Any thoughts? For those who do ancestry dna

[BramblyHedge]

I am into ancestry and did the dna test a year ago. I have been doing my tree for years and some parts are more robust than others but for most lines I have gone back at least 200 years and more on others. I have a puzzle with my dna results which is driving me nuts.

I am basically British with some Western Europe. My results show a bit more Ireland and Scots than I’d expect but i know these things aren’t accurate. The things is I have loads and loads (50+) of 4-6 (and some 5-8c) cousin matches to a very extended family from North Carolina which seems to be mainly mayflower era descendants. By extended I mean reallly extended in that some of them are linked to each other 200+ years back. I can’t even work out how they all relate to each other but the same names keep cropping up and someone else has done a lot of reasearch in this family. I have dna links to many strands of this family. But where we have shared dna links I am the only one who isn’t American or from America. No other shared British or European matches comes up for these (which I thought would be the case if it was someone who emigrated c. 250 years ago and had descendants on both continents). Which leads me to wonder if I have a more recent ancestor who was from North Carolina and came over here? They seemed to intermarry a lot so not sure if that is squeing the dna result and it is in fact an ancestry from longer back. Anyway it is making my brain hurt so thought I’d see if anyone else had similar oddness with their results. The closest match is 26cm over 2 segments which I know isn’t close but I have founds loads of 6th cousins on about 8cm. And yes I know it doesn’t really matter :-)

Surely you share a common Scots-Irish ancestor who migrated? Do you have any of the surnames? Early settlers of North and South Carolina are my main genetic communities and I’m in 15 ‘dna circles’ from that region - some lines go back to the British isles sort of 1600s ish - there was a lot of intermarriage for the first few generations.

Forgot to add I also haven’t yet found any matches in the British isles despite coming up as around 30% Scottish or Irish on all the main sites, I wonder if it’s just because of the inbreeding which went on for centuries? Yuck! My colonial ancestors on the paternal side really didn’t want to mingle with other settlers or move far. My dad still lives within spitting distance of the very first colony.

I have dug deep and worked out that they common ancestor is someone who went over on the Mayflower. So I guess that I must be related to their family who stayed behind. I agree about the intermarrying. I think that concentrates the DNA. Just puzzling that no other British people also share the match. I guess it comes down to more Americans taking tests.

Maybe we're related 😀.

What was the name of their ancestor on the Mayflower? Are you sure that's who you share? I think you'd be like 9th-10th cousins if you did.

I think that Mayflower descendents are often big into family history, so are much more likely to have done a DNA test than the descendents of those who didn't migrate.

That's why it is so odd. His name was George Soule and I have links to descendents (c.50) of 4 of his children. Most are very low amounts (6-13cm) and I know may be connected through other people, and the the North Carolinans are about 20-25cm but intermarried alot. The other 3 lines didn't move to North Carolina. So if it doesn't go back to 1600 I must have a NC ancestor I am unaware of.

I've even mapped then all out on a new tree...bit obsessed 😀

So Mayflowrr thoughts and ramblings...quite a few of them came from Scrooby so do you have any Notts links? Just because someone went to America doesn't mean that they didn't have a quick farewell to a local lady before they set sail. Have you checked passenger lists as often folks through their religion popped backward and forwards across pond more often than you realise. Have you contacted a Mayflower association as they are more likely to have a documented tree.

Tragically nobody of that name in my tree, not yet anyway.

The very first British (English) settlers of North Carolina all mysteriously vanished, that was decades before the Mayflower and Plymouth and all that. I’m something like 70% European at least half of which (paternal half) by way of Carolinian hillbilly extraction and they were mostly Scottish and Irish, late 1600s early 1700s. Part of the reason they were so inbred was because each colony was quite isolated. Do you have any Scots-Irish ancestry?

If you download your raw dna and upload to familytreedna .com you’ll probably be matched with some projects and people who can help you figure it out?

I am 14-15 generations removed from some of my Mayflower ancestors.

I'm trying to compare with relatives I have on Anc.com... I have a 2ndCx1R who is 38 cm across 3 segments. So I guess you're right to be thinking about 4th cousins, that means shared 3G-parents, right? Is generation to look at.

