What Are My Genetic Genealogy Goals?

I’ve been spending a lot of time—a real lot of time—working with my Ancestry DNA, FTDNA, and GEDmatch results, working through my match lists, compiling data, and, where I can, identifying my most recent common ancestors with various matches. It’s a great deal of work. And most of the time I feel like I’m flailing about, trying to swim in water that’s really too deep for my abilities.

As I was traversing a match’s GEDCOM file searching for a common surname—unsuccessfully, I might add—it occurred to me to wonder why I was doing so. Just what did I hope to gain from all this work?

It’s common online to see folks trying to identify relatives in order to identify their or a relative’s birth family. That’s not my situation. I know who my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents are—and my DNA matches confirm this.

So, why am I spending so much time analyzing my results? What do I get out of it? I took the test for fun. I thought it would be interesting to see my ethnicity results, maybe find some cousins. I’ve already done so much research to build the “paper trail,” I didn’t really consider that it might be useful otherwise.

But recently I’ve been spending significantly more time working with the DNA results, than I have been researching. Maybe it’s time to stop and consider whether that’s a productive use of my time.

What do I want to get out of it?

Here’s that I’ve been able to come up with so far.

1. I want to use genetic genealogy to confirm my research.

Not particularly exciting and rather obvious, but a true and useful goal. My DNA matches have become another piece of source data to add to a proof argument. The fact that I share DNA with other descendants of Philip Hoover and Hannah Thomas of Armstrong County strengthens my assertion that my ancestor Christian Hoover was their eldest son. As more matches come in which share DNA with their descendants—or those of their ancestors—the stronger my argument will grow.

2. I want to “ancestor map my chromosomes.”

Since I know the majority of my ancestry back six generations, and a number of lines back even further, sounds like a simple thing to do, right?  Uh huh. Wouldn’t that be nice? There are actually several factors that complicate this process.

First, in order to find how you and a DNA match are related, you need to compare ancestors. Sometimes it’s as easy as finding a shaking leaf on Ancestry. It’s more common, however, to find no family tree to examine, a private family tree, or a tree with only couple of generations—all marked “private”—with no names or dates. Somewhat less than useful. Furthermore, when you contact matches hoping to collaborate, you get no response.

Second, my ancestors on both sides of my family tree arrived in Pennsylvania, decided it was a good place to live, and then never left. Although this really helps with the document research, it complicates the DNA research. You see, they not only stayed, but they married. Then their descendants intermarried. So, finding how I match that 4th-6th cousin prospect is not always as simple as locating the common surname in a family tree. Occasionally, there are multiple common ancestors. Which one (or more) is the reason for the match?

Which brings us to the next difficulty—Ancestry’s total lack of useful tools to analyze the actual DNA. At most, you can identify the overall amount to DNA you share and the number of segments. Because there is no means of identifying segment or chromosome information; there is no method to triangulate your matches. You can’t determine whether the DNA you share with several matches is actually the same segment on the same chromosome—or that they share that same DNA between them, too.

To actually use Ancestry DNA results for more than just guessing, you need to upload it to GEDmatch or Family Tree DNA so that you can access segment and chromosome data. You can upload to both for free—although to use FTDNA’s tools, you’ll need to pay a small fee. It was $19 when I did it and well worth the price.

Several of my Ancestry matches have already uploaded to both places. Because they’ve done so, I was able to identify the specific segments we share from our common ancestors. It’s cool to see that I likely got about 30 centimorgans (cM) of DNA on chromosome 16 from my 4x great grandfather George Walker of Boggs Township, Centre County, Pennsylvania. A shorter segment on chromosome 16 may have come from his in-laws, Andrew and Catharine Margaret (Fetter Fetzer) Walker.¹

3. Break down some genealogy brick walls.

This one is the trickiest of my three goals. Christian Hoover was a brick wall ancestor for some time. Research, however, pointed to a possible location and family. DNA, so far, has been supporting that conclusion. More on that in another post.

Another brick wall ancestor is Jefferson Force. I believe he was orphaned at a young age, possibly as early as age ten. My research to date has not yielded much. I would like very much to identify his parents. Identifiable DNA matches between other Force descendants to some of Jefferson’s descendants might provide other avenues to explore. Jefferson’s parents would be my 4x great grandparents. This is pushing the limits of usable DNA information as 25% to 50% of 4th cousins share no DNA. Someone of my generation would likely be my 5th cousin, making it even a bit more unlikely a share DNA with any given 5th cousin.

The Plan

So now that I’ve identified some goals for using DNA testing in my genealogy, it’s time to come up with a plan and action items. What exactly do I need to do to accomplish them? More testing will likely be required. Any aunts, uncles, or cousins out there who want to volunteer to take a DNA test?

• Category: Research
• Tag: DNA