Parents with a sense of humour?

Who needs them?
Having found yet another Family Finder DNA match amongst my Devonshire DAWEs, I've been checking off my data to upload a few more of my DAWE family to WikiTree.
Checking the marriage of Charles FLOOD I found his father was one Noah FLOOD.
Back at the  turn of the 19th Century when Noah would have been growing up, I wonder if he was teased unmercifully?

The newly identified Family Finder DNA match is the second descendant of Isaac & Sarah (SMITH) DAWE's son William DAWE who is a match to 3 of the descendants of William's brother Isaac Smith DAWE so we have some DAWE, or SMITH, autosomal DNA that has survived down to present day over 6 generations.

All power to DNA!

New FamilyFinder DNA results are being received all the time, but it is often hard to see where the connection might be between respective trees, although there has to be a link, given the dna evidence.

There was an exception this week, which, once again, highlighted the random nature of autosomal dna inheritance.
But more importantly, they brought attention back to the Mary McEWAN that had been sitting in my database for many years potentially marked as being  the daughter of James McEWAN and Mary McLAREN, and thus niece of my 3*great grandmother Margaret McEWAN.
This potential duplicate for Mary had married a William DUNCANSON and emigrated to Tasmania in 1855. Others have long ago connected the families up as one and the same, but her age didn't quite match, although census data did place her in the right places about the right times, among other candidates.

This time around I found her death entry, which squashed my qualms about her age, although no parents were indexed.
This, coupled with a dna match between a descendant of Mary's and myself, and to my third cousin once removed, both of us descendants of Margaret McEWAN, Mary's aunt, means that she has been connected up to the family and a heap of new McEWAN descendants formally welcomed to the database.

For those interested in further technical detail:
Autosomal dna (atDNA) is the part of our genetic heritage that we inherit randomly from all of our ancestors, as compared to the mitochondrial dna everyone inherits from their mothers but only daughters can pass on to their children, or to the Y-DNA that sons inherit from their fathers, passing that inheritance on to their sons in turn. Both of the latter are far more certain at surviving the transmission process from parent to child more or less intact, but the former is a bit of a lottery as to what survives from which ancestor.

We now have autosomal dna (Family Finder) results from four descendants of Archibald  & Margaret (McEWAN) HENDERSON, and now one from a descendant of Margaret's brother James.

The only match that showed initially on Family Tree DNA, at the default settings, was between myself and my second cousin.  Disappointingly no match shows up between myself and another descendant of our shared James and Amelia (MILLAR) HENDERSON, nor between any of us to the descendant of James' sister Margaret, although the latter was not entirely unexpected. This sort of test is really only expected to detect significant matches back to a shared 4-6 generations ago, so it's always a bonus to find a match further back.

Further exploration via GedMatch, where the parameters may be tweaked, revealed that there are several matches slightly below the matching threshold used by FamilyTree DNA between at least three of us after all. Mostly between the descendant of the two Margarets, one the daughter of Archibald and Margaret (McEWAN) HENDERSON and the other the daughter of James & Amelia (MILLAR) HENDERSON. Could be completely random coincidence (called Identical by State, rather than the Identical by Descent that we are after) of course, but I prefer not to think so.

We now have this growing scientific evidence that supports our paper trails, and provides a good solid base for future matches to pinpoint where they might be from.
But it would be even better to get representatives to join the fun and add to the evidence for the less defined paper trails, those for Margaret and James' siblings William, Archibald, and John, who either emigrated themselves, or many descendants did, to Australia, America, and Canada respectively.  
I'm pinning my hopes on FamilyFinder evidence for William and John as both lines are rather short on direct male line HENDERSONs able to represent them. A Y-DNA representative  may eventually be able to be found for Archibald's line, but a FamilyFinder match would also be very welcome!

Maternal side DNA

A string of Family Finder results have finally made it through the system, one long shot didn't expand our knowledge of the RUNCIMAN dna that may have been shared with the remote RUNCIMAN/RICHARDSON match we found a while ago, but two of the other tests resulted in matches to explore further, refining which bits survived the inheritance process down from the ANDREWS in particular.
The pic above is of the Family Tree DNA chromosome browser tool and shows my matches with three of my maternal relations with the key showing which surnames may be involved in the resulting matches, the newly received data being from a third cousin once removed whose closest shared ancestors with me are Simon ANDREWS and Jane GIBSON.

Another set of results shows some data shared with my BAIN fourth cousin but that part of my tree is not well represented with FamilyFinder results as yet.

Sintons, Fairbairns and Hendersons

Family Tree DNA recently "invited" assorted dna participants to add Family Finder to their DNA knowledge, at a considerable discount.
This tests chronicles your autosomal dna, ie that you inherit from all of your direct ancestors, as compared to the Y-DNA used for Surname dna projects which is only passed on from father to son, or the mtDNA similarly only from a mother to her children, but only passed on by the female line.
Should you be lucky enough for Family Finder to find a match with someone else in their database, you get to see which bits of your chromosome you match on.
As this test is really only most useful for the closer generations, up to 5-6 generations, ie back to 2-3*great grandparents, to find matches, it was a bit of a long shot to expect Peter and Michael to show up with the distant ancestry that we shared, but we decided to proceed anyway.
Peter and I have Peter SINTON and Jane WIGHT as common ancestors, my 3*great grandparents.
Michael and I share  Walter FAIRBAIRN & Agnes ROBINSON, also my 3* great grandparents, but Michael's 4*greats.

As you can see above, the blue portions are far more prominent.
They reflect my shared ancestry with Bill. We share William HENDERSON & Helen Sinton WIGHT, my great grandparents.
I guess we can conclude that the overlapping pink and blue lines are shared SINTON ancestry (unless of course there is an undocumented relationship between Jane WIGHT, Peter SINTON's wife, and Helen Sinton WIGHT's ancestry).