RLP 212: Pennsylvania Germans Part 6 – DNA

Nicole (1s):
And this is Research Like a Pro episode 212 Pennsylvania Germans part six DNA. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.

Nicole (43s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Hi everybody. And welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (49s):
I’m well, I really enjoyed, you know, working on a research project yesterday about somebody in a, my proof argument. So with my DNA proof argument for Barbi Tharp’s mother and working on proving all the parent-child links from the DNA matches up to the common ancestor. And there’s this generation right in the early 18 hundreds where the person did not live in the home of their parents as a child. And so it’s a really challenging one to document because you can’t just put in, it’s like an 1880 census, or even an earlier census from 1850 to 1870, where they’re the inferred child of the parents in that household.

Nicole (1m 32s):
And so they’re an adult in the 1850 census. And so how do you show that who their parents were, unless there’s a will probate or some kind, some kind of deed that mentions their relationship. And so I have this one that I’m working on, the parents don’t have a will or a probate record. And so I’ve just been, trying to find a bunch of indirect evidence, and I’m gonna have to write a little paragraph or proof argument. That’s a couple pages long to show that he is the son of the person who the family trees are showing. He’s the son of. So that’s been a challenge that I didn’t really know would happened when using DNA evidence is that you’ve gotta show documentation for all these lines going back. And if your common ancestor is in the 17 hundreds, those early 18 hundreds are hard.

Diana (2m 17s):
Yes. And I think we see this all the time in our family trees that we look at it and we think, well, what is the proof of that generation? And then when you dig into it, you totally see how it all comes together, but you’ve gotta write something or else nobody else is gonna believe it.

Nicole (2m 34s):
Yeah. With my other one that I did for brushy with Herb’s father, I ended up writing like three or four short proof arguments for people in that paper. And it just came down to looking at who lived in the county proximity, eliminating candidates to be the father. And then just looking at like tax records, deeds. And there was just, you know, some indirect evidence and looking at, you know, tick marks in the census records, those early census records and eliminating other people that could have been the parent. So it gave me a lot of good practice with writing proofs.

Diana (3m 9s):
That’s great. Well, and now we have the fun, new tool of DNA to add extra evidence to those indirect evidence proofs, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. So that’s gonna be fun. But before we do that, let’s do our announcements. We have got our research psycho pro study group registration open. So we hope if you are interested, you have checked out all the dates and what we’ll be doing, and we will join us for that. It will begin September 7th and we meet every week for nine weeks and have a break for extra research time in the middle. And if you are interested in being a peer group leader, the application is on our website and you get complimentary registration for that.

Diana (3m 55s):
So as always join our newsletter for coupons and deals.

Nicole (3m 59s):
While today we’re talking with Heidi Mathis again, hi Heidi.

Heidi Mathis (4m 2s):
Hello. Again,

Nicole (4m 3s):
We’re happy to be wrapping up our series on Pennsylvania German research. And we’re finishing with a very interesting topic, which is the use of DNA evidence to help us discover our colonial Pennsylvania German ancestors.

Heidi Mathis (4m 19s):
I was just thinking about this as, as Alice and I were writing this series, and I thought it was just really important to start off by just thinking about some general things about researching colonial ancestors. And the first one is just to think about how everyone’s match list is a little different. We, we get used to looking at our match list and we kind of think that’s the whole world, but if you have a chance to either listen to someone, talk about kind of the different structure of their match list, or you’ve had a chance to do client research, you’ll start to see that there’s some real differences and that, that those kind of differences start to help you kind of hone in to like what’s going on with your own family and why your list is the way it is.

Heidi Mathis (5m 2s):
And so I got to thinking about this and in the beginning, when I first started getting interested in genealogy and how to use DNA with it, I started going to my local genealogical society, the Oregon GFO, and they had a DNA interest group. You know, I was just beginning to think about this. And I kept hearing speakers refer to how they had over a thousand close matches at ancestry. And I thought to myself, what’s wrong with me? I had tested my parents and, and their siblings and nobody in my family had anything like that many matches. And so I started to think, well, why was that? And after, and moving along in my genealogical education, I was listening to your guys’ podcast.

