No living Maternal relatives for DNA testing, but several Autosomal Tests

Question

Can someone look at this for me? I actually have several members of my family who have had DNA tests done at least on my father's side. Are these enough to have DNA Confirmations done with? One Autosomal test has a 50% match with her, because he's her grandson, and that's my grandfather. All three, Me, My Father, and My Grandfather have all done Ancestry Autosomal DNA tests. Is this enough to confirm this relationship with https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Insley-107 ?

Comments

Men carry their mother's MtDNA, they just can't pass it on, so you can do a test and follow your mother's line.

Answer 1

Hi Shawn,

Assuming that you and your father match each other at AncestryDNA with a suggested relationship of parent-child, you can mark the relationship between you and your father as "confirmed with DNA". Similarly, if your father and your grandfather match each other at AncestryDNA with a suggested relationship of parent-child, you can mark the relationship between your father and your grandfather as "confirmed with DNA". For any relationship that you mark as "confirmed with DNA", you need to provide a DNA confirmation statement in the Sources section of the child profile. Please see the DNA Confirmation Help Page for more information and sample DNA confirmation statements.

You can also see an example parent-child DNA confirmation statement on my profile (the first one listed in the DNA subsection of the Sources section). It's based on an FTDNA match between my father and I.

Delia (Insley) Wright (whom you linked in your post) appears to be the grandmother of your paternal grandfather. You mention that "One Autosomal test [your grandfather] has a 50% match with her". WikiTree actually indicates on her profile (based solely on the relationships that exist in WikiTree) that your grandfather may share ~25% DNA with her. To confirm relationships to her, you would need to use DNA matching at Ancestry (or another site that provides such functionality) to determine if that's actually the case. WikiTree doesn't do DNA matching (there's no uploading of DNA to WikiTree). Also since Delia died in 1938, it's very unlikely that she has an AncestryDNA (or any other DNA) test kit available for DNA matching.

The Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) for the DNA match between you (or your father) and your grandfather is your grandfather, so you can only mark relationships up to your grandfather as "confirmed with DNA" based on those DNA matches. So the AncestryDNA matches between you, your father, and your grandfather don't provide any support/evidence for confirming any relationships with Delia (Insley) Wright.

For confirming relationships up the line to Delia, your best bet is to use your grandfather's AncestryDNA test/kit (assuming that you have access to his test/kit/matches), since he's the closest relative to her, and find 3rd cousin or closer AncestryDNA matches of his that descend down different lines from Delia or one of her ancestors. And again, you would follow the instructions in the above linked DNA Confirmation Help Page, for any such matches that you would find.

Hope this makes sense. If you still have questions, please post back here.

Edited to update link to my profile