Talking 'Bout Our Generations

Autosomal DNA match: Michael Shade and CG - the view from GEDmatch

The GEDmatch website has a number of utilities that offer different ways of looking at your DNA match data. It’s an independent website, and anyone who has done an autosomal test with any of the usual companies, such as the FTDNA ‘Family Finder’ test that I did, can submit their data there. This has the obvious advantage that you have access to potential matches who tested with the other companies, plus the utilities available on GEDmatch may give insights that you couldn’t get from the other sites.

This week I followed up the tests I ran on FTDNA on my recent match with CG - see last week's post Big Chunks of DNA - by checking how the match looks in some of the GEDmatch utilities. CG has done something similar, and it will be interesting to see how our interpretations compare.

I concluded in Big Chunks that my match to CG is on my mother’s side, which hopefully will help to narrow the field a bit when looking at what GEDmatch has to tell us. CG and I have a match on Chromosome 5 on a significantly long segment of 26cM, and one of the other people I was comparing with there shared this stretch with us; it will be interesting to see whether any of the people who come up in GEDmatch also match us on this segment.

Disclaimer: as in the previous post, I hereby admit that I know next to nothing about genetic genealogy.

Selecting the subjects

My first step was to run the utility ‘People who match one or both of two kits’. This produced a huge long list, in three sections: people who match both CG and myself, people who match me but not him, and people who match him but not me. From the list of those who match both of us, I then selected the ones that had the strongest matches to me.

This gave me 7 people who are predicted by GEDmatch to be related to me via a common ancestor at an estimated distance of 3.5-3.6 generations - ie, predicted 2nd-to-3rd Cousins. CG himself comes out on GEDmatch as 4.1, so he’s estimated to be a 3rd or possibly 4th Cousin. At this point we need to bear in mind that my 7 close matches all seem to be more or less 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, as am I, and there will probably be an element of over-matching between us due to the endogamous nature of the Ashkenazi heritage.

In other words, we are probably really a bit further apart than the DNA test seems to predict. CG, however, has only one Ashkenazi great-grandparent, so any matching with him will point us in a fairly specific direction, and the GEDmatch predictions for him may well be a bit closer to the mark. This test should give some indication of how all 9 of us relate to each other.

The 9 people are: PL, RNB, JMN, BN, YS, AD, LS, plus CG and myself. To recap - they all match both CG and me, but we have no idea yet how they match each other - if indeed they do.

Chromosome Segment Matching

This does a similar job to FTDNA’s Chromosome Browser, and shows us where people match on each of the 22 chromosomes; note that the 23rd, the X-Chromosome, is dealt with by a separate test. I don't match CG on the X-Chr, so I haven't included the results here, although they could be useful for locating how the others match to each other. Here’s how we shaped up.

There are lots of mutual matches, but these were the only places where people had matches to both CG and myself:

Chr 3: RNB

Chr 5: PL + RNB

Chr 14: PL

Chr 18: PL + JMN

Chr 22: YS

So right from the start, we can see that although all 7 people came up as overall matches with both CG and myself, only 4 of them show up with significant matches to us on individual chromosomes. BN, AD and LS do not appear here, so we must assume that they match CG in places where they don’t match me, or that their matching segments are all shorter than 3cM, the minimum used in this test.

The second point of interest is Chromosome 5, where CG and I share a match on 26cM of DNA. Two others match us there, PL and RNB. PL matches us on 10.7cM of this segment, RNB on a much shorter stretch, 3.2cM. The 10.7cM that PL shares with CG and myself is the longest 3-way shared segment to appear in this test. Last week we noticed that there was another person, MW, who matched us in the FTDNA Chromosome Browser on this same stretch of Chr 5. At the moment we can't see how well MW matches PL, as PL did not test through FTDNA, and MW does not seem to have submitted her results to GEDmatch. But there does seem to be a good match here on Chr 5 between the four of us - CG, PL, MW and myself. We must have inherited this segment from a common ancestor, several generations back - but who? And how do we trace them?

PL also matches both of us on 2 other chromosomes, 14 and 18, on shorter stretches; JMN joins the party on 18. I strongly suspect that somewhere not too far down CG’s Ashkenazi line we will find an ancestor of PL, and that this person will also turn out to be the ancestor I share with CG, or may be one generation up- or down-stream of them.

I do share significant stretches on various chromosomes with BN, AD and LS - but not in places where CG matches us. It would be interesting to see how all 7 in this sample show up in CG’s results.

Generations

This table shows us an estimate of the number of generations back to the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of each pair in the sample. Bear in mind that the sample is based on the people who match me most closely, of those that match both CG and myself. So it is no surprise that the figures in the top row (my own results) are lower - ie, the relationships are closer - than those for the others.

Estimated generations to MRCA

	MS	PL	RNB	BN	YS	AD	LS	JMN	CG
MS		3.2	3.4	3.5	3.3	3.5	3.4	3.4	4.1
PL	3.2		3.5	5.7	3.5	5.6	5.2	3.6	5.2
RNB	3.4	3.5		3.7	4.2	5.1	4.2	5.0	4.9
BN	3.5	5.7	3.7		3.6	7.2	4.3	5.8	4.9
YS	3.3	3.5	4.2	3.6		4.0	5.6	4.9	4.7
AD	3.5	5.6	5.1	7.2	4.0		5.1	5.2	5.1
LS	3.4	5.2	4.2	4.3	5.6	5.0		3.4	5.2
JMN	3.4	3.6	5.0	5.8	4.9	5.2	3.4		4.9
CG	4.1	5.2	4.9	4.9	4.7	5.1	5.2	4.9

Key: generations to MRCA

3 to 4 generations

4 to 5 generations

5 to 6 generations

more than 6 generations

Several things strike me here.

