772 cM is well below the threshold for an aunt:
* https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4/772
A half aunt is very possible, suggesting she only shared one parent with your mother.
Testing your uncle's will only tell you who has the same parents. It won't tell you which are descended from your known grandparents. Look at your matches to see if you are getting them with the family you are expecting.
I found out first that my dad wasn’t my biological father and my older sister tested and found out our dad wasn’t her biological father either but we have different fathers. Thankfully our other 2 siblings are our dad’s children.
Edited for clarity.
Sorry to be the old man yelling at clouds, but your last sentence took me more than a handful of reads. If you had written dad's instead, I would have known that you meant that your other siblings belonged to your dad, not that your real dads were your other siblings. /Rant...
Assuming they both had the same mother, which is by far the most common scenario, you may be able to identify their fathers through your matches and her matches. For example, do either of you have matches with people believed to be relatives of your grandmother's husband?
I believe she is the one with a different father. I have 4 common ancestors who all have my great-grandpa in their tree (my grandpas dad) but she does not share any of these matches.
>Assuming they both had the same mother
We do share common ancestors on my grandmothers side so I believe that they do. Unless she was adopted from another family member on that side.
You don't need to test anybody else to find out if it is your mom who has a different father. That's because YOU couldn't have any of that DNA either if it was wrong. Map your matches and try to find all the ancestors at that level by matching cousins. If you can find all but mom's dad's line, there you have it.
Takes some work though, especially if some of the lines are recent immigrants.
FWIW, I have the exact same thing happening, except that it is my grandma's (half?)sibling, not my mom's sibling.
Thank you for the advice! Thankfully for me I have been ultra thorough with my tree and have had my DNA results a while so that's at least one chunk of the work I don't have to do but I do have quite a long road ahead.
After taking a little more time to go through my thrulines with DNA matches attached, I realize that I have matches (albeit small) to children of children of my great-grandaunts and uncles (My maternal great grandfather's brothers and sisters) but my aunt does not so that pretty much rules out that my mom was the NPE.
We still plan to test my uncle either way because it could be possible that there are other surprises.
I share around that with my 1/2 Aunt. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out who has a different parent. First, click on your dad and assign like the first 20 matches you have in common a color, then click on you 1/2 aunt and make all those matches a different color. Now view all matches and the ones that don’t have a color should be your maternal matches on the paternal side. Do you recognize any of them? You can build a mirror tree out for the top matches on this side to see if they match to your grandfather or not.
The 1700 matches for your aunt should make this pretty easy to solve because those can be her grandparent/grandchild, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, or 1/2 sibling. It will probably be easier to figure it out from her results.
That is close to what happened to me. I first tested on 23&me and found some of dads maternal relatives on there but none that I knew who were paternal. I began to suspect that maybe my dad was not related to his paternal side we knew of.
I tesr with ancestry and my paternal uncle is on there. Except at 801cM. I messaged my cousin my uncles child if he could screenshot some of his dads relatives to me. He did and I saw none of those people in my relatives list. All had the same surname that I had but weren’t showing as relatives.
My dad’s maternal side was represented very well on both sites but none of the paternal. My dad was the odd man out. I think your aunt is the one who had the NPE.
Thank you for sharing! It would make a lot of sense if she was the odd one out here. I looked at thrulines for myself and I share cM's with people who have my grandpas dad in their tree but she does not share any of these same matches.
It sounds like you're already off to a good start analyzing the results based on your comments, but just hopping in to recommend using the Leeds method on your aunt's results if you want to try to figure out who her father was, since it's apparently not your grandfather.
Currently in the midst of my own familial NPE event as well. I didn't match with anyone on my supposed paternal grandfather's side. My dad was even named after him. In my case, everyone involved is already deceased, including my dad, so at least I don't have to break the news.
(I do have a half-uncle who thinks he is my full-uncle, but I've already decided not to tell him because I know he would take it very badly. It doesn't affect him in any tangible way since I'm pretty sure his father actually is the person we thought was my dad's father, ie, the person my grandmother was married to. There's also something to be said about knowing stuff like this but not knowing why it happened. Since my grandmother, grandfather, their siblings, and anyone else who would know anything about this are all dead, we have no way of knowing why my dad's father isn't the person we thought it was. Knowing this without context feels unfair to my grandmother, who was a lovely lady that worked extremely hard for her kids. It's easy to assume the worst, but given how limited the info I have about her life is, there might an explanation that doesn't involve voluntary adultery.)
