Background
I’ve been using ancestry.com as the primary place for
storing all my ancestral research since 2008. So, I have a large number of
individuals in my extensive family tree. I also bought a DNA kit from them
about 8 years ago and have used it extensively. In order to extend the reach of
my DNA research, I also loaded my DNA results into GEDmatch – a DNA tool that
allows people who use not only ancestry.com but other DNA analysis tools such
as 23andMe to search for relatives based on shared DNA. I had used this tool at
the time to find a few new relatives, but I’ve not used it actively for a
couple of years. Thus, I was surprised to get a message from GEDmatch this
weekend announcing that I had a new match to be checked out.
My New Match
The information in GEDmatch is fairly technical. It
shows the total length of matched DNA, the largest matched segment, an estimate
of how close the match is (e.g. 4.00 is a 4th cousin – but numbers
are never that precise so it might give anywhere from 3.8-4.2 or so),
haplogroups, etc. It tells where the DNA test is from (ancestry, 23andMe,
MyHeritage, etc.). And it gives a name/alias that the individual has given and
an email address that you can use to contact them. You can sort the matches by
any of these fields, with the default being the match closeness. For example,
my closest match is my niece who used 23andMe this past January and the degree
of that match is 1.54 – pretty close to the actual 1.50 that she actually has.
I was surprised that this new match was in the 3rd
cousin range, i.e. someone relatively close to me. But who was this individual?
The name/alias was “Momoffivekids”. That would seem to indicate that it was a
female and the sex of the individual was “F”. With five children, she would not
be very young. And her email address was of the form FLLLLLLYY, i.e. a fairly
common usage where the individual uses their first initial, last name, and a
two-digit number which is often either their birthyear or some other
significant date. In this case the YY was “62” which I believed would be their
year of birth.
Thus, my new cousin was female, had a first name that
started with “H”, a last name of “M_____”, and she had been born in 1962. (Note
that for privacy purposes, I’ll not be giving exact names.) But with 5
children, the “M_____” is probably her married name, so that’s going to present
an additional challenge in making a family tree for her and determining how she
is related to me!
Initial Searching
While searching using an email address is usually not
very successful, I thought I’d give it a try anyway. I was pleasantly surprised
to get one hit – in a document on a proposal for a community health advocacy
program in New Mexico from 20 years ago. It was a 75-page document that
included a 7-page list of all the task force members, including their email
addresses. Now I had a full first name and a state (or at least where she lived
20 years ago).
I next did a search using that information, i.e.,
“H_____ M_____” and “New Mexico”, to see what else I could find. I was quickly
able to find her current address, her husband’s name, and the names of a few of
those five children. But then, farther along the list of results, there was
another page that gave even more detailed information. H____ and her husband
were running the Spanish ministry of a church in the area and were listed among
the church leaders. It gave a brief bio for each of them, noting that she was
born in Michigan, moved to CA as a teenager, met and married her husband in
1980, and that they had 5 children (confirmation of the info in her alias). It
also had a picture of the two of them.
Ok, so now I know who this new cousin is. But how do I
find how she is related to me?
[H____]
Family Tree Research
[Before beginning H’s ancestral tree, I thought I’d
see if I could find her using social media (e.g., Facebook) because she had a
somewhat unusually spelled first name. There were only a handful of people with
her first/last name, but I was quickly able to determine that one of those was
for her since I had a picture to match. She had a minimal amount of information
there, but there was a good picture of her entire family, i.e., she, her
husband, and all five children. But she was not accepting new friends.]
The best place to start looking for ancestors of
living individuals is often obituaries. I searched using her name, state, and
the word obituary. I was able to find one somewhat sparse entry – an obituary
for one of her sisters from over 20 years ago. But this was valuable as it
mentioned that her mother had predeceased her and gave her mother’s last name,
“T_____” (of course, that being her mother’s married name, not her maiden
name). But that meant that H_____’s maiden name was “T_____” and was another
piece of valuable information.
Ancestry.com hides a lot of information on living
individuals. But I now had the names of some individuals who were no longer
living – H’s sister and her mother. I started a partial tree with what I had
thus far – putting the full name and birth/death years of the sister, the
maiden name and year of birth of H, the full name of H’s husband, the first
name of H’s mother, and the last name of H’s father. Now I would be able to use
the power of the hint/search capability of Ancestry.com!
I quickly found a marriage record for H in California
– and that supplied me with her middle initial. Then death records for H’s
sister gave me the full names of her mother and father. Continuing up the tree,
adding one generation at a time, I worked through the various hints. In
particular following the women in H’s maternal line, it went back from CA to
the Midwest, then finally to her great-grandmother who had been born in CT –
and whose name I recognized.
I checked my own family tree and found that I had her
great-grandmother already there and her grandmother as well. I then added in
the other generations going down so I could discard the partial tree I had just
created.
I have now confirmed that H_____ M_____ is indeed my 3rd
cousin and exactly how she is connected to me. The initial hint from GEDmatch
has resulted in my identification of a living and previously unknown (to me)
relatively close cousin – and one who is at least interested enough in her
genealogy to take a DNA test and load it into GEDmatch.
I’ve sent this information to her and am eagerly
awaiting her response!
