Calin’s Irish Citizenship paperwork was kicked back. We need to provide a copy of “a gov’t issued photo ID”. Umm? You mean a passport? Yup.
So that is currently in the works as of last Monday.
DNA: Jenny’s brother’s results are back. He is a Colonial American in a big way and also houses a ton of Canadian-French. Both of these groups on their own are a beehive of endogamy. When you add them together, it becomes a whole bunch of cousin kissing. You can see this in action at the top of the graph. The big news is that his Y-DNA results are back. This shows his father’s father’s father’s father’s line. I have to admit, for all the time I’ve spent on DNA, it has really only been Irish DNA. Josh is not Irish. The main reason we tested him was to find out what he and the rest of the Lees are: Irish, Scots, Scots-Irish or English.
How about Haplogroup I-M253.
Haplogroup I dates to 23,000 years ago, or older. The I-M253 lineage likely has its roots in northern France. Today it is found most frequently within Viking/Scandinavian populations in northwest Europe and has since spread down into Central and Eastern Europe, where it is found at low frequencies. Haplogroup I represents one of the first peoples in Europe.
Well, because DNA people tend to be geeks, I was able to take his results from the 37 marker test and load them into a tool to compare it with a whole bunch of other folks with similar markers. This gives good idea of where to go next to more dial-in his specific results; from 23,000 years ago to, say, 1000 years ago. Based on this tool, it is looking like he is Eastern German or Goth. As he is heavy into Death Metal, this news gave me a good chuckle and an excuse to send him that YouTube video of the Goths dancing under the overpass…to the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song.
We need to come up with an additional $39 to prove this Gothishness, but the tool saved hundreds in testing each and every little step along the way.
I’ve also had the results of several of my mother’s cousins come back. I was hoping for better results than we got, but it is still useful. Let me tell you, you share VERY little DNA with a third cousin. VERY little. But the real excitement is that her male Flynn first cousin’s Y-DNA came back just a couple days ago. Turns out, he is Irish! And very closely (genetically speaking…which is not close at all genealogically speaking) related to my father’s people. Not too shocking, really. My male DNA has markers that pre-date the vast majority of the Irish. This guy is pretty much “garden variety” Irish and gets to fly the Niall of the Nine Hostages flag.
I do not get this flag because Niall is my kid cousin.
Back in the world of paper genealogy, I received a marriage cert recently that listed the name of the best man. The last name of this best man was the same as the mother of the groom. Cousins!
To prove this, I have been hard at it all week and solved in a couple nights ago. Now I am going through and filling in other parts of this previously brickwalled branch. Who are these folks? The Lemay family. My mother’s Canadian-French connection. I think I have turned up another living cousin on this line. He comes from the Lemays and has nothing to do with Flynn, so getting his DNA would help to separate the two groups of matches that we have around my mom’s grandparents (MRCA with her 1st cousins). We will see. I think this guy is back to a level of something like 3rd or 4th cousin, so it might not actually be worth it.
But, breaking down brickwalls is always good news. Turns out, I have had this family in my sights since I started doing genealogy all those years ago.
I was never able to piece it together until I had this marriage record and a tiny one sentence blurb from the newspaper society page, listing two woman as Mrs. Clara Valliere and Mrs. John Flynn as sisters who would be visiting each other.
I had to prove that these marriages were to women who were Lemay sisters. That then gave me enough evidence to build the rest of the case and kick that branch of the tree back another generation. BTW, the best man was the son of these two sister’s brother. It was a tangled up mess, and they all pretty much lived next door to each other, save for Mrs. Clara Valliere, who had moved to Brooklyn after getting married.
Good, good fun. My mother is over the moon with finding all of new names. I think that might be the best reason to do genealogy.
My father, who is better at Y-DNA interpretations than me, let me know this morning that after he reviewed the markers, it seems that his father’s crowd ran with my mother’s crowd about 1000 years ago. Hard to prove the MRCA on that one!
That is the kind of thing that convinces me there is “genetic memory.” True, 1000 years ago is a long time, but still fascinating.