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My Newly Found Half Second Cousin Once Removed

Dec19

A few months ago, my family had a good DNA match (about 151 cm for my aunt) at 23andme to our Bavarian side. This was Mary, who had been adopted as a baby back in 1950 from a Munich orphanage. She knew her birth mother’s name but not her father’s. She had no other significant matches at 23andme besides my family, so we needed to get her into more DNA databases to figure this out.

Great Grandfather Benedict Reiner

I sent her an Ancestry kit I had on hand and ordered a MyHeritage kit for her as well. Germany does not have very many people who have tested their DNA so typically my matches on those lines are Americans with Bavarian ancestors. However, there are a few tested Germans at MyHeritage.

While we waited for the new test results, I had her upload her DNA to GEDmatch so I could compare her to my known German cousins there. To my surprise, she matched my half second cousin in Bavaria at 91 cM. This is a line I have not researched deeply. I was hoping she matched my grandmother’s other side which I have much more information on. Luckily I am in touch with that cousin’s granddaughter Katharina, who enjoys doing genealogy. We found each other on GENI because she is descended from my great grandfather Benedict Reiner via a different partner (click here for that story)

Benedict’s mother Anna Reiner had several partners and at least two husbands so my plan was to start by building the trees of her other descendants. Naturally I fired off an email to Katharina and asked her what she knew. She sent me quite a bit of information and got involved in helping. She said to me “Now I remember why genealogy brings me so much joy — it’s just so fascinating!” Sadly many of Anna’s children had died before reaching an age to have children themselves and only one had moved to Munich.

The Ancestry results came in and Mary had two good matches (167 cM and 160 cM) who did not match each other or me, although one had a whole family of testers, all matching. Next I copied the Bavarians from their trees into Mary’s tree and then built their trees further back. There were some surnames of interest ….

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Ancestry’s Updated Ancestral Origins

Oct13

Ancestry.com has just completed a major update to its DNA bio-ancestry predictions that has broken down European countries into many smaller areas. They have added 68 locales, mainly in Europe. French Canadians are no longer listed as France, now they are either Quebec or Acadia. They have also made four jewish groups from one: Central and Eastern Ashkenazi plus North African and East Mediterranean Sephardic. Almost all my Jewish friends have no Sephardic listed, giving the lie to some family stories. There are some interesting new categories like Germans in Russia and one combining both sides of the English Channel into a new category called Southeastern England & Northwestern Europe.

I am enjoying looking at the updated origins of many of the people I have helped. On the next page I will show images of the more interesting mixtures. Here is a classic North European mix of a Tenneseean with colonial roots.

I do recommmend scrolling down and clicking on the link to what has changed. Below is the image of how the predictions for our Tennesseean are different from last year. Notice that Germany has gone from 21% to 2%. Some of that must now be Denmark and some SE England & NW Europe.

While 1-2% could be a 4th or 5th grandparent, it could also be just noise or too far back to find. I have often told people not to worry about a 1% call as it is too small to be sure of. In my own case, I lost my 1% Finnish, which I actually thought was accurate because its location matches one of the two where my Norwegian American dad has Finnish, according to 23andme. Additionally, 23andme has my brother matching the other location. We have yet to find that Finnish 4th or further back grandparent, but we do match many Finnish people on those segments over at GEDmatch. Perhaps they just have some Norwegian. More on that in another blog post.

To quote my own blog post from 2020 comparing the origin predictions at each company “predicting the ethnicity for people of Northern European heritage like my brother and myself, is very hard to do accurately because there was so much mixing of those populations.” The book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” by geneticist David Reich makes that point well and goes into the details of what ancient DNA teaches us about European migrations and mixtures.

I found the explanatory Ancestry white paper (click here to read it) hard to understand, so I enlisted two different AI platforms to summarize it for me. A fun use of this technology. To be fair, after the quite technical many paragraph summary ChatGPT gave me, I wised up and asked Claude to summarize it in plain English. That went better. Here are a few take aways:

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A Breakthrough in my German DNA

Jun17

Modern day Germans do not seem to do DNA testing. I have one German grandparent born in Munich, with several generations of Bavarian ancestors, whose line I never get any matches to. Since this is my mother’s mother’s line with the paternal lines proven, the lack of matches is not due to an NPE (non parental event). For example, I have one German half 2nd cousin on my maternal grandmother’s father’s side who tested at my request (click here for that post).

Ancestry has a nice new feature where you can filter your matches by Journeys (where your ancestors came from); see image to the left. I was disappointed not to have any German journeys, but my brother has something called Franconia. When I used that filter I found a good match at the top of his list. Richard, from Pennsylvania (think Pennsylvania Dutch aka Deutsch), with an Italian surname, shares 72cM with my brother, 62 cM with me, and 25 cM with our first cousin Margaret. Richard’s tree had no ancestors listed, but his closest shared match to us, a great nephew, did have a small tree. One thing I like to do with my Pro Tools is to change the way matches are sorted to be by the best ones for the match I am looking at, rather than the usual sort of those closest to me (see image below). Their close matches often have better trees or have notes I wrote to myself when I figured them out long ago.