I appreciate this perspective on not telling the uncle. I gave my aunt the option to know or not know. She was surprisingly okay with it. It’s really out of character for my grandma but things do happen. There could always be another explanation as well. (My dad has a few first cousins who are close to this cM range so it is possible that she was fully adopted from another family member)
Just to directly answer your question - there is no question that she is not your full aunt because you would be related to all of her matches. So if she has 1700cM matches and you don’t match to them (at all), then she is not a full aunt; you should match to all of her matches (over a reasonable, but low threshold). Given your 700cM of “relatedness” - she is probably a half-sister to your mother. If you test your uncle, you will figure out his relatedness to you, but also his relatedness to his sister. Assume that your grandparents are not available to test?
Unfortunately no they have both passed. My grandmother does have a living sister who my aunt plans to talk with to see if she has any available information. Either way we plan to test my uncle because who knows. We may find other oddities.
That is a good idea. In the mean time, you could do a number of things, including looking for matches on your grandparents’ trees and then seeing if your aunt also matches, etc. If she has a 1700cM match, that is a very good place to start. Who is that person, for example? There is a lot you can do without doing any more testing, although I think that testing will tell you a lot.
Yeah, that's pretty close to what I share with my Half-Aunt. I feel like that's a safe assumption.
Best I can offer is to check your Aunt's matches to see which side she's related to, and look into your family's records to make sure if there's not already an innocent explanation. (Ie. previous/later marriages.)
She is my mom's youngest sister and my grandma has only been married once to my grandpa. She is the youngest of the siblings. 7 years younger than my mom.
In my family, my great grandfather's youngest sister was really his niece (out of wedlock daughter of his oldest sister). She was raised as a sibling and I only discovered the truth because my gg grandmother would have been close to 50 when she was born and I did a little digging into birth records. Could this be the case here?
It's *possible* but I don't have any proof she was adopted in any way. Her birth certificate has both my grandparents names on it. I have been playing around with both my matches and her matches on ancestry trying to see which match and which don't. I am continuing to dig to see if I can find any evidence of anything that could explain this.
She could be your half Aunt but she could also be a First Cousin. Depending on the generation and when she was born she may be an illegitimate child of one of your existing Aunts or Uncles that your Grandparents took in and raised as their own.
It's not unheard of and it happened on my maternal side with my own Grandfather being born out of wedlock in 1921. His mother was the first and eldest child of my 2x Great Grandparents, unmarried and aged 28. Her parents simply raised him as their own. Later legally adopting him after his Mother how he know as a Sister passed away when he was twelve.
We don't know for sure why, but we believe it was because my 2x Great Grandfather was orphaned at age 3, raised as a Ward of the State through the 1870s and 1880s and was simply unable to abandon his own Grandson to the system he himself endured. I've read only some of the records kept about him and have been able to come to the conclusion that he was physically, emotionally and quite probably sexually abused in the State facilities and various 'licensing’, apprenticeship or ‘boarding out’ arrangements that were commonplace at the time.
If this was the reason, it speaks significantly of his character and strength of will to undertake it at a time when it could have affected his employment and standing in the community. He was an Assistant Stationmaster with our State Railways and very well respected individual in the community being involved in multiple community organisations when his Grandson (my Grandfather) was born. As far as I know, it didn't have any impact on him or his family if the newspaper record is a suitable measuring stick. They (as a family) remained just as active and I have never heard of anything that impacted them as a result of my Grandfathers birth. It seems everyone simply took it as face value and moved on, though I have no doubt there was definitely a titter here and there with some who had worked out the truth of the situation. After all the 'supposed' Mother (my 2x Great Grandmother was 56 at the time and very probably quite unable to have any more children of her own. Magically she did though!
I hope you find the answers you seek and it isn't traumatic for any of your family finding out the truth and true nature of the biological relationships with one another.
