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Tag: DNA

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Time to Dismantle ‘Accepted Wisdoms’ – Frances Scully or McHugh?

Last year I wrote about the mysterious disappearance from records of Augustine Hoy. This time around, I want to unravel his wife’s maiden name, which is just as mysterious! Was she Frances Scully or McHugh?

The commonly held wisdom is that Augustine’s wife Frances (or Fanny) was born Frances Luby Scully. I’ve known this to be so ever since I started researching the family in the 1980s. But time and the gradual collection of both documentary and DNA evidence have undone my belief that this is the case. Today I want to illustrate why I have concluded that Frances Scully was actually Frances McHugh.

It is also unashamed ‘cousin bait‘. At last count, there were 189 trees on Ancestry alone that almost all attribute the name Scully to Frances, most unsourced. If just a handful of them stumble over this blog and are open to looking at the evidence, it may go some way to prevent the further proliferation of the name Scully (at least in that part of the tree!). Also, I’m hoping someone holding further documentary evidence one way or the other that I have not yet found may get in touch!

Augustine Hoy Frances McGeow marriage
Marriage certificate of Augustine and Frances

Who was Frances?

Frances was the wife of Augustine Hoy. She was born in approximately 1814, probably in the West Indies (according to her death certificate) though of Irish background. A small but significant bit of African DNA that pops up among descendants regularly shows she was possibly of mixed race. This may support the claim on her death certificate that she was Caribbean-born.

The first documentary evidence I have of her existence is her marriage to Augustine in Eccles, Lancashire, England in 1833. They had three children together before emigrating to Melbourne in 1841 with the surviving two, thankfully after the 1841 Census where they were living in Liverpool.

Augustine Hoy 1841 Census
Augustine, Frances with surviving children Margaret and Augustine in the 1841 Census, just prior to emigration.

After settling in the Western District of Port Phillip Colony, later Victoria, they went on to have a further six children together. Five of these lived to adulthood. She was rumoured to have been a cook for the whalers at some point during that time, though no evidence of this other than family stories has yet been found. She died in Warrnambool in 1895.

Augustine Hoy passenger list
The Hoy family on the passenger list of Intrinsic.

Which Documents Show Her Maiden Name?

Documents that potentially reveal her maiden name include those relating to her own marriage and death, and the civil registration (birth, marriage and death) and possibly baptismal records of her children. An obituary with lots of lovely detail would be welcome but none has been located as yet.

Only one child’s birth was registered in England. One was born well before, and the other just five days (AAARGH!) before civil registration commenced.

Augustine Hoy junior's birth certificate
Birth certificate of Augustine Hoy junior.

Civil registration did not begin in Victoria until 1853, so the births of all but her last Australian-born child could not be registered and it seems the last one was just not registered. Luckily, Victorian marriage and death certificates contain the mother’s full birth name where known.

See the table below for what records I have found containing a maiden name for Frances. It is worth noting that her marriage certificate was signed with an ‘X’, indicating she was illiterate. This would account for the spelling variations in her surname. McHugh is by far the most common variant of this name and is why I’m using this in the face of so many possible spellings!

Frances Scully or McHugh in documents
Scully vs McHugh in documents

What About DNA?

As usual, I then turned to DNA to utilise the other form of evidence that may help answer the question.

At AncestryDNA, I have a great-great-granddaughter and great-great-great-granddaughter (from a separate line) of Frances amongst my kits who have been sorted into ancestral groups. So I did a search for Scullys and McHughs amongst the group which I know to be related through Augustine and Frances’ family.

The only matches with a Scully in their trees were those who had attributed this as Frances’ surname. No other Scully families at all. There were a bunch of McHughs and McCues, all from County Mayo.

Repeating the process over at MyHeritage where I also have the DNA of a now-deceased great-great-great-grandson as well as the above two, I found the same thing. Again, predominantly from County Mayo, although there were a couple apparently from County Galway too.

Frances Scully or McHugh?

Wherever Frances gave her own maiden name, it was a variant of McHugh (written on her behalf as it sounded to the writer). This is significant. Who would know better than she whether she was Frances Scully or McHugh?

Her daughter’s civil marriage certificate also gave this name. It’s often the case that daughters know their family history better than sons.

