My wife Marie has Butler, Ellis, Lefevre and Upshall. Butler is originally from Ireland, Ellis from PEI, LeFevre from Quebec and Upshall from Newfoundland. I have uplaoded Marie’s DNA results to MyHeritage. They have a utility called Theories of Relativity. This matches DNA with family trees. Once I get those connections, I can map Marie’s DNA using DNA Painter an online utility.
DNA Painter
I have already mapped quite a bit of Marie’s DNA here:
This shows that Marie is 30% painted or mapped. I’d like to improve this by looking at MyHeritage’s Theories.
Marie’s Theories of Relativity (TOR)
Marie’s top TOR is already mapped. That is Fred. Marie’s second TOR is Jo-Ann. Their common ancestors are Hopgood and Watson:
Marie and Jo-Ann match here:
I downloaded the details of this DNA match and entered them in at DNA Painter. I didn’t have these ancestors at DNA Painter, so I added them along with a new suggested color:
When I do this, I notice a potential problem:
This indicates that Jo-Ann’s match is bumping into Sarah’s match. That makes me suspect that I have mapped Sarah wrong. Sarah may have Hopgood/Watson ancestors also that I didn’t notice.
Another Look at Sarah
Sarah’s results are at AncestryDNA and Gedmatch. This is how I have Sarah at Ancestry:
That means that there is a mix-up somewhere. The reason I suspect it is on Sarah’s side is because the DNA match for Marie and Sarah is high for a 4th cousin once removed. I don’t want to try to fix this at this time, so I’ll just note the discrepancy. The problem is that one shared segment should represent one shared common ancestor. In this case it represents two.
Even with the overlaps, Jo-Ann brings up Marie’s mapped DNA to 31%.
Caroline and the LeFevre/Boure Line
Next is Wallace who I already mapped. Then Caroline. TOR shows a common ancestor with this couple:
This tree is also not without its problems. How could Charles Lefebvre be born in 1891 and have a daughter born 1870? This Ancestry Tree from Marie’s cousin has a Charles:
When I checked details on Caroline’s tree, it said that Charles was born before 1891. So I’ll say Caroline’s tree is OK. Caroline doesn’t add much new DNA, but doesn’t conflict with other DNA
Caroline overlaps with orange and pink but those are also LeFevre matches from more recent generations:
Pierre -Luc and an Older Pouliot Ancestor
Here is how MyHeritage shows the connection:
My suspicious side says that there could be other ancestral connections, but my lazy side says, put this in as is. Pierre-Luc’s DNA doesn’t bump into anyone that it shouldn’t bump into.
Pierre-Luc bumps into Joe and Patricia but they have common ancestors with Marie of LeFevre and Pouliot. That means that Joe and Patricia’s pink segments above Pierre are most likely Pouliot DNA. That means that if I wanted to get fancy, I could re-assign those two Joe and Patricia segments to Emma Pouliot. But I won’t.
The Problem with Daniel: Too Many Ancestors
Here is how MyHeritage shows Daniel:
But also like this:
DNA Painter may help figure out which DNA goes where. First, I’ll put Daniel in ambiguously:
Here are the hairs we are trying to split:
On Chromosome 2, we still can’t tell where Daniel belongs:
First I had to change Daniel’s color to green so he would show up better. In order to tell where Daniel belongs, we need an older match. The pink, orange and blue matches are too recent. That means that I entered Daniel correctly as Methot or LeFevre. For brevity, I left out the spouses. Sorry, spouses.
Daniel’s DNA matches with Marie were just under the limit of 7 cM, so they didn’t get painted:
Irma with PEI Ancestry
Matches on Chromosomes 2 and 3 will be too small to paint:
Painting this brings up more problems:
Here we have some bad overlaps between Ellis, Hopgood and MacArthur. One may be explained in that Irma has a different path to Ellis:
The Hopgood segment was one we just mapped from Jo-Ann – but with reservations.
Here is another path for Jo-Ann:
Here is a more likely, but slightly more distant relationship:
The Problem with Marie’s DNA Matches
Marie has four grandparents as do we all:
- Ellis from PEI – Island genealogy and intermarriage, but the records are pretty good
- Upshall from Newfoundland – More intermarriage like in PEI, but the records are not as good or missing
- Butler from Ireland – No known intermarriage but very few relatives who have tested or posted genealogies
- LeFevre from Quebec – Very good genealogies but a lot of intermarriage
Summary and Observations
- Marie has confusing intermarriage issues on three out of four sides of her tree. This makes analyzing her genetic genealogy difficult
- The further back the match is, the more possibility there is that the DNA could represent multiple sets of common ancestors
- DNA Painter points out some of these issues. However, it is possible that DNA Painter could also sort out from which ancestors these DNA matches come from where there is more than one possibility.
- I may come back to this later and try to sort this out.