After decades of struggling in vain to connect my surname to those from Cornwall with the Gatt(e)y surname It’s possible I’ve made a breakthrough. I’d been unable to find a suitable baptism/birth for my 4gt William Gatty. I was advised to check a site called Find my past. I had an account there, but had not renewed my subscription. To cut a long, and probably boring to others, story short short I came across a catholic baptism for a William Gatty in Lincolnshire that I’d not come across before. My 4gt’s children had all been baptised as Catholics. The only suitable result,so far, for his father Samuel Gatty traces back to Cornwall and a Gatty line from Cornwall that I’ve known about for quite some time now.
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What’s an affordable test that’s also accurate that you can take?
I have been interested to take one but don’t know the best place
Are you building your family tree? I have an aunt who did that
That’s a very good question that’s very hard to answer. There are so many differing beliefs as to which ethnicity estimates are best. As a general rule of thumb - distinguishing as to which continent an ancestor came from is likely to be far more easy/accurate than distinguishing at a subcontinental level. For example France or Germany. That in turn being more easy/accurate than tracing your ancestry to a specific region within a country.
The best way IMO is to look at where your cousin matches come from . Ideally there should be a chromosome browser that allows you to see whether your match with someone is within a pile up zone or not.
Via Bing
An “autosomal pile-up zone” is a term used in genetic genealogy to describe a region on a chromosome where multiple shared autosomal DNA segments are stacked up on top of each other1. These pile-ups occur when there are multiple shared autosomal DNA segments that are stacked up on the same part of the genome1.
The presence of a pile-up should be considered as a warning sign. For any shared segment to have genealogical significance, we would expect it to be shared only with descendants of the common ancestral couple. If we share a segment with hundreds or thousands of people, it is extremely unlikely that we will share that section of DNA by virtue of a recent genealogical relationship within the last ten generations or so, and it is much more likely to be indicative of a false match or a more distant relationship1.
Pile-ups can occur for a number of different reasons such as lack of phasing, SNP-poor regions, and excess identical by descent (IBD) sharing1. For example, Chromosome 15 is known to have a common pile-up area between 20,060,673 to 25,145,2602.
It’s important to note that if you have a DNA match that only matches you in a pile-up region, you should be aware that you might share some ancient ancestors with this person. It might be impossible to identify the common ancestor2.
Ancestry DNA has the largest number of people who have tested and the ability to filter based on location but no way of checking which chromosomes you match with another person. Family tree DNA has a chromosome browser but a much smaller user base and no way of filtering by location. 23 and Me restricts you to a limited amount of cousin matches . My heritage has quite a large user base and a chromosome browser.
I have built a smallish family tree. A major problem is that of people copying the data off trees that are themselves inaccurate and lacking in sources.
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That’s interesting
Thanks for explaining
Did sort of wonder about the validity and had not heard of the pile up detail
Later I might have a look and see
Main reason is I do not know enough about my blood related fathers family
All I know is that all round the grandparents level includes Irish, Portuguese, Spanish and English.
That’s all I know but I kinda wanted to confirm it and go further back
My further basic understanding is that the families were catholics
I am distantly related on my mom’s side to a guy who fought at the Alamo. He was the one who rode out and came back and told them no one was coming to save them. His name was “William Butler Bonham”. My mom’s maiden name was Bonham. All the Bonhams in the U.S. are related to two brothers who came to America in 1643, so all the Bonhams in the U.S. are related.
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James Butler Bonham. The Washingtons. Volume 7, Part 1: Generation Eleven of the Presidential Branch - Justin Glenn - Google Books
Via a cousin match of mine
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All my fathers lineage should be Muslim. My mother had a Muslim father but her mother came from Baptist lineage.
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All the Bonhams in America are descended from two brothers who came over from England in 1643, so yes, he is my ancestor. I think he is my 16th or 32nd cousin, or something like that. I got the first name wrong. It was James Butler Bonham.
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