Frances Scully or McHugh Mary Ann's marriage certificate
Mary Ann Hoy’s marriage certificate

Three sons used another name for their (first) marriages, two Scullys and a Tully. Two of them married twice. Both of them gave a variant of McHugh instead at their second wedding.

Frances Scully or McHugh - Augustine Hoy 1st marriage certificate
Augustine Hoy’s first marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Augustine Hoy 2nd marriage certificate
Augustine Hoy’s second marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Joseph Hoy 1st marriage certificate
Joseph Hoy’s first marriage certificate
Frances Scully or McHugh - Joseph Hoy 2nd marriage certificate
Joseph Hoy’s second marriage certificate

Son Thomas only married once and was one who used the name Scully. However, his witness was his brother Augustine who had also used the name Scully at his own first wedding and may have helped him fill in his wedding certificate. (Thomas may have stuck with this belief. The authorised agent who acted as the informant at his death used Scully too – who gave him this information? His wife was dead, so maybe one of his children?) The other sons just didn’t know their mother’s maiden name at all.

Interestingly, son Augustine was the informant at Frances’ death and gave her parents’ names as ‘unknown’. Perhaps he was too emotional to remember at the time that her father at least would have been a McHugh or a Scully. He also got one sister’s name wrong, though can be forgiven as she died before he was born.

Death certificate of Frances Hoy, 1895

The DNA appears to support the McHugh surname but not the Scully surname.

So was she born Frances Scully or McHugh? Based on the evidence I have so far, my deduction is that Frances was born Frances McHugh.

So Where Did Scully Come From?

So let’s now jump into the land of supposition and guess where Scully might have come from. I believe there’s a good chance it will turn out to be a family name, just further back in the tree (this would also make it less likely to turn up in DNA matches). For example, if Frances talked about Scully relatives to her sons (especially Augustine) at some point, maybe the assumption was that she was born a Scully. Time will, I hope, tell.

The other name that is often associated with Frances is the middle name Luby. I’ve only heard this from other family members, but on multiple descendant lines, so this belief goes back several generations. I am yet to see any document containing this middle name, nonetheless, it appears to be associated with her. Luby is also an Irish surname. So I’m keeping my mind and eyes open in case this may provide a clue.

Next steps

  • I’m currently trawling through the McHughs in the area around Eccles and Liverpool to see if I can find any evidence of other members of her family there. She was quite young when she married, so there is a chance that she wasn’t originally there alone. She may turn out to have witnessed a wedding or been a sponsor to a child of a family member if this is the case. Utilising the ‘FAN Club‘ may be very useful.
  • I’m also building out trees of DNA matches to see if I can find the McHugh connection between them. I’ll be extending the search to ungrouped matches and other sites where I have DNA kits for her descendants uploaded.
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Lost Child Reunites With Parents! A Small DNA Match Story

Image source: Tim Ellis

This week, another longstanding brick wall tumbled. This one was thanks to a relatively small DNA match (19cM) that popped up at one of the sites I have tested with.

Benjamin Morter

Benjamin was my 5th great-grandfather. I had not had any luck in unraveling his origins over the years. He’d lain a little neglected in recent times. Morter is not a common surname and is localised around East Anglia, so I suspected he or his ancestors probably came from around there somewhere. But I’d had no luck in definitively finding a likely candidate.

The only indication of a birth date I had was the fact that he was recorded as 65 years old when he was buried in the Globe Fields Wesleyan burial ground at Mile End Cemetery in 1834. This meant he was likely born around 1769 if the informant was accurate about his age.

His will named five surviving children and I have DNA matches with descendants of at least four of them. It also named a brother, John, and DNA matches to me have turned up on several branches of HIS descendants too.

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin Morter’s will named five children from two mothers, almost all of whom have descendants I share DNA with.

His children were from two relationships. The second was a marriage in St Dunstan, Stepney, London on January 7th, 1798 to Elizabeth Cupee, but the first was with a woman named Esther who remains a stubborn mystery and is my 5th great-grandmother. No marriage has yet been found. Perhaps it didn’t take place and the twins he had with her were illegitimate. It might explain why he was able to call himself a bachelor when he married Elizabeth…or he may just have been telling a fib.