Heidi Mathis (5m 44s):
Like one after another, you know, then I took your DNA class. And as well as, you know, listening to other sources, I began to realize that the reason why my particular family’s match list were smaller than some other people’s was that my parents both had mostly mid 19th century immigrants for their great grandparents. And so the presenters I just happened to be listening to just happened, to have a lot more American colonial lines. And that was, that kind of explained it later. I heard about other people who had even more recent immigrant ancestors than my family, and they had even fewer matches at ancestry. One woman mentioned to me that her mother who was born in Germany had only something like about 50 close matches at ancestry.

Heidi Mathis (6m 32s):
My dad who has mostly mid 19th century German ancestors currently has about 330 close ancestry matches. So that whole kind of range demonstrates the general principle that different groups are gonna have fine different number of matches in their list. And that people who have more recent German ancestors are probably not gonna find very many matches at all at a, a place like ancestry that mostly has American test takers. My heritage has a little bit more Germans in their database. So if you have recent German ancestors, I always say it’s a good idea to, to get your test there. But the point that I’m trying to make here is that everyone’s match list will have a small number of very close matches, such as your parents level matches down to your second or third cousins.

Heidi Mathis (7m 22s):
But the bulk of the people who you see in your match list are gonna be around 20 or 30 cMs. And they’re gonna be mostly your fifth to sixth cousins. And if your parents great grandparents were mid 19th century immigrants like mine, then most of their fourth and fifth cousins are still in Europe. And so the DNA is most likely is gonna be less helpful on those more recent immigrant lines.

Nicole (7m 47s):
Wow. That is such an interesting perspective on the number of matches and why that is when you say close matches at ancestry. I think what you’re talking about, correct me if I’m wrong is this category that they have a fourth cousin or closer,

Heidi Mathis (8m 2s):
Right. It’s like on that first facing page, when you click into your DNA page on ancestry, it’ll kind of give you a snapshot. And that’s, that’s what I mean by close matches.

Nicole (8m 13s):
Got it. Yeah. So on that, your DNA results summary, I guess.

Heidi Mathis (8m 17s):
Yeah.

Nicole (8m 18s):
Yeah. And it says DNA matches. And I have like 1000 plus fourth cousins are closer. Right,

Heidi Mathis (8m 23s):
Right.

Nicole (8m 24s):
When you click into the DNA match list, there’s a little button at the top for filtering and you can click on that and it says shared DNA. And it, you can see your total, all your matches, which I’m looking at my own personal ones. So I’ll just tell you the numbers. I have 35,000 matches, which isn’t that many compared to some of the other people.

Heidi Mathis (8m 40s):
Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole (8m 41s):
And then close matches, which our fourth cousins are closer have 2,640, which is a lot compared to what you were saying and distant matches. I have 32,000, which everyone should go look at this. It’s so interesting to see how many of your matches are distant, because if you didn’t know that and you had to guess like, well, how many matches are close and how many are distant? You probably wouldn’t say that 95% of your matches are distant, but they are,

Diana (9m 4s):
Well, I’m looking at mine and my close matches, I have 2,775 and distant matches. 36,000.

Heidi Mathis (9m 13s):
Yeah. Yeah. So for example, my dad is like, he has 330, I think it’s 326 right now, actually. And, and I think I checked and he has something like 8,000 distant matches. So that really, really is a good picture of what we’re trying to talk about here. You know, that everyone should sort of think about that and you know, what does it mean? What can they expect when they try to use their DNA matches for clues?

