Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 5 What Next?

In previous posts I've put down some First Thoughts on MyHeritage's new Genetic groups, discussed their Ethnicity Estimates and Historical Maps and found them both wanting, and had a first look at how the Groups themselves shape up in my own family, and found them very promising indeed. 

Here's a few ideas for next steps.

1 Match info
First off, MyH should add the Genetic Groups to the information it gives us about all our matches. This information is already quite substantial, but the GGs have the potential to add even more value to it. Up front, in the Match List, just below the Estimated Relationships, there's plenty of room:

2 Match filter
Next, add a Filter for 'Your Genetic Groups' at the top of the Match List, so that we can see in one list all matches who share a particular GG with us. Once again, there is plenty of room. This could be very revealing, and lead to immediate progress in tracing family connections.

3 Group info on segments
Let us see the segment information on which the Genetic Groups are based. This could be via an option to display a GG label on segments in the Chromosome Browser, for instance. This would immediately help us to distinguish maternal matches from paternal ones, and could even help us to further narrow down how these matches are related to us.

4 Maternal/paternal labels on segments
Once we have identified our closest maternal and paternal matches, MyH could possibly even automate the allocation of maternal and paternal sides to individual segments, thus taking the 'bucket' procedure used by FTDNA to a whole new level.

5 Pile-up info
MyH say they have taken segments of all sizes into account when compiling the Genetic Groups. I presume this includes the pile-up regions that are the bane of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic genealogy. Could it even be that the pile-ups themselves are pointing towards the Genetic Groups? For instance, could membership of a given GG be determined by a combination of specific pile-ups on specific chromosomes? If this is what is happening, MyH has all the info needed to identify this association for us.

6 Timeline
Following on from (5), might it then be possible to suggest a timeframe for the formation of these Genetic Groups? This could contribute towards our understanding of the patterns of migration of the AJ community, in particular the movement from Western Europe towards the East during medieval times, and even the origins of the community itself.

7 Time to MRCA
In turn, could (6) even lead us towards an estimation of Time to Most Recent Common Ancestor(s), for any given pile-up region? Where and when did a particular pile-up segment originate?

8 Location, location, location
How local can we get? In her original article - all of two weeks ago! - Roberta Estes said that MyH had "absolutely nailed" her Dutch ancestry, pinning one of her Genetic Groups down to an area 20 miles square.  I don't expect quite this level of precision for AJs - but ..... ???

9 Third Parties
I would love to see what our friends at DNA Painter and Genetic Affairs can dream up. I have in the past asked Jonny Perl at DNA Painter if they could find a way for AJs to identify our individual pile-up regions. Maybe he could offer us the option of colourising our Genetic Groups in the Chromosome Browser display? And Genetic Affairs' AutoClusters do not seem to be working for AJs as well as they do for non-endogamous groups. Can Evert-Jan Blom find a way of including MyH's Genetic Groups in the cluster information he gives us? We would then be able to see to what extent there is a correlation between the clusters, which are based on shared matches, and the GGs, which are based on shared segments - ie, actual DNA.

That's probably enough to be going on with.

Tracing the X in Levin

Several of my cousins have now done a DNA test, and we are beginning to get some interesting results. Within the last couple of weeks results have come in for Beatrice, a 3rd Cousin to me, and for Dan, a 2nd Cousin. Dan and I share great-grandparents, Shliomo Dovid Ilyutovich and Mikhlya Levin, whilst Beatrice's great-grandfather is Mikhlya's brother Leib. So our connection with Beatrice is one generation further back, with the parents of Mikhlya and Leib, Berko Levin and his wife Sora Leya. Our Levin family is from a village called Streshin, in Mogilev province in the east of Belarus, and later from Gomel, a bit further south.

With these new results in, I was able to do a few checks comparing known Levin family members using the chromosome browser on the FTDNA website. Apart from my brother Brian and myself, we have results for Katy (the daughter of our 1st cousin Jenny, so she's our 1st Cousin-once-Removed), and for Patrick - a 1C1R to Dan. 

The Chromosome Browser shows us where we have segments of DNA that exactly match those of another person. These matching segments - especially the longer ones - must almost certainly have come from a common ancestor, although in many cases this ancestor will turn out to be too far back in time for us to be able to trace.