The twins, John and Charles, were born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire in 1796. So for a while I thought that may have been his place of origin. However, I found no evidence of his baptism there, and there appeared to be no Morter families in the area. He likely went there for work.

Benjamin’s London life

He turned up next in London. In 1797, he and his family of five were removed from Christchurch, Middlesex to Shoreditch. I don’t know who made up that five, other than the twins and possibly Esther (there is probably at least one other child to discover). Though given he married Elizabeth soon after that, and she was five months pregnant at the time, perhaps she had already died. I am yet to find her burial.

He and Elizabeth had five children together, all baptised around Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. When he wrote his will, he was ‘of Exeter St, Strand, Middlesex’, so appears to have moved back to the area he was originally removed from in 1797 at least for a time. He was living back in Bethnal Green when he died in 1834.

I had never found a baptism for him in the London area and had no evidence to suggest where else he may have been from.

Serendipity strikes with a small DNA match

Not all useful DNA matches are enormous. Do not ignore your smaller ones.

And then…I got this small DNA match and it all fell into place over the course of the next few hours. Guess who stayed up all night? She was a shared match to multiple other Morter matches. Sure enough, she had Morters in her tree, but it didn’t go back very far. It was a start though.

So off I went and soon found out why she had run into a brick wall. Her furthest back Morter ancestor was orphaned young, raised by an uncle and aunt, and gave the wrong name for his father at his subsequent marriage. He had been born in Norwich and it was a fairly straightforward job for me to find his birth, his parents’ real names, and their marriage.

How a small DNA match tumbled the brick wall

Tracing the tree back, he turned out to descend from a Charles Morter, born around 1763 in Neatishead, Norfolk, who in turn was the son of John Morter and Hannah Walsingham of that tiny village of fewer than 500 people at that time. I checked their offspring. Lo and behold, they had sons Benjamin and John born within a couple of years of the estimated ages of my Benjamin and his brother John. Could this be it at last? Were John and Hannah my 6th great-grandparents?

small DNA match Morter
Benjamin’s baptism in the Neatishead parish register – found at last!

I worked the trees of a few more DNA matches. Some of them also went back to John and Hannah. I constructed a hypothetical tree including as many of the matches as I could and checked the Shared cM Tool at DNA Painter for each one of them to see if it all hung together. It did. I checked that their Benjamin didn’t stay in the Neatishead area or die as an infant. It all gelled beautifully, there was no sign of him anywhere.

This shows that you don’t need to have a huge DNA match to make a brick wall fall. With some solid tree building, research and a thorough analysis of the shared DNA matches you already have, sometimes it can be achieved with a small DNA match which is possibly at first glance not especially helpful.

My conclusion is that John Morter, collar maker of Neatishead, and his wife Hannah are my 6th great grandparents. Now who on earth is Esther…?

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Make Sense of Your DNA Matches Using Statistics Without Exploding Your Brain…Now Even Easier With WATO2!

make sense DNA brain explode
(Image by Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay)

There are multiple tools available these days to help turn your ever-growing list of DNA matches into a wealth of useful genealogical information (and meet new cousins!). Each of the testing companies has its own suite of tools on their site. There are increasing numbers of excellent third-party tools also available to analyse your information using different and more specialised approaches. One of my favourites for the past year or two has been WATO (‘What Are The Odds?’).

What-oh is WATO?

WATO was the brainchild of Leah LaPerle Larkin, aka The DNA Geek. Andrew Millard turned it into an odds calculator, then Jonny Perl transformed it into a user-friendly form. It is now freely available at DNA Painter. WATO uses statistics to help you decide who belongs to who in your DNA zoo, and make sense of your DNA matches.

For anyone whose brain saw the word ‘statistics’ and began to prepare to explode, it’s not like that. You have a few shared matches, and you’ve been able to work out how they are connected to one another. You can now use WATO to work out how your DNA tester fits into their tree. Really really useful for cases of unknown parentage, and for any group of mysterious matches that make no sense on paper.

To make sense of your DNA matches you need to be clear on what you want to know about the DNA subject whose kit you are analysing. For example, “who is her father?”. With WATO v1 you also need to have matches of over 40cM in size. And you need your matches to have common ancestors to one another that you can find or build a tree for.

