Discerning the Distance

 

There's already been a lot of exploration done on the question of Lydia Miller's parents. Just in this month, I've outlined the eight children of her second marriage to Benedict Palmer and sketched out each child's line of descent down to the current generation. Of those many descendants from that second marriage, I've yet to find any DNA matches linked to my husband's own test.

While I realize the connection would have been distant—Lydia would be my husband's third great-grandmother—it is not beyond reach. Actually, any two resultant fourth cousins could share up to 139 centiMorgans, but they could also share absolutely nothing. With the children of Lydia's second marriage being half-siblings to my mother-in-law's great-grandfather Adam Gordon, Lydia's firstborn son from her first marriage, any potential DNA matches would share even less than that amount.

There are, however, some other surprising DNA matches showing up in our results. Very small connections, hovering around ten centiMorgans, belong to people whose pedigree chart points straight back to a Miller ancestor.

While they do reach back to a Miller connection, it is unclear just how their ancestor—Jonathan Miller of Perry County, Ohio—was related to Lydia herself. One collaborator I'm working with has hypothesized that Jonathan was actually Lydia's father. Right now, I'm tending to lean towards a scenario where Lydia may have been Jonathan's much younger sister.

To test out those hypotheses may mean employing some specialized DNA tools. "What Are The Odds" (WATO) comes to mind here. Before I make that jump, though, I'll be working on a few more Miller DNA matches, as there are actually two different Miller lines showing up in my husband's matches. But the bottom line is that, for a DNA match as small as some of these connections, there may be no way to pinpoint a relationship. Just looking at, say, a ten centiMorgan match could mean seeing a third cousin or a fourth or fifth cousin—or beyond. There is no way to differentiate.

Still, to find any DNA match in our list leading back to Jonathan Miller is encouraging. In tandem, maybe they can both point us to the identity of Lydia's parents, and his, too.