My husband and I joined the DNA testing community in 2014. Now we manage over a dozen family DNA kits across three testing sites plus GEDMatch.com. We manage the kits for my parents, all our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren!
Solving Irish Myths – Irish History with DNA
Hey Dad, how about donating some spit to science?
Some of my first memories of my Dad are stories he told me from college about experimenting with cadavers. He was so engaged with the scientific value of cadavers, he constantly talked about donating his body to science.
By the time I asked him to donate spit, he had been told that he was too old to donate his body. A new project was starting on Family Tree DNA where some researchers had decided to try to use DNA to determine where Irish myths ended and Irish history began. With that, I was able to talk Dad into letting me arrange for DNA testing for his autosomal DNA, his Y-DNA, and his MT-DNA. Autosomal DNA is useful for genealogy. The Y-DNA chases the male line and was for the myth-history project. And the MT-DNA that chases the female line was just because it was there.
So Dad starts out on this Irish Y-DNA tree as a lonely Duffy leaf on an empty branch.
Time passes and more people join. The tree gets bigger, and limbs get renamed. We upgrade Dad’s test a few times. But no matter how big the tree grows and Dad’s limb moves, it still only has one leaf! He now has a small cluster of matches with a common ancestor that was born between 1450 AD and 1750 AD, probably in Ulster or south of the Ulster border. But our records only go back to 1809 in County Longford, just south of the Ulster border.
The project is progressing though and they have successfully moved some Irish myths to the actual history list.
Adoptions
I had received a couple of emails from a weak DNA match on the Parr line. But, the match didn’t have a family tree and I didn’t recognize his last name, so I ignored him. He sent another email telling me he was adopted and just needed a little help.
Ok, so this wasn’t someone who thought they could just spit in a tube and magically a full family tree would appear. He was a US soldier that had a good childhood with his adoptive parents and had decided to find his birth parents so he could say “thank you”.
Once we connected he gave me a list of people with who he had close matches and the number of cM of the DNA match he had with each. I happened to have all the names he sent me in my tree. I concurred with his guess of who his mother was and let him know how the other names belonged in the tree.
He contacted one of the matches we assumed was a cousin, and she told him that his mother was the woman we thought and she had been looking for him. He was able to contact his biological mother and meet her before his next deployment.
New Zealand DNA??
Two sisters in New Zealand contacted me about their DNA match with my Dad. New Zealand?? How did that happen? As best as we can figure out, my ancestor Honoria left Ireland to come to the USA and several years later their ancestor Honoria left Ireland to go to New Zealand.
We met the sisters and their families when we went to New Zealand. We all pulled out our computers and started combining information. We still have not figured out the exact relationship but it looks like my Honoria is either aunt or cousin to their Honoria.
More McGee Parr DNA
Mom’s DNA is on Ancestry, so I can easily sort her DNA matches from mine. And now I can sort her DNA matches between her paternal, McGee, matches and her maternal, Parr (Fish, Work, Morgan) DNA.
Today, Mom has over 13,000 maternal DNA matches on Ancestry and over 10,000 paternal DNA matches. This is a significant change. The American colonial matches in the Parr line used to be significantly larger numbers than the recent Irish immigrants and the Irish who stayed in Ireland.
Most of Mom’s Irish DNA now shows up as “Scottish” because the current algorithms merge Northern Ireland and Scotland together in one group. But the McGee clan in Ulster was Catholic, so not part of the Scots-Irish Protestants that England sent in. Religious beliefs have no effect on DNA, so everybody looks the same no matter which side of the street their house was on.
Mystery Matches
Mystery matches are those that don’t make any sense. If Mom or Dad doesn’t have first cousins, how can I have 2nd cousins??
NPE is the usual response by genetic genealogists. It used to mean “non-parental event” and now is more commonly referred to as “not parent expected”. Affairs and adoptions are the usual culprits for this discrepancy in the family tree. But another cause is “donor sperm”. Yes all those college students and doctors that donated sperm in the 1940s and later, may not be quite so anonymous over time. See more about donor sperm siblings at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/modern-family-20-plus-sperm-donor-siblings-find-each-other-n1071656
Iceland requires DNA testing before granting a marriage license and with sperm banks proliferating, we may be close to needing to do the same. Who wants to unknowingly marry their half- sister, brother, aunt, or uncle?
