DNA News: Episode 6 of "Finding Your Roots" & 7cM and 700 SNP Threshold

Episode 6 of "Finding Your Roots" was another interesting episode. The theme was enslaved ancestors.  A highlight of the episode was the slave receipt for one of Nas' ancestors. I've never seen one of those before. Valerie Jarrett turned out the be 49% European, which wasn't surprising. She was surprised that Native American ancestry showed up in her DNA ethnicity results. She came out to be 5 % Native American. Her slave owner ancestors were wealthy, willing and able to cultivate her ancestor's intellect and provide materially for him. One of her ancestors attended MIT. It was uncommon for the mulatto children of slave owners to be treated like their legitimate children. It was very nice to see how the former slave couples legalized their informal slave marriages after they were freed. This episode gave substance to people who were often just nameless property while enslaved.

Two whole people , so far, at AncestryDNA agreed to compare results with me at GEDmatch. These matches pointed, again,  to the problem of the too strict criteria for matches at Family Tree DNA. I had around half a dozen people to compare these matches with. When looking at the total cM's, even turning down the shared cM's to 1, some of these matches would not pass the strict matching requirements at Family Tree DNA, even though they do share DNA segments over 10 cMs and have a proven paper trail relationship to my family. The 14.1 cM segment illustrated here is an example. I found other good matches that don't add up to 20 total cM's either. I think the 7 cM and 700 SNP threshold at GEDmatch should be a model for the testing companies to follow. They can rank the matches according to their own system, but please give us all of our matches that fall in the 7 cM and 700 SNP range. Family Tree DNA is great for identifying parents and close cousins, but as a genealogist I'm interested in more distant relatives.

I watched this great video which featured a presenter from AncestryDNA. It's filled with interesting information about their DNA testing program. The number of kits being processed every month is staggering! They process 30,000 to 50,000 kits per month.

I'm not completely emotionally prepared for the coming changes to our match lists at Ancestry. When I saw the new DNA symbol on the Ancestry matches' pages I jumped. I wondered if that meant we would see the changes Ancestry has been promising sooner rather than later?  I'm hoping we don't see another Family Tree DNA scenario with limited matches. I'm hoping it's more like 23andMe, which has a reasonable threshold similar to GEDmatch.

I've been continuing to create chromosome charts with segments from our matches. I'm collecting Forgey surname related segments. I used a suggestion from Kitty's blog to name the segments after ancestral couples. Here are the people the Forgeys came from.

DNA News: Two Outstanding Genealogy Shows And Evaluating Matches

Last night I binged watched two excellent family history shows. CNN's "Roots Our Journey Home" and PBS' "Finding Your Roots". Didn't go to bed until 1 am (again).

"Finding Your Roots" episode 5 was one of the best of the this season. Celebrity chefs were featured in this all male episode "The Melting Pot". My Mom loved the show "Simply Ming" so he is very familiar to me. Great to see the role his family played in Chinese history. His enormous family tree was great to see rolled out. Wonderful that a stele with his ancestor's names was the only one which survived the cultural revolution in his particular ancestral location. He is very fortunate. Tom Colicchio's immigrant ancestors were much like mine. My Great-Grandmother traveled back and forth from America to her Village in Austro/Hungary. Her husband was working first in Allentown, PA then Chicago, Ill. She often made the trip with several small children accompanying her. Aaron Sanchez' family's roots are in Sonora Mexico, not far from border with the US. The family was a target of hostility during the Mexican Revolution which forced the family to flee with their large herd of cattle to the US. Aaron's DNA results were very interesting to me since I have some Central American heritage. His mix of European, Native American and African were typical for Central and South America too.

The "Roots our Journey Home" show on CNN borrowed heavily from "Finding Your Roots". The Anderson Cooper segment repeated many facts first presented when he was a guest on "Finding Your Roots". It was interesting to see Anderson visiting family graves. I thought this show was a nice mix of emotionally connecting with ancestors and tongue in check segments. They also used DNA results to fill in the blanks.

23andMe Zombies

It was announced this week that 23andMe would be partnering with My Heritage. If they integrate the trees with the DNA results like they do at AncestryDNA it could make 23andMe a more useful resource. The biggest problem at 23andMe is the lack cooperation of those who have tested with them. More than half my cousin's matches won't even share their own names let alone any ancestral surnames.

