Sam and Beth

I have been preoccupied the last couple of weeks and have not blogged. Even this one is brief. But it's something.

Family Finder results came in for my cousin Sam. He is a second cousin on my mother's mother's side. Sam has also done a Y-37, but those results are not in yet.

The only other person in Sam's family who has tested is his first cousin Beth. I have asked Sam's brothers and sister, but no luck yet. If you look at the numbers below, you will see (once again) that siblings can have significantly different matches from one another. "My brother already tested" is not really a good answer to a request to test.

So at least I can look at how Sam and Beth match with my grandmother's descendants. That would be my three sisters and my first cousin Kay. Our mother and Kay's mother are sisters. (On our side, we have another first cousin and my fourth sister whose tests are in the lab.)

First the general comparison.

All of us have better matches with Sam than with Beth. Jean's, Sarajoy's and Kay's are not significantly larger. Amy's match with Sam is about 27% larger than her match with Beth and mine is about 46% larger. Those numbers are significant and might indicate a match with Sam on his mother's side, one that Beth doesn't share.

The other point of note is that Kay has better matches with both Sam and Beth than we do (Amy's match with Sam is an outlier here), so perhaps Kay's mother's DNA is closer to that side than is our mother's. We cannot know, of course. On our side we have tested almost everyone living in our generation..

I also looked at the chromosomes. I am not going to show all of them here - just the ones where Beth and Sam match. Each of has quite a few places where we match Beth or Sam, but not both.  The chromosome browser below includes only segments of 5 cM or greater.

We have a really nice match on chromosome 9, including everyone - well, Amy not so much.

All of us but Amy have a nice little match on the left end of chromosome 2.

Amy, Kay and I have matches with Beth and Sam on chromosome 8.

Beth and Sam have matches on chromosomes 14 and 18. All of us match them on either 14 or 18. None of us matches them on both 14 & 18. I find that curious though not really significant.

I think I will wait until we have our other two test results before setting out to see what unsuspecting new relatives might match us. And of course, we should have Sam's Y-37 results in a few weeks, as well. (I have an MtDNA here, which I have discussed before.)

However, just before I post this, I hear from Sam, who received an email from a woman named Mary whose husband is a "third-fifth cousin" match to him. None of the surnames she has on her FTDNA entry match the very few we have on our side, but I had a look anyway. Mary's husband has matches with both Sam and Beth on chromosome 7 of nearly 16 cM and although he also has some scattered matches with us, they are in different places and he does not match Kay at all.

This tells me that Mary's husband is probably on the side of Sam and Beth's grandmother, probably a few generations beyond FTDNA's prediction. But it may give us something to work with.