Matching patterns

How to understand and work with matches

The following table shows how we match each other. 

The creamy yellow section reflects the Australian Buchans, and with pink Helen and Sheila, displays descendants of Robert born 1813. Those in bold in the yellow section are descendants of my great grandfather Robert George Buchan born 1863. Vicki and Kathryn (KJL) descend from two sisters of Robert George.

The green section reflects descendants of George born 1802. The blue section reflects Paul as currently the sole representative of descendants of Isabella born 1805.




What it shows, as expected, is that our closest relatives have the highest cM matches. But even within a tight genetic link of shared x2 great grandparents - the Robert who emigrated to Australia - we are not always matching. Peter does not match either Vicky or Kathryn. Julie matches Kathryn at 166cM but I only match her at 31cM.

Pat, Kathryn, Ron, Paul and Sheila are all in the closest generation to George and Jean.  

Pat matches 11/12 of the group; failing only to match Ken.

Kathryn matches 7/12, and none of the 'non-Roberts'.

Ron matches 4/12, only one Australian, another 'Robert' and only two others from his ancestor, George.

Paul matches 6/12, four Australians, another Robert, and only Ken as a descendant of George.

Sheila matches 9/12, five Australians, another Robert, two Georges and an Isabella. A full hand!

This table is of course limited to a very small subset of descendants. I hope that looking at patterns within our group will be interesting to you. It illustrates I think the interplay between closeness of relationship and randomness of inheritance. The first match list I looked at was Pat's. Not knowing I was going to do a multi-person study, I didn't take enough notice of exact matching numbers as they came along. 

In the order of receiving the match lists, the following table shows how many matches each person has of different types of matches. Pat was the earliest, followed by Helen (Robert), Kathryn (Robert), Vicki (Robert), Clare (Robert), Julie (Robert), Marnie (Robert), Paul (Isabella), Mark (George), Ronnie (George), Ken (George), Pedro/Peter (Robert) and our newest member Sheila (Robert). 

I have marked all these matches on your lists with generally a dark blue colour, this being my colour for Buchans. Then you'll see all the shared matches similarly marked with a dark blue dot. Most of the time I have added where they fit into the George+Jean family tree as I understand it, in the notes section. I have generally left the 'Relationship' button to you to complete, but I am happy to do this if you'd like. Let me know.


The number of 4th cousins or closer on your entire match list is provided by Ancestry on your DNA Home page.

Mark and Vicki have 1,000 such matches, indicating large families overall and a larger number of relatives who have tested. It can also be a marker of endogamy but with our immigrant families there is generally a marriage outside ethnic groups within a few generations. Sheila on the other hand has just 256 matches who are judged by Ancestry based on at least 20cM shared likely to be 4C or closer. This is the same cut off point of 20cM for Ancestry to show your matches, but you can adjust that under the 'Shared DNA' filter at the top of the page.

By the way, you can also filter your matches by 1) Common Ancestors which is a great way to quickly identify how a match might be related to you, 2) whether they have Trees and 3) by Groups which is where the Buchan group with its blue dots is found.

What does this all mean?

Pat threw up the initial big list of matches, and she continues to have the highest number of 'treed matches' at 58. All the Australians have higher 'Treed matches' since half the match list is composed of Australians. Pat is of the generation closest to George+Jean. Similarly Ronnie, in this generation, identified 142 new matches [reduced from previous total which I miscalculated], and Paul identified another 86 new matches. This illustrates that differences existed between the DNA of the Robert, George and Isabella lines. In Ronnie's case the George line is markedly different from Robert's and Isabella's. Just as there are many differences between me and my two siblings in how we inherited DNA from our parents.

Although Sheila is in this same close generation, there were only 18 new matches and I feel that the smaller number of matches who are closer than 4C is part of the reason, as well as that she is also from the Robert line, and that is already well sampled. Kathryn is also in this generation, and added another 100 new matches. Both she and Pat provided numerous 'new matches' since they were the first two lists I saw from the closest generation.

Of people in the next generation, Ken added 29, I added 25, Julie added 14, Mark added 12, Helen added 7 and Pedro added 6. Despite her whopping 1000+ 4C or closer, Vicki added just one new match. I think that is because the Australian matches were already identified by Pat and Kathryn. The new matches I added are shared by my sister Julie but not my brother Peter. The bottom line is that a new match is likely on every person's match list.

I also have not had time to go back and check whether other people match any of the matches identified by Ronnie and Paul. The 'commonality' of matching is very interesting to me - but it does not advance the main purpose of all this.

Gathering the collective DNA of George+Jean

I constantly acknowledge the importance of the people in the generation closest to our ancestral couple. George+Jean are their x3 great grandparents. Each should have inherited about 3% of these x3 great grandparents' DNA. With Sheila joining our collective, we therefore now are sampling 5x3% or about 15% of George+Jean's DNA signature. Of course, it must be less than 15% because if there was no overlap of this DNA we would have no matches. 

However a whopping 85% of George+Jean's DNA is not captured. Even if I gathered the DNA signatures of the other 5 known people of this generation in all the DNA databases, we would not go anywhere near the potential 30% signature.

When we add in people in the next generation (like me), who are descended from different lines within the Buchan family, we might potentially add another 1% each. I have identified about 40 people in this generation and we have 8 people already in the collective.  It is unlikely, fortunately, that I will need all this DNA signature to match to descendants of George and Jean's siblings - who ever they might be.

Next Steps

The next steps are to identify the people on the  520 strong match list who have public trees. Some of these people are surprisingly high matches, over 100 cM, and if that is the case, you might be able to identify who they are from your own researches to date. I will send an individual email to people where a high match exists without a tree, and ask you to look into it if you can.

Do we descend from the Dalkeith Buchan family? A woman, MN, in Canada does not match any one of us. She is descended from William Buchan born 1800 for whom we have no DNA matches to date. This is not too concerning as we also don't have matches from Andrew or Alexander Buchan either. Remember that whopping 85% DNA we have not yet gathered.

But she does have 2 matches to Walter Buchan born 1742 from Dalkeith. We are currently investigating whether this small match could have come about from any other family. While I am lucky in that my ancestor left Scotland before he married and did not marry someone from the Lowlands of Scotland, MH's ancestors did not leave Scotland until her father's generation, so there is scope for his other lines to descend from the Dalkeith Buchans. MN's maternal line is Canadian with no Scottish connections.

This is the potential power of DNA to take our family trees further back than documentary records. While MH and I separately explore this family, I am also about to start the more laborious process of going through every available tree in our match list. Hopefully I will place more on the George+Jean tree - but better to find descendants from other Buchan and Johnston (and McRae) families. 

One or two matches proves little. However the accumulation of matches is strong evidence of the truth behind inferences we make from DNA.

Further possibilities

I want to throw one more interesting possibility into the mix. Next to the Buchans in the 1841 census is a family of Johnstons. Christian Johnston aged 55 is the head, and her (probable) children - David 32 farmer, Margaret 30, John 26, Jane 25, Alexander 20 mason journeyman, William 17 ag labourer, and Thomas 15. Could they be related to Jean Johnston? Could part of the reason why George and Jean came to Borthwick be that Jean's family were here?

I will try to investigate whether any of these children had families, so that I can look for them in the DNA match lists.

I realise that these concepts are hard to understand. Please ask for any clarification or more detail.



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