Just read about George and it's been proved that he's Scottish. Just because he was on the Mayflower doesn't mean he didn't have any other relationships....

I think if it is closer than 1600 someone in my tree was probably engaging in naughty behaviour as I have a fairly developed tree (or it is wrong). I have found though that I can have lots of DNA for a proven 5th cousin and less than you'd think for a closer one. I think after a bit it becomes harder to know how far back the link is. Thanks for all the thoughts and thanks for the hint about uploading to familydna. I'd don't know about that.

Have you tried your numbers on dnapainter, yet?

That is so weird. I just came on here to post this about the centimorgans. I think this means it could be further back than 8th cousin (far right of image)

I searched my dna matches for Soule and loads have this chap in their trees - is he the son of your person?

Yes, it goes George (1600), George (1638), William, Benjamin (settles in NC). My bigger links are then from his daughter Delilah with other Soules marrying in here and there). I’m prepared to accept that some of lower amounts with other non-Carolina lines may be coincidental as I suspect there are an awful lot of people descended from the Mayflower passengers. However non of them are shared matches with my mum (she has done the test), which I would have expected if it was connections through other lines who emigrated to America.

I’m in at least five dna circles (on ancestry.com) with literally dozens of 4th cousins who all have that Soule family of yours in their trees - we all share 3rd, 4th and 5th gt grandparents but not all the people in each circle match with one another, if that makes sense? Which doesn’t really make sense to me, if we all share fairly recent ancestors.

So after much nosing around on the app it seems one of my whatever cousins married someone from the Soules around the turn of the century, 1900ish, then we are sort of related after all!

😀 I did actually read an article which I now can't find that said after 5th cousins, there are obviously thousands of them but is also more likely that some of them will pass down the same chunks of DNA. So the amounts I have could be 12th cousins. There must be millions of descendents of the Mayflower Soules, so me matching about 50 of them as 10-12th cousins isn't beyond the realms of possibility and more likely than me having a recent American ancestor. Thanks for the feedback (cousin) 😀.

Just reigniting this with a question - well more a ponder with views welcome. Having explored all these Carolinans..and those who moved on to Alabama, Tennessee, Florida it seems the mystery seems even bigger. I have constructed a large single tree of those shared (and some unshared) dna matches where I can. Many are relatively closely related to each other, some very distantly and none are British like me. I seem be have links back to the 1700s on several shared lines. One is the Soule line, one is a Swiss line of immigrants (with some dna links to families who stayed in Switzerland), a few from early Plymouth Mayflower era settlers. There are so many of them and now I am unsure that there is a single English ancestor which is connected to me. Can it really be possible that I have dna links to several different ancestral lines of these related American settlers and not be a descendent of one of them? I know the further we go back the more likely all the wires cross, particularly by the 1700s - but I don’t know if they do to this extent and without any obvious connect to the countries of my known heritage. I really should give up but so many of my matches are part of this puzzle that is becoming a bit of an obsession (in my family tree world, not in my real world)!

Do you have any of these regions in your timeline?

Putting my family history and statistical hats on at the same time (and a familiarity with the inaccuracy of other people's research which supposedly links to my tree) your dna is matched only with living persons and not the ancestors appearing on their trees. The ancestors' dna has not been sampled. The family trees have been uploaded by the people who supplied their dna.

A large number of Americans research their genealogy and most of them are desperate to find links with the Mayflower and other early settlers. This means that you can't always rely on the diligence with which they or others have conducted their research. Just because a tree has been compiled and submitted online doesn't mean that it is complete and/or correct. Inaccuracies will have crept in. That ancestor who married a Jane Smith in Conneticut probably did marry a Jane Smith, who may have been related to your common ancestor. But there may have been more than one Jane Smith in that area at the time and they could have picked the wrong one by mistake. Or they never found which one was right and that branch of the tree is consequently empty. Chances are that there is a link, but it hasn't been found or entered correctly and doesn't show up on the results.

Sounds like you're a descendent from someone you didn't know about.

US army Air Force have been in the British isles, in the tens of thousands, since 1940s - could one of them have fathered a gt aunt or a cousin twice removed or something like that? Do you have any relatives who lived near any US bases? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_in_the_United_Kingdom