Created using ChatGPT and my prompt, create an image showing a rabbit looking down a DNA rabbit hole.
As you know, I love working with DNA.
On Monday, I went down a rabbit hole after watching just a little of Roberta Estes’ webinar, Six Ways to Figure Out How We’re Related on Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Roberta’s webinar is part of Webtember at Legacy Family Tree, and you can watch the videos for free until the end of September.
Here’s what got me going. Roberta talked about the trees at Family Tree DNA and how you can see your Maternal matches and Paternal matches if you’ve linked just a few people from your match list to your tree. I know I have a tree for myself and all the other kits I manage. In fact, I spent a lot of time making sure my trees were transferred to my MyHeritage tree. FTDNA and MyHeritage announced their enhanced partnership on July 17th. The deadline to move the FTDNA trees was September 9th, and I had just made it as I had quite a few kits to do.
But I digress.
I decided to see how many I had for maternal and paternal, as I hadn’t looked in a long time. In Roberta’s video, she said those unassigned matches, meaning those that weren’t your maternal or paternal matches, were your “identical by chance” (IBC) matches. Identical by descent (IBD) are those you match because you and several others share segments of DNA from a common ancestor. If you want to learn more about IBD and IBC, read about it on Roberta’s blog HERE.
But here’s what got me down the rabbit hole. See that number below that says both? Well, as you can imagine and Roberta talked about this being people’s children, etc. But I only have two sons, so who is person number 3? I had to have a look.
When I checked, sure enough, I saw my two sons and a third person—let’s call her Jane for privacy purposes. Jane only shares 25cM with me, which isn’t a lot, but I’ve worked with such small amounts for the Beaton Batten Mystery that 25cM seems okay.
When I compared Jane to see who we had in common, the system gave me a list that included both my mother and father. Hmm, interesting. See the “rabbit hole”…. it’s getting deeper.
Created with ChatGPT
The next thing to do is look at my parent’s accounts.
Mom shares 15cM with Jane, almost all of it on chromosome 8
Dad shares 10 cM with Jane, nearly all of it on chromosome 9
Of course, you have to look at who they each have in common with Jane, and other matches share more significant amounts with my parents.. back in that 25cM range. Although my parents shared matches in common with Jane, my parents didn’t share the same people in common with Jane.
So what does this all mean? Now, I’ve wasted almost the entire afternoon, and I know that working with small amounts of DNA, like 10cM and 15cM, isn’t a good use of my time. But I’m still wondering if this is real or if it’s a bit of that IBC. So what do you do?
I’m lucky because Roberta is a Facebook friend, so I asked the source. So on Tuesday morning, I explained the situation and asked her what she thought.
Roberta said just one thing “sounds legit”.
That was good enough for me because I wondered about that small bit of DNA.
But I will tell you that I watched more of the video last night, and it got me looking at things I hadn’t looked at for a while, like my clusters at MyHeritage and Genetic Affairs. Okay, I admit it: I have a big issue with rabbit holes. There, I said it. So there is more to re-explore for another evening.
I highly recommend this video if you are new to DNA and even if you have been doing this for awhile because like me you might not have looked at this tools in awhile and it’s a good review.
Of course I encourage your to take advantage of the other videos that will be available for FREE during Webtember at Legacy Family Tree.
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