Tag Archive | German DNA

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 ….

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →