Family Finder Results, Part I

Results are back for both me and my Mom. There is much information to digest, and I will have more posts later. For now, some initial impressions about the matches.

Aside from the obvious parent-child match, the remaining matches (44 for me, 113 for my Mom; 25 overlap) are all distant cousins, perhaps very distant. FTDNA distinguishes between distant and speculative cousins, and provides an estimate of the relationship. My early reaction is to take those distinctions with a grain of salt. Initially my focus is on the length of and the number of segments in the matches.

On the list of matches results page, there are two lengths provided for each match: (1) the sum of the lengths of all of the matching segments and (2) the length of the longest matching segment. Those lengths are reported in centiMorgan values (FTDNA FAQ 52). The Chromosome Browser page provides more detail, but for only five matches at a time. Although I have looked at those details for only a portion of the matches, a consistent pattern has emerged. In each case there are several (usually at least eight, sometimes 16 or more) matching segments. All but one of those segments fail to meet the 5 centiMorgan minimum length required by the program for a match (FTDNA FAQ 30). But there is one much longer segment, and it is because of that one long segment that a match is reported (FTDNA FAQ 30). In each case the longest block happens to be the only segment longer than 5 centiMorgan.

Besides hypothesizing with distant cousins about possible connections that we may never be able to prove, it is also interesting to look at the results collectively. For example, there are 19 of my matches that do not overlap with my Mom's. About half of those are clearly tied to Eastern Europe; certainly their connection is through my Dad's ancestors. And about half of those ties are to the parts of present-day Poland and Ukraine that were known as Galicia when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It suggests that at least some of my distant ancestors migrated south across the Carpathian Mountains and subsequently became assimilated in Old Hungary. About three or four of my matches that do not overlap with my Mom's look like they ought to be connected through my Mom's ancestors--those matches have strong connections to the British Isles and Ireland. For each of those the longest block is less than 10 centiMorgan. This FTDNA FAQ 15 indicates a possible way that most of the match could still be through my Mom.