Family Finder Results - Let's Discuss This Stuff!

[seferhabahir]

I am up to 271 Family Finder matches as of today.

I am now at 1060 matches. Only one suggested 2nd cousin, but I can't place this person in my line based on his surname. Nineteen suggested 3rd cousins, no related surnames.

[Mike Forsyth]

1060 matches is a few more than I have...I'm at 98 matches, not counting my An Falcarragh (Crossroads)and West Cork/Kerry, and Leinster matches...I am lucky to get one new match a week...

My direct paternal line has been in North America since mid 1700s..

[rms2]

I am up to 271 Family Finder matches as of today.

I am now at 1060 matches. Only one suggested 2nd cousin, but I can't place this person in my line based on his surname. Nineteen suggested 3rd cousins, no related surnames.

Wow! You have me beat, although my list of matches seems to be growing all the time.

I'm up to 274 now.

No real close relatives yet.

[rms2]

Over the last few days, the Family Finder matches "New Since" function doesn't seem to work. FF will give me all my matches, but when I try to check the "New Since" a certain date, the thing just times out.

Anyone else having that problem?

[rms2]

Over the last few days, the Family Finder matches "New Since" function doesn't seem to work. FF will give me all my matches, but when I try to check the "New Since" a certain date, the thing just times out.

Anyone else having that problem?

Okay, I got it to work by pushing back the date a bit.

I still wonder what the problem was.

[seferhabahir]

I am up to 271 Family Finder matches as of today.

I am now at 1060 matches. Only one suggested 2nd cousin, but I can't place this person in my line based on his surname. Nineteen suggested 3rd cousins, no related surnames.

I am now up to 1120 matches. Here is the oldest picture I have of a relative (this is my paternal great-grandfather, and my link into R-L21 Celtic wonderland). But I don't really see any Celtic here after some 600-700 years of Ashkenazi autosomal gene-pool mixing. I was going to try to post this in the "Is R-L21 Really Celtic" thread, but unfortunately (or fortunately) it got closed down during my recent vacation to Victoria, Canada.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

[rms2]

Neat photo!

Here is the oldest photo I have of a y-dna line ancestor, my great great grandfather, James Holmes Stevens,  born 1835 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.



I don't look anything like him (I still have all my hair, for one thing).

[princenuadha]

(I still have all my hair, for one thing).

And that is the most important thing : )

I still have my fingers crossed.

[rms2]

Since we are posting photos of ancestors, here is my most distant known mtDNA ancestor, my maternal great grandmother, Nora Lancaster Morris (maiden surname Lancaster), born 1878 in Alabama and U5a2.



Nora is the adult. That's my maternal grandmother, Lela Morris, on her lap. The bigger girl on the right (Nora's left) is, I believe, Katie Morris, a niece. The boy on the far left (Nora's right) is my grandmother's brother, Doyle Morris. The other little blond girl is, I think, my grandmother's sister, but I don't yet know her name.

[seferhabahir]

Since we are posting photos of ancestors, here is my most distant known mtDNA ancestor, my maternal great grandmother, Nora Lancaster Morris (maiden surname Lancaster), born 1878 in Alabama and U5a2.

Nora is the adult. That's my maternal grandmother, Lela Morris, on her lap. The bigger girl on the right (Nora's left) is, I believe, Katie Morris, a niece. The boy on the far left (Nora's right) is my grandmother's brother, Doyle Morris. The other little blond girl is, I think, my grandmother's sister, but I don't yet know her name.

And they all have nice heads of hair, too. I don't know if my great-grandfather had any hair under that cap, but my father starting going bald on the top of his head in his early 20's. Is there a gene or combo of SNPs for male pattern baldness?

[rms2]

Since we are posting photos of ancestors, here is my most distant known mtDNA ancestor, my maternal great grandmother, Nora Lancaster Morris (maiden surname Lancaster), born 1878 in Alabama and U5a2.

Nora is the adult. That's my maternal grandmother, Lela Morris, on her lap. The bigger girl on the right (Nora's left) is, I believe, Katie Morris, a niece. The boy on the far left (Nora's right) is my grandmother's brother, Doyle Morris. The other little blond girl is, I think, my grandmother's sister, but I don't yet know her name.

And they all have nice heads of hair, too. I don't know if my great-grandfather had any hair under that cap, but my father starting going bald on the top of his head in his early 20's. Is there a gene or combo of SNPs for male pattern baldness?

I think there is, and I believe FTDNA has a "Factoid" test for it.

I've always heard that you inherit baldness or the lack thereof from your mother, and that if you want to know whether you will be bald or not, look at your maternal grandfather, but I don't know if that is true.

[rms2]

Since we are posting photos of ancestors, here is my most distant known mtDNA ancestor, my maternal great grandmother, Nora Lancaster Morris (maiden surname Lancaster), born 1878 in Alabama and U5a2.