1. Despite the fact that PL matches both CG and me on a fair bit of our Big Chunk on Chromosome 5 (see previous section), she appears to be his most distant relative of the 7, along with LS, at 5.2 generations to MRCA. This tempts me to think that perhaps the strength of CG’s relationship to the others lies in a greater number of shorter matching segments, rather than the one blockbuster we share with PL on Chr 5.
2. CG may be the least Ashkenazi of all of this sample, but he comes up with the narrowest range of relationships - he has 4.1 with me, and the others all fall between 4.7 and 5.2, a range of 0.5. This feels like it’s telling me that wherever my connection to him is, all the others are linked to him one generation further back. In other words, if I turn out to be connected to him via his Ashkenazi great-great-grandparents, then the others will be via his 3g-grandparents.
3. Looking at the spread of figures for the other 7 people, some seem to fall into identifiable patterns. PL, for example, is comparatively close to 3 of the others (3.5-3.6), and two generations further away from the other 3 (5.2-5.7). AD’s closest is YS, at 4.0, but he’s much further away from all the others, and is into the red zone with BN. Whatever the connection turns out to be between BN and CG, AD doesn’t seem to share it. He is connected to CG, but his connection is probably via a different pathway.
4. PL’s 3 closest relationships are at a distance only slightly greater than mine to the same people: with RNB she is 3.5, I am 3.4; with YS she is 3.5, I am 3.3; with JMN she is 3.6, I am 3.4. BN’s closest matches are also with RNB and YS, just slightly further out than PL; however she is 2 generations further away from PL herself, at 5.7, and she’s 5.8 from JMN. YS has a similar pattern: his closest are PL and BN, but he is also further away from JMN.
5. This prompts me to wonder whether maybe we should be looking for several different common links: one between PL, RNB ,YS and myself some 4 generations back; a different one between BN, RNB, YS and myself at a similar distance; and another one between PL, JMN and myself at the same sort of distance. And of course CG ’s matches would have to be taken into account as well.

There could be other possibilities, although some of them seem contradictory. Or maybe they’re just endogamous.

NB - if this is getting hard to follow, try following the colours on the chart - or maybe read a book, or listen to some music.

Autosomal DNA comparison

More pretty colours. This time it’s for the total amount of matching DNA in segments over 3cM.

	MS	CG	PL	YS	JMN	RNB	LS	AD	BN
MS		50.8	168.5	141.6	133.0	129.5	123.8	106.6	105.3
CG	50.8		11.1	22.5	16.2	16.8	10.2	11.8	15.3
PL	168.5	11.1		106.8	93.3	110.9	72.7	27.7	86.1
YS	141.6	22.5	106.8		110.3	95.0	100.5	56.6	95.7
JMN	133.0	16.2	93.3	110.3		80.2	122.8	38.5	72.7
RNB	129.5	16.8	110.9	95.0	80.2		109.5	71.2	88.5
LS	123.8	10.2	72,7	100.5	122.8	109.5		50.8	113.8
AD	106.6	11.8	27.7	56.6	38.5	71.2	50.8		10.4
BN	105.3	15.3	86.1	95.7	72.7	88.5	113.8	10.4

Key: matching DNA

over 150 cM	strong
over 100 cM	good
60 - 100 cM	moderate
20 - 60 cM	weak
under 20 cM	very weak

NB: these are my own subjective descriptions, and I am applying them to matches between full Ashkenazi Jews in the first instance. Matches between people with partial Ashkenazi descent and full Ashkenazis, such as those of CG in this sample, would need to be viewed differently. CG's match with me is 50.8cM, for example, and FTDNA regards it as quite strong; however I would regard this figure as quite weak for a full Ashkenazi relationship.

1. PL is my strongest match in terms of total number of shared cMs, apart from Katy, a 1st Cousin Once-Removed - she’s on my father’s side, so she doesn’t appear here. I have not yet established exactly where the connection with PL lies, but as we saw in the previous section, it will probably be found somewhere not too far from my connection with CG.
2. My match with CG is twice as strong as the matches all the others in this sample have with him. Even discounting our shared Big Chunk of 26cM, our match is still the strongest here. This seems to back up the suggestion earlier that our MRCA is possibly a generation or two closer than those he shares with his other matches here.
3. CG has what look like ‘very weak’ matches with all members of this group, apart from myself and, just, YS (see the NB note above). But they are matches that register, nevertheless. My guess is that this is because, with only 1/8 Ashkenazi DNA, he only has 1/8 the background genetic ‘noise’ that the full Ashkenazis have as a result of endogamy.
4. Looking at all the Ashkenazi Jews in the sample, apart from myself - ie, from PL down to BN - the matches they have with each other are all in the moderate to good range, with no ‘weak’ matches at all, with the exception of AD. He is the converse - he matches weakly with all except RNB, and his match with BN is in the red zone - it is even weaker than his match with CG. He may not match the others very well, but nevertheless his match with CG is of the same order as theirs. This suggests to me that CG and AD share an MRCA who is a different person to the one(s) that the rest of us share with him, but is possibly of the same generation. In other words CG could be sharing one 3g-grandparent (say) with AD, and a different one - or perhaps several different ones - with the rest of us.

