A day after our last message exchange, I logged into 23andMe and scanned down the list of DNA matches. My hunch was correct – Gina’s name was half way down the first page. According to 23andMe we shared 1.09% of our DNA – probably in the range of third or fourth cousins. I clicked on Gina’s profile and scrolled down the page to view our comparison. I then clicked “Find Relatives in Common”.
Immediately I recognized a surname in our list of shared matches, that of a third great-grandmother through my paternal grandmother’s ancestry. Aha! That is exactly the direction I had guessed when viewing Gina’s shared matches on AncestryDNA. There was a good possibility that Gina and I shared at least one ancestor from this particular surname lineage. If the match was accurate and we shared a third great-grandmother, our relationship would be 4th cousins. Although it was a fairly distant match, I could build a tree forward from the 3rd great-grandmother and see if it led to a potential candidate as birth father.
To be honest, I wasn’t relishing the task as it would mean compiling a family tree containing five generations and many possible males who could be Gina’s father. Although this was an option, I decided to wait for Gina’s response before tackling a major tree reconstruction. If I could study her DNA results in more detail, I was sure I could narrow the search to the past three generations of her paternal ancestry.
As I studied my 23andMe shared cousin matches with Gina, it became murky with endogamous surnames! Not only did we share a great-grandparent related to one of my paternal grandmother’s line, we shared surnames related to all four of my 2nd great-grandparents through the same grandmother! Yikes! And our DNA waters became even muddier as I spotted at least three other cousins who I knew were related to my paternal grandfather’s ancestry! Oh for goodness sake, endogamy was once again to blame for a genealogy mess.
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