A Different Way of Looking at the Odds

Ever since genealogists have been looking closely at how DNA can reveal the connection of familial matches, we've been equipping ourselves with charts. We have charts to tell us how likely it might be that any given DNA company would predict, say, our fourth cousin relationships with any accuracy. Likewise, we have charts to guide us in determining, given the amount of shared genetic material, just what that match-to-match relationship could be. Better yet, we've crowdsourced those numbers from a wide variety of research enthusiasts, and even updated those results and made their use interactive.

Those charts present a lot of numbers to use when struggling with a brick wall ancestor. They can tell me, for instance, that I am more likely to find a third or fourth cousin match at AncestryDNA than the other testing companies. Or that, given a specific centiMorgan count of shared genetic material, my husband's relationship to any other descendant of his second great-grandmother Johanna Falvey might be a third cousin once removed—but it could also be a third cousin twice removed, or a fourth cousin, or... or...

Just because, in the midst of this swirling overload of confusion, I need some encouragement, I decided to use a different way of looking at the odds, when it comes to comparing someone like my husband with his distant Falvey-linked DNA matches. Rather than bemoan the slim chances of correctly determining the nexus with his matches, let's look at how much we increase our chances of finding any answer when looking at such distant relationships as third cousin and beyond.

Granted, finding a missing half-sibling would be a sure thing, with a likely half-identical 1700 centiMorgans signaling the hit—but how many half-siblings are there out there, just whimsically deciding to give DNA testing a whirl?

If, on the other hand, we flip this scenario on its head, we see how much we increase our chances of finding a match on the far side of family connections. As the ISOGG Wiki noted in its section on "Cousin Statistics,"

Although there is only a low chance of sharing enough DNA with a specific distant cousin for the relationship to be detected, we have a large number of distant cousins.

The article provides a chart which outlines probable expected numbers of cousins, based on the degree of relationship—first cousins, second cousins, and beyond if that relationship can be detected through a DNA test. For instance, the chart shows an "expected number of detectable cousins" for first cousin relationships to be slightly higher than a count of seven. The number of possible detectable fourth cousins, on the other hand, could be well above four hundred. And that's a number of matches I'd much rather draw from, when figuring out missing family tree connections.

Genetic genealogy blogger Kitty Cooper put it this way: "How many cousins share my fifth [great] grandparents?" The potential number of those distant cousins can grow astronomically over the generations, as demonstrated by a simple chart put together by Canadian genealogy blogger John D. Reid. While those raw numbers may be cut almost in half by testing companies' inability to predict distant relationships at one hundred percent, that still leaves us with a larger universe of possible matches for any given umpteen-great great-grandparents.

While this is only a minute dynamic in the universe of cousin-matching efforts, it is the silver lining that encourages us that the likelihood of finding a match may be at those outer fringes of relationship. The only catch is that the weight of the proof must shift to the reliability of the documentation assembled to confirm just how two matches are connected.

Without that Falvey connection in those matches' trees, my attempt at determining Johanna Falvey's family constellation might be near as impossible as, say, for an adoptee seeking birth parents through distant cousin relationships. There does need to be a secondary guide post—like a shared ancestral surname—to keep us on the right path while we reach back to distant connections. But the fact that, in our collection of DNA matches, we are more likely to encounter the key to a second great-grandparent than anyone closer is enough to keep me seeking answers.

Most Recent Thoughts About a Most Recent Common Ancestor

I've done a lot of thinking about the potential for using DNA matches who share only a small segment in common with my target test-taker. At the first—almost exactly six years ago when my husband agreed to be my guinea pig and take the Y-DNA test as well as the autosomal DNA test at Family Tree DNA—I had heard warnings that any match sharing less than 100 centiMorgans would not be worth my attention.

"What?!?!" was my pained, shrieking reply to such an assertion. At that point, we didn't have any matches over that mark. As far as centiMorgan riches were concerned, our DNA test results proved we were poverty-stricken. Most of the matches I could account for were of people who turned out to be fourth cousins.

To further my research agony, looking at the pedigree charts for the closest of these matches was like reading through a nonsensical litany of foreign surnames. None seemed remotely familiar.

It took a while for me to gather my senses and realize something: any matches who turned out to be fourth cousins would need to have penciled in one essential element in their pedigree chart: the right third great-grandparent. If either I or my target match were missing a key third great-grandparent, we would have no trigger to alert us of the Most Recent Common Ancestor who would tie the two of us together.

