It was March 16th, 2016 when the results came in.
I held my breath, expecting magic with its release. Instead, I was greeted with more confusion.
First things first–the Y-DNA matchlist.
Upon navigating to the Y-DNA match screen, I was immediately greeted by a list of 10 new (to me, anyway) male family members. Their names were entirely unfamiliar to me, as were all the other symbols associated with them, presented on the page.
What does a “genetic distance” of 3 mean?! What does the “FF” symbol next to just some of their names indicate? Why doesn’t it just say how close the predicted relationship is like the other tests???
At the bottom of the page was also a note that said…
Additional possibilities for searching matches:
Your results have already been uploaded to YSearch.org. Your User ID is 6NGMW. Click below to go to YSearch.org
Ummm, what?! (By the way, I still don’t know what this means)
My eyes did light up right away after seeing the last name “O’Reilly”, which I knew was an alternate spelling of the last name “Reilly”, which had already been displaying prominently on my closest match on AncestryDNA’s tree (Jessie’s).
As excited as I was, I had no idea what to do with the information in front of me, aside from clicking around in vain, trying to figure out what this new test result could tell me.
The blue button appearing next to some of my matches’ names seemed to indicate that these were folks with family tree’s attached to their accounts, so I perused through those, looking for a link to a common Reilly ancestor. Nothing was readily apparent.
After a bit of research, I was able to determine that a “genetic distance” of 3 or 4 actually meant that the “Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA, for short), between my brother and these matches would have been quite a few generations back in time, so it generally made sense that I wasn’t readily seeing the connection between the little information I had on the Reilly portion of Jessie’s tree and these matches. Also, of the 10 matches, only 4 had a family tree attached to their account, and of those, none of the trees were all that extensive. Once again, I was feeling a bit stuck, but also somewhat hopeful since there was messaging feature attached to each match’s account.
Before reaching out, I decided to check out the rest of my brother’s results, starting with the traditional “Family Finder” list of autosomal matches (the same type of list I had on my Family Tree account, that I obtained from importing my raw data from AncestryDNA to create a Family Tree DNA account). These were matches that could be maternal OR paternal, but there wasn’t a clear way to immediately decipher which was which. I was so curious to see if we would show up as full siblings or half-siblings, given the scenarios we had discussed months before.
Sure enough, there I was, with our “relationship range” listed as ” full siblings”. Phew! So that makes 2 out of 3 at least!
I then quickly scanned the list of remaining matches–or at least the first few pages (there were over 30 pages total, and over 1000 matches). No quick-wins of “parent-child” matches or any half-siblings, but our Claypoole match (on my Mom’s side–this is the one that originally made clear to me that my own list of matches was indeed for my DNA and not any sort of mix-up, since this was a family member of my Mom’s who we were already aware of) was listed for James a well (as a 1st-3rd cousin “relationship range”).
After that, the relationship ranges were all “2nd-4th cousin” and further, with many repeats between my list of matches and his–although I noticed that there were quite a few matches that only one of us had, and not the other.
On to the regional breakdown list! Would HE have any of our Dad’s countries listed somehow?
This is where things really got interesting.
As you might remember, my list (at least from FamilyTree DNA) gave me the following breakdown (which might actually be slightly different from what I gave you before, which was probably my AncestryDNA breakdown…none of it is a PERFECT science):
- British Isles: 72%
- Western & Central Europe: 18%
- Scandinavia: 11%
James’ results were as follows:
- British Isles: 92%
- Southern Europe: 6%
- Scandinavia: 2%
Wait, wait…SOUTHERN EUROPE?! Where the heck did that come from?? And why hadn’t it shown up on my list? And where was his “Western and Central Europe”???? (which is supposedly where much of my Mom’s family is from…in Germany, and the bits of French that ended up in the French-speaking portions of Canada)
At this point, I was questioning how reliable FTDNA’s relationship range of “full siblings” truly was. Another “new” relative of mine, Natalie, had suggested that I join a private online Facebook group called “DNA Detectives”, which helps folks with questions like mine. It’s filled with people working on their family trees, searching for birth family, and those who have become experts along the way (and some who already were). I asked how my brother and I could have such disparate information, and even some instances of matches that didn’t overlap between our two lists.
Turns out, one of the most crucial ways of determining how close a genetic relationship is involves comparing what’s called your “shared centimorgans”. They sent me charts and graphs that explained how to compare your numbers (provided by each of the “Big Three” DNA sites) with those of your matches, and infer the possible degrees of relatedness. Example below!
James and I, according to FTDNA’s results, share 2,632 centimorgans (CMs), so we fall a bit on the lower end of the “full sibling” range (which is between 2,300-3,900 CMs). The thing I had to remind myself was that while each of us inherits 50% of each of our birth parents’ genes, we don’t inherit the exact SAME 50% from each–otherwise we’d be identical twins, not fraternal (or any other full siblings). As a result, some of the genes that he inherited but I didn’t were only inherited by certain other family members of ours (including matches), so while I am related to them as family, those folks aren’t going to show up on my DNA match list, just his, and vice versa. Similarly, he inherited more of our birth parents’ “Southern European” genes, whereas the 50% that I got contained more “Western and Central European” and “Scandinavian” markers. Our ancestors were the same, but we each picked up different combinations of their genes.
So, alas, we are still full siblings…and this raises the point that getting him tested, too, gives us even more clues to work with (and about our ancestral heritage).
Something else a bit interesting about his results was his list of “most common surnames” on his “Family Finder” autosomal match list. His top hits (which may be paternal or maternal–we don’t yet know), listing the 3 most common surnames of his matches, contained the last name of the family-member-by-marriage that James suspected to be our or Adam’s birth father. That said, this particular surname happens to be VERY common (just as common as the other two listed for us–“Johnson” and “Brown”, so it could just be a fluke. Also, since then, I’ve done more work on my maternal family tree, and it looks like we do have some of that surname hidden in our tree anyway, so who knows.