Do you have any ancestors to whom you cannot seem to stop making DNA connections?

Question

For me lately I've been on a roll with my 4x great grandparents Desire Morier and Marie Louise Gagnon.  My mother has 23andMe matches with descendants of 5 of their children (so far):

• Ovila
• Marie Louise
• Mathilde
• Marie Josephine
• Henri

I think it helps that they had lots of children, and that I am descended from two of their children, Joseph and Marie.

Do any of you other genetic genealogists have ancestors like this where you just keep finding DNA connections?

Comments

I have lots of large families I match on. What is frustrating is a family with 8 kids I can find little about!

Answer 1

Hi Brian,

I have a lot of lines like this.  Many of them stem from my paternal grandmother who was born in Alabama.  The ones with a plethora of DNA cousins include my Barnard, Dorminy, Kelly, and Kirkland lines.  My maternal grandmother also provides a lot of cousins up her Hunsaker, Imbler, Millison, Roberts, and Sears lines.  I was particularly excited when I located all of the cousins up the Millison line, as it helped me break down the brick wall of my grandmother's father...

Answer 2

I have 175 DNA matches, and my father has 199, on Ancestry's Thrulines for my 4th great-grandfather Edward Dodd, who had 16 children by two different wives (I match to descendants of 13 of those 16 children).

Answer 3

I have long observed the same situtation - I have a single 4th-great grandparent couple who currently account for about 50% of my identifiable DNA connections.

I think there are several factors that help this:

1. they had more children (13) survive to have children than any other couple of that generation.
2. they had the largest number of descendents migrate to North America, where most early DNA testing has occurred
3. their tree was better researched (not by me) than any other branch of my family
4. once you start making links in certain parts of your tree, the matches "in common with" help focus the search in that area and it results in a bit of a positive feedback effect.

I have just today started on my new 23andMe DNA results, paternal side. From the first page of results, about 50% are either definitely, or strongly suspected to be, from that same line. There are bits of all the above factors that seem to have played a part in this.

Answer 4

I have FAR more maternal matches than paternal matches, and on my father's side what matches I do have are almost all from his mother's side. My McFatter ancestors just don't seem to have been as successful at reproducing.

Answer 5

On my maternal side I have more than 1,000 DNA cousin matches for Coleman/Geiger, between first to fifth.  My 3x great grandfather had approximately 18 children, and my grandfather Coleman and three of his brothers, married four Geiger sisters, one was my mother.  I will probably never get them all researched.  Some I already knew,  some I have met, in person, some on-line and some did not respond to my notes but it has been an interesting and information journey that is still going strong.