With my current mission of (hopefully) breaking past one particular brick wall ancestor, Johanna Falvey Kelly, I am missing one key detail: the name of her parents. And yet, not only do I have clues regarding where in County Kerry, Ireland, she may have originated, but I have at least seven DNA matches to my husband—her second great-grandson, according to his pedigree chart—who also claim a Falvey heritage from County Kerry. Significantly, one of those is from New Zealand, neatly confirming Johanna's obituary report that she had a sibling who had emigrated to that very country.

The downside to this realization is that each of these matches shares far less than the once-preferred target level of 100 centiMorgans.

Yesterday, we sized up the level of each DNA segment shared by seven distant Falvey matches. Today, I want to look at this challenge from a different angle: what, exactly, we can expect from sharing a Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) who is that distantly related.

There are two possible outcomes I am anticipating from these small DNA matches to my husband—each of whom, by the way, shares a Falvey entry in their respective pedigree charts. One outcome is that the connection would be through the line of a sibling of Johanna Falvey, which would mean the MRCA would be the parent of those two siblings—and thus, a third great-grandparent to my husband. The second scenario is that the connection would be through a cousin to Johanna, thus pushing the MRCA to the level of fourth great-grandparent.

In the first scenario, a likely relationship between my husband and his DNA match could be that of a fourth cousin. If we take a quick look at the interactive version of Blaine Bettinger's Shared cM Project at DNA Painter, we can see at a glance that fourth cousins could share anywhere from zero cMs to 139 cMs, with an average of 35 cMs in common.

In the second scenario, we would possibly be looking at fifth cousins, for whom anything from zero to 117 cMs could be shared, though generally it could be around 25 cMs as an average.

Of course, the candidates we've already identified as Falvey matches range from sharing 35 cMs down to only eight cMs. This agrees with the tentative level mentioned of fourth cousin for the higher end of the group of matches, though it is entirely possible that a wide range of other matches could be possible, like third cousins once removed. Especially with the long generations observed in my husband's family, that once removed, or twice removed, possibility needs to be kept in mind.

And yet, we also need to consider one other possibility: if any relationship beyond third cousin can share zero cMs, the amount held in common by any of our distant cousins could be an amount approaching zero, as well. Examining the "What Are The Odds" chart, assembled by Leah Larkin and available at DNA Painter, entering the value of "0" shows us the range of relationship possibilities for sharing absolutely no genetic material with a given distant cousin. Entering the amount of shared cMs for each of these seven Falvey matches gives me a range of possible relationships, along with the probability that each of them could, indeed, happen.

Admittedly, sliding down that slippery slope toward the twenty—or fifteen—centiMorgan amount often portrayed as the danger zone before entering the realm of Identical by State can be risky business. However, using a quantifiable chart demonstrating probabilities of specific relationship can be one tool to steady us on our mission past DNA landmines and towards documentable relationships by descent.

Why a Small Link Can Make a Big Difference

Many of us who have learned how to use genetic genealogy to address the mysterious gaps in our family tree have been taught to shy away from matches sharing smaller centiMorgan counts. Much of what gives us our matches when we purchase a DNA test is a mathematical calculation of the likelihood that any two cousins, say, would share the same genetic patterns. The closer the cousin relationship, the higher the measurement—in what is called centiMorgans—of matching genetic material.

Some companies are apparently better at calculating the level of what we might call cousinhood, as we can see from this chart provided by the International Society of Genetic Genealogy. Closer relationships have a better chance of being labeled accurately, though relationships beyond third cousin can sometimes be accurately predicted—though with varying degrees—depending on the testing company.

This, however, is not necessarily why smaller centiMorgan levels usher us into a danger zone of prediction reliability. The ISOGG chart, for instance, can help us infer how many cousins we won't match by DNA who, in reality, do descend from the same common ancestor as we do.

The flip side, though, is discovering someone who does share a sequence of genetic material with us who could turn out not to be an actual relative. For that differentiation of results, science offers two terms: Identical by State versus Identical by Descent.

Identical by Descent—or IBD—is what we are looking for, of course, but what we may hear from some instructors in genetic genealogy could be a specific number past which genetic matches would be merely a matter of coincidence. "Yep, he's Irish, just like me" would be the response to discovering a shared genetic segment received not by virtue of the paper trail of our pedigree, but because the match is merely Identical by State—or IBS.

