Match Making in Clare using autosomal DNA and Y-DNA

Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2017

5:00 p.m. Sunday 22 October 2017

Shelbourne Hall, Royal Dublin Society

by Paddy Waldron

WWW version:

http://pwaldron.info/GGI2017/

Video recording:

A video recording of this presentation is available in the Genetic Genealogy Ireland facebook group which all are welcome to join.

Outline

Match Making in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare
Arranged marriages and shotgun weddings
Using sisters' X-chromosomes
Six degrees of separation
What have we learned from these examples?
How to get the most out of your autosomal DNA results
The Y-DNA of those claiming Clare ancestry

Match Making in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare

Over 60,000 people from all over the world come to the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival in County Clare every September and October "to have fun, party and find the love".
Thousands of people from all over the world come to County Clare at least once in search of their Clare roots.
Matchmaker Willie Daly has his ‘office’ in the Matchmaker Bar in Lisdoonvarna.
The Clare Roots DNA project has its `office' in the Stella Maris Hotel bar in Kilkee where we meet and greet people whose DNA and/or paper research suggests that they have Clare roots, and introduce them to their long lost known cousins and DNA matches:

(see below for DNA match between the two groups)
Cardboard Willie Daly with a client.
The real Willie Daly with the same client.
Tommy is also an FTDNA client (courtesy of his 4th cousin in New Zealand) and a GEDmatch user.
His top match was an adoptee who had been on GEDmatch for only 8 weeks before him.
Within a couple of hours, I had identified her birth parents, who had married some time after putting her up for adoption.
Willie Daly may not be a miracle worker, but GEDmatch is.

Arranged marriages and shotgun weddings

Genealogists soon learn that in previous centuries in Clare, throughout Ireland, and elsewhere, marriage was always an economic rather than a romantic transaction.
Up to the mid-twentieth century, most marriages in rural Ireland were arranged, in Shrovetide (Nollaig na mBan to Shrove Tuesday).
Some brides were pregnant when they married.
Some were even pregnant by their husbands.
Counter-examples:

marriage Jan 1908 Clare; first son born Jun 1908; husband's greatnephew and first son's son have different Y-DNA haplogroups (I and R); 2C1Rs share no autosomal DNA
marriage QI 1943 England; first child registered QII 1943; first child's child only a half-nephew to younger children
marriage QIV 1955 Dublin; first child registered QI 1956; DNA test for inheritance from supposed paternal half-sibling showed no relationship
etc.

droit du seigneur/jus primae noctis
Ridire na mBan
Neighbours married neighbours

Killard to Cloghaun Beg (East)

About 8 miles apart
Gianpiero Cavalleri earlier today showed a chart by Jim Wilson of distance between spouse birthplaces for all British marriages 1855-1955
Irish spouses were probably less mobile
About 80% of British couples were born within 4 miles of each other, and only about 10% over 8 miles apart.

The Clancy Brothers:

Thomas of Killard, d. 1 Jul 1898 aged 87, eight children with his wife Honora Nolan of Cloghaun Beg (East)
George of Killard, d. 1 Apr 1871 aged 50 or 52, nine children with his wife Mary Galvin of Glascloon
Michael of Killard, alive 1901 aged 73, fifteen children with his wife Ellen Sexton of Killard
Henry of Killard, d. 24 Dec 1897 aged 67, eleven children with his wife Honora Marrinan of Cloghaun Beg (East)

Honora Nolan's greatgreatnephew showed up in the middle of Storm Ophelia last Monday as an AncestryDNA match (28.3 centimorgans shared across 3 DNA segments) to Honora Marrinan's greatgreatnephew (and also as a more distant match to myself)
In 1855, Michael Nolan was in no. 3 and Michael Marrinan in no. 2 in Griffith's Valuation (Ryan Tubridy's GGGgrandfather lived in no. 6 and also occupied no. 5 and no. 7)
Next door neighbours!
Nolans and Marrinans still live in these locations today.
A manuscript Marrinan pedigree turned up in Jul 2017 showing Honora's mother as an O'Brien.
Different user-submitted online family trees show the mother of Honora's brother Timothy (who inherited the farm in Cloghaun Beg (East) and d. 10 Jan 1889) as Anna Maroney or Mary Ann Mahoney.
DNA evidence has long since cast doubt on their being any close relationship between the authors of these online trees and the Marrinans of Cloghaun Beg (East).
Mrs Nolan is buried in Kilmihil:
IHS Here lie the remains of Ellen Nolan alias O'Brien who depd this life Feb 15th 1855 aged 64 yrs Erected by her beloved husband Mr. Michael Nolan, Clohanbeg for her and posterity
Mrs Marrinan's grave has not been found.
Research of all sorts is about spotting obvious patterns and surprising trends in data.
Data-mining is digging in large quantities of data (such as DNA provides) for patterns that are not obviousl
A pattern is starting to emerge here:

Were the two next-door neighbours (whose sons-in-law were brothers) themselves related?
Maybe O'Brien sisters?
Sisters who possibly even called their daughters Honora after a common grandmother?
So that the new DNA matches are fourth cousins, consistent with the amount of DNA that they share?

