How many generations

Question

I am still puzzled by my DNA connection to the Netherlands.

I am from England and have a paper trail going back to at least my 3x Great Grand Parents, often much further than this. On paper I am 100% English with what I have found so far.

I tested through My Heritage a couple of years ago and currently have over 5000 matches there. Of these 418 are showing as being from the Netherlands.  They fall into these cm's.

1     @ 41.8 cm's

13   @ 30-40 cm's

51   @ 20-29 cm's

243 @ 10-19 cm's

and the rest 8 to 9 cm's.

I have looked at some of the Dutch trees (where they exist) and so far I have seen no English names on them either.

So you see my puzzle and my questions are :

How many generations must I look back to find this Dutch link ?

Am I looking for a father who is not a father on paper?

And does anybody have any suggestions on how I try to solve riddle ?

Comments

Based on these numbers

https://isogg.org/wiki/Cousin_statistics

I can't see how it's possible to have that number of matches.

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Hi Horace

Had a look at those numbers and if the My Heritage estimates that these fall into the 3rd to 5th cousin category that is between 175 and 17,000 possible cousins on average. So I would have thought 431 is possible ( although seems very high - this is what is puzzling me).

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Actually I did a rough estimate the other day on how many 3rd cousins my children may have.

Their 3x GGP had 51 children between them with 36 surviving.

If those had an average of 4 children that would be 144.

If the next generation had an average of 3 that would be 432.

If the next generation has 2 children each that gives an estimate of 864 3rd cousins, which is a bit higher than the 175 given in those statistics.

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Hi Christopher,

Have you tried using the AutoCluster tool at MyHeritage? It's possible that your matches from the Netherlands will be grouped together in one or a few clusters of matches that match each other.

If there are other matches within those clusters for which you've already determined your connection, even if there is no segment triangulation among the matches, it may still give you a clue where to look for your potential Dutch ancestry.

If you've not yet determined a connection to anyone in those clusters, you may want to focus on trying to determine your connection to one or more of the non-Dutch matches in those clusters.

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Thanks Rick

I will have a go and see what I can do with auto clusters.

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You also have to factor in what proportion of your cousins will have done a DNA test with MH.  Does MH have a massive presence in the Netherlands?

Answer 1

Dutch has very unstable orthography.   You can have Westvaal evolve to Westvael, Westphal, Westphael and ultimately to Westfall  over several generations. My 3rd GGM Margaret Courtwright was a brick wall for a long time and I thought maybe her name came from the Belgian Kortrijk but ultimately her ancestors were lurking on wikitree disguised as Kortregt.  Is it possible one of the names on your tree is anglicized Dutch?

Comments

Hi Mark

I did have my suspicion of my 3x GGF William Pointon, but I have recently been able to take him back another couple of generations so it is making him less likely considering the size of some of the matches - I have some segments over 36cm's. Also I have a 3rd cousin who I recently met up with via a DNA match who is from that same line and has had some similar results. Though I realise this could be a red herring and he has his Dutch genes from elsewhere.

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Also my Grandfathers name was Pallant and there was talk within the family that we where related to the singing Danish/Dutch duet Nina and Fredrick Pallantb from the 50's/60's. But again I have took this line back to my 3x GGF James Pallant who was baptised in Suffolk in 1789 ( This relationship has also been partly confirmed by a DNA match)

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I just learned a new word...cordwainer. There were certainly Dutch cordwainers in London judging by the legal conflicts they had with English cordwainers.  And the Pallant name took me down a rabbit hole.  Frederick von Pallandt got involved with Australian drug smugglers in the Philippines and was murdered by one of them.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/drug-tsar-uses-silence-in-fight-to-keep-villa-20061216-gdp2de.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_van_Pallandt

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That's the thing with Wiki - there's always something to learn. Cordwainer was new to me when I found it. When my GGF moved here to Leicester it was to work in the boot and shoe trade.

As for the drug dealing, I don't think my grandfather would have keen to be related if he knew.

Me I think good or bad it all adds spice to your family tree.

Answer 2

A few ideas to consider. First at 41.8 cM I'd be looking more at 4th to 5th cousins than 3rd, all of my verified 3rd cousins have significantly larger matches (~60 cM - 120 cM). Is that 41.8 cM all one segment or is it split over multiple segments? If it's split over multiple segments then how many and what size?

Do all or most of your Dutch ancestors match you on the same segment(s)? If so, I'd build out that triangulation group and start looking for common ancestors among the biggest matches. You'll also want to look for close matches between your Dutch matches that might potentially move you a generation or two closer to your common ancestor. MyHeritage has tools that can help you with this.

I'd second Mark's point on changing spelling of surnames and add that you might want to consider that your Dutch relatives may have an English ancestor hiding behind a Dutch surname somewhere in their trees.

Depending on your resources you may want to consider either uploading your DNA to FTDNA (I think this is still possible) and maybe GEDmatch (as always read the privacy agreements and make your own decision). You might also consider getting tested at Ancestry as they don't allow uploads but do have the largest pool by far. I personally haven't had much luck with Ancestry at that distance mainly owing to a lack of necessary tools available (i.e. chromosome browser), but, with luck, it can provide some helpful clues.

If you've got a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket you might consider the long shot option of yDNA and/or mtDNA testing at FTDNA. If you're really lucky, and you do actually have a Dutch ancestor (rather than Dutch relatives with an English ancestor) and that Dutch ancestor is on either your all maternal or all paternal line you could hit pay dirt and narrow your search tremendously. Far more likely you'll narrow your search very modestly by learning that your all maternal and paternal lines are probably English. I'd go with yDNA first since mtDNA can go back so far as to not be very conclusive either way, particularly in attempting to differentiate between two such closely connected populations (while my yDNA is clearly Irish, my mtDNA produced a mix of matches from the British Isles and Scandinavia, not surprisingly).