Nora is the adult. That's my maternal grandmother, Lela Morris, on her lap. The bigger girl on the right (Nora's left) is, I believe, Katie Morris, a niece. The boy on the far left (Nora's right) is my grandmother's brother, Doyle Morris. The other little blond girl is, I think, my grandmother's sister, but I don't yet know her name.

And they all have nice heads of hair, too. I don't know if my great-grandfather had any hair under that cap, but my father starting going bald on the top of his head in his early 20's. Is there a gene or combo of SNPs for male pattern baldness?

I think there is, and I believe FTDNA has a "Factoid" test for it.

I've always heard that you inherit baldness or the lack thereof from your mother, and that if you want to know whether you will be bald or not, look at your maternal grandfather, but I don't know if that is true.

Apparently that is true. You do inherit baldness from your mother, at least according to SNPedia:

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Baldness

Male pattern baldness, sometimes abbreviated MPB and referred to clinically as androgenetic alopecia, is thought to affect up to 80% of all males by the age of 80. It is clearly a genetic trait (i.e. it's inherited), and depends on levels of the hormone androgen and the Androgen Receptor (AR) gene on the X chromosome, but the actual cause remains unknown. Males inherit their X chromosome from their mothers, so AR's contribution to male pattern baldness is inherited maternally.

The SNP involved is rs1385699, but evidently it's not in Family Finder, because I couldn't find it in my raw data.

Since the trait comes via the X chromosome, I guess looking at your maternal grandfather is only a partial clue. Since your mom has two X chromosomes, the one she passed on to you could be the one she got from her mother. And she could have passed on the X she got from her mother, and so on!

Anyway, here's a photo of my maternal grandfather, who kept his hair.

[seferhabahir]

I am up to 271 Family Finder matches as of today.

I am now at 1060 matches. Only one suggested 2nd cousin, but I can't place this person in my line based on his surname. Nineteen suggested 3rd cousins, no related surnames.

I am now up to 1120 matches. Here is the oldest picture I have of a relative (this is my paternal great-grandfather, and my link into R-L21 Celtic wonderland). But I don't really see any Celtic here after some 600-700 years of Ashkenazi autosomal gene-pool mixing. I was going to try to post this in the "Is R-L21 Really Celtic" thread, but unfortunately (or fortunately) it got closed down during my recent vacation to Victoria, Canada.

I have quite by accident stumbled across a woman doing family tree research in ancestry.com for her (non-relative) godfather, who is the grandson of the brother-in-law of my paternal great-grandfather above. If I did the math right, this makes her godfather my 2nd cousin once removed. Too bad it is not on the Y-DNA line.

The cool part is this brother-in-law to my great-grandfather had a nephew who died intestate with no descendents. My new genealogy woman friend found a forty year old probate document that listed all of the deceased's first and second cousins. At that time, they had no record of my great-grandmother so my family was not listed. Some time later one of the cousins recalled there was yet another sister to the father of the deceased (and this was the wife of my great-grandfather above), so she started pulling records from ancestry.com for my paternal line which is how I found her.

So now I have been able to add a gigantic number of people to my tree (perhaps close to one hundred) from her work and the documents she uncovered. It goes a long way towards explaining the proliferation of FF cousins that keep showing up (still looking for the surname matches, but now I have a lot more). Many of these relatives had six to ten children each, most of whom survived to adulthood.

(Yowzah!!!)

[rms2]

Gold mine!

Congratulations!

[seferhabahir]

Gold mine!

Congratulations!

Ooops. The woman friend's godfather in the above post is the grandson of the brother-in-law of my great-grandfather, not the brother-in-law. I'll correct the previous post.

[rms2]

I picked up another Canadian among my FF matches last night. That makes at least two that I have seen. Otherwise, my matches mostly have ancestry in the South. I do have a few (well, at least two for sure) FF matches with current British citizens. That amazed me, since my family has been in North America for a long long time. The most recent arrival that I know of was one of my 4th great grandfathers on my father's side, who came from Ireland in 1803.

[seferhabahir]

You said: “You'll probably not be surprised to learn that Population Finder results states 100.0% Middle Eastern with a 0.01% margin of error”. What should FTDNA say to its customers who do the exam to confirm their Middle Easterner and Jewish origin?
The Dienekes’ results seem to me less ideological and more true. What are they demonstrating? What we know from many years. For what concerns me, from the beginning of my researches. Because we cannot think that Sicilians, Greeks, Tuscans, Italians etc. are all of Jewish descent, I let you draw a conclusion.   

Yes, I agree with you that the Population Finder result is very misleading. It places my Jewish FF results in Israel and then says I'm 100% Middle East, when the Dodecad results are in line with more balanced thinking.