Comparison between Generations to MRCA and Autosomal Results

An intriguing comparison can be made between the results we see in the chart showing the estimate of Generations to Most Recent Common Ancestor, and those in the chart for Autosomal DNA, both discussed above. I am sure this is very unscientific, but equally I strongly suspect that it is pointing us in something like the right direction.

If you take the average figure for each person in the  Generations to MRCA results, this is what you get:

MS: 3.5

PL: 4.4

RNB: 4.3

BN: 4.8

YS: 4.2

AD: 5.1

LS: 4.5

JMN: 4.5

CG: 4.9

This represents the notional average distance between each person and their ‘cousins’ in this sample. I come out as closest to my cousins, at an average of 3.5 generations, but that’s because I chose them for being comparatively close to me in the first place. All the others have an average distance of between 4 and 5 generations, apart from AD who has 5.1. CG, despite having only 1 Ashkenazi great-grandparent, sits firmly within this group. The common ancestor(s) he shares with the rest of us appear to be more or less the same distance away as those we share with each other.

Now let’s do the same for the matching lengths of Autosomal DNA - these are the average amounts in cM that each person shares with the other people in the group:

MS: 119.9

PL: 84.6

RNB: 87.7

BN: 73.5

YS: 91.1

AD: 46.7

LS: 90.2

JMN: 83.4

CG: 19.3

Excluding myself once again for the reasons given above, we can see that all bar one of the Ashkenazis in the sample lie in a narrow band between 73.5 and 91.1. Is this ‘the zone’ for Ashkenazi 4-to-5 generation relationships?

The one person outside this zone is AD - his matches with the others are considerably weaker, with an average of 46.7cM of shared DNA, and his generations-to-MRCA average is the only one over 5. This could be because his MRCA is a generation or two further back, or that for some reason he has acquired rather less of the DNA that the rest of us have been sharing around. Maybe one of AD's post-MRCA ancestors moved to a different area, and then married out of the local community, whilst those of the rest of us stayed in the same place for a generation or two longer, and continued marrying within the same community? That could explain how he has sufficient DNA in common with the rest of us to register as a good match, but the rest of us share more.

CG’s 1/8 Ashkenazi heritage leads him to share an average of 19.3cM, though if you take me out of this calculation it comes out considerably lower, at 14.8cM. The 26cM segment we share on Chromosome 5 comes from his Lisky line, and appears to be having a considerable effect on these results.

Caveats

This discussion comes with a number of health warnings:

• Please bear in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about - I have no qualifications or experience in this area. I may be missing or misunderstanding important factors that could completely wreck my analysis.
• I am aware that this is a very small sample. In mitigation, I don't think my brain would be able to cope with anything larger.
• I suspect that 'Average' may not be the best tool to use to crunch these numbers, however I am not a statistician, and have nothing else in my tool-box. 
• One thing I am aware of is that, whilst we inherit our DNA equally from our 2 parents, what comes through to us from our 4 grandparents is not equally shared out. It is quite possible to lose the DNA trace of a given ancestor completely over the course of a few generations. In other words, we may have very little DNA, or none at all, from one of our gg-grandparents, and quite a lot from another one. This will affect how we match with other people who share an ancestor with us. Take a hypothetical case involving two people - let’s call them A and B - who share the same common ancestor with me, say a gg-grandparent: this common ancestor’s DNA has come through quite well to myself, and to A, but hardly at all to B. So A will appear to be a good match to me, but B’s matches to both of us will be weak, if they show up at all. There may be quite a bit of this going on in the group I am looking at here.
• We should also bear in mind that by the very nature of endogamy, some or all of the members of this group may be related to each other by more than one route. Thus our connection to our Most Recent Common Ancestor with CG may not be our only connection to each other. Our connection to CG is only via his g-grandfather's ancestors, as this is his only Ashkenazi line; however our results will doubtless be affected by the endogamy that probably occurred in earlier generations.
• There is an outside chance that one or more of the Ashkenazi members of this group may have an unsuspected non-Ashkenazi ancestor, and that this ancestor may also have a connection to one of CG’s 7 non-Ashkenazi lines. About as much chance as me proving descent from King David, but I thought I’d mention it. Slightly less unlikely is that there may be a second, unsuspected, Ashkenazi input in one of CG’s other lines. Either of these scenarios could provide a second connection between individuals here.
• A brief revisit to the X-Chromosome, which I have ignored here as CG and I do not match there. On the basis that "No is also an answer", I will attempt to look into the implications of a non-match on the X in a later post.  In theory an X match would serve to narrow the possible field for a connection - only certain ancestral lines can carry an X-match, so we can restrict ourselves to looking at those. Is the converse true for a non-match? If we do not match, might this justify discarding those ancestral lines where X-matches are possible, and concentrating on those where they are not possible?

