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I took 23 and Me and i received 75% Sub-Saharan, 17% British, 3% Spanish & Portuguese 2% North African 1.8% Native American and the rest is 0.9 unspecified. I uploaded to Gedmatch and I see 200 or more Puerto Rican matches ranging from 6 - 56 centimorgans. I'm from Louisiana and my whole life all i knew I was black and I'm trying to figure out how is this possible? how is louisiana and puerto rico tied to each other?
I took 23 and Me and i received 75% Sub-Saharan, 17% British, 3% Spanish & Portuguese 2% North African 1.8% Native American and the rest is 0.9 unspecified. I uploaded to Gedmatch and I see 200 or more Puerto Rican matches ranging from 6 - 56 centimorgans. I'm from Louisiana and my whole life all i knew I was black and I'm trying to figure out how is this possible? how is louisiana and puerto rico tied to each other?
That is a distant cousin. 56 centimorgans shared is about 5th-6th cousin--so you & that person had the same Great, great, great, great grandparents or maybe 5X great grandparents.
You would need do your family tree research and see who they were. However, that would be rather intensive research. Most of my family lines are only documented back to 4X great grandparents (born in mid/late 1700s).
One or more of the descendents of these 5X great grandparents(or 4X greats) ended up (or began) in Puerto Rico while yours ended up (or began) in Louisiana. This was 6 generations ago in your family tree. You would have 64 great great great great grandparents.
56 cM can be as close as a 3rd cousin or as distant as a 7th cousin.
There's a lot of things that could be at play here - I would recommend researching your family tree and compare it with the trees of the Puerto Rican matches.
56 cM can be as close as a 3rd cousin or as distant as a 7th cousin.
There's a lot of things that could be at play here - I would recommend researching your family tree and compare it with the trees of the Puerto Rican matches.
Agree. I posted one of my matches that were showing as a distant cousin for me but they were a 3rd cousin to my 2nd cousins
Thousands of Cubans migrated to Louisiana in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and by 1870 there were about 3000 Cubans in New Orleans. Cubans and Puerto Ricans are closely related, so you probably have ancestors, whether Spanish, African, or both, who settled in Louisiana from the West Indies. It seems many more Puerto Ricans than Cubans have taken DNA tests, so your number of matches is skewed in that direction.
All this means is that both you and those other people with Puerto rican segments might be distantly related. It does not mean they are your ancestors. It could easily be that they have the same ancestors as you do but they are alive today.
As someone who is half Puerto Rican, I suspect that you have common ancestors with those Puerto Ricans that have ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa.
The North African ancestry is connected to Spanish/Iberian ancestry as the Moors mixed with the Spaniards. Spaniards and Portuguese who colonized the New World often owned slaves and we know what happened between male slave owners and female slaves.
Slave trading, once slaves were forcibly brought to the New World, got complex. For example, my family has long believed that we had some Haitian ancestry. I wondered out loud to a relative as to how the Haitian blood got into our line. She said that when Puerto Rican slave owners wanted more slaves, it was easier to get them from Haiti than it was to get them from Africa.
All that goes a long way when it comes to explaining how you are getting distant matches with those of Puerto Rican descent.
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