The first impression was that we all seem to match each other here and there, to a greater or lesser extent. Phew! I experimented comparing the group first against myself, then against Brian, then against Katy - and it was here that I encountered a major surprise.

Here is the chart for Katy's X-chromosome. The X has a different inheritance pattern to all the other chromosomes. It is passed from the Mother to all children, Male & Female, and from the Father only to a Female child. This makes the inheritance path quite complicated, but if you sit down with the Tree in front of you and a pencil in your hand, you can follow it through.

NB: the black background represents Katy, the green is Dan, the yellow is Beatrice. The blank lines you can discern on the right-hand side are where Brian, Patrick and myself would be, except we didn't get this X because we are all males, and our Levin line passes through our fathers. And as we saw above, fathers don't pass an X on to their sons. And none of us matches Katy on the left-hand side.

We see that Dan shares a long segment on the X-chromosome with Katy, and Beatrice also matches both of them in this segment in a couple of short stretches. Dan's match with Katy is 110cM, which I am told is unusually long for 2C1R - the segment has been passed down unaltered over 3 generations to Dan, and 4 to Katy. And although Beatrice's match is comparatively short, it is significant that she matches with both of the others at those points.

What is more, we know where this segment comes from, for any ‘match’ displayed in the Chromosome Browser has to come from an ancestor common to all the people who share the match, and our cousinship is close enough for us to know who those ancestors are.

We can trace one of Dan’s X-inheritance paths back via his mother Raya, and her father Shmuilo, to our great-grandmother Mikhlya Levin, and then on to her mother Sora Leya, born about 1830. 

Katy has a path that also wends its way back to the same place, via her mother Jenny, Jenny's father Michael, his mother Zlata, and back to Mikhlya and on to Sora Leya.

And Beatrice also has one that goes back to Sora Leya, via her mother Alice, Alice's mother Annie, and Annie's father Leib, Mikhlya’s brother.

Here's our Levin X-inheritance chart:

NB: girls are pink, boys are blue; and notice that none of these 3 paths pass through two successive males at any point - this would block transmission of the Levin X, which is why Patrick, Brian and myself can't share in the fun.

So we can trace this long stretch of X back to a known common ancestor. That in itself is nice to know, but it has further significant potential. Because anyone else matching Dan or Katy on that same stretch of X - or Beatrice, on her shorter stretch - will have got it from Sora Leya, or from her X-path ancestors, or their X-path descendants. That leaves quite a lot of possibilities, but at least we know what direction to look in.

I would say that this makes anyone matching either of Dan or Katy on the right-hand module of the X-chromosome worth following up - they will be related to us, and the relationship may be traceable. They won’t be close to us, the closest they could be is probably descendants of any siblings of Mikhlya and Leib - but it would be wonderful if we do find some! They would be 3rd Cousins to us - and that's worth knowing about!

Dan and Katy meet for the first time last year. At that point we didn't know about the X in Levin.

Two more members of the Levin X-club: Beatrice and Alice, celebrating Alice's 100 birthday in 2011 with a Yiddish song or two. Sadly Alice passed away the following year.

Just like a jigsaw

Our first success
I did an autosomal DNA test with FTDNA getting on for 5 years ago, and since then a few of my cousins have done so too. Week after week I check our match lists, occasionally spotting a promising looking match, but never yet managing to establish a connection with anyone.

Well, we've just had our first success: my cousin Katy has been able to confirm a previously unknown cousin. It's on her father's side, and I'm connected to her on her mother's side, so it's not a new cousin for me, but the discovery could indirectly be of some help to my own researches.

A few days ago a new match, Niel, appeared in Katy's list, with figures too big to ignore: they share a total of 225cM, with a longest single segment of 75cM. FTDNA predicts they should be 2nd-3rd Cousins. We all have plenty of predicted 2-3Cs, as do most people with Jewish ancestry, and I have never yet been able to connect to any of them. But none so far have shown figures as high as this, so it was obviously worth investigating.