Nicole (9m 40s):
And it really makes sense that there’s a lot of descendants in the United States. Who’ve taken these tests because, you know, that’s where they began. Ancestry DNA is based out of Utah. So a lot of people from Utah who have ancestry, who were part of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints or Mormon church, a lot of them have tested. So if you have ancestors from that group, you’re gonna have probably more matches. And then people who have been living in the United States for several generations, from those colonial families that have a lot of descendants here, like you’re gonna have a lot of matches from those sides of your family, which I think is so interesting to think about.

Heidi Mathis (10m 16s):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think Pennsylvania Germans do fit in that latter category. You know? So that’s, that’s good news. If you have a Pennsylvania German in your, in your family tree.

Diana (10m 26s):
So yeah. So let’s, let’s get to our Pennsylvania German ancestors. How can we use DNA with our Pennsylvania German?

Heidi Mathis (10m 34s):
Yeah. A couple of, of things. First off the top, just like we’ve been talking about, just to realize that these are colonial ancestors and therefore they’re not gonna be a recent ancestor. Recent ancestors share more DNA with us and the closer cousins we share with them. And so we’re gonna be on firmer footing when we use DNA to look for recent unknown ancestral. So for most test takers, colonial ancestors will be beyond the typical five to six generations. That autosomal DNA is really solidly useful. However, because colonial Germans may have left many American descendants. There may be enough matches in the American databases to bridge the gap between the ancestors that you know, and those that you’d like to discover.

Diana (11m 18s):
Well, it’s good to know that we might have some possibility that we can use DNA for our Pennsylvania Germans. I think it’s, that’s always the question. It’s how far back can we use it?

Heidi Mathis (11m 31s):
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve I’ve found that, you know, my dad is an example. He has the one Pennsylvania German line and the rest are more recent 19th century immigrants. And so the Pennsylvania German one, I found the DNA really, really useful. And the record’s a little harder and sort of the opposite for the 19th century Germans, like the DNA hasn’t been been generally as helpful because there just aren’t that many matches, but the records can be often really good for a recent German ancestor.

Nicole (12m 1s):
Well, what is the first step for looking into this DNA evidence for our Pennsylvania colonial ancestors?

Heidi Mathis (12m 7s):
Yeah. I’d like to give like an overview of how, you know, you would approach any DNA project and then sort of like hone in on the specifics of Pennsylvania German. So with any DNA project, you first wanna identify your key matches along an ancestry, align where you have your question that you wanna answer. So you wanna sort, your oldest relatives matches into clusters that connect to their great or even better, their second great grandparent lines. And then you wanna single out the ancestral line that you’re researching among those. And you’re gonna wanna use your in common with matching to find the cluster of unknown matches that are related along that line.

Heidi Mathis (12m 49s):
And then you wanna use the family trees within that unknown cluster to find any common ancestors that you can find in that cluster. And then you’re gonna wanna use through lines. If you’re looking at ancestry and documentary research, to try to assess how that clusters common ancestor could fit into your tree, as you’re doing this, you’re gonna kind of notice what we’ve been talking about. That some lines are gonna have more matches than others. And you’re gonna wanna think to yourself, why is this? As we’ve been saying, colonial ancestors fed several generations to leave American descendants and Americans, especially of European descent are, are more likely to have taken a DNA test today. And I’ve personally noticed anecdotally that colonial Germans often have many descendants who have taken a DNA test.

Heidi Mathis (13m 35s):
Unknown colonial German ancestors will often be the test takers fourth or fifth, great-grandparent and fourth or fifth, great grandparents are about seven to eight generations away. And so it’s kind of a little outside of the five to six generations where autosomal DNA is gonna be really solidly effective, but fourth and fifth grandparent lines with many matches and good trees may be able to kind of overcome that difficulty of distance. And you might be able to get enough DNA matches to get some hands and clues and narrow down the possible candidates of your unknown ancestors family. And also you don’t wanna forget. There are other types of DNA besides autosomal.