Last week a test result came back for our Owens line. Sadly Ancestry doesn't release segment information. Fortunately a descendant of John Melvin and Mary Redden (my fifth great-grandparents) agreed to compare with us at GEDmatch. We compared with his grandmother and him. We shared varying amounts of DNA from as small as 4.6 cM's up to 50 cM's total. We can now call a segment five of us share on chromosome 1 a Melvin family segment . We are all around the fourth cousin range relationship to his grandmother. After doing a few comparisons of Ancestry results at GEDmatch  I'm finding their prediction process occasionally works, but some valid cousin matches aren't showing up as close matches? Also some of the high confidence matches aren't as good as they look when you compare at GEDmatch.

The Family Tree DNA process for determining matches isn't any better. The scientists at Family Tree DNA aren't as well versed with autosomal DNA as they are with Y and mtDNA. As one of them stated at an ISOGG presentation, paraphrasing, what I tell you now may turn out to be wrong in hindsight. From a past presentation by the founder of Family Tree DNA his scientists don't believe autosomal DNA is useful beyond 4 generations. That demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the subject. Most of our matches are at 4 generations and beyond. Their use of total shared cMs as a criteria for determining matches causes many good matches to be discarded. Looking at my proven matches at Ancestry a few haven't shared the 20 total cMs required by FTDNA. I can't find any common ancestors with most of my Family Tree DNA matches. If they eliminated the 20 cM requirement and instead gave us all our matches sharing 7 cM segments or higher it would help us find more cousins.

John Melvin and Mary Redden were my 5th Great-Grandparents
I've assigned chromosome 1 to them

DNA News: Episode 4 of "Finding Your Roots" & Overwhelmed With New Information

Episode 4 of "Finding Your Roots" was another interesting episode with fun DNA results. The episode theme was Civil Rights and Freedom. Ben Affleck's mother was a Freedom Rider in the 1960's.  It was so funny to hear the former President of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, is mostly white only 18% African. On the flip side Khandi Alexander had more African than she expected, she seemed to change her identification from black to African. The most moving story in this episode was how one of Ben Jealous' ancestors purchased his freedom, and that of his wife and children. He was able to do this because he was a trained shoemaker, an unusual occupation for a slave.

It was great to see an explanation of how DNA testing works in this episode. Instead of showing the stock film blood vials they showed the accurate testing process and explained that saliva was used. I'm sure more people would pursue a saliva test rather than a blood test. I hope this encourages more people to test.

Looking at Ben Jealous I could predict he had a high percentage of European. Another guest on a previous show was quite dark complected and turned out to have more European than he expected. This brings me to my current projects. Predictions based on appearances can turn out to be correct or incorrect. The genealogical proof standard requires inferences drawn from appearances to be checked out by doing a reasonably exhaustive search. I'm turning more and more to DNA to support my inferences.

In  mid 2001 I began focusing my genealogy research on the Mason family line. I found some information about the family posted on message boards, which were the popular social networking media at the time. I received some great leads from a 3rd cousin, Sophia Preston. She posted some information about our common Mason line. She referred me to another Mason researcher with additional information. With their help I discovered the locations of our Masson family in Quebec, Canada. It was easy to trace the family back hundreds of years due to the fact that transcriptions of the extensive record collections in Quebec were available online at this point.

After quickly putting together a huge family tree for the Mason line I moved to my ancestor Peter Mason's American wife's family. His wife was Mary Owens. That's what I started with in 2001. I had a great lead on her parents when I found two of her sister's living with the Mason family in 1880 in Mattoon, Il. It was easy to find them  living with their father in 1870 in Mattoon, Il. His name was William F. Owens. I later found a Nancy Owens wife of William F. buried in a local cemetery. She would have been in the right age range to be the mother of my Mary Mason, and her siblings. Their mother was not in his household in 1870, she was probably the Nancy I found in the cemetery who died in 1865?

According to the children of William F. he was born in Kentucky, and their mother was born in Ohio. I looked for a marriage for a William F. Owens to a Nancy. I found such a marriage in Clermont, Ohio. A William F. Owens married a Nancy Hicks in Clermont, and they matched the Census description regarding where they were born. I found them in 1850 with two sons , James H. and John W. living in Clermont, Ohio. From there I looked for them in 1860. At that point in time the online Census information was sparse and the search function didn't always show matches with similar names. It took many months before I found them listed with the name spelled Owen and initials used instead of full names. I found Mary and all her siblings including James H. and John W. from the 1850 Census. These eldest siblings had disappeared from the area in Mattoon, Illinois early on.

