Cousin Harvey

My father's sister, aka Aunt Betty, ordered her MtDNA test four and a half years ago and upgraded to the full sequence about eighteen months later. Initially, she had only three matches with no genetic difference and a fourth showed up about a year ago. Three more appeared in the final months of 2016. One of the seven was a suggested third-fifth cousin and the others were remote or not an autosomal match at all.

Aunt Betty's haplogroup is H10a1b and goes back to my great-great-grandmother Feige Stern who was born in Kalocsa Hungary about 1841. Her mother may have been Beti Grunwald.

Last week, she received a new match, a man named Harvey in North Carolina. In addition to the perfect MtDNA, they are suggested second-fourth cousins. It looked like it was worth following up. Harvey is active in genealogy but is a DNA-novice. There was nothing obvious in the surnames, and he let me upload his data to GEDmatch.

Harvey's most promising matches with my family appeared to be not on my father's side at all, but on my mother's mother's Rosenbloom side, from Borisov, NE of Minsk.

On chromosome 9, Harvey matches seven of my Rosenbloom family, all about 18 cM. The seven are my second cousins Sam and Beth (first cousins to one another), my first cousins Kay and Leonard (also first cousins to one another), my sisters Sarajoy and Jean and me.  (My other two sisters do not match Harvey at all and my brother's results are not in yet.)

On chromosome 11, there is a smaller match (on the far right) of over 12 cM with Kay, Beth and Sam's sister Beverly, one of the newer participants in our project.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote two months ago about a new project I am doing with Galit Aviv on a number of Borisov families. We are still laying the foundaton for this project, but I asked Galit to see if Harvey matches "her" members of this group. I was surprised when she said that they do. So using the GEDmatch Tier1 "Matching Segment Search" tool, I had a look at all of Harvey's matches, arranged by chromosome and segment.

When I did the matching segment search, I was able to add three of Galit's group to my family's matches with Harvey.

Then there are my Jaffe second cousins. Their grandfather is also from Borisov and Harvey has a match of about 17 cM with them.

And here too, Galit's cousin Nurit fits right in.

Galit has invited Harvey to join our project. Cousin Harvey!

But lest we forget, Harvey is a suggested second-fourth cousin to Aunt Betty. On a one-to-one comparison, we see they have three matching segments.

The small match on chromosome 5 is shared by a three other family members, but they are small, so I am not ready to draw conclusions.

The match on chromosome 13 is shared by no one else in the family. That leaves the large match on chromosome 3.

Harvey has 21.3 cM matches with Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, as well as with my second cousins Roz (on my grandfather's side) and Susan on my grandmother's side. When you consider that there are another dozen family members who ought to fit in here, it doesn't look like anything we can work with.