Contacts at 23 and Me

My results are just a couple of days old at 23 and Me and already I have had two contacts (one I initiated and one to me). For the one it is my Blake line in Hampshire and the relationship is very ancient going back to my 11x great grandfather (I have one Blake marriage which brings two lines together at my 9x great grandparents giving a little extra boost to the genes I guess!) and the other is a mystery at the moment although we share surnames in both Hampshire and Warwickshire. So a little sleuthing to come on those lines (3rd cousin is the indication). I have 919 matches at 23 and Me but mostly in the distant category. No close relationships but 1 2nd to 4th unknown, 5 3rd to 5th cousins, 101 3rd to 6th cousins, with the remainder being more distant. About 1/3 to 1/2 are public matches. There are many many with American ancestry. My contacts were both from Australia with ( like me) 100% British Ancestry.

There are also quite a few matches with people having 100% Irish ancestry. Perhaps I will solve that elusive great grandmother after all with a match. I have one particularly good match on the X chromosome which bears further research and it is a public match. I have written and will see what happens there. This person has ancestry in Northern Ireland which is the likely place for my great grandmother to have been located or at least her family as she was born in Birmingham. The nice part is my mitochondrial DNA can be used as well. This particular grouping that I have is found principally in Northern Ireland and in Argyllshire/Ayshire Scotland. We are ancient to the British Isles (H11a2a1) although I note that the greatest frequency for our haplogroup H11a2 is The Netherlands which I think is one of the migration points out of Ukraina following the Last Ice Age. Because my matches are also in Sweden I was suspicious that they had taken the northern route to get to Scotland but a southern route across Europe into the British Isles (via Doggerland) is also very conceivable with people spreading out from a common migration route. All of this is so exciting and the area is under water (the North Sea flooded Doggerland thousands of years ago as the ice sheets retreated).

So all in all, another interesting result for me and I have taken all three autosomal results into Gedmatch and I am a perfect match for myself. Always rewarding given my science background to see the duplication of results from the same person. Since I have been involved with DNA from almost the beginning of my genealogy research days, I adhere very strongly to the principal that you really cannot do genealogy without both paper trails and DNA trails. It is amazing to be able to prove your research in such a scientific way.