Heidi Mathis (14m 15s):
If, if the answers to a line that you’re interested in, it has a Y DNA or it mitochondrial DNA or an X DNA component. You’re gonna wanna try to identify DNA testers that would have inherited that particular DNA. Because when you’re answering a genealogical question, you’re gonna wanna try to use every type of clue that you have available. And lastly, by identifying these matches, you’re gonna have a knock on effect. That’s helpful in Pennsylvania German research. And that when you’re looking at these collateral lines, you’re gonna be basically looking at the extended family of your Pennsylvania German ancestors. And this will help you. You identify their fan club, which will help you. When you’re looking into the documentary records,

Nicole (14m 58s):
It’s also linked together. And it’s so helpful when you do all this broad research for extended family and fan club, because you start to get really experienced at this. And that’s what I noticed yesterday when I was working on this project that I’m doing for my proof argument, but like, oh, I, I see the trends here. You know, they migrated this direction. Everybody kind of in the same in this extended family did kind of the same thing. So it’s really helpful when you can work on identifying that extended family,

Heidi Mathis (15m 25s):
Oh, 100% Pennsylvania, Germans were particularly head strong family and communal ties. And so following their fan club is, you know, just like you can’t leave that on the table. You’ve gotta really check that box.

Diana (15m 41s):
That’s such a good advice that we come back to again and again, don’t we, but I love the idea of the fan club with the DNA, because so often the fan club is like a sister who got married and you don’t even notice that they’re living right next door, but just with a whole different surname. And so you, you have to figure all that out so you can find your DNA connections. So that brings me to my next question. Why do some of our ancestral lines have more matches than others? Because we see that in our DNA.

Heidi Mathis (16m 14s):
Yeah. And this is the, the kind of thing we’ve been talking about here. And I just wanted to expand on it a little more and it sounds like a simple question, but sometimes simple questions are just the best ones to ask cuz it gets you really thinking. So what determines the number of matches of any ancestor is the total descendants of that ancestor and how many of those descendants have taken a DNA test? I thought the case of my dad with one colonial German line versus, you know, a lot of mid-century more recent German lines kind of illustrated this really well. So I’ll go into my dad’s case a little bit more deeply. So my dad’s great-grandparents were born in the mid 18 hundreds and he has one great grandpa with all of his ancestral lines, going back into the colonial era and this great grandpa’s father had English roots and his mother had Pennsylvania German roots.

Heidi Mathis (17m 8s):
And so that makes my dad one 16th, Pennsylvania, German, but the rest of his other seven great grandparents were either born in German lands or their parents were. So this sets up sort of an interesting situation where we can clearly see why some ancestral lines have far more matches than others. So from the beginning, when I first began analyzing my family’s DNA test, I noticed that both my dad and his sister, why I have access to her test seemed to have an overwhelming number of matches from this one 16th of their ancestral line, their second great grandmother that had these colonial German roots. And I asked myself, why was this? And, and it’s probably because more descendants of Pennsylvania, German ancestors have taken a D and a tested ancestry than any of my other dad’s lines.

Heidi Mathis (17m 55s):
You know, again, why was this? And it’s probably a combination that his Pennsylvania, German ancestral family had many descendants and they were Americans. And so a lot of the descendants of those ancestors have taken a DNA test. And that’s the main point we’ve been talking about here that if you’re looking at a colonial era ancestral line, it’s especially worth pursuing DNA because the descendants of that line most likely live in America. And generally a greater portion of them have taken a DNA test than other lines so far, especially Americans with European ancestors. And so those descendants are really well represented in the DNA testing companies. On the other hand, my dad’s mid 19th century German immigrant lines have very few matches.

Heidi Mathis (18m 39s):
And the reason for that is probably there’s a combination of, there’s just not as many descendants from those lines in general, wherever they are in the world, but especially because most of those descendants are still living in German lands where people tend not to take DNA tests. And we talked a lot about this in our podcast on 19th century, Germans and DNA in my own experience between my family and clients, I’ve traced several Pennsylvania German lines with DNA and with documentary evidence. And anecdotally I’ve noticed that they all had a lot of descendants in a lot of matches. And so I suspect that this may be true for many Pennsylvania German lines. And so I hypothesize that Pennsylvania Germans in general have many descendants, but with a lot of genealogy, this is just my hypothesis that American colonial lines mostly have a lot of matches, but it’s always possible that a specific colonial line may have few matches because everybody’s match list is unique.

