Large

 

Autosomal DNA is "THE" topic most genealogists are talking about these days, albeit by ZOOM instead of in person.  

As a data analyst by profession, I am most excited about the opportunities to apply all the Excel sorting and filtering tools that I use in my "real world" workplace.  

The latest such opportunity is "clustering," whereby you dump all of your DNA matches into a data file and convert them into color-coded groups based on who is related to each other.  Basically, this is an amplification of the "LEEDS METHOD," developed a few years ago by researcher Dana Leeds.  (Read all about it at https://www.danaleeds.com/the-leeds-method.)

Anyway, I bring all this up because of this week's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" blogging prompt: LARGE.

In examining all of my clusters, I noticed the matches I find from my dad's side of the family outnumber the matches from my mom's side by about a 3-to-1 ratio.  And I wondered why that number was so relatively LARGE . . . pun definitely intended.

Drilling down further, I notice I have at least 7 identifiable matches for each of Dad's 32 third-great grandparents.  But one couple has a disproportionately LARGE number of matches at 126 each: Isaac Timmons and his wife Sarah Davis, who lived at Mount Croghan, South Carolina, in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

If YOU find this sort of disproportionality in your own results, fret not.  This is typical.  There are two main reasons why this happens:

1. Fertility rates.  One side of your family may consistently have LARGE numbers of children, while another side has a history of only one or two children per generation.  The lines with multiple generations of multiple births will obviously produce more potential living matches, but that doesn't mean you inherited more DNA from your most recent common ancestors.
2. Who is taking tests?  Common sense tells us if you have a bunch of cousins from one branch of the family who are testing while very few cousins from another branch are submitting their DNA, the totals are going to be lopsided.  Many factors come into play here.  One group of cousins may be more interested in genealogy because their branch of the family belongs to the LDS church, while another group may have an aversion to DNA testing due to privacy concerns.  But varying participation rates do not mean you have more DNA from one pair of ancestors over another.

These apply to my own results.  In the case of Isaac and Sarah Timmons, they had a LARGE family of thirteen children.  All of these children survived to adulthood (a rare achievement in that era) and all but the youngest boy (who marched off to fight in the Civil War and never returned) went on to marry and produce large families of their own.  By my count, Isaac and Sarah had no fewer than 115 grandchildren!