Exploring AutoClusters

The other day several of us where having a discussion about AutoCluster, which employs In Common With (ICW) matches, and AutoSegment cluster, which employs overlapping segments and triangulated segment.  Triangulated segments, where you and some of your matches share the same segment on the same location of a particular chromosome, indicate that you share a common ancestor. A segment of DNA can only come from one ancestor. Then it’s a matter of determining which ancestor gave you that segment.

ICW clusters are groups of matches that share many if not all matches but they do not necessarily share one common ancestor.  The question then came up if matches are in a cluster together, doesn’t that automatically mean they all share a most recent common ancestor (MRCA).  Like so many things, it depends. 

In many cases I’ve been able to classify an ICW cluster to a specific grandparent or great grandparent.  But then there are some where there’s a mixture of generations, a great grandparent and that person’s parents, for example.  Those seem to be the ones that I see most often.  There is a common ancestor, but not everyone in the cluster has the same most recent common ancestor.  Recent being the key word there.

My family is such that I have a large number of unknown DNA matches.  I’m an only child.  My parents did not do DNA testing.  My closest known cousins are 2nd cousins.  Most often I’m looking for fourth or more distant cousins. 

Maternal 3rd and 4th Great Grandparents

The AutoCluster in figure 1 is from 23andMe.  I found person A early on as a DNA match.  She has tested on several sites.  We emailed back and forth, and I was able to add her to my tree.  The next one I found on 23andMe was person E.  We also emailed, and I was able to place him in my tree.  Filling in other descendants from the same line with the help of cousin’s trees I had all the others in my tree before they showed up as DNA matches.  A mini tree that shows how they are all connected to me is in figure 2.

This is my mother’s mother’s side of the family.  I’m circled in the tree in figure 2.  My grandmother, Louise Wolff, was the daughter of Jacob Wolff and Anna Marie Briel. Both were born in Marburg, Germany and immigrated to Richmond, VA.  A number of Anna’s cousins on her mother’s side had already immigrated to Richmond.  In the tree Anna Briel’s parents were Phillip Briel and Elizabeth Schaaf, my 2nd great grandparents. All but one of the matches in the cluster descend from Phillip and Elizabeth.  Person H descends from Elizabeth Schaaf’s parents Matthaus Schaaf and Anna Kuntz.

I like to use the Cluster Auto Painter (CAP) and add my cluster results to DNA Painter.  Figure 3 shows the segments from this cluster.

The segments are labeled the same as in the cluster (figure 1) and the tree (figure 2).  Each segment of DNA that you inherit comes from only one ancestor.  Most of the time I name them for ancestor couple because I don’t know which of the couple gave the segment to me.

The segments on chromosome 10 and 12 are where person H matches me.  Because the MRCA between H and me are my 2nd great grandparents, I would move those to a new group named for Matthaus Schaaf and Anna Kuntz.  Then I’d change the cluster name for the rest of these matches to Phillip Briel and Elizabeth Schaaf. Clearly A, B, C, and D on chromosome 10 got that segment that they share with me from my 2nd great grandmother, Elizabeth Schaaf, and she got it, as did H from her parents.  I name my groups based on couples, and I have no way, at the point, to tell if that segment came from Elizabeth’s father or her mother.

How was I able to figure all of this out?  First one of my Schaaf 4th cousin has been researching and documenting the family a lot longer than I have.  A lot of the information in my tree came from her research.  When I noticed a match to person A first on FTDNA, I emailed her.  That helped me fill in some of the living people in her part of the family.  Person E matched on 23andMe, and because of his triangulating with A and me, I knew he was in this part of this same family.  I messaged him, and he helped me fill in his family.  When person B appeared I knew right away where she fit because her mother and mine had been good friends.  So really it came down to having a good, filled out tree and matches who replied and shared information with me.

Paternal – Somewhere on the Byrnes line

I don’t always have such luck in getting replies to messages.  Figure 4 shows a perfectly filled AutoCluster from 23andMe that my paternal 2nd cousin, Trish, is in.