Crossing that line from the one (IBD) to the other (IBS) has caused some to offer, in their professional opinion, a target number to avoid. In my years of attending genetic genealogy trainings, I have heard everything from "don't go under 100 centiMorgans" to "don't go under ten." Many have solid reasons why twenty cMs is their avoidance zone of choice.

So why, in my current project of examining the family history of my husband's second great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly, would I risk going below that jinxed twenty centiMorgans? This is where I need to have a discussion with myself and think aloud about research strategies.

While the risk of an IBS situation comes from a small segment "shared by many people both within and between populations...which have no genealogical revelance," another aspect of that small segment may simply be that it is of a size signifying relationships beyond the reach of a paper trail. The ISOGG Wiki, for instance, offers the danger zone as shared matches of fifteen centiMorgans or less:

Many matches under 15 cMs will in any case share ancestry more than ten generations ago and will be mostly beyond the reach of genealogical records.

However, if, in my strategy, I pull up all my husband's DNA matches at Ancestry, and then search those results to select only those matches who also contain a Falvey surname in their pedigree, wouldn't the coupling of a known surname with that low centiMorgan count mitigate the problem somewhat?

So far, at least among the pertinent AncestryDNA matches, I have seven possibilities to work with. Of those, the largest match shares one segment at 35 cMs with my husband, and the smallest match contains one segment of only eight cMs. Every one of those matches contains a Falvey in their tree from County Kerry, Ireland—though I have great doubt regarding the accuracy of a few of their choices for supporting records.

Of those seven matches, I've made a chart listing the names of the "founding" ancestor, being the couple born in County Kerry. Only two trees seem to include the same Falvey couple, and a third tree matches relatives from a solid match gleaned from a different testing service. Some of those County Kerry Falvey ancestors left for New Zealand, which is an encouraging sign regarding Johanna's story, as she had at least one sibling who moved to New Zealand. Others moved to the United States, settling in Detroit, or Connecticut, or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island. And then, of course, there was Johanna, moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

I'll continue matching information from the trees of each of these seven Falvey connections, looking mostly for documentation to signal we've got the right path back through the generations. I'll also take the surnames of the earliest Falvey ancestors in each tree to see whether I can find them in the baptismal and marriage records in the townlands where I believe Johanna originated.

If all of these details can line up, regardless of the limit of the small centiMorgan count shared, the result may be that these tiny clues could indeed lead me to the right verifying records, and thus confirmation of connections with an earlier generation—the goal of my research quest.

This is not the first time use of a small segment match has led me to break through a genealogical brick wall. It is beginning to show me that, with due caution, combining these small genetic segment matches with specific surnames can lead to confirming documentation which contained the answers I was looking for, all along. Of course, the document was always there; it was finding a way to confirm it was the right document that I've needed.

While I'll have to step carefully through the research landmines that can surround me, holding closely to those guideposts should help me discern which ten- to fifteen-centiMorgan match does, indeed, confirm it is Identical by Descent.

Connecting With Distant DNA Cousins

Most people are death on the wholesale copying of online family trees—and I get that. There is no sense perpetuating erroneous material. As we use DNA to fill in those stubborn blanks in our pedigree charts, though, there can be much to learn by partnering with distant cousins through their trees to discover more about our family's past.

Lately, I've been writing a different sort of letter than the ones I've been hoping to discover from ancestors. I've been reaching out to contact DNA matches and others with Ancestry subscriptions whose trees show possible family connections. My goal, right now, is to find others interested in tracing their Falvey ancestors back to the specific townlands where they originated in County Kerry, Ireland.

Connecting with DNA matches can have its drawbacks, as many researchers have shared with me. When the topic comes up in conversation, it is often accompanied with groans. How many of us have sent out introductory inquiries, only to wait...and wait...and wait. How to get around that impasse?

Thankfully, there are a lot of tips available from the world of genealogy blogging. If you want generic guidance on contacting DNA matches, you can't go wrong with the crystal-clear advice of "Your DNA Guide" Diahan Southard, who compares composing that introductory letter to setting up a first date. Legacy Tree Genealogists offers thirteen "secrets" to improving the odds of getting a response from a DNA match. For those who have tested specifically at AncestryDNA, going right to the source with their blog and Crista Cowan's video on this topic provides some product-specific direction, like sending your message straight from your AncestryDNA match page, so the message will link the recipient directly back to your own kit.