Conclusions

The impetus for this discussion was finding CG amongst my closest autosomal matches on FTDNA. He has only one Ashkenazi g-grandparent - ie, 1/8 - yet at the time of writing he is my 10th closest match, out of over 5300. The vast majority of my other matches are full Ashkenazis, 8/8, and yet my match with him appears to be stronger than with all of them bar the top 9. FTDNA predicts our relationship as 2nd-to-4th Cousin, GEDmatch rates us as 4.1 generations back to our Most Recent Common Ancestor, which would be 2g- or 3g-grandparents, ie 3rd or 4th Cousins. His only Ashkenazi line is through his g-grandfather Abraham Lisky. He's pretty sure the Lisky family came from Poland, but he does not know which part of the country they lived in, though there is a suggestion of Augustow in the north-east.

He does not match my cousin Katy, who is on my father’s side, so he must be on my mother’s side. However, there are no known Liskys in my mother's family. What we have to try to work out is how one of CG’s earlier Liskys could have married an ancestor of one of my mother’s Frankensteins, or one of her Waksmans.

A quick check on the Surname Distribution Mapper on the JRI-Poland website shows that the main centre for the name Lisky (and variants) in Poland is an area to the south-west of Warsaw, from Lodz to Mogielnica. This area is about equidistant from the ancestral homes of my maternal grandparents' families - the Frankenstein family is from Gombin, about 125 km to the north of Mogielnica, and the Waksmans are from Demblin, about 100km to the east. Not too far for a connection, but it doesn't seem to offer us a quick and easy geographical solution. 

There are a few other Liskys dotted around the rest of Poland, some in and near Warsaw, and even one occurrence in Plock, the nearest larger town to my Frankensteins' home, Gombin. There appears to be no Liskys in the records for the town of Augustow in the far north-east of Poland, though there are a couple in the nearby larger towns of Suwalki and Bialystok. The name does not seem to occur elswhere - there’s just a handful in the Ukraine and Belarus - so Poland seems a reasonable assumption. But so far, there's nothing persuasive.

It might help to know some of their given names. CG’s grandfather Abraham Lisky was born in London; Abraham’s father came to the UK in the 1870s. He was known as Hyman in English, but I can find no Lisky anywhere in the available Polish records, living at a suitable time, with a given name that could reasonably give rise to this English name. So no joy there either.

In my own family, on my maternal grandfather’s side I now have reasonably good lines of descent for two children of my 3g-grandparents, Lewek Frankensztajn and Libe Taube Szczawinska. However they may well have had more children - most people did in those days - and if they did, I know nothing of them as yet. It’s the same story for my 3g-grandparents Wolek Zegelman and Waila Chern. I have much less for my 2g-grandparents Lejbus Kohn and Marya Igla - I have neither parents nor siblings for either of them, and descendants for only 2 of his 13 children.

It’s much the same on my maternal grandmother’s side. I have a reasonably good ancestral line back to my 4g Waksman grandparents, but information on many of their descendant lines comes to a stop after a generation or two, and as on the other side, there are probably a host of siblings I know nothing of. In my g-grandmother’s Szechtman family, I know the given name of her father, but nothing else.

So my family tree has more bare branches than leafy ones, and so does CG's, at least on the Lisky side. The paper trail runs out, both forwards and backwards, in both our families, just at the point where we are trying to connect our DNA results. It’s all very frustrating, but you do get the feeling that somewhere or other, there is a single piece of information that could solve the puzzle.

Who’s hiding it?

Big Chunks of DNA

Autosomal DNA match: Michael Shade and CG

I am of East European Ashkenazi Jewish origins. For centuries the East European Jews lived as small minority populations in whichever country they were in, and consistently married within their own community. Married couples were often related to each other, more or less closely, sometimes as closely as first cousins. This phenomenon of near-exclusive intra-community marriage is referred to as endogamy, and it has led to a situation today in which nearly all Ashkenazi Jews seem to be related to each other, more or less distantly.

This has significant consequences for our Autosomal DNA test results. Ashkenazi Jews have many times more ‘matches’ than other groups, and the predicted relationships often seem exaggeratedly close. FamilyTreeDNA have recognised this effect, and have altered their algorithms to try to take it into account, but the results still seem skewed. This makes it particularly difficult to identify genuine matches that can be checked against evidence gained from traditional methods of family history research.

In my own case, I now have over 100 matches at a predicted level of 2nd-to-4th Cousin or closer. However, I have not been able to establish a definite relationship to a single one of them, apart from Katy, the daughter of one of my 1st Cousins. I discussed these issues in the post A Hundred Up, from a couple of months back.

Here I look at the case of a match that came up a couple of months ago with someone who, at first sight, doesn’t seem to be Ashkenazi Jewish at all.

Disclaimer: I must point out before we start that I am a total amateur at this, and may be talking complete rubbish. If you know better, or can suggest a different interpretation, please let me know. Nicely. Many thanks.

FTDNA Family Finder results

As at 14 Jan 2016, CG is my 10th closest match on FTDNA’s Family Finder. I currently have over 5300 matches there altogether, the vast majority being too remote to even consider following up. A look down any page at random suggests that the vast majority of those listed have recognisably Jewish surnames, and a check of the Ancestral Surnames that some have listed seems to confirm this.