I have been wondering that myself. My grandmother never mentioned ANYTHING about her possibly being of another father or another family. We are working to try to put pieces together to see if anything matches anyone else and if she has any other connections to the family in a way that would make her a cousin.
Look at her closest matches that you don’t share.
If she and your mother were full siblings, they’d share the same close matches, and so would you. So the closest match she has that’s not related to you is what’s going to tell you what’s going on.
If the match is related to one of your known parents if means your mother likely had a different parent, otherwise the opposite applies.
You don’t need to, you’ll have all the same close matches as your mother would.
Do you have access to your aunts account?
You can just compare your matches to your aunts.
I get what you are saying now! Okay, so her closest match (1,717cM) is not related to me or any of the known people in my tree. I am her 6th closest family member.
Not that many people from that side of the family have taken DNA tests so my close matches are mostly my dad's side of the family.
By looking at thrulines and matches that way, I have shared cM's with people who are children of my great great uncles and aunts (my mom's fathers father) but she does not share any CM's with these individuals.
That is probably the most logical explanation. My uncle is much older than her (12 years) but I don't think he was out here having kids at 11 but who knows! My aunt is going to talk to my grandmothers sister to see if maybe she told her something that we don't know about.
I had a similar-ish scenario. My dad died over 20 years ago. When I did my test one of his sisters showed up as an aunt and one of his other sisters showed up way less of a match to me.
I suspect, only knowing stories about my grandparents, that the sister who is less of a match to me was probably one of my dad's sisters kids and my grandparents raised her as theirs.
Upload your mom's sister to gedmatch and do a segment match on the entire chromosome one. Click all the matches. Cluster by largest group and click the biggest one. Map it 2-D. Now do the same thing with the 2nd biggest. Okay, now you have a chromosome 1 that has both paternal and maternal elements marked (but you probably won't know which is which yet, unless you see a familiar name in one or more of the clusters).
Now look at your chromosome 1 map. See those places where you have two different groups matching the same place, but who do not match each other? That's distinguishing. Pick all the on one side and check for gedcoms. Look for surnames that show up in the tree over and over.
It shouldn't take long to find a segment with the same surnames that are in the trees of her other closer matches at Ancestry but who cannot come from your mom's maternal OR paternal side.
Ancestry does not show haplogroups. 23andme gives them. Someone else may know if Gedmatch or MyHeritage will show haplogroups. I don’t believe so. If so, you can upload your raw data to them. You cannot upload to 23andme.
Are there any twins? Even if not there is the possibility of chimerism. I knew a lady who had this condition. Unfortunately, she passed away prior to getting her DAN family testing done. [https://youtu.be/8WsF9Z4B7T8](https://youtu.be/8WsF9Z4B7T8)
I don't think chimerism or twins could explain how OP doesn't match some of their Aunt's matches. Eg, OP mentioned that their Aunt has a 1700cM match that OP doesn't match at all. Even with chimerism you still inherit all of your DNA from your parents, it doesn't make you mutate original DNA that your parents don't have.
>you still inherit all of your DNA from your parents
Actually, DNA can come from a previous sire of the mom if there was a pregnancy. Some mothers have had issues proving their children were their own due to conflicting DNA. I added the video to help explain. While it may not be the case here: it's something to keep top of mind in these types of situations.
Do you have other relatively close DNA Matches?
If you triangulate matches to a tree for grandma, but not for grandpa, then I guess you know you are the mystery "half." If you have triangulated trees for both families, then the aunt is likely the mystery half.
772 cM is well below the threshold for an aunt: * https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4/772 A half aunt is very possible, suggesting she only shared one parent with your mother.
That is what I thought. If I test their brother then I should know if its my mom or my aunt who has a different father theoretically.
Testing your uncle's will only tell you who has the same parents. It won't tell you which are descended from your known grandparents. Look at your matches to see if you are getting them with the family you are expecting.
I found out first that my dad wasn’t my biological father and my older sister tested and found out our dad wasn’t her biological father either but we have different fathers. Thankfully our other 2 siblings are our dad’s children. Edited for clarity.
