This post is really a placeholder.

I fully intended to do a serious post this morning.
But….

Instead, here’s a photo taken late Friday afternoon when my favorite pair of Brazilian cardinals landed just outside our deck doors and caught my eye, letting me know that they would appreciate some food being shared with them. Of course, I responded positively to their plea.

Meanwhile, this morning I’ve been sucked down into the genealogy time warp once again.

This started back when my sister, Bonnie, pressed me to submit for a DNA test with Family Tree DNA. At the time, the test she chose tracked DNA back through your direct male lineage. She was interested in the Lind family in Scotland, and wanted to confirm relationships she had found in searching of paper records and inherited family stories.

So I did the DNA test and turned the results over to Bonnie. I wasn’t much interested in who I might be related to from a common ancestor 25 or more generations ago. Then Bonnie passed away in 2016 after a short illness. And I was left with many of the genealogy notes, including some from my mother’s papers, Bonnie’s computer files, and the DNA test.

As I browsed through this stuff, I got more interested in those unknown “cousins” who share one or more common ancestors within the last 5-7 generations. So I did a different “autosomal DNA” test, which tracks DNA inherited from both parents, considered to be fairly accurate in that 5-7 generation range.

Things got more interesting when I found that I share a small but significant number of DNA segments with dozens–maybe hundreds–of people in New Zealand and Australia, many part of large Maori families. So that’s what I’ve been concentrating on, digging town into and trying to find patterns in the DNA matches identified by these tests.

That led to the next step when, several months ago, I created an account at Gedmatch.com, which is a portal into what I’ll just call geek genetic genealogy. It features a set of computer applications that allow “triangulation” of DNA matches.

So, step one, after uploading your DNA test results to the Gedmatch database, then get a list of all the other people who you share a DNA match somewhere along the 23 chromosomes tested. That’s interesting, very long, and not too meaningful.

Step two, where it gets interesting, is to move ahead to triangulation. This bit of fantastic software takes each person with which you have one or more DNA matches, and then compares their DNA to every other one of your matches, finally sorting this new list by chromosome, and the particular segments on each chromosome where your own DNA, and that of other people, all match. This identifies “triangulated or triangulation groups,” where all members of the group are likely to share a common ancestor or, potentially, ancestors (plural).

The strongest matches with people I’ve identified as being in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Pacific (including Hawaii) comes on Chromosome 14, although there are smaller clusters of matches with many of the same people on several other chromosomes.

I used the Gedmatch.com software to identify those in a triangulation group on this chromosome. Here’s an excerpt from the larger set of results.

Each pair of names represents people who have matching DNA in a particular location on Chromosome 14, and both match my DNA at the same location. The last column of numbers indicates the length of the matching DNA segment in centimorgans, a unit for measuring genetic linkages.

I’ve omitted the email addresses, but have been slowly contacting people on the list in the hopes that eventually we will be able to confirm a common ancestor. I’m in the process now of digging through the family histories of two people on the list who are here in Hawaii. On these two, at least, I see enough clues to think that we’ll figure it out. Still no clue, though, about the origin of the DNA matches down with Maori cousins in New Zealand. So the puzzle continues.

Click on the table for a larger image.

It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole following this stuff. And that’s what has happened to me this morning.