Mystery Man
I have pretty full information on our close relatives on Katy's mother's side, but I have no record of Niel's name. He appears on my match list, and that of my brother, but we share such a small amount of DNA with him that the match probably has very little significance. So the first conclusion is that he'll probably turn out to be on her father's side.

Next step: ask Katy. She had never heard of him. She asked her Dad. He didn't recognise the name either.

So I tried looking online. My first port of call was the Geni world-wide Family Tree - and bingo!, there he was, in a Tree with a handful of relatives, none of them known to us. One of these was his father, Louis, so I tried looking for him on Geni, to see if there was maybe another Tree for this family. There was, and it showed Louis' mother with a surname not too far from Katy's own family name. This did indeed look promising.

Yesterday, while we were still scratching our heads over this, Katy received an email from Niel. He had seen her in his own match list, and recognised her surname as being close to his grandmother's maiden name. He looked for her via Google, found her website, and saw that she had family connections to South Africa.

Jigsaw
This is where the jigsaw comes in.

Niel told us that his grandmother, Mary, was "sent to Canada" to marry his grandfather, Noah, whose wife had died, leaving him with two young children. She herself had a young child, and as Niel puts it, "Unfortunately in those days they thought it was OK to leave her baby behind in Lithuania." This child, Heidi, was brought up by one of Mary's brothers, who later emigrated with his family to South Africa; Niel didn't know the name of this brother.

This last sentence immediately rang a bell with Katy. She knew from her father that his own father, Bentzion, had grown up in South Africa with a "cousin" called Heidi as part of the family. However none of the children seemed to know how she was connected, nor who her parents were.

Now we know. Piecing together the information from Niel and Katy, we have been able to re-constitute the family tree. Mary (also known as Miriam) has to be a sister of Woolf, Bentzion's father (and Katy's great-grandfather) - they have the same surname, and the two stories fit. Heidi is Mary's daughter by a first partner, brought up as a member of Woolf's family, and emigrating to South Africa with them. Meanwhile Mary and Noah had two children in Canada, including Niel's father Louis.

So Niel is Katy's 2nd Cousin-Once-Removed. Without the DNA test to spark the contact, we would most likely never have known. They are now moving on to swapping photos and more stories, no doubt.

Bonus
And as an added bonus, FTDNA uses the DNA that a person shares with known close relatives to allocate some of their other matches to one side or the other of their family. In Katy's case, her mother is a First Cousin to myself and my brother. The DNA we share has enabled FTDNA to create a list of Maternal-side matches for her. Fitting together the pieces of the jigsaw with Niel has now produced a list on her Paternal side. This should help orientate further researches for her.

It may even have repercussions for myself and Brian, as we are more likely to be related to her Maternal matches than to her Paternal ones. So if a promising match appears on my own list, I can use Katy's lists as a steer, and pay it more attention if it is also on her Maternal side.

So we haven't exactly completed the jigsaw, but it's nice at least to fit two of the pieces together - and at the same time, to increase our chances of finding more pieces!

Of X-boxes and Abraham’s Ancestors

Or, ‘No’ is also an answer.

I have recently posted - Big Chunks of DNA, Talking ‘Bout Our Generations - about a close autosomal DNA match I have with CG. He has only one Jewish great-grandparent, whereas I have 8, so the match between us almost certainly goes via this great-grandfather, Abraham Lewis. FamilyTreeDNA predicts that we are 2nd-to-4th Cousins, GEDmatch says our Most Recent Common Ancestor is 4.1 generations back. This puts us in 3rd-great-grandparent territory, ie a couple of generations prior to Abraham Lewis.

I ran a number of comparison tests on GEDmatch, on CG, myself, and a few other people who are closely matched to me, and who are also matched to CG. These threw up a number of possibilities, and closed off several others, but so far I haven’t been able to draw any solid conclusions as to how or where any of us match. See the Talking post for a discussion of these tests.

A major problem is that none of us seem to have full ancestral trees going back as far as we need to for these purposes - that is, 4 or 5 generations. At 4 generations we each have 16 2g-grandparents, at 5 we have 32 3g-grandparents. Here’s my current score, for ancestors whose given names and surnames I know:

parents: 2/2

grandparents: 4/4

great-grandparents: 8/8

2g-grandparents: 12/16, plus 3 given names and 1 completely unknown

3g-grandparents: 13/32, plus 3 given names, and 16 complete unknowns

That is a seriously incomplete tree, once you get down to my 3g-grandparents, and few of the others in the sample seem to have any more in theirs.