There are still pitfalls in the process, as witnessed by the opposite approach taken by Amy Johnson Crow—considering possible reasons why a DNA match might not be responding to your email. But for as many deep and complex reasons as Amy may have mentioned, some reasons are so simple, they are simply overlooked. Kitty Munson Cooper discovered that for a while, Ancestry subscribers relying mostly on the app had no way to see that they had received a message. Thankfully, that glitch has been fixed, but who knows what other tiny tech details derail our attempts to get connected.

For quite a while, I had given up on contacting my DNA matches. I tend to go overboard with the word count when getting enthusiastic about a match discovery, but perhaps the avalanche of information, for a newbie, was like taking a drink from the genetic genealogy fire hose. I seldom received responses to my inquiries. With this new Falvey project, though, I'm noting specific research approaches, and communicating them in my decidedly more succinct emails to matches.

This project is not just limited to directly finding DNA matches, though. Somehow, I realized that the "Shared Matches" choice on AncestryDNA's readout doesn't necessarily include any "distant" cousins. And yet, my premise in building these connections back in County Kerry is that the matches include two vital details: a Falvey surname in other people's pedigree chart, plus at least a very small but still possibly useful ten centiMorgan segment shared with my husband.

That means, for one thing, that if I utilize the ThruLines™ option at Ancestry, the two distant matches who do show up include little if any "Shared Match" listings. However, if I go back to my husband's general match listings and search there for any matches containing Falvey in their tree, I will get "Distant Cousin" matches, once I check their DNA results—and yet they, once I click on their "Shared Matches" button, will show none. It seems, for these low-ranking connections, that there is no way to get "there" from "here."

Despite the small connection, I have reached out to these matches anyhow—and, delightfully, am receiving responses from people willing to contribute what little information they have on their distant Falvey ancestor, as well. I'm quite convinced the answer, for all of us, will come much like crowdsourcing efforts do: if we all work on this together, we may more quickly arrive at an answer that none of us, on our own, might have uncovered.

Now Indexing: Immigration Records from New Jersey

Who says a holiday can keep me from my regularly scheduled volunteer indexing?

Last night, while waiting for nightfall to get here so we could enjoy viewing the celebratory fireworks, I realized I could squeeze in a couple short batches of naturalization records. While my usual project selection—naturalization records for New York, where my immigrant ancestors entered the United States—was not available, there was one for neighboring New Jersey. Remembering that many of my extended family opted to settle across the Hudson River from the "Big Apple," I thought this might be enough cause to join in the effort.

One plus to keeping with a certain type of record set, over many volunteer sessions, is that you become familiarized with the usual data requested, both on the original form and in the indexing format. It really didn't take that long to review the forms, despite their originating from a different state. Besides, since the forms were a forerunner of the Declaration of Intention—these were from 1855, when bureaucracy hadn't yet flexed its muscle—there wasn't much information collected from the immigrant. Streamlined forms mean streamlined indexing for me.

On the other hand, short batches sometimes mean the group of documents had been previously attempted by someone else, who apparently became stuck and abandoned the project. It sometimes does take me by surprise to see what the previous problem was—and figure out the best way to backtrack and correct the issue—but the more I get involved with this process, the more the problem solving seems intuitive.

With two short batches to complete—this time for Essex County, New Jersey—I was finished with my volunteer service for the week and quickly out the door to view some fireworks. The idea behind setting up these brief batches of indexing is to provide small packets of work that a volunteer can do without involving huge amounts of time. The more volunteers who make themselves available, because of this light work load, the more those records can be processed and become fully searchable for future researchers. Whether it's "giving back" or "paying it forward," it allows all of us to find more of the family history records we seek.

What a Strange (Quarantine) Season This has Been

Today may be an American holiday—happy Fourth of July!—but with vestiges of the pandemic quarantine still holding life hostage, it hardly seems like a time to freely celebrate. Our family will likely resort to our top secret vista tonight, far from the maddening crowds, to view the illegal but inevitable fireworks displays—keeping a prudent six feet of social distance, mind you—and call it good for holiday celebrating.