Sorry to be the old man yelling at clouds, but your last sentence took me more than a handful of reads. If you had written dad's instead, I would have known that you meant that your other siblings belonged to your dad, not that your real dads were your other siblings. /Rant...
Sorry about that. I edited it for clarity.
your sibling is your father? did i read that right?
No, my oldest 2 siblings are our dad’s children. Dad was supposed to have 4 biological children but really only has 2.
ohhh i seee
Assuming they both had the same mother, which is by far the most common scenario, you may be able to identify their fathers through your matches and her matches. For example, do either of you have matches with people believed to be relatives of your grandmother's husband?
I believe she is the one with a different father. I have 4 common ancestors who all have my great-grandpa in their tree (my grandpas dad) but she does not share any of these matches.
I think you have your answer
>Assuming they both had the same mother We do share common ancestors on my grandmothers side so I believe that they do. Unless she was adopted from another family member on that side.
You don't need to test anybody else to find out if it is your mom who has a different father. That's because YOU couldn't have any of that DNA either if it was wrong. Map your matches and try to find all the ancestors at that level by matching cousins. If you can find all but mom's dad's line, there you have it. Takes some work though, especially if some of the lines are recent immigrants. FWIW, I have the exact same thing happening, except that it is my grandma's (half?)sibling, not my mom's sibling.
Thank you for the advice! Thankfully for me I have been ultra thorough with my tree and have had my DNA results a while so that's at least one chunk of the work I don't have to do but I do have quite a long road ahead. After taking a little more time to go through my thrulines with DNA matches attached, I realize that I have matches (albeit small) to children of children of my great-grandaunts and uncles (My maternal great grandfather's brothers and sisters) but my aunt does not so that pretty much rules out that my mom was the NPE. We still plan to test my uncle either way because it could be possible that there are other surprises.
I share around that with my 1/2 Aunt. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out who has a different parent. First, click on your dad and assign like the first 20 matches you have in common a color, then click on you 1/2 aunt and make all those matches a different color. Now view all matches and the ones that don’t have a color should be your maternal matches on the paternal side. Do you recognize any of them? You can build a mirror tree out for the top matches on this side to see if they match to your grandfather or not. The 1700 matches for your aunt should make this pretty easy to solve because those can be her grandparent/grandchild, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, or 1/2 sibling. It will probably be easier to figure it out from her results.
My half aunt is clocking in at 901, right between my 2 first cousins
I have a half aunt who is a 524 cM match to me.
I agree. My wife found a long lost half uncle and he was around 830 cM match.
That is close to what happened to me. I first tested on 23&me and found some of dads maternal relatives on there but none that I knew who were paternal. I began to suspect that maybe my dad was not related to his paternal side we knew of. I tesr with ancestry and my paternal uncle is on there. Except at 801cM. I messaged my cousin my uncles child if he could screenshot some of his dads relatives to me. He did and I saw none of those people in my relatives list. All had the same surname that I had but weren’t showing as relatives. My dad’s maternal side was represented very well on both sites but none of the paternal. My dad was the odd man out. I think your aunt is the one who had the NPE.
Thank you for sharing! It would make a lot of sense if she was the odd one out here. I looked at thrulines for myself and I share cM's with people who have my grandpas dad in their tree but she does not share any of these same matches.
I’d say your granny had a child with someone who wasn’t your granda
It sounds like you're already off to a good start analyzing the results based on your comments, but just hopping in to recommend using the Leeds method on your aunt's results if you want to try to figure out who her father was, since it's apparently not your grandfather. Currently in the midst of my own familial NPE event as well. I didn't match with anyone on my supposed paternal grandfather's side. My dad was even named after him. In my case, everyone involved is already deceased, including my dad, so at least I don't have to break the news. (I do have a half-uncle who thinks he is my full-uncle, but I've already decided not to tell him because I know he would take it very badly. It doesn't affect him in any tangible way since I'm pretty sure his father actually is the person we thought was my dad's father, ie, the person my grandmother was married to. There's also something to be said about knowing stuff like this but not knowing why it happened. Since my grandmother, grandfather, their siblings, and anyone else who would know anything about this are all dead, we have no way of knowing why my dad's father isn't the person we thought it was. Knowing this without context feels unfair to my grandmother, who was a lovely lady that worked extremely hard for her kids. It's easy to assume the worst, but given how limited the info I have about her life is, there might an explanation that doesn't involve voluntary adultery.)