What about the X?

One test I did not take a close look at in that post was the X-Chromosome Matrix. The reason I didn’t go with the X is that it looks fiendishly difficult to interpret, but seeing as how I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped with the other tests, I thought I’d give the X a whirl.

The problem is that, as a male, I only get an X from my mother. At first sight this appears to be good news, because it means if I match someone on this chromosome, I can immediately discount my father as the source of the match - and all his ancestors. Females however get their X from both parents - this means that my mother’s X is a combination of both her father and her mother. This pattern repeats back through each succeeding generation, and should mean that we can narrow down the source of our matching X.

From the explanations I’ve seen, such as Unlocking the genealogical secrets of the X chromosome by Blaine Bettinger, this has the result that, at the level of 2g-grandparents, only 5 of your 8 maternal 2g-grandparents could contribute to an X-match, and none of your paternals could anyway. One generation further back, and the contributors form an even smaller proportion: only 8/16 maternal 3g-grandparents.

Blaine Bettinger's Male Inheritance Chart

Here’s the chart he devised - male is blue, always to the left, female pink (of course), always right (of course). I’m the blue circle in the middle, the left side is totally blank because my father didn’t give me an X. Two generations further back, and the same applies to my mother’s paternal grandfather - she got nothing from him, so neither do I. Which means that the whole of his line can be discounted for X-matching purposes. Similarly for each male that appears in my ancestry chart - they got no X from their father, only from their mother, so their father’s line doesn’t contribute to the party.

Now all I have to do is map my ancestral Tree to this chart, and do the same for anyone I have a decent X-match with, and hey presto, sooner or later we will spot someone appearing in both Trees, who would be the source of our match.

Well, following Bettinger’s chart, here’s my X-map, showing only those ancestors who could have contributed to my  X-chromosome:

4th Generation (2g-grandparents)

(m: mother, f: father)

m-f-m-f: Lejbus Kohn (1820-1884)

m-f-m-m: Marya Igla (b 1834)

m-m-f-m: Gitla Laja Glasman (1847-1872)

m-m-m-f: Aron Moise Szechtman (b 1845)

m-m-m-m: Laja Ruchla Landenbaum (b 1848)

I know them all. I have names and dates of birth, and some places, for all of them. Anyone I match on the X, the match has to be through one of these. The Most Recent Common Ancestor I share with the match person is not necessarily one of these, but the X-path we share goes through one of them, so the MRCA has to be an ancestor of one of them.

However, the autosomal matches I am considering here are at least one generation further out, and this is where, once again, our paper trail doesn’t quite meet our DNA trail. Here are my potential X-donors from the generation before:

5th Generation (3g-grandparents)

m-f-m-f-m: ? ?

m-f-m-m-f: ? ?

m-f-m-m-m: ? ?

m-m-f-m-f: Pinkus Glasman (d 1895)

m-m-f-m-m: Chawa ? (d 1886)

m-m-m-f-m: ? ?

m-m-m-m-f: Jankel Hersz Landenbaum (b 1822)

m-m-m-m-m: Cyma Elbsztajn (b 1822)

I know fewer than half of them. Or, to put it another way, at this level, which is the first we come to that could possibly host our MRCA, more than half my lines go blank. Worse still, Jews in Poland were only obliged to adopt surnames in 1821, just around the time when this generation was being born. Prior to that, the Jewish custom was to use patronymics, referring to the father’s given name. It is highly likely that the parents of this generation were not born with surnames, and many of them did not have surnames when they married. This makes them extremely difficult to trace even when the records are available, to put it mildly.

So even if I had a full house of 5th Generation ancestors, and knew the given names of all of their parents, I would be extremely lucky to be able to identify an MRCA with any of them. In fact I have names for only 2 out of the 13 candidate X-donors in the 6th Generation, so it looks like Mission Well-Nigh Impossible.

Nevertheless, I gave it a go, just to see where it might lead me.