However, of the 100-odd 2nd-to-4th Cousin matches, very few show any of my own ancestral surnames or places, and if they have one, they don’t have the other. Of the closest 20, only one lists an ancestral surname that corresponds to any of mine. So they don’t feel like a bunch of 2nd-to-4th Cousins, even if that’s how FTDNA categorises them. That’s Ashkenazi endogamy for you.

CG stands out from the crowd, as his list of 60-odd ancestral surnames includes only 3 that could be considered to be recognisably - though not exclusively - Jewish. One of his great-grandfathers was Jewish, and used the surname Lewis. His parents had immigrated to London in the 1870s, from somewhere in Poland, where their surname was Lisky.

FTDNA: Shared centiMorgans

On the FTDNA Matches page, you can sort by Relationship Range to see a listing in order of genetic closeness to you. In my case this puts my cousin Katy at the top - she’s a 1st Cousin Once-Removed - followed by a few predicted to be 2nd-to-3rds, and then the 2nd-to-4ths. CG is in 10th place - but it turns out this is not because of the total amount of DNA we share, but rather because of the length of the longest shared segment.

The unit used is centiMorgans - don’t ask me to explain what they are, I’ve seen several different explanations, none of which I can claim to understand, but for our purposes it’s the standard measure used for the amount of DNA you may or may not match someone on. The more cMs two people share, the stronger the match.

Here are the relevant numbers for CG and the four people around him in the list - these are my top 5 out of a total of 100 2nd-to-4ths:

	Total shared cM	Longest shared segment, cM
MM	134.98	30.99
GIM	159.43	27.73
MW	113.04	26.54
CG	57.99	26.35
LAE	108.68	24.14

So although CG has only 1 Ashkenazi Jewish great-grandparent, and so is only 1/8 AJ, he shares 1/2 as much DNA with me as the others do. And the longest segment we share is right up there with the best. Looking at these figures aroused my curiosity even more.

FTDNA: In common with

It struck me that the match with CG could be quite helpful, even if we were not able to determine exactly how and where we were related. If I could pin down on which side of my family he matched me, that might help locate some of my other matches, at least on one side or the other of my family.

This is where Katy comes in handy. I know she is on my father’s side, and I can use FTDNA’s ‘in common with’ test to see which of my own matches also match her. It is highly probable that the matches we have in common will be located on my father’s side. At least that halves the problem - they are not on my mother’s side. The converse is also the case - if I run the ‘not in common with’ test, the matches in the resulting list will probably lie on my mother’s side.

It’s actually a little more complicated with Katy, as she has one non-Jewish grandparent, and a Jewish father from a different geographical area to the ancestors we share. But I’m going to ignore those factors for the moment.

Last week I ran the ‘in common with’ test on CG. Katy does not appear, so CG is therefore on my mother’s side. And because he has only two identifiably Jewish great-great-grandparents - the Liskys - the connection must be through them. We haven’t got any further in identifying exactly where it lies, but at least we now know where to look.

FTDNA: Chromosome Browser

I next took a closer look at the ‘in common with’ results, in particular at the top 4 in the list. These are the people whose overall results place them closest to me, and who also match CG. Since they match CG and not my cousin Katy, they too will eventually turn out to be on my mother’s side. Again, I’ll refer to them by initials: MW, SLR, JW, DRT.

The Chromosome Browser test shows where you match each other on each chromosome, and how long the matching segments are. It also tells you how many segments you match on with each of the other people you have included in the test. 

Number of matching segments with me:

MW: 24

SLR: 23

JW: 20

CG: 11

DRT: 36

The point of interest here was that although CG only has one Jewish great-grandparent, as far as I can tell the others in this group all have 8, as do I. And yet despite having only 1/8 the amount of Ashkenazi genetic input, he nevertheless matches me on 1/2 the number of segments that most of the others do. I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this. As we saw before, he also came up with roughly 1/2 the total shared cM as my other top 2nd-to-4ths - a different group of people (see previous section). Might it be that some bits of Ashkenazi DNA are more durable, or more sticky - less likely to mutate - than the average? Or maybe it’s just some of the bits that he and I share?

However, some of these segments are quite small, and may not be of much genetic significance.

I ran 2 checks on the Chromosome Browser, to see where we all matched. When I put the minimum match length at 5cM, there were only 3 points at which more than one person matched me exactly:

Chromosome 5: MW & CG

Chromosome 15: JW & DRT

Chromosome 18: SLR & DRT

The match on Chr 18 between myself, SLR & DRT is quite short, but the other two appear to be quite substantial. Chr 5 is where CG and I have our 26cM match, and MW substantially shares this. The same is the case on Chr 15, with myself, JW and DRT. These look like big chunks of DNA in common between 3 people.

I would like to conclude from this that, if and when CG and I manage to establish exactly where in our respective families our match is located, then we should expect to find one of MW’s ancestors there or thereabouts as well. Or of course the breakthrough may happen with MW’s family, pointing the way to the match with CG. The same thinking applies to the match on Chr 15 - JW and DRT are on my mother’s side, but maybe not in the same branch as CG and MW.

As I said, I would like to be able to come to this conclusion. Either that, or be shown why I shouldn’t.

