Genes Day Friday - Lots to see (and not see)

This has been an eventful week for this budding genetic genealogist. First up - new results! My maternal grandmother's results came in this week, and some things that I've learned so far - she has a lot of European DNA, which makes sense, given that I know she has a lot of German ancestry, as well as several lines that probably go back to the United Kingdom. I haven't traced all her lines across the pond yet, but names like Craddock, Fielder, Scribner, Harris, and Martin all seem to point to a UK background. Oddly enough, she only had one match in 23andMe's Ancestry Finder, and that was in Brazil of all places. She also has 636 matches in Relative Finder - more than my paternal grandmother, but less than my paternal grandfather. The cool thing is, one of those matches has the last name Craddock, which was my maternal great-grandmother's maiden name! I emailed him and asked to compare notes, so hopefully he's interested and will write back.
I also learned that my maternal grandma's mtDNA haplogroup is H3. I was just reading about mtDNA haplogroups in DNA and Social Networking literally yesterday, and it said haplogroup H is far and away the most common haplogroup in Europe. I don't know yet if H3 is included in that. I just find it very interesting, mostly because both of my paternal grandparents and my maternal grandmother have German maternal lines, but from Russia/Poland (grandfather), Bohemia/Czech Republic (p.grandma) and Hessen-Darmstadt (m.grandma). Both my paternal grandparents were in U5, with my grandpa being U5b2a1 and grandma being U5a2b. I kind of expected my m.grandma to be U5 as well, so now I've got two major haplogroups to learn about. Because she's my m.grandma, that means H3 is also my own personal mtDNA haplogroup as well, so that's an added incentive to learn about it.

The most intriguing part of the results was what I didn't find. According to the research we've done on her father's side, one of her great-grandmothers was Lisette Rainier, who was either full or half Native American (the documentation on Lisette isn't very clear, plus she has a French name). According to 23andMe's Ancestry Finder, my grandma is 100% European - no Native American at all. Needless to say, it was a little surprising. There are a lot of tribes out there, and I wonder if there aren't tribes that have no representation in databases like this. It's even more difficult because we don't even know what tribe Lisette was from. I'm going to upload the results to Gedmatch.com and see if anything comes up there. I'm not quite ready to give up on my Indian princess ancestor yet!
Another cool thing I learned about this week was also in Ancestry Finder. Up until now, I thought I had to share genomes with someone to know where exactly on our DNA we matched and how long the match was. It turns out, if you go down to the bottom of the Ancestry Finder screen, there's a link that allows you to download all your Ancestry Finder matches for the person you're looking at. If you haven't shared genomes with a person on your list and they aren't a public match, they will show up in your list as Anonymous. But it gives you the chromosome number/letter, location of the match in megabase pairs (which I'm guessing is in millions, so a DNA segment that begins at 37 megabase pairs and ends at 77.4 megabase pairs would probably start at 37 million and end at 77.4 million. I'll have to look it up somewhere and double check though). But it also tells you where that person declared their parents and grandparents were born, and whether they declared Ashkenazi Jew for that person. That would be very cool to find a Jewish relative/ancestor somewhere, though it would also mean learning about a whole new ethnic group and set of records. I'm open to that though. Anyways, I now have three very large files of DNA matches to sort through and compare. Let the fun begin!

On the FTDNA front, once again, I'm still waiting for my results on my grandpa's mtDNA tests, my dad's mtDNA test, and my m.grandma's mtDNA test. Meanwhile, I still have two autosomal tests outstanding at 23andMe - still waiting to hear back on my mom's autosomal DNA test, hopefully within a week the results will come in. And I've mailed one off to a cousin on my Joseph side, but he's still waiting for the test to arrive. I'm really excited for my mom's test results to come in, as this will be the first known relative of a known relative I'll have tested. It will be fascinating to see how many matches she comes back with, and what segments of her DNA are from my m.grandfather.

I just checked FTDNA, and my grandpa's Y-DNA results are in!! I can't wait to get in and start looking at them! I've read about so many online databases I can plug the numbers into, hopefully one of them will have a match for me.
Lots discovered this week, but we've only scratched the surface of the tip of this iceberg!