Our X-matches

Here’s the chart that I get for the group of people who match both CG and myself, for matches on the X-Chromosome, in cM (centiMorgans, the unit used for measuring matching segments of DNA on a given chromosome):

	MS	CG	PL	YS	JMN	RNB	LS	AD	BN
MS
CG
PL					41.6	13.4
YS						4.2
JMN			41.6			16.1	27.5
RNB			13.4	4.2	16.1
LS					27.5
AD
BN

The first thing we notice is that 4 of us do not match any other member of the group: CG, AD, BN and myself. Which immediately suggests that I need to rethink the relevance of the X-Chromosome to my match with CG. I don’t match him there. So is the X-test useless for this study?

Well, maybe not quite. We have already deduced (see earlier posts) that my match with CG is not on my father’s side, as Katy, a known 1st Cousin-Once-Removed on that side, does not appear amongst his matches. So he’s almost certainly on my mother’s side. The lack of a match on the X means that we can probably discard those lines that do make an X-contribution - the ones I tried to map above. His match with me is not an X-match, so it is probably along one of my other maternal lines, one that sooner or later passes through 2 consecutive males, so that that particular X-stream comes to a halt.

So we are maybe one small step closer to locating our MRCA - they’re probably hiding in one of the blank boxes on the maternal side of Blaine Bettinger’s chart.

The same logic applies to the other non-matches here. We need to focus on our blank boxes.

On the other hand, the ones that do match look quite promising. JMN matches with 3 others, as does RNB, including their match with each other. JMN also has the two strongest matches, with Big Chunks in common with PL (41.6cM), and with LS (27.5cM). Does this indicate a common line of X-descent for the four of them? And is their MRCA to be found along those lines? If so, what implications does this have for the results we looked at in the two earlier posts?

Our Autosomal matches

In Talkin ‘Bout Our Generations, we noticed that CG and I have reasonable autosomal matches on 3 chromosomes with PL, 2 with RNB, and one with JMN. These matches seem to be quite significant, as there’s only one other match with any other member the group, a small match with YS. There is no other chromosome where any of them matches both CG and myself - they match us both, but in different places. 

What’s more, of the 3 who do match both of us, there are 2 chromosomes where 2 of them join with us to make a foursome: PL and RNB join us on a stretch of Chr 5, and PL and JMN join us on Chr 18. So CG, myself, and PL seem to form a core autosomal group, with RNB and JMN also associated. Is this a hint that some, or maybe all, of us share a single MRCA? Or maybe two MRCAs across the 5 of us, a generation apart?

And as we’ve just seen, PL, RNB and JMN are just the ones who form the core of the X-matching group. We might have a promising lead here, if it weren’t for the fact that neither CG nor I seem to match any of them on the X. However, maybe we can extract some clues from this situation.

Abraham's Ancestors

To re-cap: CG has only one Jewish g-grandparent, the rest of us have wholly Jewish ancestry, as far as I know. His match with us must come through his g-grandfather Abraham Lewis. The MRCA(s) he shares with the rest of the group must be ancestors of Abraham. So how do the rest of us connect to Abraham’s ancestors? And can our X-trails help us find our pathways to our MRCA(s)?

Let’s start with CG himself. His g-grandfather Abraham is on his father’s side, so CG has not inherited any X from his Jewish ancestors, which is why he doesn’t match on the X with any of the others in this group. However, all the rest of us can only connect to him via Abraham’s ancestors.

If I’m understanding this right, the most recent common X-ancestor of a group of people is the same person as their autosomal MRCA, it’s just that X gives us a different way of identifying them. So the X-ancestor of the core X-matching group - PL, RNB, JMN - is their MRCA. I’d really like to make the jump to say that this person is also the MRCA they share with CG, but I’m not sure that’s justified. It would be particularly nice for me, since the 5 of us - PL, RNB, JMN, CG and myself - have a reasonably good overall autosomal match, and the X-match could be pointing the way to our shared MRCA even though 2 of us don’t share in it.