Meanwhile, all sorts of other events are swirling around the unsuspecting observer of life. I cannot begin to count the number of times I've received unsolicited texts from spammers, attempting to grab my attention with descriptions better suited for unattached men on the prowl than happily married women. Thankfully, our phone service provider found a way to effectively nip the erupting epidemic of phone spamming in its cancerous bud early on this spring, yielding us one form of peace. But don't think that reprieve extended to email spam or phishing expeditions.

One particular maddening email just arrived in the official in-box of our genealogical society's treasurer, supposedly from the organization's president (that would be me), requiring information by return email so that a bill could be immediately paid. Thankfully, rather than comply, what our treasurer did immediately was call me to confirm that I had sent the email. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that, even though my name was on the email—spelled correctly, too, an unusual flourish!—the address it was sent from was a contrived gmail account, something almost anyone could set up for free and without any oversight or questioning.

That kind of incident was not an isolated example. It just so happened that a similar attempt was directed to the board of a nonprofit organization where my husband serves. I'm sure many other small groups have been targets of such attempts, as well.

What is frustrating to realize is that many nonprofit organizations are not the large, well-funded concerns we usually have in mind—thinking of places like the Red Cross or Salvation Army, for instance—but local, and tiny, volunteer groups whose hardworking heart is focused on helping make life better for others. Every penny for such groups is hard won, and volunteer help is stretched so thin that one rushed misstep could mean irrevocably losing an entire treasury.

Even more than that, not every genealogical society has been able to step up to face the social distancing demands of the current situation, and have suspended their meetings—even, in some cases, their board meetings. Without the customary frequent contact among board members, such cases might result in wrong assumptions acted upon, due to lack of communication.

Such situations are likely what perpetrators of these phishing scams are banking on. I just hope the hardworking volunteer board members of fellow genealogical societies don't fall prey to such strategies. We may be small, those of us in local genealogical societies, but we need to keep each other informed when we spot threats like this.

Where are the Letters?

When my daughter spent half a year in Ireland, attending classes at University College Cork, it was hardly as if she had moved nearly half a world away; we kept in touch daily by emails, texts, and video calls. Our ancestors of 150 years ago, however, didn't have that convenience.

Most people in such circumstances then might have relied on letter writing to bridge the miles. If you, as a family historian, are the recipient of a rich collection of such written dialog, consider yourself fortunate. As Americans moved westward, it was the humble letter which served to keep relatives connected and informed about family news—and some of us still get to benefit from that peek into everyday occurrences from a previous century's family news.

The situation with my husband's second great grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, is different. While we now know from her Fort Wayne obituaries that she had several siblings back in Ireland—plus at least one sibling who had moved all the way to New Zealand—I realized there was something that might have been missing from that scenario.

Irish Catholics, from the era prior to Johanna's immigration to the United States, likely did not have the opportunity to learn how to read and write. Thus, no matter how much they yearned to connect with the family they left back home, there likely would be no letters saved to recount the story to those of us who would most like to know that history.

That realization was just one more of the jolts which remind me that a family historian cannot overlay assumptions about modern life onto the story of our ancestors' past. Knowing that Johanna had relatives in County Kerry and in New Zealand made me wonder just how they kept up on news about the widespread siblings' daily lives.

There are other recountings of Irish men and women connecting with the folks back at home—sometimes, thanks to a neighbor willing to serve as scribe to write out a dictated letter and mail it to someone back home, who could find a priest willing, in turn, to read aloud the letter's contents to its recipient. I know that was the case with another of my husband's ancestors, whose wife kept that letter close at hand for the rest of her widowed life. Only in such rare situations does that first generation of immigrants pass along to us any record of their daily transactions from that period of their life.

Which leaves us, the stumped researchers, desperately trying to piece together records which leave us bleary-eyed and despondent. I find myself bouncing from times in which I pore through the baptismal records of County Kerry, noting mothers' maiden names and comparing them with names of the child's sponsors, to searching for DNA matches whose already-constructed trees contain hypotheses about just how they fit into the Falvey line. Besides populating the cells in a spreadsheet, the names begin filling up our hypothetical Falvey tree, both from the bottom up (with DNA matches) and the top down (from records of likely Falvey ancestors).

And yet, the process leaves me feeling so very much stuck in the big middle of nothing. Which is where I begin yearning for the sign of an impossible letter from someone, anyone, from back home in Ireland.