Since a significant chunk of the Roman Empire converted to  Judaism 2000 years ago, there are no doubt some (many?) converted Sicilians, Greeks, Tuscans, or Italians amongst my Jewish ancestors. I'm sure you've read Zoossman-Diskin's "The origin of Eastern European Jews revealed by autosomal, sex chromosomal and mtDNA polymorphisms" where this is discussed in detail. I don't know enough about current academic debate on this to comment, but his article seems consistent with my  Dodecad results.

As I've said in other posts, along with my mtDNA J1c7a, there is also my maternal grandfather's Y-DNA J2a* which probably goes back to Caucasus or Levant areas.

There are some recent posts on Dienekes' blog about a brand new paper:

The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses

(authored by Eran Israeli-Elhaik of Johns-Hopkins)

Available as a pdf at http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.1092

This paper contrasts the two major schools of thought on where Central and Eastern European Jews originated. References work of Behar (2010), Zoossmann-Diskin (2010), Sand (2009), Koestler (1976), and many others. Conclusions make a case for large Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions, and that the genomes of European Jews are a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian Jews, and also Judeans.

Here is the abstract:

The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The "Rhineland Hypothesis" proposes that Eastern European Jews emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the "Khazarian Hypothesis" suggests that Eastern European descended from Judean tribes who joined the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. The Judaized Empire was continuously reinforced with Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman Jews until the 13th century. Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo-Khazars. Thus far, however, their contribution has been estimated only empirically; the absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian Hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian Hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland Hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses - including principal component, biogeographical origin, admixture, identity by descent, allele sharing distance, and uniparental analyses - to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry.

[seferhabahir]

There are some recent posts on Dienekes' blog about a brand new paper:

The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses

(authored by Eran Israeli-Elhaik of Johns-Hopkins)

Razib Khan's review of this paper (apparently a pre-print) is at

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/08/ashkenazi-jews-are-probably-not-descended-from-the-khazars/

[rms2]

This subforum and this thread have been dormant for awhile. I keep getting FF matches that I cannot seem to make a connection on. I know they are relatives. I just can't figure out how.

I feel like a trapper. My FF thingy is sitting there among the fallen leaves waiting for a big bear to step in it: the big bear of a relationship that will net me some good information.

Patience, patience . . . back at the cabin, drinking a beer.

[rms2]

Did you all complete the Family Finder survey on your myFTDNA pages?

I'm afraid mine won't be of much help: all four of my grandparents were born in the USA.

I think I hear Bruce Springsteen starting to sing.

[seferhabahir]

Did you all complete the Family Finder survey on your myFTDNA pages?

I'm afraid mine won't be of much help: all four of my grandparents were born in the USA.

I think I hear Bruce Springsteen starting to sing.

Yes, I filled it out - all 8 of my great-grandparents were Ashkenazi.

I think I hear Mike Bloomfield starting to sing.

[glentane]

Did you all complete the Family Finder survey ..

Yup. Got a bit non-plussed by the "Which City?" field, and ended up claiming what were little more than rows of houses a few miles (or yards!) apart as grand metropolises, as the distinctions are made in the records, like what they oughta, having done so since Domesday or something.
It's OK, they come up on Wiki as proper places, and it explains all the gubmint meddling, amalgamation and reassigning that's gone on recently.
To go out on a limb somewhat, basically the same handful of near-adjacent parishes since at least the fourteenth century, perhaps for nearly all of them. Pretty certain about the paternal sides of both parents. Dullards. If it hadn't been for conscription and mass mobilisation of my parent's generation, I'd still be there <shudder>.

[djm3808]

Just completed the survey, all my grand parents were born in the US as well.

I ordered the family finder test today, looking to fill a gap between my great grand father and the ancestors I find through Y-DNA testing or confirm a relationship to a family in 1850s Missouri.

[rms2]

Just completed the survey, all my grand parents were born in the US as well.

I ordered the family finder test today, looking to fill a gap between my great grand father and the ancestors I find through Y-DNA testing or confirm a relationship to a family in 1850s Missouri.

I've enjoyed my Family Finder results and have gotten a lot out of them. Once you get your results, download your raw data and check out some of the other threads in this subforum. You can see where you stand on some interesting alleles.

[djm3808]

Just completed the survey, all my grand parents were born in the US as well.

I ordered the family finder test today, looking to fill a gap between my great grand father and the ancestors I find through Y-DNA testing or confirm a relationship to a family in 1850s Missouri.

I've enjoyed my Family Finder results and have gotten a lot out of them. Once you get your results, download your raw data and check out some of the other threads in this subforum. You can see where you stand on some interesting alleles.

I'm excited to see the results, I've hit a brick wall trying to find some of these connections with traditional research. Should have ordered the test months ago.