Locating the X-ancestor

We can also narrow down the candidates for the common X-ancestor for each person, by tracing the lines back on Blaine Bettinger’s chart above. Both FTDNA and GEDmatch suggest our MRCA(s) lie 4 to 5 generations back. As we saw before, at 5 generations, for males there are only 8 candidates for X-donor, all on the maternal side. The lines are (m: mother, f: father):

Male pathways to X-ancestors

m-f-m-f-m

m-f-m-m-f

m-f-m-m-m

m-m-f-m-f

m-m-f-m-m

m-m-m-f-m

m-m-m-m-f

m-m-m-m-m

Of the core X-group, RNB is male, PL and JMN are female. So one of the above pathways should be RNB’s personal route to the MRCA he shares with the other two.

Females get their X from both parents, so in addition to the above pattern for the 8 lines on the maternal side of the X-chart, they also have 5 candidates on the paternal side:

Additional female pathways to X-ancestors

f-m-f-m-f

f-m-f-m-m

f-m-m-f-m

f-m-m-m-f

f-m-m-m-m

For PL and JMN respectively, one of these 13 pathways should be their route to the MRCA. All we need is a full family tree for each of them going back 5 generations along each of these lines. We  can then put those trees alongside the 8 candidate lines from RNB’s maternal tree, and wait for a name to jump out at us.

Easy!

'No' is also an answer

My own case is different again. I know that I match CG on my maternal side, but do not match him on the X. This could be where “‘No’ is also an answer” comes in. I do not match him, so our MRCA should lie not in one of the coloured ‘candidate X-donor’ boxes in my X-chart, but in one of the blank boxes. Or, to put it another way, looking at the male-pathway list above, the path to our MRCA should lead to one of my 5th-generation ancestors who does not appear in that list - ie, to one of these:

My blank X-boxes

m-f-f-f-f: Lewek Jakobowicz (1803-1876)

m-f-f-f-m: Libe Tauba Szczawinska (d between 1852 and 1868)

m-f-f-m-f: Wolek Zegelman

m-f-f-m-m: Wajla Chern

m-f-m-f-f: ? Kohn

m-m-f-f-f: Izrael Waksman (1814-1860)

m-m-f-f-m: Chaja Gitla Ejsensztat (b 1822)

m-m-m-f-f: ? Szechtman

Amazingly, I seem to know these better than my X-match candidate ancestors (see list above). I have full names for 6 of them, and surnames for the other 2. So all I need is full lines of descent for each of them, then to put those alongside CG’s tree, and look for his 2g-grandfather Abraham Lewis, and Abraham’s parents Hyman Lisky and Rose (Lewis ?), to pop up.

Done and dusted!

Minor issues

There are a couple of minor issues that could make a bit of a mockery of my reasoning, if I’m not lucky. Many of us reckon that FTDNA, and to a lesser extent GEDmatch, overestimate the closeness of the relationships of Ashkenazi Jews. I have over 100 matches on FTDNA predicted to be at 2nd-to-4th Cousin level, but have not yet succeeded in identifying a single one of them. My guess is that most of the relationships are really a generation or two further out. That would mean looking for MRCAs at a distance of 6 to 7 generations. I have the given names of just 3 of my 128 7th-generation ancestors. 

Hopeless!

The other issues arise from the way in which our DNA is passed on from one generation to the next. We do not necessarily receive exactly a half of our DNA from each parent, and as this is repeated over the course of a few generations, we could gradually have lost all genetic trace of one or more of our ancestors. Also, our DNA is liable to mutate over the course of the generations, and so will no longer match with people who are in fact our relatives.

These factors may be making nonsense of my argument at one point or another of this discussion. There is an outside chance that they could be behind the apparent contradictions in my interpretation of some of these tests. For instance, it is possible that CG is in fact related to me on my father’s side, but that he and/or Katy have lost some of the segments of DNA that would indicate this. The same could apply to my reading of the X data - maybe I’ve just lost the bits of X that would have indicated that I share the X-match with the core group identified above.

It is also possible that multiple instances of the endogamous relationships that are inherent amongst Ashkenazi Jews, such as cousin marriage, or just intra-community marriage over many generations, could be leading us up several garden paths at the same time.

As I have said in previous posts on this topic, I know next to nothing about genetic genealogy. I could be misunderstanding anything and everything, and making false assumptions left, right and centre. These posts represent my current grasp of the issues. Comments welcome.