Finding a Cousin by Using DNA

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 4^th 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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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!