What else can DNA tell us?
Mrs. Nolan (RIN 12422) has three descendants in the DNA databases, one already at GEDmatch, with the new one to be uploaded tomorrow.
Mrs. Marrinan (RIN 113913) has sixteen descendants in the DNA databases (plus the grandson of one), seven of them at GEDmatch.
If they were sisters, then the Nolan descendant would be 4C and 4C1R to the Marrinan descendants, with 50% or less chance of sharing detectable amounts of DNA.
The autosomal matrix is further strong circumstantial evidence of the relationship.
The Nolan descendants already in the DNA databases are not in a position to inherit X-DNA from Mrs. Nolan.
But one of the Marrinan descendants already in the DNA databases gets his mitochondrial DNA down the all-female matrilineal line from Mrs. Marrinan.
Guess who will be using my free test sponsored by FTDNA for this talk?
Three Chicago-born sisters descended down the all-female matrilineal line from Mrs. Nolan left a total of twenty children, who owe me a favour.
I am appealing to them to club together and order mtFull Sequence for one of them.
Cindy's tree has another speculative child for Mrs. Marrinan - Mary m. Carrig.
Mrs. Carrig's matrilineal greatgrandson is already awaiting mtFull Sequence results.
Let's add him to the autosomal matrix - speculating that he is 3C and 3C1R to the Marrinan/O'Brien descendants and 4C to the Nolan/O'Brien descendant, in which case he would be expected to share four times as much autosomal DNA with the Marrinan/O'Brien descendants as the Nolan/O'Brien descendant does.
Could Mrs. Carrig have been from the only other Marrinan family in the parish? See third worksheet in Excel workbook.

Using sisters' X-chromosomes

Jim Palmer, a hall of fame baseball player, is adopted and matches me (6.0 centimorgans shared across 1 DNA segment) and one of the Marrinans of Cloghaun Beg (East) (65 centimorgans shared across 5 DNA segments)
He took his surname from his adoptive mother's second husband.
Fishing in all the gene pools:

AncestryDNA:

closest match 273 centimorgans shared across 14 DNA segments
Table of probabilities predicts 1C1R (20%) or 2C (60%) or 2C1R (20%)

GEDmatch: closest match (same person) 290.8 Total cM 54.7 largest cM
FamilyTreeDNA:

Y-DNA pending
missing SNPs in AncestryDNA raw data preventing autosomal transfer

MyHeritage:

closest match (2C1R to top AncestryDNA/GEDmatch match) 5.0% (358.9 cM) Shared DNA; 12 Shared segments; 84cM Largest segment
Table of probabilities predicts 1C1R (59%) or 2C (40%) or 2C1R (1%)
There is anecdotal evidence of false negatives at this level, so could this be a false positive?

Five descendants of Thomas Moroney and Mary O'Dea (who married about 1850) in the adoptee's top 16 AncestryDNA matches.
Maroney thought to be his birth father's surname pending arrival of Y-DNA111 results.
GEDmatch put the cat amongst the pigeons.
41.7cM on the X-chromosome shared with one of the female Moroney descendants (so there must (also?) be a Moroney connection on his maternal side).
no X-chromosome shared with her sister (so the shared X-DNA must come from their mother).
AncestryDNA would like its customers left in the dark about obvious facts like this.
"Are your parents related?" at GEDmatch.com shows no evidence of a relationship.
But there is a NYC birth index entry for a Maroney child with the relevant birthdate (mother soundex K530).
And there is a Moroney female in the right area of the family tree married to a Kennedy male according to a user-submitted family tree.
Work in progress ...
... but his wife is addicted already:
It's official DNA is my cocaine. I've got to have it.

Six degrees of separation

I've never believed in the "six degrees of separation" theory.
Tom from Maine and Maria from England both have holiday homes in Kilkee where their ancestors lived.
They arranged to meet in the Stella Maris Hotel to discuss their long half-identical region:
```
20 2,171,481 44,695,165 60.7 6,677 Tom/Maria
```
No common surname between their Kilkee greatgrandparents and no other common geography, so almost certainly no closer than 4th cousins.
Probability of no crossover in in ten randomly selected recombination events in 60.7cM is 0.2%.
But we have picked this half-identical region out of the extreme tail of the probability distribution.
Is this just data-mining?

