Looking for a mysterious 3rd-great-grandfather

The third of my research questions for the current DNA study group is to identify a third-great-grandfather on my Mom's side of the tree, the father of Mary Alice Cain Read. My strategy at the moment is to use my Mom's DNA matches, and create networks of people descending from best known matches from her Read/Holsclaw line, Flatt/Gaw line, and Whitley/Matthews line. I already had a Read/Cain group based on matches from my 2nd-great-grandparents Charles Read and Mary Alice. This is about 2900 matches.

I created a group called "Cain Targets" and assigned everyone from the Read/Cain group who did not match to Flatt/Gaw, Read/Holsclaw or Whitley/Matthews to that group, creating a network of about 1900 matches. I know there are still some matches to those lines in that network.

Next I took anyone who had a common ancestor with one of those three lines, and unchecked any of their matches, then unchecked themselves from the Cain Target group. I repeated this step until there were no more matches with common ancestors on these lines. This brought the total to 1731, which is still a lot.

I'm now in the stage of looking at the matches who have connected trees, and checking to see who has descendants in their tree who were living in Barren, Metcalfe or Adair County, Kentucky between the 1850s and 1880. Then I'm going to look at those groups to see if I can identify any patterns of names. After that, there's more steps to learn from the DNA study group to see what can be done with this group of mystery matches.

This strategy might not work. There's already the complication that Nancy Jane Flatt's second husband was also her first cousin. There's also the possibility that this could work and topple the brick wall on this side of the tree.

Vasquez matches

 One of my regular research quests is looking into the family of my 3rd-great-grandfather Gabriel Vasquez, to see if there may have been any siblings of his which will allow me to trace the family further in Chilean records. Switching from my current research questions with DNA, using my Mom's DNA matches I've found a cluster of Gabriel's descendants through his daughter Carmen Vasquez, a younger sister of my 2nd-great-grandmother Maria Jesus Vasquez.

Carmen and Jesus Garcia were married in Pitiquito, Sonora and had at least the following children:

• Leonor Garcia
• Maria Jesus Garcia
• Ana Garcia
• Angela Garcia
• Teresa Garcia
• Gabriel Garcia
• Jose Garcia

Using the methods from the DNA study group, I've identified cousins matching from descendants of Ana, Angela, Teresa, Gabriel and Jose. There's a lot. The large number gives me some hope we might be able to use these matches to work backward to Gabriel, split the DNA network from the Suastegui branch, and potentially see Vasquez DNA connections to Chile. This is essentially the same approach I'm using to figure out the family for my 3rd-great-grandmother Bridget and her Irish family, although in this case I know the names of Gabriel's parents (Jose Vasquez and Agustina Rojas). 

What I don't know is if Gabriel had siblings, or if Jose and Agustina made the voyage from Valparaiso, Chile to Mexico. DNA can't tell us the second question, but it can help identify others on the Vasquez line.

A deeper dive into the 2024 update

 

AncestryDNA 2024 update. 

Taking a closer look at things that changed in the 2024 AncestryDNA update, I see the reference panel size is up to 116,000+ samples, vs 72,000+ last year. This is up substantially from 40,000 reference samples in the 2019 update. As I've been tracking these updates since I first submitted an AncestryDNA test in 2012, it has been really fascinating to see the ancestral regions evolve and fluctuate over time. It is a little odd to see Germanic Europe go from 4% in 2019 to 26% in 2024, and for Ireland to completely disappear.

Nigeria (now Nigerian Woodlands) has held pretty steady at 1% since it first appeared in the 2018 update. Clicking on this ancestral region shows another surprise, connecting us to the Tiv ethnic group of Benue State.

AncestryDNA Oct 2024. Nigerian Woodlands sub-region.

 It's nice to see Spain at 16%, and that tracks with my Mom's Spain percentage increasing to 33%.

AncestryDNA Oct 2024 for KDJ.

On my Dad's updated results, his England & Northwestern Europe went up to 62%, while his Ireland lost 6%, down to 12. This seems to be a decrease for Ireland across all the tests I administer, along with the increase on Germanic Europe, maybe that is a sign of a larger trend. Interestingly, because my Mom's results have no Germanic Europe and my sister now has a sub-region of Germanic Europe for Italian Swiss, maybe this comes from my Dad's side.

Dad's results also show two sub-regions in Ireland: Leinster and Munster. This makes sense, as Limerick and County Clare are in Munster, and John O'Brien's obituary from 1901 says he was from County Clare. Longford is part of the western edge of Leinster, so maybe this also helps trace where the family of my 3rd-great-grandmother Bridget came from.

On my results, the sub-region for Scotland's Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney appear as "strong" connection strength. My Mom shares this sub-region, although her connection strength is "moderate".

Scotland sub-region 2024.

On my Mom's sisters' results, my Aunt Patty retained her 14 ancestral regions, as well as adding the Northern Isles sub-region for Scotland. Her percentage of Jewish went up from 1% to 2% and now shows the sub-region of Sephardic Jews.

AncestryDNA Oct 2024 for PM.

It's interesting that my Mom does have the trace for Nigeria, but Aunt Patty doesn't, and my Aunt Linda has 1% Senegal. My Mom's cousin Irene, who is a great-granddaughter of Vicente Antonio Campuzano and Maria Conception Amado, has a trace of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. This reflects a little studied aspect of history that a large number of African slaves were brought to Mexico from along the West African coast in the late 1500s and 1600s, many through the port of Veracruz in the Gulf Coast.

I am really interested to see how MyHeritage's next DNA update, teased earlier this summer, will look in comparison with Ancestry's 2024 update. Maybe this will be out by Rootstech in March.

The 2024 AncestryDNA Update is here

 

AncestryDNA Oct 2024 Update.

The 2024 update for AncestryDNA has been released, and there are quite a few changes from last year. While the 2023 update showed 8 ancestral regions for me, this year's version is down to 6, with a new sub-region for the Northern Isles of Scotland. My percentages for England and Northwestern Europe dropped from 56 to 38%, and my Germanic Europe shot up to 26% from 7. Spain is now 16% from 7. Scotland stayed the same and I added a sub-region. Indigenous Americas - Mexico stayed the same at 5%, but Ireland dropped off along with Wales. I still have 1% Nigerian, now shown as Nigerian Woodlands.

AncestryDNA Oct 2024 for BAJ.

My Mom's results also changed slightly, and now I can see where this mystery sub-region of Northern Isles, Scotland comes from. This region is coming from her paternal side of the tree, either from the McKinley line or the hole I currently have as one of the research questions to determine the identity of the father of Mary Alice Cain Read using DNA.

Her England & Northwestern Europe went up from 17 to 38%. Her Spain also went up from 30 to 33%. Scotland dropped from 20 to 6%. Indigenous Americas - Mexico stayed the same at 12%. Her Sweden dropped from 10 to 4%. Ireland at 4% is new, along with 1% Sephardic Jews. She retained 1% Basque and 1% Nigerian Woodlands.

The Sephardic Jewish percentage makes sense, as the Amado surname is known to be of Sephardic origin.

I'll have another post comparing the updates on my Dad's results and others in the DNA tests I administer for the family. 

Irish Travel Posters

 

National Museum of Ireland.

This beautiful travel poster is from the National Museum of Ireland's digital collection. I'm partly posting this so I can easily locate these again to go with future posts and plans for next summer's visit to Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland.