23andMe and Ancestry don’t seem to be the best at gauging relatives that you may have when they are only half-related to you. For instance, they may tell you that you have a first cousin based on the percentage of DNA that you share with them because that is the percentage of DNA that you would be estimated to share with a first cousin if that were a conventional relationship, but if that person is only a half-relative to you, that person may not actually be your first cousin… am I making any sense? Because in the case of my highest match on 23andMe, the “first cousin” that I have there, he is actually my biological half-uncle, which I was able to confirm because his daughter (who is actually my half-cousin if you want to get symmetrical about all of this) read the message that I sent him since she has access to his account and actually corresponded back with me. She’s also awesome, by the way. But getting back to what I had originally been writing about… I began looking into my two highest matches on Ancestry, which were more than 10%, which is statistically significant. That would normally put you in the ballpark of first cousin, but once I was able to find out a little bit more about them, they were so much older than me (not knocking you for your ages if you find my blog and read this!) that it was, and is, actually unlikely that they are both indeed my first cousins.

It seems more likely that they are my half-aunts (or my half-great aunts, but half-aunts seems more likely).

Given the gap in our ages, it actually seems more likely that they may be the biological half-sibling to one of my parents. And since both of my parents have, for all intents and purposes, an unknown biological parent of their own, I can’t immediately identify which one of those it might be by virtue of “the one with the unknown parent”. And based on the research that I have done, my two highest matches on Ancestry are sisters to one another. I did send both of them nice, polite messages when I found out that we were of the relation that we were… one of them when I got my own results back from Ancestry, and the other one when she came up as the high match to me that she did on Ancestry, because she is now my highest match. I can only hope that, at some point in time, I get a response back from either one of them, or someone on that side of the family. If possible, I would like to get to know them, because I’m under the impression that they had (or have, until they see those messages) no idea that I existed until now. And a lot of them are on Ancestry, too.

Now this tells me where in the United States my ancestors originated to. I find this extremely interesting.

My DNA is so entrenched in the Mormon religion that this automatically shows up as one of my communities.

Although I was curious and waiting to see what communities Ancestry would add me to by virtue of… well, my ancestry, it almost seems poignantly injurious that my DNA screams “Mormon pioneer” while the rest of me screams (at least internally) “I don’t want anything to do with religion since it makes me uncomfortable”.

At some point on down the line, I may further elaborate on some more of my thoughts regarding religion.

I’m still trying to figure out how we may actually be related, because I suspect that this is a case of “we think you’re first cousins based on the percentage of DNA that you share, but because there are so many variables and so many chances for you to be a half-relative, you’re probably one of those and our algorithms can’t suss that out yet”. I did send her a message though as soon as I saw her take the place of the person that I formerly shared the highest percentage of DNA with in the Ancestry app, so I’m hoping that someone is interested enough to respond. These people probably have no idea that I exist given the… complexity of all of this, which has been one reason why I’ve wanted to try out 23andMe and Ancestry. I want to get to know some of the relatives that I wouldn’t have had a chance to get to know were it not for that because I would have had absolutely no idea that we were related, let alone how. (And because there is an unknown grandparent on both sides of my family, I get the fun from both sides, so it isn’t as cut and dry as “oh, this is from the side of my family that I don’t know”, let’s try sides. There is more than one unknown side at play…)

Based on the math that I did with the help of an online site, we share 13.8% of DNA in common.

I’m speculating that these may be people that have no idea that I exist, let alone the parent that we share relation to. Still, though, it will be nice once I start hearing back from more relatives of mine from Ancestry.