NPE - Great Grandfather Paternal line

LauraCarey6

Hi, I have 5 kits, two belonging to my Paternal Aunt and her son. I completed the Leeds Method based on myself and realised that I have only one match to my expected Great Grandparent and it turns out all the shared matches with this person are on the maternal line. So no DNA from expected Great Grandfather (this occurs on all kits).

We all have a match that’s relatively high and lots of shared matches with that person. My Aunties match with this person let’s call him Robert, at 186cm. I completed a tree for the mystery DNA some time ago and have been able to place them and their marched into the tree, linking them together. We still do not fit. We have both Roberts maternal and paternal lines as matches. Mainly maternal but some paternal too - one going back to fourth great grand uncle.

My Aunt is the closest to this line so I’ve used her as my example. I have drawn the conclusion that my GGP must be descended from Robert’s parents as we have both sets of DNA and that would make one of Roberts brothers the actual GGP, except from all I’ve found, they would be too young but biologically possible.

Im looking for answers so if you think my conclusions are completely wrong please let me know, I want the truth and if that means starting again I’m happy with that. If you need more info please ask and any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading!

LauraCarey6

I’ve tried the WATO tool but I just can’t work it out despite watching tutorials 🙈

AnneLoForteWillson

You mention 5 kits. I assume one is yourself, two are your Aunt and her son (your cousin). Who are the other two?

Second, while sorting the DNA matches according to shared matches helps, you also need to contact wild card matches (such as your 'Robert') and find out about other matches they have in their family and compare your DNA kits to other members of Robert's family. On one side or the other (yours or Robert's) you will start finding folks who DON'T match both you and Robert. I find that these non-matching DNAs are almost more helpful than the matching DNA as you can see the extent of the family that does match. Cross out ancestors of the not-matching DNA folks and you will end up with a lovely pyramid pointing right at the person who is a direct ancestor of both sides.

So start by contacting Robert and asking him if he recognizes any names in your tree. Then you can send him a couple of cousins on each of your four grandparents' lines to see which he matches. That should get you started in the right direction. Keep searching out relatives on that matching line and ask him for relatives on his four grandparents' lines and compare them with as many kits as you have access to. That should get you started on the line that should be the common ancestor. Then you keep building both trees and comparing to additional new-found cousins. Personally, I use a diagramming program to chart DNA trees, as none of the regular charting programs have the ability to compare on all four lines on two separate trees.

You also have to watch for sibling marriages. When two siblings of one family marry two siblings of another family, children of these two couples would actually show up as DNA siblings rather than first cousins.

You also have cousin marriages that loop ancestry back into another line.

Is there anyone else that you know (paper-trail) is descended from that great-grandfather who might be able to do DNA testing, to broaden your match database? The more known DNA tests you have, the better your chance of sorting out mystery ancestors.

For example, on my father's side, we showed up with a really close DNA match (1st-2nd cousin to my grandfather) who's tree didn't match ours AT ALL! As we investigated, more and more of my dad's cousins did DNA testing. Turns out that my dad, myself, my brother, my dad's father and one sister, her daughter, and three other cousins from my grandfather's siblings all matched this other tree, but nobody else did! When we crossed off all the ancestors of the non-matching folks, it shows that my Great-grandmother's father wasn't who gggrandmother was married to! There isn't any documentary proof, but as we traced the other family, we found that for 20 years they lived within 1-5 miles of my gggrandmother, and that my gggrandmother and gggrandfather, in spite of being married for 20 years and having 5 kids, never showed up at the same address. We had a database of 9 DNA kits within our family (done at different times, and with different companies) that all matched this other family. The other family has something like 150 folks on that line that show DNA matches to our 9 kits. It's kinda hard to refute that kind of evidence!