By March 2002 I was able to find proof that Mary's mother's maiden name was Hicks. It came from a marriage record for her sister which listed her mother as Nancy Hicks, and her father was listed as William F.. Her own marriage record from a decade before did not contain her parents' names.

It wasn't until fairly recently that I found out what became of William F. and Nancy's eldest sons. I found some information about them at Find-a-grave and made contact with descendants through this site (you can read my 2012 post here. I later exchanged info with Pam and Justin.) I also found more information posted in Ancestry trees. Pam and Justin provided me with loads of additional information. I also discovered that one of the male Owens in my line Y DNA tested which helped confirm some of my inferences about this Owens ancestral line.

I was fairly confident I had traced this line correctly. I was a little apprehensive because I didn't have very much info about my Great-Grandfather Mason. I had heard he was French Canadian and used this knowledge to find his family in the Census. I believed I found him with the correct family. I had not known that he was originally from Mattoon, Ill. I was only aware of the family living in Chicago. I asked an Aunt and she said she believed I was on the correct track, and he was from Mattoon.

All of my apprehensiveness disappeared when the third cousin I had located on the message board years earlier tested at 23andme. We compared at GEDmatch and there was absolutely no doubt we were from the same Mason family from Mattoon. We shared more DNA than most third cousins. So the Mason line was confirmed with DNA.

Darrell Owens 3rd cousin 1x and me

I purchased an AncestryDNA kit on sale in August. I decided to give it to an Owens/ Hicks line cousin to confirm this relationship and hopefully find additional cousins in these lines. The results came in on last Wednesday, exactly 3 weeks after it was received. We were predicted to be 3rd cousins by Ancestry (great news!). We are actually 3rd cousins once removed, good prediction. Unfortunately Ancestry's raw data download feature was down until yesterday. It was so hard to wait for this to be fixed. I was on pins and needles the whole time. It was incredible to see how much DNA we shared in common. We had some 30 cM segments. There was a chance we wouldn't share any DNA at all. Our Cousin Sophia shared a 9 cm segment on a different chromosome, a lot less than either my Aunt or myself. That's the fickle nature of DNA inheritance.

Susan and Nan's Aunt

Another great match came in on the same day. My 5th cousin Nan Harvey's Aunt's results also came in on Wednesday. She turned out to be a much stronger match with my Mom and I than Nan. So now we have some good sized segments for triangulation. She was predicted to be a 4th to 6th cousin to both my Mom and I, which is the correct range. My cousin Susan is actually Nan's aunt's strongest match.

With our growing segment collection I'm hoping to reconstruct some of these lines.

There are so many changes occurring in the genealogy industry. Family Tree DNA released news about many new features which will be offered to customers at their group administrator conference. They rolled out one of those changes this week offering those who upload raw data from AncestryDNA or 23andme (only v.3) the opportunity to try their service for free. They can see their highest ranked 20 matches for free. The price to see all of your matches is $39, which doesn't include the myOrigins feature. They also announced a social networking platform will be added to the site. Sharing photos and documents etc. should make the site more interesting to use. The ability for the public to search Family Tree DNA trees for their surnames should boost interest in testing. I would love to see the number of testers grow.

GEDmatch is undergoing some changes too. You will be able to access more tools if you donate $10. Using family kits to create ancestors' kit sounds interesting.

I mentioned finding an Owens cousin at Ancestry.com. The value of the trees and information attached to them can't be over estimated. Most of my breakthroughs at Ancestry have been through documents attached to trees. A Wray line cousin contacted me to let me know she uploaded some pictures and manuscripts she found at their Kansas family home. I've never been to Kansas and would never have seen all of this had it not been for the networking opportunity provided by Ancestry.com. The old forums and mailing lists were helpful but didn't allow you to share documents and photos. It's been great with sites like Ancestry and Facebook that we can share information and coordinate DNA testing and find cousins to test.

I've had so much information coming at me so fast I need to stop researching for a while and start adding my new facts to my tree and my new segment information to Genome Mate .



Sophia's only shared segment with our 3rd cousin 1x removed

AncestryDNA Phasing FFFFF..ail!

I listened to the explanation of the AncestryDNA phasing process via a video from i4GG. It seemed like a good idea. Now I'm thinking it's not really a good idea; especially when there is no way to see the segments you share with matches. I don't want phasing unless I can see the segments!