Diana (19m 36s):
Well, and I’m glad you gave us that caveat because I’m thinking of a specific project that we worked for a client that was New York, and it was colonial ancestors. They’d been there for a while, but their particular branch of the family really did not have hardly any descendants and no good matches, which was so unique with my lines, which had lots of children. Like one of them had 14 children, another one had 10 and, you know, we have so many matches. So I think we really do have to that there could be a line where something happened and people didn’t survive to have any dissent.

Heidi Mathis (20m 17s):
Absolutely. But it’s always worth a try with a colonial ancestor, the, oh, for sure. You just wanna give it a, a go, but you know, keeping in mind what we’re saying, that you could have a unique line that just doesn’t have that many matches.

Diana (20m 28s):
Right, right. Darn well, and I’m gonna throw another scenario out there, which I think is so interesting. One of our current client projects that you are working on is a recent German immigrant. I mean, I say recent, you know, 1800s. Yeah. But their DNA on my, my heritage has a lot of matches that are coming out. It looks to me like maybe out of Israel where my heritage is located because some of the trees are in Hebrew. So I thought that was really interesting.

Heidi Mathis (21m 0s):
Oh yeah. It’s fascinating. And that’s why, you know, what we’re talking about about getting some kind of a greater context for how your match list is fitting in and where you really need to have your test at. Like, so if you have recent German, you know, including people who immigrated in the 1800s, or you have Jewish ancestors, you’re really gonna wanna check my heritage cuz they have generally more people from those communities that are gonna be found in their database.

Nicole (21m 30s):
So right. And I have great hopes for living DNA that more people in Europe will use their testing company because they’re based in Europe. And so that gives, I think some Europeans, a little bit of a better sense of security or that it will be better for them, you know? And so that’s kind of a hope that I have is that company is building up their program and database and they’ve been adding some things lately. And every time I go back, they have a little bit more functionality and I’m just hoping that they will add trees. And as soon as they add trees, it will be so much easier to see the common a

Heidi Mathis (22m 4s):
Oh yeah. We’re always so excited. And we never know when our amazing match, what, what database is gonna pop up in.

Nicole (22m 12s):
I have one more anecdote I wanted to share and this relates to Y DNA, but I think it’s along these same lines of smaller match lists and some families not having a lot of descendants who have tested. So I know I’ve talked a lot about my research that I’ve done on my husband’s St family. So some of you might recognize this, but my husband’s like third or fourth grade grandfather, John Robert Dyer, we don’t know his father. And so I’ve been in several of the DNA study groups been researching that and I had his dad take the big Y 700 DNA test at family tree DNA. And there were no matches with the Sur dire. And so we were like, oh no, was there a non paternal event or something?

Nicole (22m 58s):
And there were a lot of matches. They were just different surnames, all different surnames, mostly Irish and Scottish. Hmm. And so I didn’t know what to do with that for so many years, you know, ever since we had him tested, well, guess what happened this year? Somebody showed up in the match list with the surname Dyer, an exact match at 111 markers. Wow. And family tree DNA, you know, their tip calculator says that there’s like a 99% chance. You’ll find the common ancestor within eight generations. And I think it was 95% chance. You’ll find it within four generations. So I am just pumped. I’m

Heidi Mathis (23m 34s):
Completely, again, totally excited.

Nicole (23m 37s):
Yay. But you know, my original analysis of those Y DNA matches was like very, I was very unsure about what it meant. And so if that happens to you and you have no matches with your surname, or you have like a branch of your family where you have very few matches, like Heidi was saying on her 19th century German, just realize there’s, there can be small families where that didn’t have a lot of descendants. Like maybe there’s only 10 people who descend from this dire branch. And one of them finally took the, took a DNA test, you know, so we have to just keep in mind, there’s there can be small families and just branches of families who don’t take DNA test.

