{"id":807,"date":"2015-09-10T09:21:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T16:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/?p=807"},"modified":"2015-09-10T09:21:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T16:21:34","slug":"our-mystery-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/?p=807","title":{"rendered":"Our Mystery Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" src=\"http:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/091015_1621_OurMysteryM1.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/>We have a branch missing from my family tree.\n<\/p>\n<p>My paternal grandmother never knew her father. She claimed she did not even know his name, and perhaps she didn&#8217;t. Her aunt, not her mother, raised her.\n<\/p>\n<p>This unknown man contributed 12.5% of my ancestry, yet I have no information on his family or heritage. Endless searches of records on my grandmother and her family have yielded no clues.\n<\/p>\n<p>Recently we embarked on our last, best hope, DNA testing. We opted for autosomal testing because we are not looking for a straight maternal or paternal line. If we could only find someone with no discernable matches to my documented family tree, that person could be related through the mystery man.\n<\/p>\n<p>Matches have begun to come back, and most of them seem to connect through lines I currently have documented:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One match also had Reed and Carter ancestors.\n<\/li>\n<li>One match and I both descend from the Puritan Edward Bangs.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Strangely, several matches came in from Australia. All the paternal ancestors I know about have lived in America since colonial times, and I know of no relatives who relocated to Australia. Could these people be related to my unknown great-grandfather?\n<\/p>\n<p>I am just beginning to wade into this new world of DNA testing. I have learned a couple of things as I try to understand how it works. For example, descent from a common documented ancestor does not mean that the DNA match is necessarily from that ancestor. One must triangulate results to prove a match from any given ancestor.\n<\/p>\n<p>With no scientific training beyond college biology, this DNA world presents me with a daunting learning curve. But if I ever want to discover my great-grandfather, I need to become proficient in this science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have a branch missing from my family tree. My paternal grandmother never knew her father. She claimed she did not even know his name, and perhaps she didn&#8217;t. Her aunt, not her mother, raised her. This unknown man contributed 12.5% of my ancestry, yet I have no information on his family or heritage. Endless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}