I ran a matching segment search and looked for people with whom they triangulated:

20 2,171,481 44,695,165 60.7 6,677 Tom/Maria
20 15,304,533 22,975,413 12.8 1,545 Pete/Tom
20 15,410,611 20,690,129 10.9 1,328 Maria/Pete

Five minutes later, Pete from Cincinnati walked past the window ...

What have we learned from these examples?

Genealogists compile family histories by matching up three categories of information:

the oral traditions passed down through the generations;
the archival sources used by traditional genealogists; and
the DNA evidence that often reconciles both, but sometimes refutes either or both (NPE).

How to get the most out of your autosomal DNA results

Upload your pedigree chart to AncestryDNA
Upload your pedigree chart and your DNA data to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA
Match each DNA kit to the relevant individual in the family tree
I will be giving a talk about this to the Irish Genealogical Research Society on Monday 20 Nov 2017

The Y-DNA of those claiming Clare ancestry

837 members of the Clare Roots project as of 20 Oct 2017
Y-DNA STR results for 317 men in the project
Their County Clare ancestry is not necessarily in the patrilineal line
Assigning men to haplogroups is much an art as a science.

Breakdown of top-level haplogroups:

Haplogroup	Number	%
E	5	2%
G	2	1%
I	29	9%
J	1	0%
Q	1	0%
R	279	88%
Total	317	100%

Breakdown within haplogroup R

Haplogroup	Number	%
R1 (R-M173)	1	0%
R1a	4	1%
R1b	274	98%
Total	279	100%

Slightly higher percentage of R1b (86%) than in the Ireland yDNA Project (81%) as reported by Margaret Jordan earlier today.

Breakdown within haplogroup R1b

Haplogroup	Number	%
R-M269	20	7%
R-U106	12	4%
R-P312	240	88%
R-S1194	2	1%
Total	274	100%

Breakdown within haplogroup R-P312

Haplogroup	Number	%
R-P312	16	7%
R-DF27	7	3%
R-U152	3	1%
R-Z290>L21	214	89%
Total	240	100%

Breakdown within haplogroup R-L21

Haplogroup	Number	%
R-L226	59	28%	Dalcassian/Irish Type III
R-M222	43	20%	NW Irish/Irish Type I
R-CTS4466	13	6%	South Irish/Irish Type II
R-L362	2	1%	Munster Type I
R-L513	17	8%
R-Z253	19	9%
R-Z255	10	5%
R-L1336	22	10%	Corcomroe
Other	29	14%
Total	214	100%

Surnames with multiple origins:

Brennan (one I, one R1b)
Brown (one I, two R1b)
Clancy (one R1a, four R-L226, two R-L1336)
Corcoran (two I, one R-L513, one R-M222)
Crow(e) (two R-Z253, three R-L226)
Crowley (one I, one R-M222, one R-CTS4466)
Egan (two R-DF27, one R-L226, one R-M222)
Fitzgerald (one R-L226, one R-CTS4466)
Hannan (R-M222)/Hannon (R-L226)
Hanrahan (one R-L513, one R-L1336, one R-L226)
Kell(e)y (one I, one R-L21, three R-L226, one R-Z253, one R-L513, one R-BY3439)
Kitson (one Q, one R-L513)
Leyden (one R-DF21, two R-M222)
Lynch (one R-Z16250, one R-L226)
Madden (two R-Z253, one R-BY3440)
Maloney (one I, one R-M222)
Mc Mahon/McMahon (one I, one R-L226, three R-Z255, one R-U106)
McNamara (one R-M269, one R-M222, five R-L226)
Mitchell (one G, one R-M222)
Murray (one R-L513, one R-M222)
O'Brien (one R-L21, one R-CTS4466, one R-L1336, nine R-DC33)
O'Day/O'Dea/O Dea (one E, five R-L226, three R-P312)
O'Neil(l) (one R-L1336, one R-Z253, two elsewhere in R, no R-M222)
Quinn (one I, one R1b)
Roche (one E, one R-P312, one R-U106)
Sullivan (one I, one R-Z253)

Well-represented surnames with a single origin:

Corry/Curry (four R-L226)
Cusack (five R-L226)
Malican/Melican/Milliken (five R-A15201)
Marinan/Marnen/Marrinan (six R-BY19488, no shared paper trail)
O'Shea (six R-L513, five of them known or assumed relatives)