It’s time to talk about my DNA matches again. I’ve been immersing myself in my matches. One of the Facebook groups I am a member of told me that the best way to learn about your DNA is to get familiar with your results. That’s what I’ve been focusing on since it’s way too cold to be outside…
Okay, I probably wouldn’t have been outside anyway. It’s never been my thing.
Where were we?
The last time I posted about my DNA, this chart was where I left things. I was going through trying to identify my public tree matches to see what I could tell about them. Everything is listed in my Excel spreadsheet. While I was going through, I also made a point of adding a star and note to each match that I identified. Boy am I glad I did that now. Wait until I show you this!
That was very clever of me!
To save screen space, I will just tell you I got a bunch of new matches over the holiday. That left me with a lot of stuff to add to my database. No problem, I have a process for that! Well, as you all know new matches don’t usually have trees. That’s okay, I’m sure some will put some up eventually. In the meantime, I can still work with that. For purposes of our example, Let’s say I have a new DNA match named New Cousin. He’s awesome because he chose to share his DNA matches with us and that’s alright in my book.
Woah there, that’s a lot, what am I looking at?
I’m glad you asked! Okay, above this text you should see a list of my shared matches with New Cousin. The special treat is that I’ve been adding stars and comments to each match I’ve identified. What you see above is what happened when I clicked that starred matches button at the top of my screen.
When I look at my notes for each person, I started to notice a pattern. Besides the two William and Anna matches at the bottom and my 2nd Cousin match at the top, the list is definitely favoring a Joseph Slusher and Nancy Wade descendant.
I am extremely lucky and cursed.
As well all know with DNA matches, this isn’t a given result for everyone. You have to be lucky enough to have the information given by your matches and then you have to know how to extract as much information from as little information as you can. On top of that luck, there was another little factor that worked to my advantage.
Mays and Slusher Families
It just so happens that three Mays children married three Slusher children. Given the size of the families, before that fact is taken into account, odds were always very good that I would have a lot of Mays and Slusher matches. The interesting part is that most of these matches aren’t coming from the Mays sections of the Slusher tree. My ancestor John Mays only had 3 children survive to adulthood and they only had a few children themselves. Some of these families were very prolific. One grandson of Joseph and Nancy had 20 children! Allegedly, of course, all this could be thrown in the cold, snowy night if my Do-Over takes a dramatic turn. Hopefully not though! HA!
Note: I am using my old file to keep up with DNA match correspondence, though I am upfront with everyone that I am re-entering everything from the beginning.