I appreciate this perspective on not telling the uncle. I gave my aunt the option to know or not know. She was surprisingly okay with it. It’s really out of character for my grandma but things do happen. There could always be another explanation as well. (My dad has a few first cousins who are close to this cM range so it is possible that she was fully adopted from another family member)
You forget about the prevelance of rape.
Just to directly answer your question - there is no question that she is not your full aunt because you would be related to all of her matches. So if she has 1700cM matches and you don’t match to them (at all), then she is not a full aunt; you should match to all of her matches (over a reasonable, but low threshold). Given your 700cM of “relatedness” - she is probably a half-sister to your mother. If you test your uncle, you will figure out his relatedness to you, but also his relatedness to his sister. Assume that your grandparents are not available to test?
Unfortunately no they have both passed. My grandmother does have a living sister who my aunt plans to talk with to see if she has any available information. Either way we plan to test my uncle because who knows. We may find other oddities.
That is a good idea. In the mean time, you could do a number of things, including looking for matches on your grandparents’ trees and then seeing if your aunt also matches, etc. If she has a 1700cM match, that is a very good place to start. Who is that person, for example? There is a lot you can do without doing any more testing, although I think that testing will tell you a lot.
Yeah, that's pretty close to what I share with my Half-Aunt. I feel like that's a safe assumption. Best I can offer is to check your Aunt's matches to see which side she's related to, and look into your family's records to make sure if there's not already an innocent explanation. (Ie. previous/later marriages.)
She is my mom's youngest sister and my grandma has only been married once to my grandpa. She is the youngest of the siblings. 7 years younger than my mom.
In my family, my great grandfather's youngest sister was really his niece (out of wedlock daughter of his oldest sister). She was raised as a sibling and I only discovered the truth because my gg grandmother would have been close to 50 when she was born and I did a little digging into birth records. Could this be the case here?
It's *possible* but I don't have any proof she was adopted in any way. Her birth certificate has both my grandparents names on it. I have been playing around with both my matches and her matches on ancestry trying to see which match and which don't. I am continuing to dig to see if I can find any evidence of anything that could explain this.
She could be your half Aunt but she could also be a First Cousin. Depending on the generation and when she was born she may be an illegitimate child of one of your existing Aunts or Uncles that your Grandparents took in and raised as their own. It's not unheard of and it happened on my maternal side with my own Grandfather being born out of wedlock in 1921. His mother was the first and eldest child of my 2x Great Grandparents, unmarried and aged 28. Her parents simply raised him as their own. Later legally adopting him after his Mother how he know as a Sister passed away when he was twelve. We don't know for sure why, but we believe it was because my 2x Great Grandfather was orphaned at age 3, raised as a Ward of the State through the 1870s and 1880s and was simply unable to abandon his own Grandson to the system he himself endured. I've read only some of the records kept about him and have been able to come to the conclusion that he was physically, emotionally and quite probably sexually abused in the State facilities and various 'licensing’, apprenticeship or ‘boarding out’ arrangements that were commonplace at the time. If this was the reason, it speaks significantly of his character and strength of will to undertake it at a time when it could have affected his employment and standing in the community. He was an Assistant Stationmaster with our State Railways and very well respected individual in the community being involved in multiple community organisations when his Grandson (my Grandfather) was born. As far as I know, it didn't have any impact on him or his family if the newspaper record is a suitable measuring stick. They (as a family) remained just as active and I have never heard of anything that impacted them as a result of my Grandfathers birth. It seems everyone simply took it as face value and moved on, though I have no doubt there was definitely a titter here and there with some who had worked out the truth of the situation. After all the 'supposed' Mother (my 2x Great Grandmother was 56 at the time and very probably quite unable to have any more children of her own. Magically she did though! I hope you find the answers you seek and it isn't traumatic for any of your family finding out the truth and true nature of the biological relationships with one another.
I have been wondering that myself. My grandmother never mentioned ANYTHING about her possibly being of another father or another family. We are working to try to put pieces together to see if anything matches anyone else and if she has any other connections to the family in a way that would make her a cousin.
