DNA Analysis

pedroeibar1 wrote: »

I've done some research on a Nott family mid 1700's to mid 1800's and the two Irish clusters I found were in Kerry, linked to the coastguard and Royal Navy. They originated in Devon/Cornwall. There also was a Capt. Knott/Nott RN in Wicklow mid-1800's.

My Knotts are supposed to be from around the Boyle area in Roscommon from oral tradition. There's a good few of them around Boyle in Roscommon and Sligo. I'm not sure which family I'm connected to since my ancestor was born about 1801 and there aren't any records. I think that it could be the Knotts from Tournagee but there's nothing to verify it.

They're Roman Catholic which makes me think they've been in Ireland for a long time if they originated from somewhere else. Interestingly enough my ancestor's maiden name and married surname were recorded on her gravestone which makes me wonder does the family have some significance since it wasn't the usual thing to do back then.

Reading up on the surname, it's meant to be English in origin but the family were supposed to descended from King Canute from Denmark but he was around over 1000 years ago so it's pretty irrelevant anyway. Going that far back, it's the same as saying the 1% Scandinavian is from the Vikings. Thanks for giving me a specific area from England where they may have come from.

I'm just going to mention my experience with DNA matches. I have 157 4th cousins or closer. I have one close family who I know, four 2nd cousins and I only know one, six third cousins and I know none and the rest are fourth cousins. I know the connection to a few while with others there's a common surname and location but the other person hasn't gone back far enough in the tree to determine the connection or the records aren't there to go back that far. However, for the vast majority there's no tree and if I've emailed them, they've never gotten back to me.

I’m planning on getting an autosomal test done and I’m trying to decide on one of the big three companies: Ancestry, FamilyTreeDNA or 23andMe. I know you can transfer both your Ancestry and 23andMe results into FamilyTreeDNA’s database but can you transfer results from FamilyTreeDNA into Ancestry and 23andMe? Also, can Ancestry’s results and 23andMe’s results transfer into each other’s databases?

RGM wrote: »

No to both questions. FTDNA is currently the only one that accepts transfers from the other companies.

Thanks.

spurious wrote: »

You can always use GEDMatch to compare against people from all companies who have uploaded to it.

I was afraid that I would have cousins who would test with the companies that I won't test with and then my cousins wouldn't upload the results to GEDMatch. But I suppose the serious genealogists who would reply to messages would have their results uploaded to GEDMatch.

Hermy wrote: »

I just got my results this morning.


As an adopted person I was particularly eager to get my results as I know next to nothing of my paternal line.
Given that my four great grandparents on my mothers side are Irish, is it possible to infer that the 24% Great Britain is on my fathers side?

Depends on where the ancestors of the great grandparents came from. They could have come over with Strongbow or Oliver Cromwell or just the Holyhead ferry.

Ipso wrote:

That estimate is based on Y DNA testing, not autosomnal.

Certainly doesn't mean "Every Irish person has Viking Ancestry"

Ipso wrote:

Given they founded/settled most major cities it's a fairly reasonable assumption. Now the amount most modern people carry is most likely negligible and hard to detect given the shared ancestry between both modern populations.

My Surname is Russell, according to Google derived from Rousell, Prominent Norman Surname.

I got mine done on MyHeritage, but I think their algorithms might skew the DNA data with data you've entered in the family tree. Here's what I got:
Europe 98.7%
....North and West Europe 95.1%
........Irish, Scottish, and Welsh 95.1%
....East Europe 3.6%
........East European 3.6%
Asia 1.3%
....West Asia 1.3%
........West Asian 1.3%

The Eastern European is a bit confusing, as I've no discernible non-Irish ancestors. However, when displaying their map of the DNA results, it shows an 'incident' in Poland which, when clicked on, says is the death of my father - who definitely didn't die in Poland. I've updated his "place of death" to include "Ireland" - maybe they rerun the data periodically. I don't know why it seems to think so. MyHeritage is where I store all my main family tree information. Going into the general (ie non-DNA) information, under "Family Statistics"\Places, it lists "Places of residence" as being 62% Ireland and 31% Poland. I don't even know anyone in my family who set foot in Poland!