The 3 others in the cluster are a father, his brother and his son.  The son was the first to show up as a match to me, sharing 36 cM.  According to the shared cM project 36 cM is the average for 4th cousins, so that would be around the 3rd great grandfather level.  His father also shares 36 cM and his uncle shares 39 cM.  He’d added a greeting on his page and wanted people to message him.  He also indicated that he lives in the same city where I grew up.  I messaged him 3 years ago but never got a reply.  About a year later his uncle showed up as a match.  I messaged him 2 years ago and again no reply.  By now Trish had tested and I could see that they matched her, so I knew it was on my father’s mother’s side.  The father only showed up recently, and I messaged him last week.  He also added 3 ancestor surnames.  Unfortunately the surname of my matches here is rather common.  I tried looking for each of them on Ancestry and found over 900 members with the same name.  Then I tried looking for trees with combinations of their surname and the 3 surnames the father had listed.  Still that didn’t help.  

The 3 of them share 2 segments of DNA with me.  They triangulate with Trish on chromosome 17.  I know that triangulated segments with Trish could be Byrnes, Fenton, Lillis, Shannon or O’Brien.  I’ve not resolved which is the chromosome 17 segment.  The other segment that the 3 of them and I share is on chromosome 1, see figure 5.  I do know something about that segment!  Four years ago I found 6 people on GEDmatch that triangulated with each other and me on that segment and emailed them.  I heard back from several of them.  One of their grandmother’s was a Byrnes, and several of them had ancestors from County Galway near the County Roscommon border!  Thomas Byrnes, Trish and my great grandfather was from County Roscommon, but we don’t know exactly where in Roscommon.  This gives us a hint to where he lived. I’ve not been able to find a baptismal record for Thomas, so I know he lived in an area where the baptismal records have not survived.  All I can say for this cluster is that I know at least 1 of the segments is on our Byrnes line, and it’s likely around the 3rd great grandparent level or more distant. Since Trish and my MRCA are our great grandparents, there are at least 2 different MRCA in this cluster.

Dave’s Paternal Grandmother’s Line

My husband Dave has a large number of known cousins on his paternal grandmother Marti side, and many of them have done DNA tests. Dave’s Aunt Mary worked on the family tree for many years, and we can trace back several generations.  Figure 6 shows one of Dave’s AutoClusters from MyHeritage.

At first I thought this was going to be similar to my Schaaf one since there’s a combination of 2nd and 3rd great grandparents.  But as soon as I drew out the tree I knew something was different here.  Figures 7 and 8 show the trees for this cluster.

Dave’s paternal grandmother Harriett’s father was Jacob Marti, son of Jacob Marti and Anna Fritz.  The elder Jacob’s parents were Adam Marti and Elizabeth Schnell.  Now the problem coms in that match K descends from Veronica Stamm, who is Anna Fritz’s mother.  After Veronica’s husband, Johann Fritz died, she remarried and had daughter Rose, who was a half sister to Anna Fritz.  Match K descends from Rose.

Dave and matches B through H MRCA are his 2nd great grandparents, Jacob Marti and Anna Fritz.  His MRCA with matches A and J are Jacob’s parents, Adam Marti and Elizabeth Schnell, and his MRCA with match K is his 3rd great grandmother, Victoria Stamm.  Person K matches B through H with Victoria Stamm as their MRCA.   All of this would be very well as long as K doesn’t match A or J.  However, K does match A. There has to be some more distant connection between Victoria Stamm’s family and the Marti family.  Matches A and K share 32 cM and do not triangulate with Dave. From the shared cM project 32 cM would be in the 4th to 5th cousin or more distant range. Veronica Stamm was born 1811, so the MRCA ancestor here is the 1700s.  All of these families were living in the same village in Switzerland at that time, so it’s quite possible that there were other earlier marriages in the family that we don’t know about.

Conclusion

This started from a question about whether or not all the matches in an AutoCluster were from one most recent common ancestor.  In my experience and the examples I have shown here, they are not.  There is a family line, such as the paternal grandmother, that all the matches follow, but there are typically several generations of ancestors present in the cluster.  How do you figure out the exact connections?  What I’ve found is having a detailed tree, matches that also have detailed trees, as well as matches that will reply to messages and share family information with you are important to helping to find that common ancestor.

Considering the fact that the clustering was performed using shared matches, this conclusion perhaps should not be a surprise. Shared match data is usually a mixture of DNA matches that share the same or another segment as compared to you. However, the AutoSegment ICW, which is available for FTDNA and 23andMe, and AutoSegment for GEDmatch, which employs triangulated data, looks for overlapping segments that are on the same side. Therefore, by using these clusters, we should be able to obtain clusters of matches that share the same or several DNA segments and therefore share a common ancestor. The AutoSegment ICW clusters will be explored in a future blog.

Both Dave and Trish have giving me permission to use their real names.  All other living people’s names are hidden for privacy.