Previous limitations of WATO

I’ve had great success with this tool but there have been limitations.

  • Being of British birth, my match list of closer relatives is smaller than average. 40cM is not a match size often enough seen in my lists to have used WATO as much as I would have liked.
  • The original WATO is purely about the statistical odds. Hypotheses that are mathematically highly possible may be impossible in real life. The father is not going to be someone who was 3 years old at the time. So red herrings are possible.
  • The statistics are calculated for hypotheses that you as the user put forward. If there’s an angle you don’t think of, the odds won’t be calculated. This is especially important when you consider how many half-relationships are possible in any tree, and the likely source of the answer to your research question.

Introducing…..drumroll……The New and Improved WATO2!

make sense of dna matches WATO2

This month WATO2 was released and the limitations listed above have been addressed. There have also been with some other improvements that have turned it from a great tool into a brilliant one which I’ll be able to use far more frequently!

Firstly, there is a reduced match size requirement. The information used to initially calculate probabilities has grown over time. It is now way more accurate for more distant relationships. Therefore the restriction to matches sharing over 40cM is gone.

Secondly, WATO2 is based on more than just the statistics. It has been ‘humanised’ for increased accuracy. You can add birth and death dates to the people in your tree and WATO2 will take them into consideration when calculating the odds.

Thirdly, you no longer have to think of all the possible places in a tree your DNA target could go. WATO2 will generate all the hypotheses with the click of a single button. I actually squealed when I found out about that! Then you can just weed out and delete any that are calculated to have zero probability, or that you know cannot work (because, for example, that person emigrated).

All my problems were solved! But wait, there was more…

Instead of having to build the tree manually at the DNA Painter site, there is now the option to import a GEDCOM to make the whole thing quicker and easier.

And the other super cool feature for those who have already been using the original WATO … you can easily switch between existing analyses to WATO2 (and back) to compare or update. So you don’t need to start again in order to make sense of your DNA matches!

What has WATO2 done for me?

make sense of dna matches WATO2

I have already managed to identify an unknown father of one of my testers very quickly. He had only half a dozen shared matches. Only three of these could be used in the original WATO due to their small size. The probabilities were much more clearly contrasted in WATO2 as a result of this and the consideration of birth and death dates. Then, by looking at electoral rolls and other records I could eliminate several of the hypotheses. I am at the point where I am very comfortable that his father is identified. If I wasn’t, I could consider target testing to prove it.

How will I be using WATO2 next?

make sense of dna matches WATO2

My next task is to unravel a large Irish family branch originating from Tralee in Kerry. There are multiple shared DNA matches on this line. I have a tree that links most of them. The other interesting aspect is that they all also link to another surname which is not so far present in the tree of my target, other than amongst baptismal sponsors.

Traditional research has not yet managed to unpick these large families with repeated forenames. I was unable to use the original WATO to help with this as we’re looking at the first half of the 19th century, the matches are much smaller than 40cM. Also, the tree is big and my time is scarce!

The plan now is to import the Gedcom, add the match sizes, hit the generate hypothesis button and see what happens. It will feel like a miracle if after all this time, it gets sorted out in an hour!

My Hearty Recommendation

If you are a WATO fan already, no doubt you’re already all over WATO2. If you’ve previously tried it but not had large or plentiful enough matches to answer your questions, now is the time to revisit it and regenerate your WATO hypotheses on WATO2. You can make sense of your DNA matches so much more easily than before. If you’re new to WATO, or even to DNA analysis, head over to DNA Painter and give it a go. It’s free, it’s not a huge time investment for the amount of information generated, and that time is saved multiple times over by narrowing down possibilities to investigate. Go knock down a few DNA brick walls!

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Genealogical Resolutions – 6 Ways I’m Going to Boost My Genealogical Game in 2020!

genealogical resolutions 2020

Another year is about to bite the dust (didn’t it go fast?) and it’s time to make some New Year’s Genealogical Resolutions! Genealogy is one of those hobbies where it is important to stop and take stock of where you’re up to and what you’re doing every so often. It helps you to keep on the right track, remain focussed and improve your habits and effectiveness at compiling your family tree.

Here are my genealogical resolutions for 2020! I would probably be staying inside to avoid the extremes of the hot summer weather anyway, I may as well do useful things!