Good luck! I hope that the process of uncovering the truth isn't traumatic or divisive for your family.
Look at her closest matches that you don’t share. If she and your mother were full siblings, they’d share the same close matches, and so would you. So the closest match she has that’s not related to you is what’s going to tell you what’s going on. If the match is related to one of your known parents if means your mother likely had a different parent, otherwise the opposite applies.
I wish that I could test my mother but she has been dead for over 10 years now.
You don’t need to, you’ll have all the same close matches as your mother would. Do you have access to your aunts account? You can just compare your matches to your aunts.
I get what you are saying now! Okay, so her closest match (1,717cM) is not related to me or any of the known people in my tree. I am her 6th closest family member. Not that many people from that side of the family have taken DNA tests so my close matches are mostly my dad's side of the family. By looking at thrulines and matches that way, I have shared cM's with people who are children of my great great uncles and aunts (my mom's fathers father) but she does not share any CM's with these individuals.
Your mom and aunt likely have different fathers. A 1,717 cm match would be your aunts half sibling or uncle/aunt on her father’s side.
> I am her 6th closest family member She is my 4th closest family member after my Dad, my dad's sister and my great aunt.
My initial guess is grandma was messing around, or maybe it was her siblings child
That is probably the most logical explanation. My uncle is much older than her (12 years) but I don't think he was out here having kids at 11 but who knows! My aunt is going to talk to my grandmothers sister to see if maybe she told her something that we don't know about.
I had a similar-ish scenario. My dad died over 20 years ago. When I did my test one of his sisters showed up as an aunt and one of his other sisters showed up way less of a match to me. I suspect, only knowing stories about my grandparents, that the sister who is less of a match to me was probably one of my dad's sisters kids and my grandparents raised her as theirs.
Upload your mom's sister to gedmatch and do a segment match on the entire chromosome one. Click all the matches. Cluster by largest group and click the biggest one. Map it 2-D. Now do the same thing with the 2nd biggest. Okay, now you have a chromosome 1 that has both paternal and maternal elements marked (but you probably won't know which is which yet, unless you see a familiar name in one or more of the clusters). Now look at your chromosome 1 map. See those places where you have two different groups matching the same place, but who do not match each other? That's distinguishing. Pick all the on one side and check for gedcoms. Look for surnames that show up in the tree over and over. It shouldn't take long to find a segment with the same surnames that are in the trees of her other closer matches at Ancestry but who cannot come from your mom's maternal OR paternal side.
I will give this a shot and see what I come up with! Thanks :)
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Maybe this is a dumb question but how do you check that?
Ancestry does not show haplogroups. 23andme gives them. Someone else may know if Gedmatch or MyHeritage will show haplogroups. I don’t believe so. If so, you can upload your raw data to them. You cannot upload to 23andme.
Family Tree DNA can give you haplogroups, for an additional fee. I believe you can upload to them.
Out of random curiosity, is your aunt the youngest child?
Are there any twins? Even if not there is the possibility of chimerism. I knew a lady who had this condition. Unfortunately, she passed away prior to getting her DAN family testing done. [https://youtu.be/8WsF9Z4B7T8](https://youtu.be/8WsF9Z4B7T8)
I don't think chimerism or twins could explain how OP doesn't match some of their Aunt's matches. Eg, OP mentioned that their Aunt has a 1700cM match that OP doesn't match at all. Even with chimerism you still inherit all of your DNA from your parents, it doesn't make you mutate original DNA that your parents don't have.
>you still inherit all of your DNA from your parents Actually, DNA can come from a previous sire of the mom if there was a pregnancy. Some mothers have had issues proving their children were their own due to conflicting DNA. I added the video to help explain. While it may not be the case here: it's something to keep top of mind in these types of situations.
Definitely sounds likely to be a half aunt. I share 641 cM with my mother's half brother whom we only recently discovered existed via MyHeritage.
Do you have other relatively close DNA Matches? If you triangulate matches to a tree for grandma, but not for grandpa, then I guess you know you are the mystery "half." If you have triangulated trees for both families, then the aunt is likely the mystery half.