Making peace with the unknown

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

That's a great idea, Glen!

I use the suffix box (for the "Junior"s) but I'm sure there's some other spot where I can plug in the cMs.

For WATO+ purposes Jonny Perl hs just added the option to have WATO search for cM  figure entered in the name field, from his fb post

'Hi all. I just added a feature that I had definitely talked about adding years ago but which had somehow fallen through the net:
When importing a GEDCOM in WATO plus, you can now specify that you'd like to look for shared cMs in the name field (e.g. some people put them in the suffix field)
If you select this option, if WATO finds cMs, it will import the person as a match with this number of cMs shared and will strip the cMs part out of the name
So for example John Smith 23cM would be imported as a match called John Smith sharing 23cMs.

If this feature is useful I can add it to the old WATO as well. As an aside, a longstanding feature in the Coverage tool is that if it finds cMs like this, it will mark the person as tested when you import.'
'

[Biggles50]

I have an unknown Great Great Grandfather in the Family Tree of my “Adopted Cousins” (they are biological Cousins to each other, and I am the adopted one into the family).

I manage the DNA of one of them and for many years and many trees I still have not found out who the guy is?

I am definitely Not At Peace, nor will I ever be, every week I look through James’s new DNA matches to see if there are any likely candidates.

The hunt continues.

[Josephine]

Those are all excellent points, 4b2.

Yes, I do follow the tactics you mentioned.

I have some match groups that probably have an MRCA from the early 1800s and others that are probably from the mid- to late-1700s and no one seems to have managed to build full enough trees to reveal the identities of those MRCAs. In most, or all, of those cases, the records needed to build such trees either aren't online or they don't exist at all anymore (if they existed in the first place).

I'll look at a DNA match and sort our shared matches by his/her highest to lowest matches. If my person of interest has a tree, I'll look at it. If his/her shared matches have trees, I'll look at those. (I'll also look at their highest shared matches and their trees.) I'll create custom clusters in case they might reveal anything. Etcetera, etcetera, until I either find something useful or give up. In the process, however, I've assigned them to a group with an appropriate label and added notations for future reference, just in case.

Once in a while, it pays off, but it's often a huge time-waster that makes me question why I'm doing this in the first place. 

[Josephine]

For WATO+ purposes Jonny Perl hs just added the option to have WATO search for cM  figure entered in the name field, from his fb post

'Hi all. I just added a feature that I had definitely talked about adding years ago but which had somehow fallen through the net:
When importing a GEDCOM in WATO plus, you can now specify that you'd like to look for shared cMs in the name field (e.g. some people put them in the suffix field)
If you select this option, if WATO finds cMs, it will import the person as a match with this number of cMs shared and will strip the cMs part out of the name
So for example John Smith 23cM would be imported as a match called John Smith sharing 23cMs.

If this feature is useful I can add it to the old WATO as well. As an aside, a longstanding feature in the Coverage tool is that if it finds cMs like this, it will mark the person as tested when you import.'
'

Interesting; thanks.

[Josephine]

I wish you success, Biggles50.

[Glen in Tinsel Kni]

I've just sent a message to someone trying to establish which side of their tree we match through, I suspect the match has an NPE ancestor though whether they know or not is hard to tell. They are active if last login details are anything to go by but don't have a tree (their inactive child does but it doesn't remotely align with bmd records).

Truth be told my tree doesn't align with bmd either thanks to NPE ancestors though it's difficult to display on a tree without the DNA results visible to back things up, all I can hope for is the match is open to mutually sharing results and accepts they have a wayward ancestor back in time.

[4b2]

Once in a while, it pays off, but it's often a huge time-waster that makes me question why I'm doing this in the first place. 

I'm hoping some may bear fruit later.

Charting them out like this give a bit more perspective. But then it's a lot of leg-work trying to figure out where they may intersect.



On my paternal line (NPE with great-grandfather), I have spent a lot of time deducing the probabilities based on shared matches and cM. I have a two main clusters on this line.

