More J.Michael Huber connections

The discovery of the J.Michael Huber connection on Chr#13 prompted a search for more connections; that search was successful. Of course, when you do a search on Ancestry you can come up with just about anyone you want in the list of matches; just because J. Michael Hoover is in the pedigree of a match doesn't mean he is necessarily the one you connect with. I use two criteria to establish the likelihood that the match is valid: 1) Are there shared matches that also lead to the same person? and 2) Are any of your cousins from different lines also a match? 

For item 1), the first thing to do is to use the search utility to look for key surnames and placenames in the trees of the shared matches. In some of the J.Michael Huber matches, this quickly identified Hoovers/Hubers in Dauphin Co., PA. Also, if the search doesn't turn up anything, ProTools is extremely helpful in identifying those who are closely related, facilitating the search of the the pedigrees for  common ancestors.

For item 2), having a large number of cousins identified in the Ancestry database is essential. SA/SO/LT/BD cousin matches were all in my John Jacobs, Jr. line, leaving open the possibility that his wife's line sourced the segment. Though having BD in the list meant the probability of the segment coming from John Hover was 25% (great for someone born in 1731!), it was nice in some cases to see that Daniel Jacobs descendants also shared the match (as they do on the Chr#13 segment).

Having access to view the matches of key individuals is also helpful. Ancestry gives you information for whether your matches are paternal or maternal, making it easy to eliminated invalid matches from the irrelevant side; it does not provide a means of eliminating invalid paternal matches. For Chr#13, I have access to view ALL of the matches (even those < 21cM) for each of my cousins having the match. If a shared match is not in the match list of all of the cousins, it does not share the same segment. 

Of course it is also very helpful if one of the matches you are investigating is willing to go to her DNA settings and give you permission to view the all of her matches. Check the profile of the match and some of them include in their profile picture "Willing to help". On Chr#13, one of the matches did this for me and it allowed me to confirm that J.Michael Huber descendants were among the < 21cM matches as well as the ones that Ancestry allowed me to see > 20cM. 

So, how about those new connections to J. Michael Huber? In the figure below, you see most of the ones I've identified. Jacobs cousins are in the left column and column headers across the top identify the J.Michael Huber descendant and how they connect. Colored box outlines identify groupings of matches have at least some common shared matches (indicative of possibly sharing the same segment). 

Green shaded cells indicate a match and, other than Chr#13 (red box), they show the cM value. All with colored boxes have indications of validity; others are more uncertain. Those corresponding to CTV are especially interesting because CTV is from the Daniel Jacobs line and was nice enough to both allowing viewing of her matches and upload her data to GedMatch (with huge benefits also to the search for Huldah's parentage - yet to be covered in this blog). Though we do not know the Chr# and segment start/stop yet, the large cM values and commonality in the shared matches is intriguing; also, DH and SW are in common with the Chr#13 segment.  

The yellow boxed cells relate to a Chr#16 segment with high confidence based upon knowledge of the share segments of GM, SW and SO. This is a small segment and has only two with connections to J.Michael Hoover, but among the shared matches on MyHeritage, two had deep trees. One tree included a Samuel Good Huber, b. 1725 in Lancaster Co., PA as the most distant known ancestor. The other pedigree was totally German and included Hubers from Kappelrodeck, Ortenaukreis, Baden-Wurttemburg, Germany. with the most distant known ancestor Nicolaus Huber, b. 1690. Being a small cM segment, it would not be surprising to see it come from a line other than J. Michael Huber's; it likely means that the two lines connect in the more distant past. What makes J. Michael Huber intriguing is that some of the cM values are relatively large, suggesting a chain of sub-segments and a more recent connection to our family. This is likely true also of the small segment on Chr#10 that we have seen connecting to Solomon Hoover of York Co., PA and Lincoln Co., NC. 

Finally, some really exciting news:  we have a new Y-DNA match that is really close and it is a Hoover. The data is only 37 markers but has only a 2-step different from my Jacobs cousin, KJ; this is the closest match we've seen so far. Even more exciting is that this match seems willing to expand his test to 111 markers (with me gladly paying for it!). In preparation, we are getting KJ's 67 marker test extended to 111 markers. Because these other markers tend to mutate more slowly, the results could result in refining the distance to the most-recent-common-ancestor (MRCA) and showing a closer match to that family. In what little conversation I've had with the representative of the person involved, it sounds like there is some chance he is connected to J. Michael Hoover.