Tuesday, October 01, 2019

Shared Segment Analysis: When a Match is both Paternal & Maternal

I'm working in matches at FamilyTreeDNA this morning and was looking at my brother, Michael's autosomal matches. Each of us have about 5 or so matches that show as matching our paternal & our maternal side.  My Mom, my paternal aunt,  3 of my siblings, and myself have our tests at FTDNA. So I gathered the segment data for one of Michael's matches that I'll call P. Smith just to get an idea of what was happening.  I then checked the match lists of my Mom, my paternal aunt, my siblings, my own match list,  and also my daughter's match list.  I was interested in seeing the size of the segments, how many of us had both or none and which segments each of us had.   I also wanted to know if my Aunt also had the segment that my brother had received from Dad.  Because of visual phasing and overlapping/shared/ICW matches I have a pretty good idea of the family groups that these segments were from but to simplify things I've only identified which of my grandparents passed on these segments.  



My brother was the only one of us tested that got both segments.  My sister got the segment from dad that was passed to him by his mother.  My other brother, and I got the segment from Mom that was passed to her by her dad.   My paternal Aunt did in fact have the same segment that Brother 1 received.  I have passed the segment of my MGF on to my daughter as well.  

From looking at the matches tree and also at share/ICW matches it appears that the PGM segment goes back along the lines of my Morrow/Sutton on back to the Knox Craig lines.  Not 100% certain but that is currently my hypothesis.  That would mean this segment is back around the 5th Great Grandparent level for me.  (screen snip from my working tree shown below)





The segment which my Mom passed to us(from our MGF) appears to be from my Mom's PGM's lines and from a person/couple who was born in the mid 1700s.

As a big fan of DNAPainter for analysis of dna matches, my next step is adding the matching segments to the profiles for each of the tests.  This is a simple process for the tests that just have one segment but has a few extra steps when there are multiple lines involved.  What I could do would be to add both segments under one group and then move the other segment to the appropriate group but I prefer to do it a different way.  I add just the one segment and then click on the option to add additional segments.  For me it works better that way.




It's important to note when we share more than one segment with a match, we cannot assume that both segments are thru the same lines without further evidence.  This drives home the importance of testing as many siblings and aunt/uncles/grandparents as possible.  Also I'm very thankful that this match was on a site that has a chromosome browser and that I had a good mix of tests with which to compare.



No comments:

Post a Comment