Amelia Millar brickwall review

 

Cracking this brickwall was one of my main aims for entering DNA testing way back in 2007.
And still is.
I've never been brave enough to tally up the $$ for kits I've sponsored for descendants over the years, particularly as the initial tests were so much more expensive than now.
Many of these people are no longer with us, but their DNA lives on in our match lists to provide excellent clues for the more recent generations.

Test the relatives in your earliest generations NOW before it is too late.

My four-pronged approach towards cracking this brickwall is covered under the following headings, which I do admit make this all sound rather more systematic than I am in reality.

1. Review of research into likely families 
2. mtDNA match review
3. atDNA matches likely to be from Amelia
4. Recreation of the DNA of Amelia

1) Review of research into likely families 

Genealogy and DNA go hand in hand. 

Most of us "working" the DNA for all the clues we can mine spend a LOT of time researching / checking / creating the trees of our matches to see if the DNA is coming from where we hope/think/are being hinted at it being.  

To which every so often I add general research into Millar/Miller, Chrystal families in the right areas (Kippen, Gargunnock, Kilmadock, Fintry) "just in case" something I've missed now makes more sense with any additional information acquired.
Those more likely looking candidates usually get "tidied up" on the FamilySearch tree, and added to WikiTree, potentially being included as a link to my WikiTree Amelia Millar Brickwall page there via a "category" link.

One day someone will pop up with family information on the missing link(s).

 

2) mtDNA match review

From our one mtDNA tested descendant we believe Amelia Millar's mitochondrial haplogroup to be T2e.

FamilyTreeDNA (FTDNA) sends notifications when a new match is found.
Although the chances of a relevant, close, genealogically significant match popping up un-prompted are slim, I always check to see how close, what they have entered as their most distant maternal ancestor, or what can be determined about their tree.

To date we have no exact matches (Genetic Distance of 0).

 

If you have tested either y- or mt- DNA do please make sure that you have completed the details on your profile under

Account Settings > Genealogy > Earliest Known Ancestors

where there are places to record both your Direct Paternal and Direct Maternal Ancestors

These are respectively your father's father's father's .... father

and your mother's mother's mother's ... mother

and must be male and female respectively.

eg

  

you'd be amazed at how many show their most distant maternal ancestor as male!

The entry here is what shows on the public mtDNA results pages for any projects you have joined (if you have elected to share your results), and is what your matches see about you on their match list.

 

The hope here is that one day I'll track down a direct female line descendant of the most likely families (hopefully a Chrystal) and they'll turn out to be haplogroup T2e to add to any additional evidence from autosomal matches and research eg.

3) atDNA matches likely to be from Amelia

We have a large number of  tested descendants of James Henderson and Amelia Millar and thus a large number of shared matches to work with, but as yet no real way of reliably separating the matches between the two given that 3 out of 4 of the parents of this couple are puzzles* and the fourth known branch is getting a bit far back to reliably get strong autosomal matches that can be proven to be from the McEwan DNA.

We do have some however, so, as always, I live in hope.

 

It doesn't help that this area of Perthshire/Stirlingshire has fairly inter-connnected families.

Just how much that is impacting the match lists is starting to become even more apparent now that Ancestry is actually showing us how much they have down-weighted matches below 90cM by applying their Timber** algorithm to remove the DNA that they've determined is less genealogically significant from the displayed match strength.

Where I could check Ancestry matches on other sites they were generally coming up at least slightly larger elsewhere.

But where I couldn't check elsewhere I was completely in the dark - until now.

 

So it can be a tad hard to separate out the matches relating to Amelia's DNA from that of James'.

 

*James' father is documented as Archibald Henderson but we have a yDNA discontinuity between the 3 (matching) yDNA tested descendants of James and the single yDNA tested descendant of the only one of his paper trail brother's that I've managed to find and convince to test.

 

** The "Timber" algorithm is explained in detail in the Matching White Paper that is available under Ancestry's DNA help - click on the ? top right on your DNA Matches box on the DNA home page.

 

Which pre-amble leads to 4).

4) Recreation of the DNA of Amelia

This aspect of the search is making me feel like an archaeologist digging up mammoths and trying to create a living one from their DNA. I do so hope Amelia would be amused!

So it's time to make all those DNA tests work even harder (payback time <g>).

Cue Borland  Genetics.

I'm in the process of publicizing to tested descendants of James and Amelia (Millar) Henderson that they can help this endeavour by uploading their DNA file to BorlandGenetics from wherever they tested and to let me know they have done so.

I can then invite them to a private Henderson-Millar project there for their DNA to be used in this reconstruction of the DNA of our shared ancestors.

Hopefully with enough in the pool we will get a reasonable amount of DNA that can be used to begin creating ancestral DNA profiles, AND also be able to use the output for use on Genetic Affairs and/or DNAGEDCOM for  clustering reports of the resultant matches.

The site offers you matching as well as advanced tools such as the above, which I've only just begun exploring.
Have a read.

If you are comfortable with the terms and conditions, and privacy aspects outlined on the site, contribute your DNA and we'll see how far we can get creating DNA profiles for James and Amelia.

It would be good to narrow down some options for her parents / ancestry.

Summary

Join me in this fascinating, and very frustrating but absorbing, journey

-  by testing your oldest generations of Henderson/Millar descendants and 

- upload to sites where their DNA can be compared across companies - ie GEDmatch and BorlandGenetics

- extend the connected pedigrees on the very DNA friendly collaborative WikiTree (see my Amelia Millar brickwall category page with some families of interest)

One day we WILL know who Amelia's family was.