I then set the bar lower, at 3cM. This gave me:

Chr 3: SLR & DRT

Chr 5: MW & CG

Chr 7: MW & JW

Chr 12: MW & SLR & CG

Chr 15: JW & DRT

Chr 18: SLR & DRT

The results in red are the new ones, and represent fairly short matches at between 3cM and 5cM. They are probably less significant than the longer matches. However, Chromosome 12 catches my eye - MW, SLR and CG all share a short segment there with me. Does that hint at a common ancestor for all 4 of us, somewhere way back in time? Notice that SLR seems to have joined the club formed on Chr 5 by MW, CG and myself, although she does not appear to have a significant match there herself. Could the Chr 12 group be related via a different common ancestor? CG only has 2 candidate ancestors - his Lisky g-grandparents. Could the Chr 5 match be via one of them, and the Chr 12 match via the other?

It feels like there are some tantalising hints here, if only we could work out what they are pointing us to.

GEDmatch to follow

CG has also submitted his DNA results to GEDmatch, as have I. The tests available there are different, and potentially very interesting. Next up. 

A Hundred Up

Three years ago I submitted a DNA sample to FamilyTreeDNA, and sat back and waited for the test results. The genetic 'matches' have duly been coming in, week by week since then, over 5000 of them and counting. Today I received my 100th match at the level of 2nd-to-4th Cousin. A cause for celebration, you would think - a host of new connections, new cousins, the expansion of our family tree, new family stories to hear and tell.

Well, I have not been able to establish a connection with a single one of them, with the exception of one I already knew, since before she was born so to speak - she's my cousin's daughter.

The problem is, my ancestors. And those of my matches. We are Ashkenazi Jews, and belong to a group that has been endogamous - ie, has intermarried within the group - not just for generations, but for centuries. So the DNA testing companies, and the science that underlies them, struggle to fit us into the pattern that works well for most other populations. They say they compensate to take account of the effects of endogamy, and I'm sure they do, but in my experience I have to say they end up grossly over-estimating the closeness of our relationships.

(click if it's too small to read)

Here's the listing of my top 5 matches. Katy, the first one, is a 1st Cousin Once Removed - my cousin's daughter. So I know her. The next four are classed as probable 2nd-3rd Cousins, which means we should share great-great-grandparents, or closer. 

The thing is, I know my family quite well. I know all the descendants of all my grandparents, most of them personally. I know the given and family names of all 8 of my great-grandparents, and where most of them were born and where they lived. I know the names and places for the vast majority of their descendants - ie, the brothers and sisters of my own grandparents, and their children in turn, who are my 2nd Cousins.

Moving back to the previous generation, my great-great-grandparents should in theory be the source of my 2nd-3rd Cousin matches. I know the given and family names of 12 out of 16 of them, including all 8 men and 4 of the women, and many of their places; I also know the given names of the other 4 women. My knowledge of their descendant lines - ie, those of my great-grandparents' siblings - is much more sketchy. In some cases I know only the name of my own ancestor, and have no information at all on possible siblings. Some of my DNA 2nd-4th Cousin matches will undoubtedly come from these unknown lines, maybe most of them. But surely not all 99 of them?

From my grandparents to my great-great-great-grandparents

(click on the image to enlarge it)

To take this one step further, the above implies that I actually know the family names of 12 out of 16 of the families of my great-great-great-grandparents - in other words, I know the family names that all of the siblings of my great-great-grandparents would have had, even if I don't actually know whether they existed or not. And these, of course, are the family names that the men would have passed on to the next generation.

At this point, let's make a few uncontroversial, generalising, assumptions: 

i) that any descendants that married and had children would be more or less equally divided between male and female

ii) that most women would take on their husband's surname on marriage, and thereby not pass on their own

iii) that any children they had would again be 50% male and 50% female, and so on

In this scenario, my knowledge of the surnames of any potential cousins would more or less halve with each generation, as the women don't pass on the known family name. However I do actually know who the siblings are in some cases, in particular who the women were, and who they married, and this knowledge increases the closer we get to the present day - so the halving process I am suggesting here is an exaggeration. I know much more than half of the names in my grandparents generation, but the calculation is easier to follow like this - let's just bear in mind we're being severe with the numbers.

So whereas I know all the family names of my great-great-grandparents' generation - the source of my 3rd Cousins - I will only know about half of those of my great-grandparents' generation, and a quarter of those of my grand-parents'. Which means I should expect to recognise the names of an eighth - 12.5% - of my parents' generation. And 6.25% of my own. Not 0% of any of them, which is where I am with my DNA matches at the moment.

We can halve again to get the picture for 4th Cousins - I should recognise fewer names in each succeeding generation: 12.5% of my 4th Cousins in my grandparents' generation, 6.25% in my parents', and 3.125% in my own. But again, not 0% of any of them. Especially considering we're just being theoretical, and not taking my actual knowledge into account.

And it's not just me recognising names in my own family tree - I am sharing trees with a number of my closer matches - and I don't recognise what's on theirs, nor they what's on mine.

So my conclusion is that FTDNA's match estimates exaggerate the closeness of our relationships. My guess at the moment is that they are a couple of generations out at least. I'm in touch this week with a couple of the 2nd-3rd Cousin matches in the list above, and I'll be surprised if we manage to confirm FTDNA's ratings. More than surprised - I'll be overjoyed! But I'm not expecting anything closer than 4th-5th.

