McCauley – HistorTree

This entry is part of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks series. This week’s prompt is Nuture. To see other posts in this series, view my 52 Ancestors in 2019 index.

It’s difficult to know the character of our ancestors when all that remains of their lives are a few impersonal records. But sometimes these records can reveal clues about an ancestor’s nature. The simple choice of who lived in her home, the circumstances of a husband returning from a Civil War prisoner of war camp, and the situation of a widowed sister suggests my 3x-great-grandmother Malinda McCauley Johnston was a nurturing wife, sister, grandmother, and aunt.

I’ve been playing with a few of the newest DNA clustering tools this winter, hoping they could give insight to my paternal family. My father’s family has a high-degree of pedigree collapse, and his parents were likely first cousins, once removed (1C1R). Other branches of his family tree also intermarried often, resulting in DNA results that are challenging to interpret.

I ran Genetic Affairs’ auto-cluster tool on my father’s AncestryDNA test with range set to 50 – 250 cM. The tool returned 206 matches, ordered below by cluster. I have also identified “super clusters” and labeled these areas A-D:

**Paternal “Super Clusters” as interpreted from results of Genetic Affairs Auto-Cluster Tool**, run date of 3 Jan 2019

Genetic genealogist Dana Leeds has a series of blog posts about analyzing super clusters, so I’m taking a cue from her and breaking my analysis into these smaller, more manageable chunks. Today, let’s look at Paternal Super Cluster A.

Tag: McCauley

Malinda McCauley Johnston: Nurturing Wife, Sister, Grandmother, and Aunt

Analyzing DNA Auto-Clusters with Pedigree Collapse: Paternal Super Cluster A