Heidi Mathis (24m 22s):
It’s so easy to like start drawing conclusions or hypotheses from some results. And they’re just really incomplete. And so I think we have to always just be careful with our hypotheses and, and just keep, keep looking.

Nicole (24m 36s):
So let’s talk more about our colonial German ancestors. So just tell us some more, like how can we use DNA for confirming or discovering them?

Heidi Mathis (24m 43s):
So using DNA with a colonial ancestors is an important clue to try when you’re researching colonial era ancestors, but you have to proceed carefully and know how to frame what you find. Here are some things I like to keep in mind for using DNA with my more distant ancestors for the most part, autosomal DNA is solidly useful. Like I’ve been saying for identifying ancestors to the fifth and sixth generation, if you have enough matches with family trees, but we have to remember DNA is only useful. If you have matches on an ancestral line that you’re researching, as I’ve been saying, some of my dads have lines, his recent German lines just don’t have any matches. So, you know, DNA is just not gonna be helpful there.

Heidi Mathis (25m 23s):
But if I’m like Nicole, maybe every once in a while, they’ll be this exciting match. So you just gotta keep looking. But generally five to six generations back for a lot of people means DNA can help us identify between a testers second to third, great grandparents with, with good confidence. And that’s because third and fourth cousins that result from our second and third great grandparents often share enough DNA with us, for us to be confident of this fairly close genetic relationship. In other words, it’s the quality of our matches that will be high enough to give us good clues with these closer ancestors. But what about colonial German ancestors who will likely be further back than five to six generations?

Heidi Mathis (26m 6s):
I hypothesize that DNA will be useful with them because anecdotally I’ve noticed that they have a lot of matches colonial ancestor matches that are seven to eight generations away from a test taker. You’ll share on average, much less DNA with your matches, but because the saturation of DNA testing in America is pretty high. You may have a lot of matches on a particular line, even though it’s a distant genetic relationship. In other words, you might have quantity on your side. So if you have a lot of matches for your Pennsylvania German line, you might have some solid clues as to which line you belong to.

Heidi Mathis (26m 46s):
But as always to prove a relationship, you’re gonna need more than DNA. You’re gonna need documentary evidence. So to sum up pursuing DNA with a colonial German ancestors, a good idea, because there’s a good chance of finding other descendants of your unknown ancestors in your match list. These matches family trees may provide you with a clue as to which family, your brick wall ancestors connected to since ancestry has the largest database of American test takers, it’s the best place to look for descendants of colonial ancestors and also ancestry is through lines, which can be very helpful. And Nicole, your blog post called how to evaluate an ancestry DNA through line hypothesis has a good explanation of sort of exactly how to use through lines in this way.

Heidi Mathis (27m 31s):
So using DNA with your colonial American lines has proved far easier as I’ve been saying with my dad’s more recent immigrant lines. In other words, I have more DNA clues as to who my dad’s Pennsylvania, German third, and to sixth, great grandparents were then his mid 19th century German lines who just don’t have enough matches. Also Pennsylvania Germans are fortunately, generally not end agamous. And so with the exception of communities like the Amish or Mennonites ancestry through lines is gonna be fairly trustworthy with them. You have to be more careful with through lines when you have endogenous lines. For example, I tend to trust through lines somewhat less with my moms, more recent Irish lines, cuz Irish lines can be on the ends side.

Nicole (28m 18s):
Wow. That’s a lot of helpful information I love using through lines to help me find potential matches. But I thanks for mentioning my article because in there I do talk about how important it is to make sure that those people you find through through lines are actually in the genetic network that you want them to be in because, you know, especially with distant matches, if they’re sharing under 20 cent organs, it’s highly possible, they could be sharing with you in another way. And that’s where the DNA is coming from from a different common ancestor. That’s 10 to 20 generations back. So it’s just really helpful to see their shared matches and just make sure it’s in the right genetic network for that line of your family.

