Descendants Besides You?

Readers know that I hate genealogy “games.” I think most of them are time wasters and I cannot see any real purpose in completing them just to say that I completed a challenge in some made contest. However as something of a more practical challenge, I decided to see how many other descendants of my great and great-great-grandparents show up in my DNA results at AncestryDNA.

  • Neill great-grandparents–no matches other than me.
  • Trautvetter great-grandparents–two other descendants
  • Ufkes great-grandparents–two other descendants
  • Habben great-grandparents–three other descendants
  • Neill great-great-grandparents–ten other descendants
  • Rampley great-great-grandparents–eight other descendants
  • Trautvetter great-great-grandparents–three other descendants
  • Sargent great-great-grandparents–none
  • Ufkes great-great-grandparents–four other descendants
  • Janssen great-great-grandparents–none
  • Habben great-great-grandparents–two other descendants
  • Goldenstein great-great-grandparents–seven other descendants

It should be noted that the matches with descendants of my great-great-grandparents descend from a different one of their children than I do.

None of my DNA matches are also descendants of my Neill great-grandparents. That family was relatively small compared to my other great-grandparents’ families and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them have tested (at least I hope not). I do have matches who are descendants of my Neill great-grandparents’ parents (and their grandparents and their great-grandparents–just not shown in this chart) and who share amounts of DNA consistent with our genealogical cousin relationship. The concern would have been if I had discovered no matches of both sets of their parents or earlier generations. That’s not the case as there are numerous descendants from earlier branches of that family.

I do have shared matches who are descendants of my other three sets of great-grandparents. In most cases I was aware of their interest in their family history and their appearance was not a surprise.

Of my eight sets of great-great-grandparents there are only two sets who do not have descendants showing up as DNA matches (other than my closer cousins who descend through the same set of great-grandparents as I do). There are no shared matches in my set of results who are also descendants of my Janssen and Sargent great-great-grandparents. Both of these sets of great-great-grandparents had three children–including the one who is my ancestor–and none of those other children had large families. The other six sets of great-great-grandparents all had significantly larger families thus increasing the pool of possible descendants who could test.

Next on my list: looking at my 3rd great-grandparents.

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