Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I have connected with first and second cousins whom I did not know growing up (children and grandchildren of my grandmothers siblings), and also a first cousin nobody knew existed. I welcome these connections, however I have been messaged by 6th or 7th cousins, and have ignored it. They are too distant for me to care.
Wow. Okay. Not even sure where to start with that. You alll share distant relatives. Are you not interested in more distant history? Sure, great grandparents from 1900 are good to connect to, but the distant relatives that date back to the 1700s are the ones that have the most interesting info, in my experience. I can trace my family back to the revolutionary war. With the document trail I have and seeing that someone is mostly English/Northwestern Europe and with a larger tree (to include state) I can figure out which family we are connected through. If I get a message i can usually say, "Hey we're connected through X family in X state (usually New England) and here are the documents that confirm this relationship. Going back to these 5th-8th cousins you can also connect to more infamous people. I have connected to several presidents (more recent and older like George W. Bush but also Rutherford Hayes), royalty, authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and judges (one of the judges from the Salem witch trial).
Maybe it's just my perspective on history and wanting to know the reasons my branches came to the United States. If the purpose of doing Anvestry was just the novelty to say I'm X this region and X this region, I can understand, but if your ultimate goal is to know lots of things, ignoring those messages could be counter intuitve.
I have connected with first and second cousins whom I did not know growing up (children and grandchildren of my grandmothers siblings), and also a first cousin nobody knew existed. I welcome these connections, however I have been messaged by 6th or 7th cousins, and have ignored it. They are too distant for me to care.
Just for the sake of courtesy, you could respond back to them. Tell them you don't have information to relate your family to distant cousins (or something similar).
Just for the sake of courtesy, you could respond back to them. Tell them you don't have information to relate your family to distant cousins (or something similar).
Just to be clear, these are not first cousins 6th removed, they are 6ths+ cousins....not remotely related to my immediate relatives.
Just to be clear, these are not first cousins 6th removed, they are 6ths+ cousins....not remotely related to my immediate relatives.
They are descended from your ancestors just the same as you are. If you're interested in those shared ancestors, I'm not sure why you wouldn't be interested in talking to someone who shares those ancestors, they could have research or information you don't have - or you could have info they don't and you could help them. Maybe you're not interested in ancestors that far back, but that would be odd for a genealogist so I think people are having difficulty understanding that.
Or maybe you don't know how you relate to these people? Maybe they are just very distant DNA matches with no clue who your shared ancestors are? In those cases, it is actually possible your shared DNA is not identical by descent and you don't actually share ancestors in a genealogical time frame, so pursuing a connection could be a waste of time. However, even in cases like this, the least you could do is politely tell them your shared DNA is too little to be worth pursuing instead of ignoring them (that's kind of rude).
They are descended from your ancestors just the same as you are. If you're interested in those shared ancestors, I'm not sure why you wouldn't be interested in talking to someone who shares those ancestors, they could have research or information you don't have - or you could have info they don't and you could help them. Maybe you're not interested in ancestors that far back, but that would be odd for a genealogist so I think people are having difficulty understanding that.
Or maybe you don't know how you relate to these people? Maybe they are just very distant DNA matches with no clue who your shared ancestors are? In those cases, it is actually possible your shared DNA is not identical by descent and you don't actually share ancestors in a genealogical time frame, so pursuing a connection could be a waste of time. However, even in cases like this, the least you could do is politely tell them your shared DNA is too little to be worth pursuing instead of ignoring them (that's kind of rude).
This is my view too. A lot of my work is done when it comes to those more recent ancestors and I need to connect to those that are more distant to connect the dots. My current brick walls were all born in the mid 1800s, so I'm not in need of connecting to my 1st-3rd cousins, it's the 4th-6th that have that shared ancestor, which can be hard to find, but what I need to close all the holes I have.
Just to be clear, these are not first cousins 6th removed, they are 6ths+ cousins....not remotely related to my immediate relatives.
How do you know for certain they are 6th cousins?
I only ask because some of my own relatives only share about 10-40 cms with me and they are descendants of my 4th great grandmother, which is rather close IMO considering that my great aunt, who is still alive actually grew up with my 3rd great grandmother. Their ancestor is my 3rd great grandmother's sister.
Because of the low cm range and mapping of chromosomes, we now know that their ancestor was a half sibling of my 3rd great grandmother. I have quite a few relatives who have a very low cm range on AncestryDNA who are related via this line of my family from the sister of my 3rd great grandmother. Looking at the cm range you'd think they were 5th-8th cousins but they are not.
I always respond to messages and actually do have relatives who on Ancestry share only 6cm (on Gedmatch the cm range is higher) who are descendants of my 4th great grandmother and are 3rd-4th half cousins.
ETA: not being judgmental but just wanted to put it out there that these may be closer relatives than you think. One of my great uncles, who I personally knew, I share only 7-40cms with his grandchildren and they are descendants of my 2nd great grandmother. Found out he had a different dad versus my great grandmother, his sister and so they are half cousins as well. Only found this out when his daughter only shared 350 cms with my great aunt (who is the daughter of my great grandmother. The uncle was her brother so their children would have more DNA shared if they were first cousins. His children/grandchildren also have no shared matches with the identified family of the named biological father of my great grandmother who was supposedly her brother's father too. Turns out the dad wasn't the dad).
This makes me think that perhaps you just are not a serious researcher in regards to compiling an extensive family history. Maybe you only are concerned with the 1st-3rd connections. I personally focus pretty exclusively on the distant connections. They have been very helpful in adding lines to my family tree. Especially the one of my 4th great grandmother's descendants. I'm hoping to make a breakthrough and discover her "maiden" name in 2020 due to all the matches and, luckily, in my POV, the "half" cousins because they are specifically attached to her and not her husband and so I can isolate in on those 4th-8th cousins and explore connections. I've isolated her to a group of 8 people who I believe are connected to this 4th great grandmother's parents. I've been road blocked at her for about 10 years due to not knowing her maiden name and her married name being very common (Jones).
So I try to answer every message I receive, but some people continue to work my nerves. I'm chatting with this woman now who hit me up last week based on who she thought was a common ancestor in our family true. The woman is a DNA match to my mother and I, but I explained to her that the person she thought was a common ancestor is actually from my father's line. You would have thought that would have been the end of things, but the woman doesn't seem to understand and is still hitting me up! It takes some real strength for me to continue responding to these kinds of people
Statistically... the low numbers are mostly background static.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