Diana (28m 58s):
Yeah. I agree. I love working with through lines and I’ve used it both to prove and disprove, you know, an ancestor that through line suggested for me. So those are fun projects. Well, and I think it’s kind of exciting that we don’t have to worry about endo gonna me so much with the Pennsylvania Germans because that can really miss things up. So I’m glad you mentioned that. Well, let’s get to an example. I think we’ve talked a lot about so many great concepts and I think everyone listening would really benefit from a real example.

Heidi Mathis (29m 31s):
So the example that I used in the blog post was investigating this one line of my dad’s. It’s a Pennsylvania German, and I was looking at one of his fourth great grandmothers. So I started with having solid documentary evidence of who my dad’s Pennsylvania German’s second great-grandmother’s parents and siblings were. But when I was researching further back, I had found only one documentary reference to the second great-grandmother’s paternal grandmother’s maiden name or my dad’s fourth grade grandmother. So this documentary evidence I have found so far was just a transcribed will of her son-in-law, which mentioned her maiden name as Christina Hile.

Heidi Mathis (30m 13s):
Christina lived from around 1770 to 1820. And when I looked into the Hiles of Pennsylvania, I found out there were a lot and Christina, you know, I just couldn’t figure out which one she could possibly be related to. It would take me forever to research all the hurdles of Pennsylvania. So I thought that was a good case to use for DNA. So since I had several good third and fourth cousin matches to this, you know, that involved this line, I used in common with matching to identify some unknown clusters of matches along this line. And as I looked through the matches for those who posted good family trees, I began to notice that several matches went back to the same common ancestors.

Heidi Mathis (30m 58s):
I didn’t know. And so I built those trees out further and I noticed that some of those common ancestors all went back to this one fellow named Nicholas Hile, who was born about 1772, very close to Christina’s reported birth in about 1770. And so I could hypothesize that Nicholas could be a brother of Christina’s. And so I put Nicholas who was born about, like I said, about 1772 and the proposed father that was in the family trees, who was also named Nicholas born in about 1740 into my dad and his sister’s ancestry tree. And I tagged it as a hypothesis and didn’t want anyone copying it, but through lines revealed about 17 separate matches for my dad and my aunt who descended, you know, theoretically from this Nicholas Tel senior, who would be my dad’s hypothesized fifth great-grandfather these matches shared between seven and 54 cMs with my dad and my aunt, which fits pretty well into the range for six cousins, which would, you know, on average be about 18 cMs with a range of zero to 71 cMs.

Heidi Mathis (32m 11s):
Also the through lines proposed a few other matches that might descend from yet further siblings of Christina and Nicholas. So that was good. But does this prove that Nicholas and Christina were siblings? Absolutely not, but the DNA proposed a candidate to research out of the many hurdles that could have possibly been Christina’s family. Diana you’ve been discussing the exact same process in regard to your Cynthia Dillard and Cynthia’s possible brother, Elijah Dillard in an earlier podcast. And my point here is that if you have colonial ancestors just carefully proceed, but definitely you wanna try to use the DNA with them.

Diana (32m 51s):
Yeah. I’m glad to mention my Cynthia and Elijah Dillard, because that was such a huge breakthrough for me. When I found this cluster of people that all came through Elijah, I was at such a dead end with Cynthia. You know, I was like, what else can I do with her? And I have, you know, some Southern those Southern lines. I have some pedigree collapse of people related multiple ways. And Elijah was just out here on, on the cusp of that. And I, I was excited to find him, but you know, it’s one thing we haven’t really talked about is this idea of wondering if there is the possibility of some pedigree collapse in our Pennsylvania, Germans, you know, were they in small communities? Were they, you know, intermarried a bit and I am kind of guessing probably yes.

