The average number of matches for a submitter on AncestryDNA is about 50,000!
About 90% of those will be “distant” (meaning greater than 4 generations away) or about 45,000.
Of those 45,000, about 25% will be total mysteries. Most of the matches will have no surnames in common with you in the last five generations. Who are these people?
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I will come back to that question, but first let me tell you about Andrew Campbell. Andrew was born in 1747. At the age of 28 he enlisted in the Minutemen of Hanover, Ulster, New York. In 1776 he enlisted in one of the New York Regiments of the Continental Army and served until the end of the war in 1783. He married Catharine Rumfield and had a child, John Rumfield Campbell, in 1785 in Marbletown, Ulster, New York. He lived most of his later days near Burlington, New Jersey, and fathered several other children. I have written a little about his military history (Journal of the Clan Campbell Society of NA) including his discharge at New Windsor.
More importantly, I have bumped into a couple descendants and active researchers of Andrew Campbell. Unfortunately, the ancestry of Andrew is still unknown. Because of his proximity to the Newark Mountain, New Jersey Campbells who were living in Hanover, NY where Andrew enlisted, and because he was in the same militia companies as they were, it seems that this connection is one to disprove. That could be done easily with YDNA (see this blog on my 8th cousin 1x removed), but Andrew has no living paternal descendant.
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If Andrew was related to the Newark Mountain Campbells....say a cousin of Joel Campbell....that would make a living decendant about an 8th cousin to me (and you?). Theoretically, each of us have about a half million living 8th cousins (see https://isogg.org/wiki/Cousin_statistics). Some of my 10,000 "mystery matches" at AncestryDNA are 8th cousins. Could a descendant of Andrew be one of them?
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More about DNA... When DNA is passed from parents to child, half is from the mother and half is from the father. But what half? [It is possible (although extremely unlikely) that your sibling could have a totally different DNA signature. This could happen if you get the exact opposite half of your parents' DNA as your sibling. This is as likely as flipping a coin 3 billion times and getting heads all 3 billion times.] This reshuffling over many generations causes many “DNA signatures” of ancestors to be "lost." AncestryDNA claims that the chances of two 8th cousins appearing as a match are about 1%.
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THE PROJECT! If I could find 10 descendants of Andrew and 10 descendants of Samuel (father of Joel) and got them to compare their DNA, that would give me 100 "match possibilities." If about 1% of 8th cousin-pairs are flagged as a match, then it would appear that I have decent odds of finding the match (if the two lines are related). Unfortunately, the 1% odds assume that the pairs of 8th cousins are chosen randomly. The "Project" as described is hardly random as the same cousin is used for ten different match attempts and I am forcing one of the comparators to descend from a specific 2nd cousin 6x removed. I may need to recruit many more than ten descendants. Not a perfect plan, but worth a shot.
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If you would like to be part of this project, contact me through this post.
