Are You “We’re Related,” Sharing Looks, and Identifying Photographs

 

They were kidding, but it made a good topic for a blog post.

My post about Ancestry‘s “We’re Related” app indicating I had a “different grandmother” was shared with my Facebook friends. One response teased me with “are you really sure who your grandmother was?” I knew my Facebook friend was kidding me–let me be very clear about that. But I got to thinking about their response.

Anyone who has seen me, my mother, and my maternal grandmother cannot deny there is a resemblance among our facial features–particularly when photographs of us under the age of thirty are compared. Of course, “looking alike” is not always good proof of a relationship, but it is suggestive–especially when people are believed to be related in the first place.

My DNA matches on AncestryDNA, GedMatch, and FamilyTreeDNA also make it clear that I’m a descendant of all four of my maternal great-grandparents. Two children of my paternal grandfather’s brother have had genealogical DNA tests done and are matches consistent with that relationship to me. Three descendants (two grandchildren and one great-grandchild) of two of my maternal grandmother’s siblings have also had genealogical DNA tests done and match my DNA with amounts that are consistent with our relationship to each other. Numerous descendants of my maternal great-great-grandparents have also tested and our DNA results are consistent with the relationship I believed to be true.

Will there be surprises in my DNA results at some point? Maybe…only time will tell.

Going through my results in this fashion was actually a good little exercise–and can be helpful in analyzing and sifting through your results. Working out the known people can be helpful in determining who some of the other matches could be.

And now I realize also that I need to go through my photographs and identify them better than I have. The ones taken before 1950 I’ve pretty much gone through and identified. It’s the later ones that I really need to work on.

 

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