Genealogical Resolution 1: Reboot my desk

No matter how well-organised I try to be with the filing of my work, when I am researching multiple lines and using lots of different sources for each, my immediate vicinity can start to resemble a mountain range of paperwork and open books very easily! I am using the quiet time after the holiday season to reorganise my desk. I will reduce it down to only the priority work I am currently doing (i.e. client research). The rest (i.e. my personal research!) can be filed. To prevent me from worrying about forgetting to follow up a line that’s on ‘pause’ at the moment, I can create a spreadsheet of things to return to.

Genealogical Resolution 2: Get on top of correspondence

genealogical resolutions correspondence
The correspondence soon piles up!

Like many of us, I get a huge number of emails every day. A large proportion of them is genealogy-related. Anything professional, I deal with immediately. Personal ones tend, like my personal research, to often be shunted to one side for ‘when I have time’. I rarely do! This pile, being electronic, doesn’t loom like the physical things on a desk. But it’s no less mortifying.

I’m going to tackle this one a piece at a time and chip away at it. It may take me the full year to get it back to something manageable. But if people have written with queries, even if I can see they are researching a completely different Mary Smith, they deserve the courtesy of a response. This is one I constantly feel guilty about, so it has to be done.

Genealogical Resolution 3: Explore new DNA tools

I manage not only my own DNA but that of many of my family members, and over multiple testing sites. This contributes to a lot of the correspondence I have fallen behind in! Genetic genealogy has grown a lot in the nine years since I first tested. It’s absolutely boomed in the last couple of years as it’s become not only a mainstream genealogical research method but also popular in the non-genealogical community. I even heard an AncestryDNA advertisement on a major radio station which caters to the youth demographic yesterday!

genealogical resolutions DNA tools
New tools for analyzing DNA results are being developed constantly!

Unsurprisingly, this growth means that new tools to help make sense of the data are popping up rapidly all over the place. Several of these are extremely exciting. The sheer number of them I want to explore seems to be inversely proportional to my free time lately. My DNA genealogical resolution is to schedule some ‘DNA Playtime’. If I don’t do this just to practice with some of the new tools I run the risk of falling behind. In particular, I want to try out the new ‘auto trees’ feature at Genetic Affairs, work out what I’m doing with Genetic Family, and do some exploring at Borland Genetics. I also want to fully utilise DNA Painter and the WATO tool, which I’ve had some really good results with already!

Genealogical Resolution 4: Finish writing my book

genealogical resolutions
I need to keep up with my writing…

Quite often in this blog, I tell little stories about my ancestors. There is one you haven’t and won’t hear about here. Her tale is such an interesting, and ultimately tragic one that I am turning it into a book. In my spare time. Are you sensing a theme here?

Nonetheless, the story of Leah Swinbourne, my maternal great-grandmother WILL be completed, and hopefully published by the end of 2020.

Genealogical Resolution 5: Get the most out of my subscriptions and memberships

I love having access to databases to access information online. Some, like Familysearch, Internet Archive and Trove, are completely free to use. None, whether free or not, will contain everything that I need to access. My research covers many corners of the world. I need access to more than just births, deaths, marriages and censuses. Therefore, I need multiple subscriptions to paid databases. So that’s what I do. And then, being human, I spend 90% of my time in just a handful of them.

This year, I will actively remind myself to check the more obscure ones regularly. Perhaps it may be worth my while to check if they also offer the purchase of credits rather than subscriptions. In some cases, it could be more cost-effective to use them in this way if they are perfectly wonderful but only visited a few times a year for a unique dataset!

Genealogical Resolution 6: Find one new research resource a week

Now this one might sound silly. The overwhelming theme throughout this blog has been that I don’t have enough time to use all the data (whether documents or DNA) that I have access to already. Why would I continue to look for more resources?

The answer is simple. There are wonderful new resources coming online all the time. We are only scraping the surface of the archival material that is out there waiting to be digitised. Also, our research often goes off into different geographical or occupational directions so different resources may help. I am always on the lookout for a site that will search several databases at once too. I will be in heaven if anyone manages to come up with something that will search all the genealogical databases at once. Familysearch has made a start in that direction. A reminder to anyone looking for genealogical resources on a specific topic – the first stop should always be Cyndi’s List. If you can’t find anything there, it probably doesn’t exist!

