Surprise Helps For Two Project Members

As most of you know I administer several FTDNA Projects (Barnett, Barney, Dodson, Finch, Charles County, Maryland, The Dallas Genealogical Society DNA Interest Group and the K1a4ba Mitochondrial Virginia, New England, and Europe Project )

Recently, I had two surprising and interesting incidents involving autosomal and Y-DNA in one of my projects.

In the first case, I was checking something on a kit of one my cousins and saw he had a match with a man of a different surname. The two were matching at 4 Genetic Distance. I compared the two on the TIP Calculator and found their common ancestor likely lived about 12 generations and probably more back in time.

I checked to see if the man was a member of our project and discovered he was not. So, I popped off an invitation to him to join the project which he did in a very short while.

Once the man was in the project, I needed to subgroup him and place him in one of the many Y-DNA sub-groups of the project. I was really surprised when I checked his matches. He actually had, not one, but 58 matches at the Y-37 marker level, several of which were 1 Genetic Distance meaning he and they had about 8 generations back to their common ancestor according to the TIP Calculator.

So, basically, this man had what is called in genetic genealogical circles as an NPE (not the parent/person expected) . In his case the NPE occurred many generations ago, rather than more recent times. I am not sure if he was aware of this surname being in his family or not.

The second case was a woman who had tested with another company and transferred her raw data to FTDNA and joined one of my projects. She was asking for some help understanding how to interpret her matches as she was unfamiliar with the FTDNA match format.

As I viewed her matches, her closest match was to a person in one of my surname projects other than the one she had joined. Because her match has a surname of a project I administered I did a surname search on her match page. I discovered she had a number of matches with people of that surname in her match list.

I wrote down the names of a couple of her male matches of that surname and checked to see if they were in our project. From there I checked to see which sub-group they were in which gave me information to pass on to her as to who, where and when one of her ancestors lived. I urged her to contact her matches and work with them as they probably had much more information than what they had posted in our project site. In fact, she later indicated to me this was going to be a new line for her.

So, in these two instances there were benefits to,first, being in a project and , second, also in having taken more than one type of test.

I can anticipate several people contacting me after reading this blog asking questions about how to do some of the tasks I referenced above. So, here are some links directly from your own personal page explaining the what and how of the many fantastic tools available to you that you already have on your personal page.

1. This first link has links to a Trouble Shooting Page, DNA Glossary, a FAQs page, Beginners Guide, FTDNA Users Guide, and an Experts Handbook.
2. https://learn.familytreedna.com/ftdna/troubleshooting/

• A page about the Y-DNA tools

• A page about the Family Finder/autosomal test 

• A page about Mt-dna