Yesterday I told you that I was having a consultation with; Diahan Southard from Your DNA Guide.
My consultation was a great experience and was done very professionally. She sends you a link to have a go-to meeting and the entire session is recorded and you receive a copy of the recording.
First of all she goes over some basic information about autosomal DNA. She then asked me if there were any male descendants of my `great-grandfather, and there are/were but to the best of my knowledge they have died and left no male descendants. She went on to say that then I had done an excellent job of testing the key individuals that were left. This made me happy to know that I was on the right trail and that my understanding of autosomal DNA was correct.
She went on to indicate that 88 CM probably meant that my mom and Marg were probably only half cousins. This was something that I had suspected and was one of the questions that I had for Diahan, as my theory is that my mom’s grandfather and Marg’s grandmother had the same mother but that each had a different father. Diahan confirmed this was the case because my mom and Marg shared an X chromosome and if you look at the fan charts that are available to explain X chromosomes there are only certain ways you can connect that way . I will cover that in tomorrow’s blog.
We then talked about the chromosome browser tool on FTDNA where you can compare five matches and see what chromosome you connect on. My family connects with Marg on chromosome 11 and 22. As there isn’t a very large list of in common people with Marg this means that it will be easy (if they answer) to contact them and see if we can figure out the overlap in chromosomes and trees of the other matches. Because we don’t know the family names for sure for my family or Marg’s we have to count on those people’s genealogy, surnames and places. I’ve already started some of that dialogue but perhaps I hadn’t asked the right questions. So Diahan advised me on what I should ask.
For instance, the match we have named Cliff, has family members who came from the same region as my mom’s grandfather, Willie and Marg’s grandmother; Annie. I’ve been working with him on this but I should have asked him if there were other descendants of those people who could be tested. So I will do that this next week.
After the session is over Diahan provides a report going over what has been discussed which also provides you with a list of “to do” items for going forward as well as sends you a link to the recording of the session. All in all it was a great experience and I would highly recommend it.
Now to get to work on that “To Do List”. I’ll keep you posted.