So there is a DNA match on Ancestry who is a
4th to 6th cousin to my mother (22.9 centimorgans shared across 2 DNA segments)
4th to 6th cousin to my brother (23.6 centimorgans shared across 2 DNA segments)
5th to 8th cousin to me (13.9 centimorgans shared across 1 DNA segment)
AND
4th to 6th cousin to my husband (30 centimorgans shared across 1 DNA segment)
This freaked me out a bit when I first discovered it, but this person is much more distantly related to me, than he is to my husband, and my husband and I don’t show up as DNA matches to each other. Phew! It is possible that we are related to this person through different sides of his family. I messaged the person who administers W.A.’s DNA test back in April and May of 2015. I never heard back from them and they haven’t been logged into Ancestry since June 2015. I hate when that happens.
The surnames in their tree are Altschul and Quinn. They only have 3 people in their tree. Based on the shared DNA matches I think W.A. is related to my family through the Heagney line, even though the Quinns in my tree that I know of so far are through marriage. I have some Quinns who married Heagneys, but I am not descended from any of those Quinn girls. But there must be some connection there that I just haven’t figured out yet.
Neither Altschul or Quinn appear in my husband’s family that I have found yet. W.A. doesn’t have a DNA match with my mother-in-law, so the connection must be on my husband’s father’s side of his family. I haven’t figured out which branch yet. There is a group of people who are shared DNA matches with my husband and W.A. who also mostly match with each other. That should help to figure out who their common ancestor is since so many people match each other. I started to try to build a spreadsheet with people in the trees of the shared matches, but some of them don’t have trees (ugh!) and I haven’t finished trying to figure this all out yet. It does seem like a lot of those people have the Peterson surname in their trees.
Hopefully someday I’ll be able to solve this mystery.
Now on to the second question posed in the title of this blog. Since both my mother-in-law and father-in-law have ancestors who have been in the US since the 1600s, and who lived in the northeast for so many years, I am absolutely convinced that they are distant cousins. There are DNA matches that my husband has that I know are from his father’s side of his family based on the people they are descended from (the Cowles family who I will write about in a future blog). But there are shared DNA matches with those Cowles descendants who are also shared DNA matches with my mother-in-law. Both families have the surname Cole in their trees, so I am thinking that is possibly where the connection is. Yet another mystery to try to solve.