The number was seventeen—centiMorgans, that is. I wasn't sure how far seventeen could reach, so I had to take a look. Seventeen, after all, is the amount of genetic material shared by my husband and his most likely DNA match claiming Falvey roots. And that is not very much.
The possessor of that particular seventeen centiMorgan segment is someone who possibly descends from Gobnait Falvey and Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry in Ireland. Gobnait—or Debora, as she was listed in the many baptismal records of her children—was likely the sister of Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. If this DNA match is the same number of generations removed from Johanna and Gobnait's parents as my husband is, we'd be looking at a fourth cousin. Slim possibilities, indeed.
Just to make sure, I popped over to DNA Painter, the website which hosts an interactive version of Blaine Bettinger's updated Shared centiMorgan Project. There, I checked the possible reach of a seventeen centiMorgan match to see if it could indeed show up to connect fourth cousins.
As it turns out, sharing seventeen centiMorgans with a DNA match could indeed be a reasonable number for fourth cousins. And the connection could stretch in either directions. Probabilities are that both a third cousin and even a second cousin's child could be revealed by that amount of shared genetic material—and, heading in the other direction, so could a fifth cousin or even a more distant relationship than that.
With this particular DNA match, the assumption is of descent from Daniel and "Debora" Cullinane, but as often happens, there appears to be discrepancies in the proposed ThruLines line of descent. We'll take some time this week to examine whether this supposed son of the Cullinanes did indeed emigrate from Ireland. We'll also follow the route of another Cullinane son who supposedly did the same. Sometimes, in using DNA for family history, we learn far more about other people's family trees than we at first assumed.
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