Where the African DNA might come from
So it’s been a week since RootsTech 2023 wrapped up and The Legal Genealogist has just had a chance to sit for a second, take a deep breath … and dive into a new tool announced at RootsTech that Ancestry now offers to help with DNA analysis.
It’s called DNA compare, and it lets us compare our genetic origins — called ethnicity by Ancestry and most testing companies but more accurately called biogeographical ancestry analysis or admixture for short1 — with those of our matches in batches.
DNA compare doesn’t provide any new information — we’ve long been able to compare our own admixture to that of each individual match on a tab on the match’s page. What this does is let us look at up to 10 matches at a time. You can read more about it at Ancestry Support.2
So… what’s it good for?
Here’s how I used it.
Among the immediate members of my mother’s family, those who’ve tested show a small but persistent amount of African DNA. I have a theory as to where it comes from — I think my Revolutionary War veteran fifth great grandfather William Noel Battles, b c 1757 VA and d 1842 AL, was the illegitimate son of a free woman of color — but there’s no real documentary evidence for that.
So the question is: can this tool to analyze our DNA tell part of the story?
I started out using the SideView feature of a maternal aunt and uncle who’ve tested. SideView — another Ancestry tool — divides our matches and our admixture percentages by parent.3 And Sideview reported that both my aunt and my uncle have that small persistent amount of African DNA on their maternal side: from their mother, my grandmother, Opal (Robertson) Cottrell. There’s no reported African DNA on their paternal side.
Next step: identify the strongest matches from each of my grandmother’s parents to see if they also showed that same small persistent African DNA. The best would be close cousins descending from siblings of her Robertson father Jasper and from her Baird-Livingston mother Eula. I was looking for any hints of African ancestry from the west of Africa: Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast in particular, since that’s what the testing companies collectively usually identify this persistent DNA as hailing from.
Lots of Robertson cousins have tested at Ancestry, and DNA compare lets me look, all at once, at the admixture numbers for up to 10 cousins at a time. So I looked at matches descending from eight of Jasper’s siblings who share somewhere in the range of 70-230cM of DNA with my aunt and uncle. Not one of them shows a detectable amount of DNA from anywhere on the African continent. Zero. Nada. Zilch. I extended it out to cousins a bit more distant just to be sure I was being comprehensive. Nope. Nothing.
That pretty much eliminates my grandmother’s paternal side. It’s just not mathematically likely that out of all the descendants of nine children of Jasper’s parents Gustavus and Isabella (Gentry) Robertson who’ve tested, Jasper’s line would end up as the only one to inherit this chunk of DNA.
Next, looking at her mother’s side, it gets a little dicey. My great grandmother Eula was the only known child of her father Jasper Baird but the oldest of eight children of her mother Martha Louise (Shew) Baird Livingston. So we can’t just look at descendants of Eula’s siblings. We have to look at the Baird (paternal) side and at the Shew (maternal) side to see if there’s any hint to which side it could have come from.
The results were pretty dramatic. Entering in all the known cousins on the paternal Baird side, up to 10 at a time, the DNA compare feature only reported African ancestry for two — and both have identified African ancestors in lines they don’t share with us. Among the cousins who don’t have those identified African ancestors, none have any reported African ancestry.
So that suggests it’s still in my direct maternal line: my grandmother’s mother’s mother’s line — Opal to Opal’s mother Eula to Eula’s mother Martha Louise. The next question then is whether the descendants of Martha Louise’s other children, those by Abijah Livingston, got that persistent DNA as well.
Yep. They did. Not all of them, but enough to suggest that Martha Louise was the source.
So… which side of Martha Louise’s family did it come from? Her Shew father, Daniel, which would undermine my theory about William Noel Battles? Or her mother, Margaret (Battles) Shew, granddaughter of William Noel?
Entering in all the known cousins on the Shew side, up to 10 at a time, and excluding cousins descending from other marriages between Shew family members and Battles family members,4 DNA compare showed none — not a single one — with reported African ancestry.
But entering in all the known cousins on the Battles side, up to 10 at a time, and excluding cousins descending from those Battles-Shew intermarriages, DNA compare showed several with reported DNA from Benin & Togo or Ivory Coast & Ghana (or both).
Now… this isn’t take-it-to-the-bank stuff. The African DNA is very much hit-or-miss among descendants of Martha Louise’s siblings (children of Daniel and Margaret (Battles) Shew), and it could have come from Margaret’s mother, Ann (Jacobs) Battles rather than her father.
So is this proof that William Noel Battles was the son of a free woman of color?
No. But it is evidence consistent with that theory…
In other words, I may be heading down a rabbit hole, but at least there’s a fighting chance that it’s the right rabbit hole.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “About those origins…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 12 March 2023).
SOURCES
- ISOGG Wiki (https://www.isogg.org/wiki), “Admixture analyses,” rev. 9 Feb 2023. ↩
- See “DNA compare,” Ancestry Support (https://support.ancestry.com/ : accessed 12 Mar 2023). ↩
- See generally Judy G. Russell, “Ancestry launches Sideview,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 13 Apr 2022 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 12 Mar 2023). ↩
- Hey, c’mon, be nice. It was a thinly-populated rural area… ↩
Wonder if this would work with a male mulatto ancestor born about 1670 in Connecticut. Whatever, I would have to hire someone to figure it all out for me. My brother’s dna connects to this Rogers family.
Thank you for this detailed explanation of how you used this feature. I, and one of my brothers, have a small amount of West and Central African DNA, which we speculate came from a particular great-great-grandmother, through one or both of her parents. Now that you have shown the way, I hope to be able to corroborate (or disprove) this using DNA Compare. I’ve learned so much from you – and not just about the law!
I have many Battle surnames, no S, in my DNA matches trees. I have McCrakens as well. They are related to my Prater/Prather lines.
No Battle families, only Battles with the S, in my research.
It also is consistent with the theory of possible brother Shadrach, for whom there is apparently information designating him as a free person of color. At least, that’s my quick reading of some online information easily findable….interesting stuff!
Yes, there’s lot of confirmation for Shadrach as a free man of color, and lots to confirm his links to my guy (including his enlistment on the same day in the same company as William Noel for RevWar service). I’d love to DNA test a male descendant (to see if they might share a father) and descendants in general (to see if we might be able to detect a shared mother).
MyHeritage reports my mother has 1% Nigerian and I can filter matches on that ethnicity. But Ancestry doesn’t report any African for her so I can’t use your method. Being that Mom is from the south and some of her ancestors were slaveholders, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some African in her mix (my sister and I didn’t inherit it).
It seems that Myheritage is assigning Nigerian DNA to quite a few people. I have it also, I have 1,3%. However, I have no leads in my ancestry to this DNA neither do the other databases that my DNA is in (FTdna, 23andme) assign me any African DNA. So I do not know what to make of it. Some people have labelled it as noise.
It definitely appears that MyHeritage is the least refined and least accurate of the geo-ethnicity estimates.
Judy, this is a good idea. I am doing something similar on one of the kits I’m working, but using DNA painter to mark out shared segments with matches from a common ancestral couple to try and identify those segments that I believe are from the Native American ancestor. By also import the chromosome paintings for ethnicity I can see if any of the Native segments line up with any of the shared segments from that particular couple.
Have you found a matrilineal descendant to take an MT test? If you yourself are on the direct maternal line to the hypothesized African ancestor, that would likely be definitive based on haplogroup.
No matrilineal descendants have been identified: the only two children we can hypothesize were born to this free woman of color were male.