I found several new Ancestry matches at GEDmatch. I was shocked to find that one very low confidence match shared a 22.4 cM segment with me. I later checked to see if he matched my Mom and he shared the same 22.4 cM segment with her. This was a phasing fail because obviously I received this segment from my Mom. This was judged to be a "very" low confidence match for both of us. I can't find a common ancestor at this point. It may be that this person matches us many generations ago. It could be what CeCe Moore called a "sticky segment" which remains intact for hundreds of years? I want to see matches like these ranked higher? When AncestryDNA prunes our matches I'm hoping they don't eliminate matches with shared segments 10 cMs or larger?

We need to know more about the segments we share with matches. There is no way to get around 10,000 matches to compare at GEDmatch. If everyone at AncestryDNA uploaded to GEDmatch the servers would probably crash and burn, so that's not an option.

PS My Cousin Susan also shares the same 22.4 cM segment with the very same match (thanks Nan!)

DNA News: "Finding Your Roots Ep.3"Light Bulb Moment Plus Improvements at FTDNA and Ancestry?

The much improved tree at FTDNA

Episode 3 of "Finding Your Roots" featured guests known for story telling. The episode focused mainly on Civil War ancestry, which was very fascinating. I love Anderson Cooper so I found his segments very interesting. I had thought his Dad also came from a wealthy family, and was surprised his roots were Southern and humble. Interesting that one of his ancestors was killed by a slave. I'll have to keep his ancestor Robert Fletcher Campbell in mind as I trace my Campell line. I'm stuck on Sarah Campbell who was born around 1810 somewhere in the South? It would be fantastic to be related to Anderson Cooper. Great to see there is a relationship between Ken Burns and Abraham Lincoln. Glad that Ken Burn's Y DNA could be linked to Robert Burns, which he had been wanting to know. The most moving parts of the episode dealt with loss of Anderson Cooper's father and brother, and Ken Burns loss of his mother.

Anna Deavere Smith's ancestors were also interesting. One of her ancestors was involved in the burial of Civil War troops at Gettysburg. Her mtDNA was used to trace her maternal line to a tribe in Africa. A light bulb went off in my brain, and I thought maybe I can use mtDNA on my Kappel/Kurta line and possibly my Owens line to glean more insight into the ethnic origins of these families. This all hinges on someone carrying the mtDNA for those lines agreeing to test. There is a good possibility I might be able to persuade a 2nd cousin or 1st cousin 1x removed to test. However, it may take some time because they don't know me and I don't know them. The Y and mtDNA tests are the most straight forward tests when it comes to interpreting the results. It's nice to get a simple answer sometimes, especially after wrestling with the admixture results from autosomal DNA.

Immediately after the show ended I began searching for information about Grandfather Rudolph Kapple's sisters. I knew one sister's married name was Salamon, and so I began Googling her full name, Bertha Salamon. I couldn't believe I immediately struck gold! I found her obituary which gave her sister Rose's married name, which I didn't have. Bertha's Obituary named her own children giving me candidates for mtDNA testing. She had 4 living named children in 2002, which included 2 daughters, and 15 grandchildren. Rose's full name, Rose Varnak, led me to her obituary in which 4 children were named and of those 2 were living. It was stated she had 15 grandchildren and 45 great-grand children. I did look for death information for them in the early 2000's and couldn't find anything. I know why I couldn't find anything then, they were still alive. I didn't expect them to live into their 90's since their brother Rudolph died in his 60's, and their parents died well before that age too. All of this is so great! I'm hoping this leads to some kind of meaningful contact with their descendants. I would love to see more pictures of my Grandfather Rudolph. I've never seen any photo of his parents or siblings, and would love to see those too. If I had known the sibling were still alive when I started out researching I would have tried to make contact immediately. I feel like I missed a great opportunity to get more information, and also just connect with some of  my Great Aunts. I was only aware of my Great-Grandparents having 11 children? One obit said there were 12. Now I'm wondering if this is true, and if so what happened to that child?

Another line which may benefit from mtDNA testing is the John Owens Indian Trader line. We know John Owens Sr. traded with Indians during the mid 1700's in Pennsylvania. We know, from a contemporary newspaper account, that he had an Indian wife. He had at least two wives. We don't know which wife our family descends from or even whether both wives were Indians ? If we could identify at least one of his wives with mtDNA we might be able to confirm whether at least some of John Owens children were half Native American. It isn't known whether he fathered any children with his Indian wife. We know he had at least a couple of daughters, and if a straight maternal line of inheritance can be found we may find the smoking gun information.

