New Ancestors You Tell Me? No proof? Is this an April fool trick?

After a neat overnight getaway, I came back to find I had a new ancestral couple from AncestryDNA..Really? Where can this couple fit? I am not all all sure although they tell me this:


"Your DNA matches the DNA of members of the Salathiel Lacy Houk DNA Circle. Because you match DNA with this group, there is a good chance (about 50%) you could be a descendant of Salathiel Lacy Houk."

..And they are telling me that this is proven because I have a strong match to 3 of the 5 people listed below.
They seem to be proving this via some sketchy looking trees which at least  3 people have different relatives in.
My Circle above to Francis and Catherine Rementer  works better BUT one of those 4 people has an incorrect ancestor and is not  descended directly from Francis or his wife.So they are basing this on what? Other people's incorrect trees?
WHICH Ancestor is it linked to,surely not both as we inherit from one ancestor and not a pair?

So  I think they laid an egg on this one. A chromosome browser would have cleared up this big mystery for sure.

I cannot find anyone in this tree any where at all. This line of Houk's seem to move directly from Berks County PA to Tennessee and then Texas? Cotton farmers it is said in this catchy little anecdotal blurb they have shared with me.

The problem is that ALL of my own ancestors have remained in either the Delaware Valley or the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Collateral relatives of my ancestors would not be my relatives would they?

I have responded on the appropriate Beta form, so I sincerely hope that Ancestry corrects this unworkable exercise and cleans up their act. They have such a large database that they could do so well with  just a few tools.

Tuesday's Tip - Fishing in all 3 major DNA pools ~ When the tide rises all the boats will float~

AncestryDNA has  32 pp matches for me ( about 1900) and 30 matches are 4th cousin or closer.. 3 of those are 2nd and 3rd..Note.. TWO known to me 3rd cousins are said to be distant, which is not correct.

14 Leaf hints and one 4 person circle with one of those someone who does NOT share the ancestor with the rest of us although he has not fixed his tree or answered any emails..

 For  23andme I currently have 1206 matches ( I rid myself of some 200 unresponsive distant matches a year or two ago)

10 are close relatives that I have tested.. 8 are 2-3rd cousins ( including the TWO Cousins who tested at Ancestry)

and 449 more or 4th cousins.. 467 total if you include the 18 close matches..

My Sister has MORE 4th cousins.. 526 including the close matches..at 23andme

At FTDNA I have 665 matches TOTAL and 8 are closer than 4th.. most known to me.. and 22 for sure closer than 5th cousins.. then it drops off quickly..

Few of my FTDNA matches have confirmed anything or even gotten back to me..

I am grateful that I have been able to test at all 3 places.. One big brick wall was broken down at AncestryDNA.. and a 2nd success was that the Circle pointed out to me that I had a lot of Rementer cousins who tested there..

The remainder of my successes have been at 23andme..

         

           
         

Surname Saturday ~ Descendants of Peter Rementer ~ No World Tree for me

AncestryDNA is making many many terrible mistakes with their product.Last week they blogged at Roots Tech about their improved Circle which would make Trees unnecessary.

Here is what happens without accurate records. In my only Circle at AncestryDNA I have 4 people. One person does not descend from my Francis X. Rementer at all,but from someone else via this Frederick Rementer. He does not seem to know this although he did once have it in his Tree. This death certificate ( from Ancestry.com) proves it..

Everyone is moving towards a One World Tree which has vast and awful implications I think..

I am not cooperating with anything besides my own basic lines. I started to put a Tree on Family Search.org but they started to load incorrect information so I took it out.. and they reprimanded me saying that I had removed other people's information..which was untrue.

" Dear Kathleen Carrow Ingram,

According to our research, you have recently deleted more than 25 records from Family Tree. Deleting records that you have not contributed will affect family history work of others...
Just as a reminder, Family Tree is an open-edit, collaborative system.  There are no private records or pedigrees in Family Tree, except those records of living individuals that you create...  If you wish to have private records of your ancestors, we suggest you use a personal computer program that is not online"

What I actually DID do is to delete a Tree that I was building on my own sign in at their site. Shame on me!!

My personal rant on Surname Saturday!

Shopping Saturday - Choices in Family Trees

Family Trees are a bit confusing.. 

My Heritage for me is free at this point in time but to confirm anything it wants to upgrade to Premium.. I only intend to have a tree less than 250 nodes( people?) so that it remains free.. so I cannot ever confirm anything..and just at 23andme.. if they expand it, I will expand it but for right now it does not allow me.. I do have all of my genetic relatives attached to the 23andme tree.. 11 of us connected..

Others use Familysearch.org.. Can it stay private? Does anyone have a Tree there? Thinking about that one also since record search is free..

However Ancestry.com which is decidedly NOT Free and that I pay through the nose to use as World Deluxe ( Irish and UK records) is likely what I will stay with..

My Tribal Pages Tree may remain but I am NOT going to upgrade to premium this year as Ancestry.com has my major Tree..

Who else has something else?

There is a Tree of sorts at FamilyTreeDNA but it is not a good one I don't think..
 I should go and look and make sure the Gedcom is current.. which it probably is NOT

Software does not work for me..Twice I purchased Family Tree Maker and it crashed completely..
 I do have the free Legacy software that also lets me keep records but if my computer crashed then that crashes also..

SOOO Ancestry.com it is for now..

Surname Saturday - Kirwans of Borris, County Carlow, and the DNA pile up regions

AncestryDNA has a very large database, second only to 23andme which is why I finally tested my own genome there in 2104, kicking and screaming the whole way. 