A major issue of course is that most of us are finding it very difficult to trace our families back more than two or three generations, which is where we need to be to locate 3rd Cousins and further. In many areas the documentary trail has been disrupted, by emigration, war, revolution and the Holocaust, not to mention those inconsiderate ancestors who wilfully changed their names when it suited them. And all this makes it even more difficult to trace the descendants of those generations. But I still think I should be able to recognise one or two of them, at least.

On the plus side, it is useful having Katy in the list, as I can do a check on whether the people that match me also match her - she's on my father's side, so this gives me a rough orientation as to which side the others probably match me on. If they match Katy, they're probably on my Schreibman-Ilyutovich side, if they don't, they're probably on my Frankenstein-Waxman side. Reassuringly, across all 5000 matches, there's more or less half on each side.

It would help even more to have a few more known cousins do the test, as this would enable us to refine the analysis further, and get closer to identifying how our matches connect to us. Ideally I would like to have one of each line - a Frankenstein who's not a Waxman, and a Waxman who's not a Frankenstein, and similarly a Schreibman who's not an Ilyutovich, and an Ilyutovich who is not a Schreibman. That woud help us identify matches for each of my four lines.

And of course it's not just for 'my' family - they would all get matches on the other sides of their own families, as well.

Any offers?

Who was Isaac Frankenstein?

My Frankenstein family were originally from Gombin and Plock in Poland, and came to England during the mid-19th-to-early-20th Century. I have recently come across an Isaac Frankenstein, who was born around 1825 in Poland, and appears in the 1851 UK Census. I am attempting to see whether I can connect him to my own family. He emigrated to the USA in 1853, and I have traced him via New York and Alabama, to Savannah, Georgia.

Isaac Frankenstein m Kate Barnett, Brighton, 1853

In 1853 he had married Kate Barnett in Brighton, England, and shortly afterwards they sailed to New York, taking with them Kate’s sister Leah. In the 1851 UK Census, Isaac had been living in the household of Kitty Barnard, mother of the two girls, in Portsmouth. He may have gone there to be apprenticed as a jeweller to Kitty’s late husband Lyon Barnard, who had died in 1849.

Kate died a few months after reaching New York,in 1854. Within a few weeks of Kate's death, Isaac married Leah; like her sister, Leah used the name Barnett at her marriage, rather than Barnard, the name used in the Census. Isaac and Leah had one child in New York, then a second in Alabama, and then settled in Milledgeville, Georgia, at that time the State capital, where they had two more children. By 1861 they were in Savannah, 160 miles away. Isaac died there in September that year.

Who was Woolf Barnett?

The Barnards/Barnetts were also apparently from Poland. There is also a Woolf Barnett, who appears to be related, but does not appear in any UK records with them. He had arrived in Savannah a few years earlier, and married Selina Russell there in 1847. She died in 1850, and I lose track of Woolf for the next few years.

Then, in the 1860 US Census, taken on 18 June, Woolf Barnett, aged 35, was living in Milledgeville, with or next door to Isaac and his family - see below for details. Two months later, he returned to England and remarried. His new wife was Rachel Joel, from another jeweller family. They were married on 22 August, also in Brighton. On the marriage certificate, Rachel gives the same address - 89 St James Street - as Isaac Frankenstein and Kate Barnett had given 7 years earlier. It is the address of Rachel's father Jacob Joel, silversmith, and his family, throughout this period.

Woolf Barnett m Rachel Joel, Brighton 1860

Woolf and Rachel returned immediately to Savannah, where they had three children, then Rachel died in 1864.

In the 1870 US Census Leah Frankenstein and Woolf Barnett, both now widowed, are again living in the same house with their respective children. There is no indication of any relationship between them. In the 1880 Census they are again in the same household, but this time Leah is reported as Woolf’s sister. However, various UK and US records indicate that Leah’s father was Lyon Barnard, and Woolf’s was Elias Barnett. The only explanation I can think of is that they are really half-siblings, and that their mother was married twice, first to Elias, and then to Lyon.

Another thought that occurs is that although Lyon's family appears as Barnard in the 1841 UK Census, and in his own death record in 1849, they call themselves Barnett thereafter, from the 1851 Census onwards. Intriguingly there is one exception where Barnard is used - see below. Kate refers to her father as Lyon Barnett on her marriage certificate. The family seem to regard the names as equivalent. Might Elias Barnett and Lyon Barnard have been brothers, even?

Who was Elias Barnett?

At this point the story gets even more complicated, as there seem to be several Elias Barnetts in the Southern states at this period, as well as a few in the UK. Intriguingly there is an Elias Barnett buying and selling property in Alabama at around the same time as Isaac and Leah Frankenstein are there for the birth of their second child Harris in 1857. However, nowhere is it specified where in Alabama Harris was born, so I have not been able to link them together there with any certainty.

The families of Isaac Frankenstein and Elias Barnett in the 1860 US Census

(Isaac himself is entered at the bottom of the previous page)

In 1860, Elias Barnett (54) is living in Milledgeville with Woolf (35) and Benjamin (25), which sounds very much like a father and two sons, though this is not specified. They are the next household in the list to Isaac and Leah Frankenstein, and may well be living in the same house. Did Isaac and Leah go to Alabama specifically in order to join up with Elias, and then all move together to Milledgeville - always assuming that the Elias Barnett we found in Alabama is the same person?