After locating the names of children and grandchildren of my great-aunts I searched on these names at Family Tree DNA. I located a tree with one of the names on it and was happy to see a new detailed view which saves time. You don't have to click to get details about an individual now. The names are now in larger print, so when you zoom in you can still read them. I'm still not crazy about the new tree layout (still too scattered), but it's easier to use with the larger names and details. I also found that one of my our Brenneman matches at AncestryDNA just showed up on my Mom's FTDNA match list.

AncestryDNA customers are in suspense right now over the impending changes that will radically change this product. Most of the details are still secret. One thing which is known is the number of matches will be drastically reduced. This was also discussed at i4gg. Ancestry had been identifying ancient segments of DNA shared by thousands of people, but supposedly not helpful because they are out the genealogical timeframe. Everyone is aware of the fact that the very low confidence matches are the most abundant, and impossible to sort through because of their number. I'm hoping this is a good change and they don't weed out good matches? Lucky I have downloaded the information for a majority of my matches. The unlucky thing is I'm waiting for more Owens DNA results at Ancestry and I'm wondering how these results might be affected? I'm hoping the changes don't go into effect until we get those results. The test kit was received on September 24, and I'm also wondering if the results will be held up by the changes?

I seem to have a pile up of segment matches on chromosome 19 at FTDNA. Reviewing these matches again, I've noticed none of them match me on my Mom's side? I'm wondering if these matches relate to me through either the French Canadian population or Ashkenazi populations?

No chromosome browser is apparently still the mantra at AncestryDNA. I don't now where the Geneticists at Ancestry got their degrees? They don't seem to understand the mechanics of segment matching for ancestry.

You can read more about the coming changes at Ancestry at Roberta Estes' blog post "DNA Day At Ancestry."

Some Segment pile up from FTDNA

DNA: Geneticists vs. Anthropologists

American's are competitive  Android  users vs. iPhone users for instance. In the academic community surrounding the human population field of study it's Geneticists vs. Social Scientists. These studies should be interdisciplinary, but the personalities of these researchers tend to clash. Does cultural identity make you a member of an ethnic group or is it genetics? It's a very interesting question. I had been identifying with Jewish community based on the perceived origin of my surname. Genetic testing isn't supporting that connection. Actually I might be Sephardic Jewish, but that's difficult to prove through DNA.

I listened to this UC Berkley lecture "From Blood to DNA, From "Tribe" to "Race": Science, Whiteness & Property."A very interesting discussion. The differences in approaching  the subject of ethnic group membership are apparent in this lecture.  I'm in the Social Sciences camp because that was my undergraduate major. Social Scientists feel cultural identity is as important as Genetic inheritance. I believe Social Scientists feel like this view point isn't shared by the Geneticists. Spencer Wells came under some criticism because Prof. Tallbear felt some of his remarks were culturally insensitive. She also questioned the scientific methods employed by the Genographic project? "Skip Gates" came under even more criticism in this lecture than Spencer Wells. The lecturers felt the results of the consumer DNA tests were questionable.

Prof. Tallbear stated that in the past land had been the commodity that was sought after by the European Americans, now it's Native American DNA. She questioned whether modern Native American DNA would be useful? It's impossible to find unmixed North American Native American populations.

Another aspect of DNA that was discussed is how some Tribes are using it to determine Tribal membership. In the past they used the blood rule of 1/4 Native American to admit someone into a tribe. This was solely based on tracing the family tree. With casino money in play the casino tribes want to limit membership. Casino tribes tend to use DNA tests for membership because this keeps the tribal membership numbers low, and payments to current members high. I thought Prof. Tallbear said the Casino tribes were using parentage DNA testing and ethnicity testing, not sure if they use the ethnicity tests? The non Casino tribes sometimes use parentage testing, but don't always require it.

The 1 drop rule and 1/4 rule were strange categorizations. Why would 1/4 Native American legally make you native American; yet one drop of African blood make you African? Racism and the need to limit the number of Native Americans created these categories.

The Lecturers also brought up a court case involving African Americans who were Naturalized as Cherokee but weren't genetically Native American. This has brought up the question of whether Cherokee membership should be based on Naturalization or genetics?

