What Family Secrets Will Your DNA Reveal?

Great news! Ancestry DNA test kits are now available to Canadians. If you've been waiting for the chance to order a kit to Canada, now's the time.

I've had my DNA (and my brothers, and my husband's, and my sons and my in-laws..) DNA tested at other companies and now is my chance to do the same with Ancestry DNA in Canada  

The more places you test, the better so I'm really excited about this! So far, with our DNA tests we've learned many new things - not just our ethnic background but family secrets. That's right.

We learned, for example, that the family rumours were true and that hubs' grandfather's father was not the man married to his mother. Nope, the rumour that Great-Grandma had been messing around with the hired man named Cooper turned out to be true! DNA connected my husband and his mother with first cousins through the Cooper family. 

We also were able to verify our paper research showing my Native American heritage, and my husband's black ancestry. 

One more secret recently came to light, and this was something no one had any inkling of. Not a whisper, not a rumour, nothing - so it was a real bombshell. We had a first cousin match to one of my sons. A first cousin we'd never heard of. No one in the family knew of this person. I'm sure my genealogist readers can figure out pretty quickly that a first cousin match meant that a sibling to my son's father (or to me) had a child no one knew about.

I can't reveal more (yet) as I don't have this person's permission but if/when I do have it, I'll tell the whole story here. It's mind-blowing! And it's been wonderful to learn. Because of DNA this amazing person is now in our lives and attends our family functions. It was a win-win situation except for one tiny blimp on our delight at finding this match.  I promise I'll share all this in a future blog post once I have the thumbs up to do so.

Meantime, why not find out what secrets lie in your family tree? Take the Ancestry DNA now.

Don't Miss the Independence Day Special on DNA Kits!

AncestryDNA is celebrating Independence Day by offering a 20% discount on AncestryDNA. Don't miss this special offer. 

If you haven't tested your DNA yet, or Grandma's or Auntie Helen, now's your chance!

What can DNA tell you? You can learn your ethnicity. It can connect you to cousins you never knew about. Family secrets are often revealed as they were for my husband's and my families. 

My husband discovered that his great grandfather was not really his great grandfather! Instead it was another man. DNA confirmed family rumours on that one. You can read all about that shocker at DNA Gave My Husband a Completely Different Great Grandfather and DNA Results Leave us Gob-Smacked! 

What did I learn? That one of my sons had a first cousin no one ever knew about. I haven't blogged about that as I have not asked permission of the new cousin yet. But in any case, run, do not walk to AncestryDNA to order your kit! The discount will run from July 2-July 6. 

Please celebrate by spreading the word!

DNA Results Leave us Gob-Smacked!

That's a British expression. It means dumbfounded, surprised as heck... you get the idea. I've been digging into hubs' DNA matches and results very closely and found a match that is one heck of a surprise.

To preface my story, this match (let's call him John) is listed as 64% .64% Sharing and with 47 cM. ^[FN1] That's a pretty close match, I estimate within 3 or 4 generations.

The matches that I've been able to confirm as matching me or my brother, are with a shared ancestor going back to 4th or 6th great grandparent - and they only have 20-25 cM matching. So finding this new match to hubs and such a close match was exciting.

The puzzler was that none of the match's surnames or ancestral tree are the same as my husband's. And we can both go back quite far with sources to prove the genealogy. So what gives? After scratching my head for a bit I had an "aha" moment.

I suddenly realized that one of the match's surnames was the same as the name bandied about as a bit of family lore from hubs' grandmother. Grandmother always claimed that her husband was the son of the hired man and not the son of the man he thought was his father, his mother's husband. We dismissed this as petty gossip on her part.

But now, having seen the lineage and done my own investigation, we have a compelling case that supports her claim. I don't want to use names yet so I'm going to make up names for each individual.

The Cast:

Sally, hubs' great grandmother
Sally's son Alex, hub's grandfather
Sally's husband William
Sally's brother Jim
Sally's hired man Mr. Smith
Hub's close match, John
John's grandfather Calvin Smith
John's great-grandfather Ralph Smith

Facts:

Great grandmother Sally came from England in 1913 to live with her brother Jim. Jim lived next door to Calvin Smith. (the grandfather of our match )

Great Sally was said to have had hub's grandpa (Alex) by the hired man (Mr. Smith) who was not her husband.

We also find that Sally's husband William was living next door to Ralph Smith and two sons in 1911. They were all farmers.

Ralph Smith and his sons were all farmers and farm hands. This fits with the story of Great Grandma Sally messing around with the hired man.

Given the presumed close relationship indicated by the DNA samples, we have a theory that either Man B (our match's grandpa) or one of his nephews (we have a good candidate) was the father of hubs' Grandpa.

Next Steps

Now the question is how do we tactfully suggest this to our  match (or do we even bring it up??) and how do we gather more evidence.

We plan on asking hubs' mother to have her DNA tested through 23andMe.com so we can see if she also matches hubs' match John, and if so, by how much.

We will also ask hubs' father to take a DNA test so we can see if he matches the same person as hubs'. One of them should match, the other should not. If it is hubs' mother who matches, that would fit the correct lineage. (maternal not paternal)

Hubs is going to join some surname groups for the lineage he thought was his. If he is not related he won't match anyone in those groups. 

Caveats

The new match's ancestors were all running around in the same very small community as hubs' ancestors. So there is a chance that the common ancestor is a secret that a wife or mother took to the grave. We would have to test more family members to try to narrow down the shared ancestor.

We'd like to get one of hubs' uncles to submit a DNA test if possible.

Meantime I'm doing some sleuthing to try to eliminate any possibility that there is a different shared surname and thus ancestor. But it certainly looks like hubs has a new cousin and many new family surnames to research! Mind you this is only in the theory stage, there is no definite proof of what the relationship is to our new-found match.

Footnotes:

FN1: cM  is  unit of genetic distance on a chromosome. Closer relationships have longer cMs because recombination has not occurred as often.