DNA Myth

A common DNA misconception is that you and your sibling will have the same autosomal DNA results. I have no idea where this myth came from but here are some examples showing how not true it is.
On the left is me and on the right is my brother.

 Here we have three more siblings: Marcos, Rebecca, and Mary.

There are more regions but they are all less than 1% noise except on Mary's. Hers also includes 2% Mali and 1% Senegal that didn't fit into the screen cap.
That's just the ethnicity results. Let's take a look at the cousin matches.

They are all listed as "immediate family" for each other and they all match their aunt, Maria B.
As you can see they all share different amounts of DNA with different relatives. Jannivy is the granddaughter of their sister who has passed away. Maria shares so much DNA with her that she shows up as "close family" instead of "1st cousin" where a great-niece would usually show. As the amount of DNA shared gets smaller it's more likely a match will only show up on one sibling. If you're using, or will be using, DNA as a serious research tool you should test as many family members as possible. Your brother, sister, aunt, or uncle may be the key to solving your mystery.

Case Study #1: Hammack & Mott

I've been wanting write a post about the research process for a while now. Even if you aren't a Hammack or a Mott I hope you'll find some helpful hints here. I'm actually not a Mott either but we'll get to that later. Here are the main characters in this story:

Sophia Ann "Annie" Hammack, my father's maternal grandmother
John Franklin Hammack and Martha Cornelia Mott, Annie's parents

Martha Cornelia Mott's name will change a couple of times during the course of this post.

Talking to Dad

The names of my father's maternal aunts and uncles were known to me, I had met them all. For anything beyond that I had to ask Dad what he remembered. His maternal grandmother's name was Annie Hammack and this case study is about her line. According to Dad the names of Annie's parents, his great-grandparents, were John Franklin Hammack & Martha Cornelia Mott. He never met them but he did have a memory of meeting one of Annie's sisters and thought her name might be Carrie. So with that I was off to try and find out something about his maternal grandmother's family.

Annie Hammack Loftice with my baby brother and me.

I had no problem finding Annie with her husband and children in U.S. censuses but finding anything prior to her marriage was my first road block. Annie was born in Missouri so there wasn't an immigration issue.

By Any Other Name

Most of my great-grandparents applied for Social Security. I had a list of applications to order. Ordering all of them was out of the question financially so I prioritized the list. Annie was not at the top. I had names for her parents and that would be the primary reason for ordering the application. As I was running out of alternate spellings and different searches to try I started moving her up the list.
Dad seemed sure of the names but I was stuck so I crossed my fingers and ordered her SS-5. A few weeks later I found out that Dad was right with one small, but very important, omission.

After the jump: The answer, more questions and contact from distant family.

New DNA Results

AncestryDNA released their updated ethnicity results yesterday!
Of course the DNA portion of Ancestry.com promptly crashed.
I know, you're shocked.
Here is the new list of the possible results:

Africa
Africa North
Africa South-Central Hunter-Gatherers
Africa Southeastern Bantu
Benin/Togo
Cameroon/Congo
Ivory Coast/Ghana
Mali
Nigeria
Senegal

America
Native American

Asia
Asia Central
Asia East
Asia South

Europe
Europe East
Europe West
European Jewish
Finnish/Northern Russia
Great Britain
Iberian Peninsula
Ireland
Italy/Greece
Scandinavia

Pacific Islander
Melanesia
Polynesia

West Asia
Caucasus
Near East

I was able to get the results for all five of my tests open in separate windows in one of the short functional periods. After making all these screen caps I was going to see how this change was shown in matches and explore some of the other changes. Unfortunately the AncestryDNA site was no longer available so for today I just have images of the results to compare.
After the jump the images are side by side so you don't have to scroll up and down to see what changed for each person.

Here are the original results for (top) Dad, Mom, Mom's Aunt, (bottom) me and Baby Brother.

Here are the new results without "trace regions":

New results with "trace regions" (Dad, Mom, Mom's Aunt, Me, Brother):

After the jump: Side by side comparison

My DNA Results III

In case you missed the first two posts on my results (links at the end of this post) the test I'm talking about is Ancestry.com's newest DNA test, an autosomal test. It can be taken by both men and women and is currently only available to purchase in the U.S..
I wanted to have results from both of my parents before writing another DNA post. I was fully prepared to write about how I really am "Daddy's girl" because I was sure my 40% Scandinavian and 18% British Isles were all from Dad. I was surprised that the percentage would be so far off of 50%. 52/48 I could see. 54/46 maybe. But 58/42 seemed off to me. Well my instincts were right. I just never expected British Isles results on my mom's side! Not even a single digit percent. I'm stunned!
Results and more after the jump.

My DNA Results II

You can read about my initial results here. Since that post I've had time to look through all the matches and new ones have been added almost daily.
Here are the stats so far:

1144   total matches
    18   are in the 4th to 6th cousin range with 95% confidence or higher
    67   of the public trees have fewer than 30 people on them
  157   do not have a tree on Ancestry.com
  184   have private trees

Because of the large number of results I'm setting aside the matches that have no tree and those that have private trees. My tree is public so they are free to look and if they find a match I hope they will contact me. One person already has because she read my previous blog post! She invited me to view her private tree. No luck finding our connection (4th - 6th cousin with 95% confidence) but we'll continue to search.

After the jump: Surnames and DNA matches

My DNA Results

I considered writing an overview of Ancestry.com's new autosomal DNA test but the Legal Genealogist already has an excellent write up. I highly recommend reading her post if you're interested in the autosomal test.

As of March 2012 the categories for Ancestry.com's results were as follows:

  British Isles
  Central European
  East Asia (includes Siberia, China & Southeast Asia)
  Eastern European
  Finnish/Volga-Ural
  French/Swiss
  German
  Jewish
  Middle Eastern
  Native North American
  Native South American
  North African
  Russian/Persian/Turkish
  Scandinavian
  Southern European

As you'll see from my results at least one of those categories, Russian/Persian/Turkish, has changed since March. Also, I have yet to hear of anyone having "German" as a result. That may have been a result that was not as clearly defined as they initially thought. As Ancestry gets more input during this BETA phase of testing the categories, and thus everyone's results, may change a bit.  
One thing to keep in mind is that a country's borders are the results of politics not biology and they vary widely over the course of history. If you have any ancestors from "Bohemia" I'm sure you are already keenly aware of this.
My results after the jump.