Chromosome 23

I still do not have that perfect match that will let me formally accept my phasing of my grandparents chromosome 23 that was passed to myself and my siblings. I know the one length of course which was inherited from my father since my sisters and I all receive his X chromosome which was passed to him from his mother. If ever I get matches on the Rawlings line then it is somewhat easy to place them as they match my two sisters and I and not my two brothers. Thus far I do not know if any of these matches are from my grandmother's father's line. Although she received the second middle name of Cotterill/Cotterell I am only penciling in the thought that her father was George Cotterill who was also born at Kimpton. This was the only Cotterill family there. The priest has baptized the baby with that middle name and the baby was registered also with that name. My great grandmother elected to keep her child and on the 1881 census my grandmother was finally discovered after several years and a number of certificates living with her maternal grandparents William Rawlins and Elizabeth (Lywood) Rawlins. Not long after I discovered a cousin in Australia had put together his family tree and he included Elizabeth with husband William Taylor (married in 1882). One of his first questions to me when we met on line was "who is Ada Rawlins on the 1881 Census with William and Elizabeth Rawlins?" By then I could respond that I believed she was my grandmother.

But back to the phasing of my grandparents Chromosome 23. To really perfect this phasing I need a match with one of my second cousins (I do not have any first cousins) where we share the Buller line or the Gray line of my maternal grandfather John Routledge Pincombe's mother Grace Gray. The Buller line looks easier because one of my grandmother's sisters had daughters. But to date none of them have tested. I have tried to find descendants of my mother's first cousin but no luck thus far. On the Gray side, Grace's two older sisters died in childbirth leaving just one daughter who has had children but thus far the DNA shared is too small to definitively declare that one of my two versions is absolutely correct.

Working with the data from the other chromosomes where I have known matches with cousins who also share DNA has helped to create these two scenarios. I await the chance that one of these days one of my second cousins will test.

And it continues to snow. Since it is nearly 2 degrees celsius the snow is fluffy and wet looking not our usual dry stuff that we get at 10 and 20 degrees celsius below zero! There will likely be snowmen if the children can find excitement in yet another snowfall. We are definitely waiting for spring.

One does wonder if 150 years later people can be content with just accepting that children were born out of wedlock. I am most accepting of that. People did not marry for a number of reasons and babies were created in an unplanned way just as they are these days! I am glad that we are more accepting of how life flows.

Chromosome 23

Still I am perplexed by Chromosome 23 and how to divide up the maternal portion I inherited from my mother. I have two known matches by 4th cousins but the length is really insufficient to say positively that I have phased this Chromosome 23 correctly between my two maternal grandparents lines - Pincombe and Buller. I have one match on my Routledge line (my great grandmother Grace Gray married William Robert Pincombe and this match descends from a sister of Grace's mother Elizabeth Mary Ann Routledge). I have one match on my Welch line and in this case the descent is from the twin sister of my 2x great grandmother Anne Welch who married Henry Christopher Buller. The amount shared is 10cM for the Routledge match and 8 cM for the Welch match. Fortunately they do not fall in the same area but they confuse a phased X chromosome which I produced prior to knowledge of these two matches. Do I go with the matches or do I go with the carefully thought through phasing that I did before the matches appeared? I am ambivalent. I wish I could find one of my known 2nd cousin Buller as their grandmother was my grandmother's sister. Likely we will share some X chromosome enough to convince me one way or another on how we have inherited our X chromosome from our mother. The paternal X chromosome is, of course, easy as that is inherited entirely from my father who received it unchanged from his mother and it was inherited by her from her parents - William Rawlins and Elizabeth (Lywood) Rawlins.

I have a new match on Ancestry lately which is also descendant of my Buller side likely back to my 2x great grandmother Anne Welch. It would be interesting to see if this individual has an X chromosome match with me. However, I have not yet written but will contemplate doing that to see if it interests him to pursue the match. It is a large match. Another similar match at 23 and Me is likely Welch-Buller with a 1.2% match and in this case the chromosomes have not been shared. I did write to this individual and verified our descent from the Welch family as being our most recent common ancestor. Perhaps over time she may share her chromosome results and again a strong possibility that there would be X chromosome results of a length sufficient to name the phased portions of the X chromosome with more accuracy.