Diana (33m 37s):
So we need to really take a look at that as well.

Heidi Mathis (33m 40s):
Oh, I think that’s totally true. Yeah. I don’t think it’s endogamy so much as there is the possibility for pedigree collapse, you know, and like we said, they’re tight networks of people, so that’s something you’re gonna have to keep in mind for sure.

Nicole (33m 54s):
Great example. Thank you for sharing that. Well, let’s talk more about the quality versus quantity idea for DNA matches. So tell us more about that

Heidi Mathis (34m 3s):
In my blog post, the second one I did for DNA with Pennsylvania Germans, it was called using DNA for clues with colonial ancestors quality versus quantity. I discussed the numbers a bit more in the, in the blog post, but in short it’s just the idea that we have a small number of close matches that we share a relatively large amount of DNA with. And that larger amount of DNA means we can be much more sure that we have a close relationship with those matches. In other words, we have quality on our side with close matches, close matches here, meaning, you know, from the parent level to the second or third cousin level, however, when you get to fourth cousins, the amount of DNA we will share with any one fourth cousin drops off a lot.

Heidi Mathis (34m 49s):
In fact, we won’t share any DNA with somewhere around half of our known fourth cousins, but at the same time, we just have so many more fourth cousins out there. So for example, there’s this Zog Wiki table that I put in the blog post that shows this pretty dramatically. It estimates that on average, we may have about 190 third cousins that we share ancestors, but only 170 of those will we share DNA with in contrast, they estimated that on average, we have 23006 cousins that we would share ancestors with. Well, we would share DNA with only about 940 of that 23,000, but still 943 is a large number.

Heidi Mathis (35m 33s):
And if the saturation of DNA testing is high in a population, you can expect that a fair number of that 943 might show up in ancestry. So in other words, fourth to seventh cousins might have quantity on their side, but only if these distant cousins come from a population that tend to take a lot of DNA tests. And then we will likely have enough of these cousins that will show up on our match list enough, perhaps to give us a clue as to which family our ancestor belonged to. So instead of doing documentary research on every hit family of Pennsylvania, which I could spend the rest of my life on, I, I used clusters of more distant DNA matches as a clue to help me find the best hit family, to really dive into the documents for since colonial German, ancestors are gonna be distant.

Heidi Mathis (36m 24s):
You won’t likely have quality on your side, but you will likely have quantity. The fact that Pennsylvania German ancestors belong to a group whose descendants tend to take DNA tests makes it especially worthwhile putting the time in to try to use DNA with them. Since these matches will descend from your colonial Germans collateral lines, you’ll have the added benefit of identifying their extended family, which means you’ll be discovering their fan club, which will be so important to the documentary research that Alice did such a great job of helping us figure out.

Nicole (36m 56s):
Thanks for sharing your numbers with us. With that example of, you know, we have possibly 190 third cousins, and we’re gonna share DNA with a lot of those, maybe 170 and how, what a dramatic difference it is when you go out to six cousins and you could, you could possibly have up to 23006 cousins, but you’re only gonna share with such a small percentage 943. So it was really cool how you said that that’s still a pretty large number. That’s why we have so many distant cousins because we have a lot of distant ancestors and we have a lot of six cousins. It all makes sense now.

Heidi Mathis (37m 32s):
Well, if there’s something about putting numbers to things that helps you think more clearly about what does this mean? It could be a six cousin. It could be somebody who who’s a much more distant ancestor, but understanding the numbers and what you can expect is just a good way to frame things for yourself. It

Nicole (37m 51s):
Is. Well, thank you for sharing all of these great ideas about finding DNA matches descending from our colonial ancestors, from our Pennsylvania German ancestors. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and we really appreciate all, all of your great blog posts.

Heidi Mathis (38m 7s):
Oh, thank you so much. It’s been a lot of fun.

Diana (38m 10s):
All right. Have a great week, everyone. We’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Nicole (38m 55s):
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