make it to me or my 2 sisters. Also note, that I am missing Rathfelder segments from Chromosome 4, 6 and 10, that the rest of my family have.

Does Anyone Else Match the Rathfelders?

As one might guess, this line is German. I checked at gedmatch.com using a utility showing people that matched both Catherine and my mom, Gladys. Then I compared them in something called an autosomal matrix to see how they all matched each other.

The upper left part of this matrix represents matches between Catherine and my family. The upper right part shows our matches to others that match Catherine and Gladys. The lower right part shows how the people that match Catherine and Gladys match each other. This is important for triangulation and finding common ancestors. From this, we can see that Michael and Tara match each other closely. In fact, they have the same last names, although I don’t show it here. Christine and Kenneth match each other at 20.8 cM, so let’s look at that. It turns out that they don’t match Catherine or my family where they match each other, so there is no triangulation there.

Let’s try something else. On the Excel spreadsheet I have created of my mother’s matches, I show where she has triangulated groups already. Here is the most promising Triangulation Group as seen from Gladys’ matches:

I went in to gedmatch.com and made sure that Catherine matched the last 2 matches and that the last two matches matched each other. All these overlap on the same Chromosome 13 and at the same areas of that Chromosome. This makes a TG or Triangulation Group. This means that these last 2 people will have the same ancestors as Catherine and Gladys, somewhere up on our shared Rathfelder or Gagnus family tree. Perhaps these 2 people have good family trees and it will be easy to see. Or they may not know much about their family history. At this point, one could contact these people by email to try to find out if they know where we match.

What About the Lentz/Nicholson DNA?

This is a bit more difficult. Cousin Judy has tested at 23andme. I have tested there, but no one else in my family has. I have downloaded Judy’s results to my spreadsheet. There I can check other matches around her matches to see if they match on my mother’s side. Not many do. Here is one spot where there are a few matches at Chromosome #17:

The blue matches are on my paternal side. We can ignore those. The pink is my maternal side. The white don’t match either side so are IBC (Identical By Chance) or they go below the threshold when checking which side they are on. At any rate, I can ignore the unhighlighted names for now. LinnyLou and Douglas are closely related. However, they do triangulate with my mom and Judith. That means we likely have a set of common ancestors out there.

DNA the Ancestry Way: Trouble With Schwechheimers

Ancestry automates all this work: easy for me and easy for them. Right? Actually, easy, but not accurate. Here is another mistake I notice that they’ve made. They see where I have a DNA match and then they find if there are common ancestors in our trees and say this is a likely match. The problem is is they don’t triangulate. And Ancestry doesn’t know if our trees are correct. For my Ancestry kit, this is what they found:

Ancestry found that I (represented by the line on the left) matched the person represented by the line on the right. We matched at 5.4 cM on one segment. That is tiny, but Ancestry puts the results through a filter, they reason, which filters out the bad matches. So what is wrong? The problem is that I tested my mom and she doesn’t come up with the same match. That means if she doesn’t match, I can’t match with this Schwechheimer as I would have gotten all my Schwechheimer DNA from my mom.

Conclusions:

I’m glad to have the testing results of Judy and Catherine because they each represent one side of my mother’s family – Paternal for Catherine and Maternal for Judy
Even with these testers, it is difficult to find many matches that triangulate
Don’t always trust Ancestry. Upload your results to gedmatch.com where you can see where the match is on the Chromosome and check for triangulation there.