Elias and Woolf are said to have been born in Poland, Benjamin in England, which suggests Elias may have emigrated from Poland to England at some point between 1825 and 1835.

An Elias Barnet in Liverpool in 1841, with sons Lyons and Berrant

One candidate in the UK could be an Elias Barnett living in Liverpool in the 1841 UK Census, with a wife Sarah and two young sons, Lyons aged 8, and Berrant (sic), 3. Elias is said to have been born in 'Foreign Parts', the others in Liverpool. This family does not seem to appear in later UK Censuses. To add to the intrigue, there is a Lyon Barnett who died in Savannah in 1867, who is said to have been born in 1834 in England, but does not seem to appear in any other records in either country. And could the 'Berrant' from Liverpool in 1841 be the same person as 'Benjamin' in Milledgeville in 1860?

To add to the mix, there is an Elias Barnett indicted of bigamy in Alabama in 1849, and one who played a significant role in the Civil War. I have no idea at the moment whether these are one, two or three different people. The bigamist married twice in the USA, so if he is indeed the same person as ‘our’ Elias, father of Woolf, he was probably married in England at around the same time, and so could quite possibly be a trigamist.

I cannot find birth or marriage records, nor any other census records prior to 1860, for anyone I can identify as ‘our' Elias Barnett. There also appear to be another couple of candidates in the UK, in addition to our Liverpool suspect, but I cannot say with any certainty whether any of them are this one. Although I do quite fancy the Liverpudlian.

One thing I have found is at least one Elias Barnett, and one Woolf Barnett, with criminal convictions in the UK in this period.

Who were Kate and Leah Barnard?

As for Kate and Leah Barnard/Barnett, I have not been able to find birth records for either of them in the UK. They would have been born before statutory records came into effect in 1837. Kate is said to be born in London, Leah in Portsmouth, both around 1830-34 - but who knows?

The most puzzling document was the Passenger Manifest for Isaac, Kate and Leah, when they sailed from London to New York in December 1853. Isaac and Kate are clear enough, but who is their travelling companion?

Isaac, Kate and Lebonard cross the Atlantic, Dec 1853

Lebonard Frankenstine? Lebonard? It was only when I tried saying the name out loud that the penny dropped: Leah Barnard! Note that both Kate (1853) and Leah (1854) married as Barnett.

Who was Harris Frankenstein?

On Isaac's marriage certificate in 1853, his father is said to be Harris Frankenstein, deceased. In accordance with Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, Isaac named his first (and only) son after him. However, I can find no other trace of Harris the father, either in Poland, the UK, or the USA. Both the names ‘Isaac’ and ‘Hersz’, which often transmutes into Harris in English-speaking countries, occur in my Frankenstein family around that period, so this Isaac and Harris could possibly be named after the same common ancestors. However these names were quite common across Poland, so for the moment that has to be classed as a nice idea but nowhere near proven.

So who was Isaac Frankenstein? Although I have managed to map out some of the key points in his life, I still don't have a clue as to where he was born - apart from 'Poland' - or whether he could have been a relative of my own Frankenstein ancestors.

I am hoping that somewhere, somehow, there will be records, that are maybe not yet available online, from Georgia and/or Alabama, that could help throw light on this family. Or from the UK. Or from Poland, even.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Any ideas at all would be most gratefully received!

David Frankenstein, 1899-1918

Last Thursday we laid stones on the grave of my cousin David Frankenstein, also known as Franks, who died nearly 100 years ago. I say "cousin" for short - he's actually my 5th Cousin; our common ancestors are my 4x-great-grandparents Jakob Wolkowicz and Bajla Moskowna, who were probably born around 1760. I had been tracing his branch of the family, and came across his First World War service record a couple of weeks ago. We were going to Belgium for a few days last week, and sought out the cemetery where he is buried on the way back.

David was born in Hackney, London, in 1899. His grandparents Izrael Frankensztajn and Fejga Szajna Rozenblum had come to London from Plock in Poland around 1870, either just before or just after the birth of David's father Harris. David was the eldest of 5 children born to Harris and his wife Ruth Leapman. The other children all went on to marry and raise families in London, as far as I have been able to track them, but I have not as yet managed to establish contact with any of them.

David was called up to serve in the British Army in October 1916. His service record is very difficult to decipher, but he appears to have been sent to France some time during 1917. He seems to have been wounded at some point, and sent back to the UK. He then returned to France on 26 May 1918, to be posted to the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. This regiment took part in the Battle of the Selle, in late October, and in the attack on Valenciennes, a week or so later.

It was during this attack that David lost his life, "killed in action" on 1 November, along with some 60 of his comrades. They are buried in the municipal cemetery in the village of Préseau, a few kilometres south of Valenciennes. There are a hundred or so war graves in this cemetery, and David's grave is the only one marked with the Mogen Dovid, suggesting that he is the only Jewish soldier buried there.

Ten days later the Armistice was signed, and the War ended. The tragedy was not yet over for David's mother Ruth, however, as Harris died the following March. Within 4 months she had lost her eldest son, and then her husband.