Chromosome 23

Still working away on phasing of my grandparents and using DNA Painter which is a marvelous tool. I had this Excel file that sort of did the same thing collecting the common matches in a nice row and I was colouring them as it turned out but DNA Painter is so much better!

Because I do not have any first cousins (my father was an only child and my mother's brother did not have any children), acquiring known lengths on the X chromosome has proven to be difficult. I do not have any known second cousins that have tested and indeed I do not have very many second cousins other than my Blake line which doesn't help me with Chromosome 23 since Blake Chromosome 23 does not pass to either my brothers or my sisters. I have one known match (10.68 centimorgans) coming down from my Routledge side (my great great grandmother was a Routledge) and so coming down from my maternal grandfather's mother's mother). The X chromosome passed to my mother from her father would have come directly from his mother. But of course it is then blended with the X chromosome which she received from her mother yielding a Gray-Buller-Taylor X chromosome from her and a Rawlings chromosome from my father (would have passed intact from his mother to myself). The Rawlings I can see in the matches because my two sisters and myself will match that individual pretty much exactly the same (depending on the testing service) since there is just one X chromosome for my father to pass to us. The challenge is of course with the Gray-Buller-Taylor matches.

I am questioning myself as to whether or not the 10.68 centimorgans is sufficiently large to use it as a control length. Doing so lets me create a good scenario for the phasing of the Gray-Buller-Taylor chromosome which all of us have inherited from our mother although there is quite a bit of variability in that inheritance. Being able to definitively define this chromosome adds greatly to the entire phasing project. I have 15 really good matches on this chromosome and being able to then place them into one of the four grandparent lines is most helpful as it lets me look at the other chromosome where there are multiple lengths of matching chromosomes. But that being said, I already have six Pincombe matches (my paternal grandfather was John Routledge Pincombe) that let me define that line quite nicely over 17 chromosomes for my one sibling that is the strongest match to the Pincombe family and even myself being the weakest match have 9 chromosomes with Pincombe matches.

Trying to decide these days if I am spending too much time on DNA! I am also working on the writing up which involves photographing my set of fiche records and inserting the original into the document. This is for family only as all of these records carry UK Crown Copyright.