I received my results back Easter weekend and was very pleasantly surprised to identify a known Carrow descendant, and her brother as my 4th cousin. At some point I realized I had cousins in this database who  shared my Kirwan/Sweeny line. 

There were other matches, not surprisingly, since I had at that point more than 11,500 matches.Eventually that amount topped out over 13,000 a ludicrous amount.A long anticipated and discussed "correction" of these matches, the majority of which were supposedly "IBS" or Identity by State was to happen late in 2014. IBD means we inherit genes from a parent and IBS essentially means  they could be not ancestral at all.

This correction when it occurred left me with 11% of the matches that I had 5 minutes before. This fact is known because Ancestry saved the whole big mess from before as a download. I was able to look and see that one Kirwan cousin was my match  #865 and his son #866 prior to the match. After the correction they moved up to #11 and #14 and jumped into my field of vision.

Other persons moved down  in hierarchy ( if there is a hierarchy based on relatedness) and  of course 89% of those matches disappeared. I sadly waved goodbye to some small Carrow matches and a few Fant from Virginia matches, who I never felt could be real anyway. My Kirwan  3rd cousin with a known ancestral ties to me moved from #24 to #57 and he tells me that I was once quite high on his list and now #27. He is still my third cousin of course but it is important to look at all changes and try to understand them.

AncestryDNA's white paper discusses ancestral "pile ups" and as an attempt to visualize them I went into Gedmatch today and posted the result of MATCHES ABOVE IN BLUE. Some of it I do see here or what I think it is because one of my Kirwan cousins is on here in an area begun and dominated by my Faunt cousin Francis. Odd as I do know that these cousins do not share my Limerick Faunts or my Donegal Dugans with me. 

I am concluding at his moment that some of these segments are as a result of very very old DNA from Ireland, surely an example of "by state", in this case the SNPs are pointing to a shared ancestral region shared by many. I also realize that this is not an accurate representation of "pile ups" but since Gedmatch came up today I took a peek at the segments I was questioning.

AncestryDNA does not yet market their product in the UK so it is possible their algorithm has excluded or included certain ancestral populations or is skewed in some other fashion not yet clear to me. 23andme has begin their UK and Canadian marketing push and they will incorporate some of the "nodes" of ancestral couple in their collaboration with My Heritage which has begin it's work.

Church Record Sunday - Parochial Registers of Borris Carlow ~ Kirwans and DNA ancestors

       

Apparently a few years ago a cousin contacted me whose ancestor Anna Kirwan Downey was sister to my Great Grandmother Sadie Kirwan Carrow. Sadie and Annie were daughters of Patrick Kirwan and Lizzie Sweeney. The Sweeny/Huey line is well documented in NJ and Leckpatrick Tyrone.

This 3rd cousin turned up on my AncestryDNA 2 months ago and also matches another person who is a 3rd cousin. Our common ancestral segment can be seen below on Chromosome #13. Cousin #3 has no known Kirwans or Sweeneys but her ancestry is known to her and is recent.She and I are the large 51.6 cm and the smaller 8 cM .

Enter Cousins 4 and 5 a week or so ago also at AncestryDNA. Well Cousins 4 and 5 were THERE prior to AncestryDNA's refinement as # 865 and #866...What?? After the refinement they now comfortably rest at #s 11 and 14 and are father and son.    

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
13	18201482	30273581	26.4	1808

  

11	75658173	100268196	22.4	6279
13	17956717	28043323	21.5	3087

                                                   

13	17956717	46594587	51.6	8432
20	41630837	45868746	8.0	1295

Cousins 4 and 5 also descend from Kerwins with the given name of Sylvester which is found in my Kirwans. They have an ancestral area of Carlow. So John McDermot my friendly Irish researcher and I put our heads together, and with some other clues (Patrick's 2nd marriage to a girl from Borris Knockroe) finally, 8 years after the fact have found Patrick's birth.

As he always said in documents his parents were Michael Kirwan and Jane/Jenny Kelly and they married and had 5 ( at least ) children in Borris Carlow between 1843 and 1855. Here is Patrick's birth from Parochial records: 27 Mar 1853-Pat,  Mick Kirwan &  Jane Kelly  with sponsors James Hickey & Maria Kirwan Knockroe.

Wait!! Not only do we not find Sylvester Kirwan/Kerwin in this happy little group but the DNA looks like what I am showing below so does not match with what the other 3 inherited.

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
7	1269965	16882053	27.3	4704

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
3	153404064	196304359	55.9	8697
11	104582818	120309501	19.1	4052

Directly above is Cousin 3 with cousin 5, Cousin 2 with Cousin 5 is right below that  I have a Chromosome # 10 match of 29cM with Cousin #5( Not shown)  ..Who only in the last week had moved up at AncestryDNA from # 865 to  projected Cousin #11 in my Top 25 cousins.

Thankfully, Cousin 2 has now tested at my urging at 23andme and moved his Ancestry results into FTDNA and Gedmatch and cousins 3,4 and 5 are at Gedmatch and FTDNA where these results are from. 

My moral here is that despite BIG matches and common geographic locations we do not always know our DNA ancestors for sure, although we see that we are related. 

Thanks to an informative series of posts this weekend at ISOGG and with some insight from an abstract posted by Debbie Kennett, I am realizing that  I have miles to go before we solve this mystery. The abstract had to do with how many genetic relatives we might have in common and all of these cousins seem to share more than one other family with me and each other. How many? It remains to be seen.

Sunday's Obituary- Virginia, African-American Funeral Programs 1920-2009

                 My Grandson's elusive Tappahannock Virginia family was discovered  here:
                           Virginia, African-American Funeral Programs, 1920-2009
                                                               FamilySearch.org