My First NPE Case - "Tonya"

This post is going to be a little bit different than my usual family history posts. One thing I spend a lot of time doing is identifying where my DNA matches fit into my tree. DNA matches are other Ancestry.com user who I share DNA with. I currently have 115,477 DNA matches. That's a lot of cousins! Only about 4200 of those are 4th cousins or closer. Since I began working with my DNA matches I have had a goal of finding the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) for all of my 2nd - 3rd cousins. I don't have any matches closer that 2nd cousin- once removed (2C1R).  Since 3rd cousins share great great grandparents and I know all of my 2nd great grandparents this should have been a fairly easy task. However, there are a few that have given me trouble. One of these is a lady we'll call Tonya. Ancestry guesses our relationship to be 3rd-4th cousins. We share 93cM (centimorgans) or about 0.5% of our DNA.

Tonya has a large tree. All of the lines go back several generations so I was stumped when we had no ancestor in common. When this happens my first step is to look at our common matches. I saw that all of our common matches were on the Watson/Brown/Oswalt line. Another interesting thing is that she had no ancestors in the South. All of my ancestors, with the exception of one line, were in the South. At this point, I sent Tonya a message asking her if she could pin point how we were related.  My next step is to build a mirror tree. This is simply a tree I build that is identical to Tonya's tree, this way I can change it and add to it as I figure out how we are connected. This helped me decide that I was definitely not connected to anyone in her tree. Maybe her tree was wrong? But how?

I started adding our shared matches to the mirror tree and quickly realized that our MRCA were John Calvin Brown and Julia Ann Oswalt. I had figured it out! But that is not where this story ends.

A few weeks after I had found the connection, Tonya messaged me back. She said that she had no matches on her father's side and had no idea how we were connected. She asked me where we go from here. I could tell she had had a lot to process since getting her results. I can't imagine finding out that way that your dad is not your father! I was glad to be able to message her back that I knew how we were related and that I would be happy to share my mirror tree with her. We messaged back and forth a few more times and I eventually offered to help her find her father. I have always wanted to solve an NPE (Non-paternity Event) but I wanted to be sensitive to her and her family. She said she had no idea how to go about it and would appreciate the help. I started right then! Tonya gave me access to her DNA matches and I saw that she had several 1st-2nd cousin matches so I felt pretty sure I would be able to solve this! 

It took me about 7 hours over 3 days but I did it! I found a man that fit perfectly. He was the right age, in the right place at the right time. It was such a fun puzzle to solve. I even think they look a little bit alike.

Unfortunately he passed away when she would have been very young. I shared all of this information with Tonya last week but haven't heard from her since then. It is up to her what she does with the information. I do hope she eventually gets to meet her half siblings and that everything works out. 

One other thing that was interesting about this case was the family line we share intermarried with the same families and sometimes their own family many times. I mentioned earlier that Tonya and I share 93 cM of DNA. She and I are 3C1R. The upper limit for this relationship is 75 cM and the average is 30 cM. There was so much endogamy that we had 18 more cM than we should have been able to! That is crazy!