Finally, there are some tools at GEDmatch that claim to allow you to analyze the ethnicity of a specific segment of your DNA. You could give them a try to see if the segment(s) where you match Dutch relatives appear any more Dutch than the rest of the chromosome. I haven't had much luck with those tools personally but I've seen cases where others claimed some measure of success using them. Once again differentiating between Dutch and English DNA is probably challenging at best.

Comments

Thanks for the advice Paul

Answer 3

Christopher, rather than looking at total match strength, I'd focus on segment size.  For example, I was long perplexed by a particular 51-cM match I have.  When I finally mapped my chromosomes, I saw that the two segments he and I shared were from completely different branches of my tree, reducing the match from a major puzzle to a minor mystery that I may never solve.

As I recall, MyHeritage counts even very small segments in their cM totals, which may overstate match strength in comparison to some other testing companies like Ancestry.

Sorry for my inadequate understanding of history, but I recall there there were times in the past that significant numbers of English immigrated, perhaps temporarily, to the Netherlands. It could have been a sibling of one of your ancestors who did that.  And if the person who intermarried with the Dutch was a woman, you might not see the English surname(s) in your matches' trees.

I would not be looking for an NPE (non-paternity event) as the most likely answer.

A final thought--my own third cousin matches range from over 200 cM down to zero.  There is a huge amount of variability in match strengths, especially once you get past the first couple of generations.  So I wouldn't focus too much on finding the common ancestor at any particular generation.  But it is easier to research more recent generations, so I'd start with them, and at each step try and trace the siblings of your own direct ancestors.

Comments

Here is one article I found about immigration:

https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-de-demographie-historique-2009-2-page-193.html#

Sorry, I don't have time to look at this further right now.  Good luck!

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Thank you for the article - to be honest I never realised that it took place on that scale.

But like I said before, you are always learning on Wiki

Answer 4

Many people are now saying that for a true match to be made you have to have at least 12 to 20 cm on the same chromosome for at least 700 SNPs  So far ISOGG has not changed its 7 cm and 700 SNP minimum statement.  If you drop in 41.8 cms to

 https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4

you get 6th, 7th, 8th or more distant as the highest probability group.  Some 5th mixed in but to me anything beyond 4th cousins starts to get very iffy.  

Also it is just as possible that an Englishman or Woman left their DNA in someone's line in those Dutch names.  I think you are assuming the Dutch would come to England and not considering that English may have gone to the Netherlands or other areas that read with Dutch type names.  

Comments

Hi Laura

It was a consideration that the migration could have gone either way, but to be honest I have no idea how to check immigration into the Netherlands.

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It is not necessarily a true emigration from the UK.  It could be a student, a soldier, a vacationer...   people can create a pregnancy without living in a specific location.  Those pregnancies create DNA matches later on.  So there is nothing in DNA that says the children were from a married couple.  

You are looking at time periods that encompass 2 world wars. multiple events where there was intermixing of people from multiple countries.   

While many births are the product of a loving relationship not all are.  And when dealing with DNA matches we have to be open to the fact that we may have some relatives who were no angels.  I am not saying this is your case but  am saying you need to be open to it because you clearly have no idea how these people are related to you.  

Some occupations take relatives far away.  To be honest my Scottish whaling relatives went very far away from Scotland and after being on a whaling ship for months, when they hit landfall it would not surprise me if they had dalliances with local women.  Hence some of the dna matches from my Scottish line from points that on the surface make no sense, do when I think in terms of whalers and where they may have gone and had landfalls.  

Additionally we all probably have relatives who went far away during WWI and WWII plus a host of other international events in the vast time period you are looking at.  So this is another option for some of the unexpected DNA matches we may come upon.  

I guess because I work with adoptees so often I tend to think in terms of possible pregnancy sources that don't necessarily follow an expected family line.

Answer 5

It's nothing to be alarmed about! Really, it's a just an interesting hint.

That's about what you'd normally see for a 5th cousins (or maybe even more distant). So you have 4th-gt grandparents (or further back) in common with these Dutch folks. Either an Englishman (perhaps a sibling of your gt-gt-gt grandparent) went to the Netherlands, or your 4th-gt grandparents came to England from the Netherlands.

I, personally, have a 41.8cM segment that I share with a large number of people where the common ancestor is somewhere back before my gt-gt-gt grandfather. The ancestry I see for these matches is all in the deep American South, which is kind of like a "different country" , vs my ancestry, which is all in either in the American North or Northern Europe, except for one ancestor who was supposedly from Northern Virginia. I believe it tells me that some ancestor had one or more siblings who migrated down South back in the early-to-mid 1700s.

In my case, as far I got was noticing that many of these people were descended from four different children of a couple (Hendricks and Barber) that was married in North Carolina in 1791. It seems to be a case where long segments can stay intact for an unusual number of generations along mostly-male lines (a phenomenon cause by the lower DNA recombination rate for males). The surname Hendricks is all over the various trees; the maiden name of my best match is Barber (and she has a Hendricks in her tree also); my gt-gt-gt grandparent is straight up my paternal line.

I think my "Hendricks" might be Dutch, so that's a funny coincidence here.

Comments

Thanks for the hints.

Answer 6

I'd agree that 30-42cM is more likely from more distant common ancestry; my largest single triangulation cluster on GEDmatch is for 18-40cM on the same segment shared with a group of people whose closest relationship to me is in the range of 6th cousin once removed to 7th cousin (verified MRCA is a set of 6th great-grandparents who were born in the 1740's).

Comments

Thank you for your comments