Sorting thru Putman DNA matches.

Working on the Union Co South Carolina Putmans today in my DNA research. Several from this family came to Williamson/Bedford/Rutherford Co TN. I am a descendant of Jabel/Jabez Putman thru his daughter Elizabeth Putman Cook(my 2nd Great Grandmother) From the DNA I can identify several segments coming from Jabel Putman and his wife...I show matches to Descendants of their sons Hiram and Noah as well as daughters Parry, Sarah "Sally" and Susan Frances. Over the past few months I have been writing notes to those that matched my AncestryDNA and were in the Jabel Putman DNA circle with me at Ancestry.com. Several had already uploaded to GEDmatch which was very helpful because you really cannot compare segment matches at Ancestry and Identify segments. The best you can do at Ancestry is tell total amt of cMs shared but that does very little other than give you a guesstimate of what relationship you might be in reference to the averages on the Inherited cMs chart which I use. I seem to remember that Ancestry removes false positive areas and doesn't count X segment matches(but that could have changed or I could be mistaken). The best policy is to have kits uploaded to GEDmatch.com so that you can compare the segments using your own settings. I generally don't lower below 7cM or 500 SNPs to be considered a segment match that is from a common ancestor. When I have a grouping of kits of descendants of the same couple I will sometimes lower slightly to see if I can get any clues for other unknown areas of a chromosome but that doesn't really happen much as I am busy working on many large segments which I have yet to find the common ancestor or ancestor couple even though I have most of my 4th Great Grandparents for all of my lines(with one or two exceptions).


I am hopeful that one or more of my Cook/Putman cousins will take an autosomal dna test so I can find our common segments and search within the ones we do not have in common with the Putman cousins to help and determine the origins of the Cook line since we can't make it past our 2nd Great Grandfather, Wm. Clifford Cook.