So that’s my six genealogical resolutions for 2020. I’m looking forward to this year of consolidation and moving forward more effectively. Working out how to balance my professional and personal research time is key – this has been my first year of genealogy being both my hobby and my profession. It’s been wonderful and also challenging!

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2020. What will your genealogical resolutions be?

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DNA Downunder – Genetic Genealogy Comes to Town

This month there has been a genealogy roadshow around Australia like nothing seen before. For the first time, there has been a series of events solely focused on genetic genealogy. Given the rapid growth in this branch of genealogy over the past decade or so, this is a fantastic idea. Many people are very nervous when it comes to the science of genetics, especially when most genealogists are used to being focused on humanities skills for their research rather than science. And that’s where the DNA Downunder events come in.

Events are in the process of being held in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. The programs are different in each city. Each contains a full day of presentations from various experts – except for Sydney which has a 3 day ‘DNA to the Max’ event. The main speaker is Blaine Bettinger, one of the most well-known genealogists specializing in genetic genealogy on the planet.

DNA downunder

DNA Downunder in Melbourne

Yesterday, I attended the Melbourne event. Blaine gave an introduction to DNA for those in the audience with no background in the subject. His other presentations looked at using DNA to solve mysteries from the 18th and 19th century, using third-party tools to help analyse DNA (such as Gedmatch and DNA Painter), the limitations of cousin matching and a case study from his own tree.

Blaine genetic genealogy
Blaine in action!

It was wonderful to hear how a DNA match led him to find an Australian connection. This led to him making use of our amazingly detailed Victorian death records and which now gives him the opportunity to visit an ancestral grave while here!

I was also extremely happy to hear that DNA Painter has released another fantastic tool which provides a range of charting options for your tree. This includes the ability to mark those relatives confirmed by genetic testing. This way you can make charts of not only your genealogical tree but your genetic tree too. Hopefully I will get a chance to check it out before I depart overseas in a week or so!

Louise Coakley, a well-known Australian genealogist with expertise in DNA presented on standards, ethics, risks and limitations when working with DNA (a crucial and very hot topic!), and verifying family lines. Apologies to Louise, I was too engrossed to take a photo!

The other two speakers for the Melbourne event were:

  • Michelle Patient, another Australian genetic genealogy expert, talking about pros and cons of the various companies offering genealogical DNA tests; and
  • Brad Argent from Ancestry talking about how to get the most from AncestryDNA results.

I missed both these speakers sadly as their talks were held concurrently in another room As their presentations were focussed more towards the beginners, I elected to attend the more advanced topics. I hear they were excellent though!

The day was exciting, interesting and very well organised. I hope to see more of this kind of event in the years to come. The attendance not only in Melbourne but all around the country so far has shown there is a huge demand for great quality speakers about modern genealogical techniques. Thank you to the organisers at Unlock the Past!

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DNA Testing For Genealogy- Useful Tool or Load of Codswallop?

dna molecules

Genealogy research has traditionally been all about compiling written and oral evidence to find your family lines and support your hypotheses. In recent years however, getting a genealogy DNA test done has become very popular. Millions of people have now spat in a tube or swabbed their inner cheek to find related family members in their DNA matches or to satisfy an urge to verify their ethnicity. Is DNA testing for genealogy actually useful, or is it a marketing gimmick?

The value of DNA testing for genealogy

The trouble with relying only on documents and oral evidence is that they are all filtered through the people involved. People are humans, with human failings. There are reasons, both deliberate and accidental, why the information may not be accurate.

There are innocent explanations. For example:

  • The person may not remember accurately.
  • The person may not have known their birthplace if they were raised somewhere else. They may have assumed they were born in the place of their childhood.
  • If they were illiterate and relying on someone else writing things down for them, that person may have misheard because of accents, deafness or inattention.
  • If the document has been transcribed from an original document, errors can creep in with every transcription.

