Thinking about that Not-So-Shared Chunk

I’ve been painting my DNA matches in DNAPainter. It’s fun, but it’s not really about the fun.

In looking at shared matches on one of my chromosomes, I was reminded of a key concept that can be easy to forget in our attempts to “figure out as much as we can as fast as we can.”

The bluish match in the illustrated image is a grandson of my great-grandparents (Fred and Tena). The brown match is a grandson of my Fred’s parents. Having larger bluish sections is not a surprise since M-U is more closely related to me than L-U. I just have to be careful in that region of M-U’s shared match that I have circled.

I can’t make any conclusions about the region that I’ve circled–other than that M-U and I share it.

I might be tempted to think that the circled region has to come from  Fred’s wife Tena–since the brown region is from a descendant of Fred’s parents and the brown region does not include what’s been circled. But that circled region that I share with Fred and Tena’s descendant (and not with the descendant of Fred’s parents) could have come from Fred’s parents and not been a segment that was passed on to Fred’s brother who is L-U’s father. I’ll have to wait until there are other matches on this chromosome to potentially determine where that chunk comes from “further back.”