I thought I’d throw in an extra Bonus Blog post this week, since last Friday’s was a bit of a downer.
We have had my mom’s, mine, my brother’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s DNA all tested at Ancestry. FTDNA and GEDmatch are two other places where we have put our DNA. FTDNA does their own DNA testing, but they also have the ability to upload raw DNA that you have downloaded from Ancestry to their site. They will then find DNA matches similar to the way Ancestry provides matches. GEDmatch also allows uploading of raw DNA. I haven’t gotten into using GEDmatch too much though, because it’s much more technical. You can do all sorts of things comparing your kit to other people’s kits and find who you both match with. They do have people who have tested at several different sites there, but I find it hard to use. You can upload trees to those sites too, but I haven’t because they don’t hide living people like Ancestry does, and I definitely don’t want to put that info on the internet for the whole world to see.
I have however found a close match on FTDNA that I have been communicating with to try to figure out where the connection is. They are supposed to be a 2nd to 3rd cousin to my mom and a 2nd to 4th cousin to me and my brother. They had ancestors in Jersey City, but they don’t have any familiar names in their family tree. Their ancestors were originally from County Cavan, Ireland which none of mine were, although Cavan is somewhat in between County Mayo and County Tyrone where some of my ancestors were from. Their Jersey City ancestors also stopped in Pennsylvania before heading to Jersey City. (More about that on Friday in my Murtha Family blog post). Assuming this person is my mom’s 3rd cousin and trying to go back in both our lines, it looks like one of my great-great-grandmothers may have had the surname Kelly. I only know for sure the surname of one of my four great-great-grandmothers on the Irish side, so it could be any one of the other three. Since the DNA match knows more about their great-grandmothers, ie one was German and one was from England, we think we have narrowed it down to one of my great-great-grandmothers being a sister to Mary Kelly. But just like I discussed in the blog about the O’Leary and Doyle families a few weeks ago, unfortunately Kelly is a VERY common Irish surname. Why couldn’t it have been a more unusual name????
I really hope I can eventually figure this out. It gets very frustrating having close DNA matches and then not being able to figure out the connection. Much more about this on Friday.