Making DNA work
FOR YOU
DAWN WRITES: Dear Karen, earlier this year some of our family decided to take DNA tests with Ancestry. My dad Tom, my sister Tina, Tina’s husband Matthew and Matthew’s niece Alex all received their results at pretty much the same time and we were rather shocked by the results. Matthew and his niece Alex shared a number of cMs which, according to Ancestry made them half relations, not full (i.e. Alex was his half-niece). Then we noticed that Matthew was a high match to both Tom and Tina, sharing 885cMs with Tom and 517cMs with Tina. We know this makes us all closely related, but how?
KAREN REPLIES: This was clearly a shock to the family but they wanted to get to the bottom of it. Before I start I want to assure readers that due to the sensitive nature of this research, all names, geographical details and other identifying information have been changed. Both Dawn and Matthew’s family are from a large industrial city in the north of England, but before the marriage of Tina and Matthew they had no known associations. Before contacting me the families had already been able to work out some possible clues.