That nephew has all but one person showing as private in his tree. Luckily the one person whose name shows has the same surname as Richard. Next I clicked over to her profile page and used the Ancestry search function to find a more complete tree for her, which included her parents. Her mother Frances had a surname, LANG, that I knew was in my tree. She was even born in the same town, Eslarn, Bavaria, as my great grandmother Margaretha Wittman! Another search at ancestry found Francis’ Eslarn grandparents’ names in yet another tree, whose owner was also a distant DNA match.

There is a useful German website – https://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/ – which has genealogy information from many German town lineage books, including the one for Eslarn. You can list everyone with a specific surname in your town to search for an individual. Be sure to check alternate spellings. Armed with the names of Frances Lang’s grandparents, I went to that source and traced her mother back to my great grandmother’s grandparents. This was not easy because the same names were used over and over again. Frances’ mother had the same name as my great grandmother. Also their fathers, who were uncle and nephew, had the same name, Joseph Widmann/Wittman. Complicated to figure this out, but birth years helped.

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23andme: Now and Then

Sep23

23andme started out by being a leader in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing business. Time Magazine named it the 2008 Invention of the Year![1] It was the first place I tested my own autosomal DNA and that of many family members back in 2011-2012. Originally it had the best cousin matching tools, best ethnicity estimates, and had a well designed interface to examine the health implications in your own genome. Now I recommend to most that they start with Ancestry DNA and then upload that data to several other sites, including Promethease for the medical analysis, although 23andme still tests a wider range of health related genes.

23andme has been in the news this week because its entire board, except its founder, Anne Wojcicki, resigned over her plan to take it private again. It went public in 2021 but has yet to turn a profit and the WSJ reports that it will run out of cash next year [ref WSJ]. However there is at least one company interested in buying it according to a post on the DNA-Newbie list.

How should those of us who have tests there react to this news? Personally I am not worried, mainly because I hardly ever use the site anymore. I have long since downloaded my data and have contacted most of my closer matches. Roberta Estes has done a thorough blog post (click here) explaining how to save your data from 23andme.

The reason I rarely use 23andme is because it no longer allows you to compare your DNA to a relative in a chromosome browser; the feature I liked the best. I now do that at GEDmatch, Family Tree DNA, and MyHeritage. That tool was removed because of a data breach over a year ago where a hacker got lists of Jewish and Chinese testers and posted them for sale on the dark web. The break-in took advantage of users who had the same email and password on multiple sites, some of which had been exposed elsewhere.

Perhaps it is the resulting class action suit that caused part of 23andme’s financial woes. Click here for an article about how that is being settled with users.

My understanding was that the inspiration for the founding of 23andme was that Genia Brin, the mother of the then husband of founder Anne Wojcicki, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1998 [ref michaelfox org]. The focus of 23andme has always been on discovering the genetic basis of various medical issues, not genealogy. However they have been quite supportive of adoptees (click here), since it is helpful to know what issues may lie in your DNA when you have no known family health history.

One way to look at the genetic basis of various diseases is to crowd-source lots of genomes.

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Riding the Rails

Aug5

​One of the benefits of doing genealogy is seeing history through the eyes of your ancestors. Sometimes helping another with their family history has a similar advantage. Cathie’s father wrote up his experiences in the 30s for her. I was so charmed by them that I asked for permission to publish a slightly edited and condensed version on my blog. Here it is:

I left home when I was just 16 in June of 1929. I worked on a farm, a golf course and spent the winter in a home for homeless boys in Chicago until clement weather arrived.

I then “rode the rails” with a vengeance when real Spring weather arrived — April or May 1930. I had made up my mind I wanted to reach the West Coast to become an apprentice seaman and, (for some obscure reason), to reach Japan.

Let me digress here a moment. Hitchhiking was the optimum way of traveling for a “wanderer” (later, a “bum”) in densely-populated areas. One could get to the outskirts of a town or city easily and there was considerable traffic from whom rides could be cadged ​with the thumb. But when it came to crossing the vast distances of the West, freight trains were the only answer. (You could starve to death hitchhiking in say, Wyoming or Nevada.)

So I took up “riding the rails”. ​It was not easy. You had to find the freight yards, seek out​ other bums who were going to take the next west-bound freight to assure yourself you had the​ right train and then position yourself strategically between where the train was made up, beyond​ where the railroad “dicks” kept the train under surveillance but still close enough to its point of​ origin before it reached dangerous speed. Then jumping into an empty car was no simple task.​ The outside door latch had to be​ unfastened, the door pushed open; then you used both your​ arms to lift yourself so you could slide on your stomach into the car. If your travelling​ companions had already gotten into the cars, they would give you a hand thus making the entry​ in a lot easier.

One had to be prepared for the monotony of hours, or days of travel. The scenery was generally​ entrancing. Freight trains stopped a lot, as you could dismount and stretch your legs or seek​ out a drinking water source. The brakemen riding in the caboose knew they had unauthorized​ passengers but normally took no adverse action against them. Chasing bums off trains “was not​ their job” (they left that to the railroad dicks).

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