There are also not so innocent explanations, usually related to ‘skeletons in the cupboard’ (often the most interesting parts of our family history!):

  • The person may be trying to hide illegitimacy. Society was less forgiving of human behaviour in previous generations.
  • The person may be trying to hide a criminal background even from several generations before. Even 50 years ago, Australians would be quick to deny any possibility of having a convict in their tree, despite Australia having been settled as a penal colony (of course, it’s a badge of honour these days!)
  • Sometimes people ran off to start a new life under a new identity, so any subsequent documents would be deliberately falsified.

DNA testing for genealogy can be a very useful tool to supplement traditional research methods. It helps eliminate the inaccuracies that can creep into them by removing the reliance on people’s word. “Science doesn’t lie, people do”.

My Personal Bombshell

Around 10 years ago, after 25 years of traditional genealogy research, I had my DNA tested along with several other family members. It turned out that the extensive research I had done on one branch of my family tree was completely wrong. It was correct for the people named, it was just that it turned out one of my grandparents was not related to me at all. Therefore that branch was not mine. I was devastated. All that work! And they were some of the most interesting ancestors (I thought) I had found! Back to the drawing board.

But you know what? I’m so glad I found out. The people in that branch that I know are still my family, I grew up with them as family and they always will be. But I can now have confidence that my tree is accurate. My other family lines have been verified by DNA, and with some diligent research, I have discovered the correct grandparent and a whole new family line to research!

Never be afraid to pursue accuracy, but be mindful of its potential impact on other family members. Think hard about whether they should know or would want to know if they were illegitimate before saying anything to them. They are from a different era when it could be a tremendous shock.

Where to get a DNA test done

There are several companies specialising in autosomal DNA testing for genealogy purposes. Currently, the five most common ones are:

  • AncestryDNA – this is the most well-known due to heavy marketing, and consequently has the biggest matching database. It used to predominantly have US customers, but the number of international DNA testers has grown in recent times as they’ve expanded their reach.
  • 23andMe – one of the oldest and most established DNA tests, also with a very large US-centric database.
  • FamilyTreeDNA – originally FTDNA offered Y-DNA (paternal line) and mtDNA (maternal line) tests only. In recent years they also have expanded into autosomal DNA tests, and this company now provides all three types of test should you want to also look at chasing specific lines or deep ancestry.
  • MyHeritage – a newer entrant into the marketplace, but with a rapidly growing database, and a very broad geographical range of testers.
  • LivingDNA – geared towards people of UK ancestry, this company is very new, and provides excellent ethnicity estimates, but is only just beginning to provide DNA cousin matching. One to watch, they have a whole new approach to matching, which should be extremely interesting when it gets up and running!

Recommendations:

I have either tested with, or uploaded to every one of these companies, and I use them all regularly. They have their own tools to help you analyse the data, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Often individuals are only to be found in one of the databases as they only test once. Therefore if you are looking to find matches for a specific line, or indeed a specific person such as a birth mother, I recommend you get yourself into as many of the databases as possible.

Ancestry and 23andMe do not allow you to upload data from other testing companies. So if you can afford only one test, choose one of these. Once your results are in, download your raw data and upload it to the other three. You will get results there too and will be available in the database for others there to find. You may need to pay a small amount to unlock all the tools and features on the other sites, but it’s cheaper than doing a fresh test for each.

The other thing I would highly recommend is uploading your DNA to Gedmatch.com. This is a third-party site where you can directly compare your results with people who have uploaded from any of the DNA testing companies.

Get other family members tested if you can to build up a picture and allow you to work out which side of the tree your matches come from. If you have family from the previous generation(s) still alive, their DNA is twice as valuable with each generation you go back as their DNA is only half as diluted. Grandparents, parents, uncles/aunts and parents’ cousins are genetic goldmines! Don’t ignore your siblings, you and each of them only share half your DNA despite having the same parents – they will have genetic cousins that you don’t in their matchlist.

Most people are not genetics experts. It can be a steep learning curve. If I had to recommend just one book to get you started on understanding DNA testing for genealogy and how to get the most out of it, it’s this one.

Verdict – not codswallop.

DNA testing for genealogy is not meant to replace your traditional research. It is an extra tool for your belt. I have found it invaluable for knocking down brick walls, finding ancestors hidden from documentary sources, and giving me confidence that I am on the right track. If you haven’t already been tested, you are missing out on one of the major new genealogical breakthrough techniques of recent times. DNA testing for genealogy is here to stay!