One or two of you out there are into genealogy. I wonder whether you’ve noticed patterns similar to what I’ve seen, and what you’ve concluded as a result.
When you’ve built a family tree to more than 10,000 relatives, you start to notice certain trends. Especially when you look at incoming DNA matches on a large scale.
One that makes its presence felt every time I try to find new matches for my tree via DNA is that my previously unknown maternal relatives are far, FAR more likely to pop up on the list than folks on my Dad’s side of the family.
I’ve tried to explain this to myself in various ways. One is that my mother’s family has always seemed closer than my Dad’s. Dad stayed in touch with his parents while they lived, and his four siblings and their families, but that’s about it. And we seldom saw them in person, except when my grandparents lived in South Carolina during my toddler years.
During those years, my Dad did whatever he could to stay in South Carolina — and his detailer obliged by putting him aboard a couple of ships out of Charleston, and Columbia for a year in a recruiting station.
That kept us close to some of his family, but to ALL of my mother’s. And even after we started moving around after my paternal grandfather died when I was 4, we spent almost every summer entirely in SC, and attended every family gathering possible. So I knew loads of maternal second and third cousins, plus all the necessary uncles and aunts. Not so on my Dad’s side, because after my grandfather died, they were mostly up in Maryland.
Still, when I started doing this genealogy stuff and had my DNA done, it initially seemed that the Warthens were more interested in tree-building than the Collinses. Three of my paternal first cousins have had their DNA analyzed, and only one first cousin on my Mom’s side.
But that was too small a sample to draw conclusions. Once I started really digging into the matches, and going beyond the people I knew well, I found a very different pattern.
Look at the illustration above. That’s the top of the results I get when I filter the list for just new matches who have an identifiable (according to the reckoning of AI) common ancestor. I find that to be a useful beginning for finding people I can reliably post on my tree.
That’s carefully cropped to remove identifying information. But you’ll see that in the top eight matches, ALL are maternal. That’s just the beginning. I couldn’t show you more without the image getting ridiculously vertical.
The full list starts with 14 maternal matches. Then there’s one paternal. Then 10 maternal, pausing for one more paternal. Then 13 more maternal to fill out the top 40, where the filtered list ends.
Are the Collinses just mad about tracing family, while the Warthens are less interested? Or is it a regional thing? Are South Carolinians far more interested in finding roots than folks who live in Maryland? Or is it a big-city thing to be less interested? For the last couple of centuries the Warthens had lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, which contains the sprawling northern suburbs of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
Recently, I’ve run across this sort of thing on my wife’s side of the family, which I’ve carried back past the 14th century, where I found our latest common ancestory. (Yes, I’m married to my 18th cousin once removed. Befored you gasp at the scandal, let me point out that the current king of England is my 16th cousin once removed, and he’s NEVER invited us to the palace. It’s quite likely you’re more closely related to your spouse — and the king — than I am; you just haven’t been crazy enough to do all that tracing.)
Anyway, I had done all that without any DNA evidence. Finally, one of my children sent her DNA to Ancestry. (Previously, three of my kids had done 23andme, which had not been quite as helpful to my tree-building. The two services concentrate on different things.)
My wife, you see, is a very sensible lady and has no interest in doing her own DNA. But my daughter’s data got me started on her fam.
And I found that those folks from Memphis and elsewhere in West Tennessee are, if anything, less interested in sending in their saliva than most of my Dad’s family. (On the other hand, I’ve filled out my wife’s side of the tree pretty well to third cousins — and back well into the medieval period, despite that lack of DNA. Indicating that maybe interest in DNA doesn’t correllate to closeness of families at all.)
But is that because people who moved that far West were less interested in where they came from, while the East-Coasters — especially southerners — were more into establishing their pedigrees?
Or is it just something about Phelans and Warthens in contrast to Collinses?
I don’t know. Perhaps if you have run into something like this, you have some insight…
Related Posts
I wrote that over the weekend because it was on my mind, but didn’t post it until this morning.
Skimming over it just now, I’m pretty sure that this is regional, and has nothing to do with one families closeness over anothers.
I’m strongly suspecting that South Carolinians are more interested in working this stuff out than people in other parts.
This might be because, as I discovered when I moved back to the state of my birth in 1987, it’s weird how often you meet strangers and figure out that they are related to you. Or, you have reason to suspect they are related, so you build out your tree a little farther along one branch in search of them. And DNA helps with that.
This is seriously a real difference about folks here. I’ve lived all over, and have only run into that kind of persistent interrelatedness here. And it’s not just that I, personally, was born here. I seem to hear about other people having the same experience a LOT….
Not that people don’t make connections with new acquaintances in other places. It’s just that in my experience, you find connections other than familial.
When I was growing up all over the place, my parents were always meeting people who knew friends of theirs, because they were part of the same roaming Navy culture.
Ditto with me whenever I go to Washington. I referred to it as a big faceless city above, but if you stay on or near Capitol Hill, it’s like being in Mayberry. I’ll run into people I know from all over, maybe from when I worked in Tennessee or Kansas decades ago. That’s because the city — or that part of it — is peopled by politicos from across the country…
So that’s separate from the DNA thing…
Oh, and journalism’s the same as those other roving subcultures. Hence things like the connection I discovered with AP’s Meg Kinnard a few years back…
In my small Pee Dee county, it is an accepted fact we’re all related somewhere along the line. I mentioned to my wife recently to be careful who she talks about….she may be talking to their cousin. I don’t know if this qualifies for endogamy, but it makes it difficult to tease out family lines on Ancestry.com
That’s certainly true if you’re from Marion County, like my mother. Are you?
Of course, it’s also a statewide SC phenomenon. I learned that shortly after I moved back here in 1987. I was editing some copy on the old mainframe system one night, struggling to breathe in those pre-smoking ban days, and saw the name “Tom Turnipseed” for the first time. Not thinking clearly, I laughed and said, “Tom TURNIPSEED? Did he go with that because John Barleycorn was already taken?”
Immediately, an editor at the desk next to mine — a heavy smoker who had already made it pretty clear that she considered me to be a dirty Knight Ridder spy since I was the first editor there to come from a KR paper after the sale in 1986), said, “Tom’s a cousin of mine….”
I’ve been very careful ever since…
On Ancestry as of this moment, on the maternal side I have 8,752 matches. Paternal side I have 52,684. I know a person (from Virginia) who has over 100,000 on each side. Wow. I am envious.
What’s worse, I spent literally years searching for my mom’s dad’s mom’s Irish family. I had no close kin on that branch. Using GEDmatch I found a person that shared with me a segment on the X Chromosome. (Yeah, I went waaaaay down a rabbit hole on this stuff.) I had to fill out that person’s tree to find where her ancestor and my ancestor were cousins in 1820’s Ireland. A needle in a haystack.
My mom’s folks came over much later than my dad’s people. That may have something to do with it. I know that some on my dad’s side had larger families. Maybe the Irish famine wiped out my Irish folks. Maybe they had less surviving children.
On my mom’s Slovakian side I found a family surname that is pretty much confined to a small cluster of villages. On a Slovak cell phone internet site, I entered that surname and several matches popped up- with their addresses. I sent them snail mail explaining who I was. Fast forward, I am meeting two of my Slovak cousins next Spring on a genealogy vacation to Ireland and Slovakia (and maybe Poland and Ukraine). Our most recent common ancestor was born in 1811.
Don’t get me started on this stuff.
One thing I’ve found about Irish ancestry is that once you get back to Ireland, the trail disappears. I’ve always attributed that to the English destroying, or at least not preserving, the records after they took over…