MyHeritage must use this information as part of their algorithm to decide regions. I'll get in touch with them to query it.

Here's the DNA map:


Here are the "Residence" places. Not sure how I can find out which people it's referring to, so I can be more specific in the information, I'll need to check.

Is there any point on following up on the DNA matches that Ancestry send you ?
I've gone through some of them and for the life of me I can't any connections. They sent me one today for someone who shares a name in my tree - Smith FFS !!
I don't expect Ancestry to do the research for me but seriously how tenuous are those suggested connections ?

myheritage.com currently accepting uploads of DNA data from other suppliers and will provide free ethnicity estimate.

Is it worth doing this?

Uploaded my sample on to Gedmatch and got an email the next day from someone matched. We have a matching surname which isn't that common locally in both our recent family tress and connections within the same geographic area but oddly enough my cousin who also did his dna and is my closest match has no match to this other person. So our connection is somewhere else where neither of us have researched yet and not what appeared to be the obvious connection. Damed if I can figure out the connection though and the only family member who could tie it all together easily is dead.

pawrick wrote: »

oddly enough my cousin who also did his dna and is my closest match has no match to this other person. So our connection is somewhere else where neither of us have researched yet and not what appeared to be the obvious connection.

That's not necessarily what that means. Just because you match someone doesn't mean your cousin will, even if the person is related to both of you. Even siblings aren't expected to have all the same matches.

Think of it this way, you get on average a quarter of your DNA from each grandparent, as do each of your first cousins. But you don't all get the same quarter.

Mez1982 wrote: »

My Heritage Ethnicity. As far as I can go back Ancestors are Irish. A few English surnames (from the research I've done into them)It's given me 2% higher Italian than Ancestry and Ancestry had it Italy/Greece..Don't think it's accurate after the Irish/scottish/welsh and I've seen a lot of people complain of it's accuracy on some of the Geneology groups on Facebook but would give them a 10/10 for the intro video

Do you have a family tree on MyHeritage? Just wondering if they might have used that in their algorithms. If you do, check under Home\Family Statistics\Places\Places of residence to see if they have misinterpreted the location of any of your data. As I said above, they seem to think 40% of my family lived in Poland (100% Irish here too).

Mez1982 wrote: »

Fairly typical tree in terms of Ancestry . But I have no one born in Germany or Canada...
No one died in Germany or GB... The USA is where branches went so that would be where they're getting that from.

I managed to find and correct (well, change) the data they were interpreting as being Poland, aswell as a few other address inconsistencies. If you go into Family Tree\Pedigree Map, you should be able to zoom in on the map and click on the pins in the wrong place to see what person/data it is. For me, the "Polish" addresses turned out to be misinterpretations of Dublin postcodes - anything with a postcode after it (eg Dublin 8) it was interpreting as "Dubliny, Poland". I was abled to fix it be moving the postcode to the Zipcode field and adding "Ireland" as the country for each one. Now I have no Polish pins listed on the Statistics map.

I realise this may look like it's going off-topic, but I think it's relevant in that I'm curious to see if it changes the MyHeritage analysis of the "Eastern European" portion of my DNA results now.

pinkypinky wrote: »

I transferred a cousin's DNA results to MyHeritage - a total of 7 matches! Is their database still very small?

You did better than me. I only have 4 matches compared to 163 4th cousins or closer matches on Ancestry. So yes their database appears to be very small. This is understandable since if you test your DNA with Ancestry and upload to FTDNA you've pretty much covered the companies that possible relatives will test with. There should be an increase due to the free ethnicity estimate though.

I got 100% Irish, Scottish and Welsh on MyHeritage. I got 96% Irish on Ancestry and 100% British Isles on FTDNA so it seems pretty accurate for my results anyway.