Coming to Grips with Non-Canavan Canavan Cousins
Editor’s Note: I asked Joe whether the biological and non-biological branches both live in his master database of more than 12,000 individuals, or in an appendix. Joe explains that he built a separate research tree for the newly discovered biological branch, and that the amounts of shared DNA lined up neatly with the generations back to the common ancestors. He then describes helping at least three adoptees find their biological families — two of them Canavans, one connected to Jimmy Harte — using Ancestry’s “shared matches” tool. One man, “James,” turned out to be a close Canavan cousin with a whole page of shared Canavan matches, though he prefers to keep his privacy for now.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: So in your database, you had mentioned to me that you have over 12,000 individuals that are more or less where they should be in some scheme of things. So both of these, biological and the non-biological, they’re part of your overall master scheme, or does your chart have an appendix?
JH: Well, it has an appendix. And I’m not sure how I’m going to resolve that. Let me just say that once I started to admit that this was a branch that I should be paying attention to, I started to build a separate family tree just with that branch, because at that point it was still for research purposes. And so I started to build this family tree in a separate — I didn’t connect it with my main family tree. And everybody that I added, and some of them produced family trees, and so I could say, “Okay, when I get down to this set of great-grandparents, that’s in this biological family tree.” And so if their family tree somehow keyed into those grandparents, then I would say, “Okay, I’m very likely to be a second cousin once removed to this person.” And so I started to build this family tree, and every time I would add somebody, if they had a family tree connected to their DNA account, and I could plug them in as a known cousin, the amounts of DNA that I was seeing in these matches all kind of matched up with the different generations that their common ancestor was back from my common ancestors. And so anyway, it was kind of interesting to get that confirmation that, yes, all these people that I’m putting into this little family tree seem to be matching up with the right generations. And anyway, let me say that not only finding my own non-paternity event was one of the interesting things that I found with autosomal DNA, but I’ve found at least three adoptees that were trying to trace their biological families that I have introduced to — two of them, two of them came to the Canavan branch, and one of them went actually to Jimmy Harte’s family.
WJB: Wow.
JH: So those were at least three situations where somebody was adopted, and they took the test, and they were extremely lucky to come up with enough evidence that I said, “Oh, this person has some connection with Canavans,” or has some connections with Jimmy Harte or whatever it was, just because of the DNA matches. So let me back up a little bit so that when I’m looking at a DNA match, one of the things you can do is you can find out what matches you have in common. So if I want to see what DNA matches I have in common with, say, Dennis Cassidy, I can click on a button on the screen that will show the DNA matches that we both have in common.
WJB: Wow.
JH: And so in one of these —
WJB: That’s pretty powerful. That’s very powerful, isn’t it?
JH: Well, especially if the database is very large like it is with Ancestry. And so, one of these persons pops up, James — I’ll call him James because he is James. I’m not going to use his surname because he wants to maintain some privacy now that he knows that he’s a Canavan instead of something else. He’s not ready to disrupt people’s lives. I guess he’s just a little hesitant at this point to —
WJB: Yeah.
JH: — want to start contacting all his biological cousins. Anyway. And you can understand that.
WJB: Yes, indeed. You can. Of course.
JH: Because it’s probably pretty exciting for him, but he doesn’t want to disrupt people’s lives. So, his name is James. So when I looked at the DNA matches that he and I shared, they were all Canavan cousins. This whole page of shared matches were Canavan cousins. So in my mind, there was no doubt that he was related to the Canavans in some way.
WJB: Yeah.
JH: And the amount of DNA was so large that he and I shared, that he had to be like a second cousin range, which would be within the last — we would have great-grandparents in common.
WJB: Wow. Interesting.
JH: And I’m thinking, “Oh my God.” And so that doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happened. The other two times weren’t that dramatic. It wasn’t this full page of —
WJB: Yes.
JH: — Canavan cousins. So anyway.