As they stated in the video they are Social Scientists and not Geneticists, so some of their statements about what can be discovered using DNA were wrong. Full sequencing individuals with large amounts of Native American ancestry would be helpful. They're right about DNA testing helping those with mainly European ancestry; and Tribes worry about the US Federal Government using the results to determine Tribal recognition. The Natives American have little to gain and potentially could lose land and benefits, but their results would help identify Native America admixture. Will those Europeans ever stop pestering the Native Americans because they need something from them? I'm feeling a little selfish now.

I'm definitely going to add Kim Tallbear's book to my reading list

DNA News: "Finding Your Roots" Review And Very Low Confidence Comparisons

I enjoyed the 2nd episode of the new season of "Finding Your Roots" on PBS. The last show focused on finding out more about absent fathers' lines. This show focused on sports heros. I could relate to Derek Jeter in the fact that I didn't know the origins of my Kapple surname until I did some research in the 1990's, which started my genealogy obsession. When you have an unusual surname people always ask where the name is from? It was great that it was possible to determine the origins of the name Jeter. That's a great gift for the Jeter family.

The only reservations I had about last nights episode was the language used when presenting DNA results. When Rebecca Lobo was told exactly which line her Ashkenazi admixture came from, I thought Dr. Gates was over stepping a little. It does seem, most likely, she got the admixture from the stated line (an Austrian line). Documentary evidence leads to that belief too, but you never know for sure unless you test more family members. Working with my DNA admixture results I was fooled a few times when trying to make an educated guess about where an admixture came from. It wasn't clear to me that I was wrong until I had more relatives tested. Ashkenazi is one of the admixtures which is easy to identify. The percentages are tricky though. She is predicted to be 10% Ashkenazi, so Dr. Gates surmised from that percentage that this came down from a particular great-grandparent based on rough inheritance percentages. Since inheritance is random, the only percentages we know for certain are that we inherit 50% of our DNA from each parent, after that generation there can be more variation in inheritance. For instance last week we learned that someone's father was substantially Ashkenazi according to available documents. This person's DNA results came out to be 12% percent Ashkenazi. So if we based our prediction of where this DNA came from we would guess farther back in time than parent based on estimates using average inheritance. Admixture percentages can fool you, and you can get admixture from more than one line. There is no way to say with 100% confidence which ancestor you got a particular admixture from, unless you test many relatives. When I watched this show before I got involved in autosomal testing and I heard, for instance, Dr. Gates say that a tradition of Native American ancestry was wrong based on DNA testing I believed that to be true. Since then I've learned that we don't inherit DNA from all of our ancestors; so it's possible a family tradition of Native American ancestry may be true even if you don't see it in your DNA results. So it's still possible Billy Jean King has some Native American roots?

Dr. Gates did use the word "suggests" when talking about results sometimes. The word "suggests" is often the best word to use when talking about results.

I'm convinced that Derek Jeter is descended from the family that owned his family. Y tests are more reliable than autosomal (autosomal testing is most reliable for close relatives). He is also most likely descended from the slave owner as stated. However, it's not 100% positive. I believe Dr. Gates did say that this connection was most likely the case, but didn't say 100% certain like he did with Rebecca Lobo. You can't look at DNA and say it came from a particular person or line with 100% certainty. With Y DNA you can only say you are definitely related or definitely not related using the test. It would be tricky to do a TV show and explain the intricacies of DNA testing. The general public probably isn't interested in learning about predictions either. They want to hear about definite conclusions. They might come away disappointed if they took a test after watching some of these episodes? Otherwise, I love the show and listen to the DNA test results with great interest.

Another point of interest is the DNA tests the guests took were blood tests. I wonder which company they used?

I was so happy to hear from someone in the Brenneman family line at Facebook. He and some of his family members had  their DNA tested. He, his sister and father were low confidence matches at AncestryDNA. We compared at GEDmatch and I found out he shares a 7 cM segment with my Mom. His sister and father shared an 8.9 cM segment in the same place. I would say low confidence is a good prediction based on the amount of DNA we share. I'm always interested in comparing at GEDmatch with AncestryDNA matches because the phasing process that produces the confidence levels doesn't always work. I'm very interested in the Brenneman line. I've found trees connecting my family to this one, but I can't find documentary evidence? Hoping DNA will help?

I'm hoping these segment on Chromosome 16 are from Brenneman line?