I love playing detective and DNA can lead to many mysteries that can take time and effort to untangle. I was contacted today by an Ancestry DNA cousin and Im her closest match...an estimated 3rd cousin. The only catch is that shes an adoptee and only knows her birth mothers ancestry and that even is sketchy--mostly in Indiana--the Indianapolis area. I checked her Ancestry tree and nothing popped out at me in the names OR the locations where they lived that could be our connection. The fathers side is completely unknown. Her only clue is that her birth mother had her when she was still in high school...so sh obtained a copy of the Junior and Senior year yearbooks assuming maybe the father was a classmate (and I agree that is likely). That is our only possible lead so far. So I asked this cousin to download her raw DNA from Ancestry and upload it to GEDMatch. She did that today and I did a one to one comparison. We only have ONE matching segment but it is a HUGE segment on chromosome 9. Since her GEDMatch database isnt tokenized yet we cant do a one to many comparison there yet...but what I did next (since Ive also been tested with 23andme) was go to my cousin matches on 23andme and use their chromosome browser to compare all my cousins there to see if any of them share the same chromosome 9 segment that I share with the adoptee. I found 2 23andme cousins who share portions of the large segment and who 23andme identify as having a common ancestor through that segment match. Both of them are more distant...one an estimated 4th cousin and the other an estimated 5th cousin. Neither had anything in their trees online that helped to pinpoint where we matched (or indirectly where we all match the adoptee) BUT one thing hit me a LOCATION: Amboy, Lee County, IL. I think this is going to be the link. My fathers paternal grandfathers brother Edward John MYERS (known in IL as John Edward MYERS) lived and died in China and Amboy both in Lee County, and his wife Hannah BUCK was born in Lee County. I dont have all the answers YET....well see where GEDMatch cousins we pick up lead us in the future. But my guess is it may lead us in the direction of Lee County, IL and either the MYERS or BUCK lines there.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 06:55:17 +0000
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