Monday, May 30, 2011

Confirmed another 23andMe cousin today!

Yesterday one of my friends/cousins at 23andMe mentioned a predicted cousin of his who has ancestors from the Gloucestershire area of England. Since my Allen, Rudge, Trotman, Chitts, Hill, Johnson, Fowler, Bailey, Jones and Pullin families are from that area, I checked out his profile. Of the seventeen surnames on his profile, we shared four (Pullin, Allen, Cornell and Gillet), so I sent him a share request.  Sure enough, he matched both of my father's siblings on Chromosome 13 for a 6 cM stretch.

Click on the chart to enlarge and get a closer look

With confirmation of a match, I immediately focused on the Pullins since according to his profile, he had traced them back to Somerset, UK, which isn't too far from where my Rachel Pullin (b. abt. 1781) married William Jones in 1801. Because I was concentrating on them, I completely ignored the fact that he also had mentioned the area of Waterloo, Ontario (Canada).

After looking at "My Tangled Vine" family tree on Ancestry.com, he informed me that Sylvanus Cornell (b. abt. 1752) who emigrated from New York to Waterloo, Ontario in about 1800, is his 4th great grandfather.  Sylvanus and his wife Joannah are also my dad's 4th great grandparents. This makes my dad's siblings and this match 5th cousins, fitting with 23andMe's prediction that they are 7th cousins with a range of 4th - 10th. [Update - Sylvanus is also his 5th great grandfather, making them 5th cousins once removed as well.]

It is difficult to be sure if our Cornell ancestors are responsible for this match since we very well may also have Pullin and Allen ancestors in common. Also, we do not know Joannah's maiden name and the shared DNA could be from her. So, as I have said before, to be 100 percent confident that we have found the correct connection responsible for the shared DNA, we will have to wait and see if we get any other matches on this spot who also have Cornell, Allen or Pullin ancestors.

One especially unique thing about today's match is that we have so many possible connections. He shares Gillet with my maternal side, he shares Cornell with my paternal side and we might even share Pullin and Allen ancestors from the area around Gloucestershire, England. (His 3rd great grandfather is Isaac Allen and so is my dad's. Not sure if it is the same one yet.)  To make it even more interesting, I have previously corresponded with his nephew (the curator of the Sheffield Museum) about family history, he belongs to David Faux's Young Family Project that I have mentioned in this blog here and he has lived for forty years in Sheffield, where my fourth great grandfather Henry Moore lived and is buried, even attending the church that my Moores helped the Cornells to found in Beverley, Ontario two hundred years ago. When you find a connection like this, it makes all the hard work worthwhile!

2 comments:

  1. Very nice CeCe. I was able to make a connection with someone on my Napier line -- http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/4815/dnaconfirmation.png -- I only made this connection in April, but we have already had two new cousins join who also match this segment. One cousin doesn't know much about his genealogy but luckily enough his mother's maiden name is Napier and she is from roughly the same geographical area. So that basically proves that indeed this segment IS from the Napiers. Hope you are also able to find a third person to confirm the match!

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