In the first cluster I've found three sets on MRCAs in the matches, and an obvious marriage between two of them. Since there is no marriage between to the other cluster I've assumed it's an NPE. All of those clusters have common matches showing the line back to c. 1725, so I can know they are solid. So my assumption is another illegitimate union between a specific man and a woman who died around 22. Best guess. All of the closer matches in this cluster also clearly have an NPE. So while we share a common ancestor, born c. 1820, I don't know who it is.

In the other cluster. It's very tricky, as all of the matches have three grandparents with the surname Jones, in Wales. Of the closest matches in that cluster, they also relate to many of the more distant ones on another line. So I need to spend a lot more time in looking into this. But the person of interest seems to be a John Jones, b.c. 1849. I need to order his marriage certificate to find out the father is, but I think it's an NPE. It's very difficult to know where that line goes back to. But the intersection and MRCAs suggest that there is an NPE with another cluster (also Jones). So I have put together a provisional tree of what I think it probably is, based on this. It's not going to be possible to know more without closer matches, either autosomal or Y.

When I got my Y test back it showed that my paternal surname was, at some point, Proctor. So this being in Wales, there were only two families named Proctor. One was 11 miles away and can probably be ruled out, as I am related to another family that married into them a generation back, so there would probably be a cluster.

The other Proctor family happened to live in the village my great-grandfather was abandoned in in 1882, where they were lords of the manor. That family had a coat of arms, which happens to be shared with my Proctor Y-DNA relatives. There's also a branch of my Y-DNA matches that breaks off c. 1100 AD where the surname is Tatham, a manor in Lancashire, where they have virtually the same coat of arms.

However, there are no trees on Ancestry with any descent from that family going back generations, as far as I can tell. So there are likely no or few tests to compare against. But that would explain why that DNA cluster appears to be blank before c. 1850.

My paternal grandmother's NPE was solved earlier this year after a closer relative was tested. So I am hoping for the same one day with this...

[phil57]

When you have a DNA Match with a User Name “kgeng45” and no Family Tree there is not a lot you can do other than look at the Shared Matches too see if their is any divine intervention likely to happen.

K Geng b1945 reports Zero records in Ancestry.

I have had success in resolving a few odd usernames for DNA matches, via internet searches for the same name.

In one case an Ancestry match used the same username for a pinterest account, and information that I found there allowed me to also discover her Facebook account and piece together her name and location. I discovered that she was a 3rd cousin.

In your case, there is a "kgeng45" who is an active member of the Pearl Jam Community forum since 2018. His image suggests that he is a lot younger than someone born in 1945, so the "handle" is probably not connected to his year of birth. Not a lot to be gleaned there unfortunately, other than that he is probably located in the USA, but there was also a user "@kgeng45" on Twitter, who could well be the same person. His name is shown as Kyle Gendreau. The Twitter account was active in 2015 but appears to no longer exist.

There is a Kyle Gendreau from USA who is a company director of Samsonite - the luggage manufacturer. He was previously a director of Tumi(UK) Ltd, and the Companies House record indicates that he was born in May 1969. Several previous officers for Tumi(UK) appear to have had connections to Samsonite.

Kyle Francis Gendreau is currently the CEO of Samsonite. There is more information under his profile on the following link:

https://corporate.samsonite.com/en/senior-management.html

There are 6 Kyle Gendreau profiles on LinkedIn. From photos linked to the "kgeng45" accounts mentioned above, it looks like the Samsonite CEO may not be the best match, and "Kyle G." on LinkedIn, from New York and linked to Epsilon Technologies Group could be a better fit.

There may be more to find, the above is just a result of 5 minutes searching on my part.

There are 2 Kyle Gendreaus on Ancestry.

[Biggles50]

Phil.

Kgend45 is the Gendreau family, they have a tree of 3 on Ancestry.

I share 30cM with them and we have 23 shared matches and the Gendreau name is not found in any of what few family trees there are in the shared matches.

Of the 23 there are 2 who are close relatives to kgeng45 but there lies the problem!

Each have the surname Murphy and both them and the other Shared Matches have Ireland as the Country of origin.

So researching Murphy’s in Ireland, well we would need a lot of luck with that.

Kgeng’s matches and a particular line does seem to originate in an area of Ireland different from my own Irish roots as my family came from the west coast, namely Sligo and Mayo.

The above was as far as I got with this particular match.