A new match with potential
Logging into AncestryDNA, I can see W, a new match at 51 centimorgans (cM) across 3 segments. His tree is sparse but includes a John Dawson McKeown b.1876 in Victoria, Australia, which sets my ancestral name radar going.
My mother shares about the same with W as I do, but I’m still keen to investigate since this could be the match that helps me break through a brick wall. But first, I have to figure out if this person with Dawson in their name has anything to do with my Dawsons in County Antrim, Ireland!
But is it actually Dawson?
Regular readers will recall that I am a big advocate of testing any willing relatives. My mother’s first cousin Derek, the son of her father’s sister, kindly took a DNA test for me back in 2017. Derek should share DNA with W if :
- (a) Dawson is the connection, and
- (b) as I suspect, the match is reasonably close (e.g. around that 3rd/4th cousin mark where you’re quite likely to share DNA with a relative)
Sure enough, Derek shares 98cM with W, and Ancestry’s SideView indicates that as expected, it’s on Derek’s maternal side. Even better, the known shared matches are all people I’ve connected to the Dawson family.
Ancestry Pro Tools can help find more clues
On the match detail page showing matches shared by Derek and W, Pro Tools lets me see how much each match shares with W, and I can sort the matches to see those who are closest to W first. This will help me corroborate which side of W‘s tree the match is on.
This reveals a match with a more extensive tree who shares only 38cM with Derek but 913 cMs with W, making her a likely first cousin or half-niece.
Her tree confirms she is a first cousin to W and that the match is indeed on the side of his tree that includes the person who caught my eye, John Dawson McKeown. It also confirms that John Dawson McKeown’s mother was a Mary Dawson b.1841 in Ayrshire, Scotland. It turns out that Mary appears in many public trees at Ancestry. There aren’t many sources, so I’m not very hopeful, but:
- In one tree, the owner states that a relative told her Mary Dawson was previously married to someone called McIver
- This is enough information for me to dive into Scotlands People and find the marriage of Mary Dawson and Robert McIvor on 22nd April 1859
- We’re in post-1855 Scotland, so the record provides the parent names for both groom and spouse
- Mary’s parents are given as John Dawson and Agnes Burns
I can then cross reference this with what we know about our match’s ancestor in Australia. Mary Dawson died in 1930 as Mary McKeown. The death record at Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria confirms her parents’ names as John Dawson and Agnes Burns. While this could be a coincidence, it looks like I have the right person.
Hypothesizing about the connection
My work so far makes me confident that John Dawson born about 1796 was a relative of mine. But how close a relative? My mother shares 42cM1 with W and her first cousin Derek shares 98cM.
The Shared cM Tool with two amounts tool is quite useful when you have two people of the same generation, since this means they will both have the same relationship with most unknown matches. As the name implies, it allows you to enter two amounts that people of the same generation share with a match. When I enter 42 and 98cM, the table of relationships updates so that only those that are possible for both these amounts are highlighted.
I can click on any relationship box to see a detailed histogram showing the curve of submissions for that relationship in the crowd-sourced Shared cM Project.
After glancing at the chart and clicking on a few histograms, my rough estimate is:
- The most likely relationships are probably 3c, 3C1R and 4C.
- For this to be correct, the common ancestor couple would be my mother’s 2nd or 3rd-great-grandparents.
Here’s where it gets slightly complicated: my mother has two different Dawson 2nd-great-grandparents:
- Margaret Dawson b. 1814 (unknown parents)
- William Dawson b. 1794 (he didn’t marry until 1845 and his father is named on the certificate as William Dawson)
Margaret and William may have been siblings but perhaps more likely cousins.
John b.1796 could fit into this family, and perhaps the most obvious place would be as a brother of William Dawson b. 1794. I can use What are the Odds (aka WATO, a tool at DNA Painter for investigating hypotheses). A quick WATO tree shows this would work for the cM amounts: if William and John were brothers, this would make Derek and my mother fourth cousins to my match W.
The 98cM that Derek and W. share is a lot for 4th cousins. However, we have a potential double dose of Dawson DNA on our side due to two Dawson sources among Derek’s 2nd-great-grandparents. Since this might well boost the amount shared, 98cM could well represent this relationship.
I’m feeling quite excited at this point:
- John appears aged 67 in the 1861 census as a lodger in Lugar, a town to the east of Ayr
- This means he must have died in the era of civil registration in Scotland, meaning his death certificate might name his parents
- I could therefore be on the verge of finding the names of two unknown ancestors
But alas I can’t find John anywhere after 1861. It’s possible he went back to Ireland, or followed his sons to the US.
It’s tantalizing, but perhaps I’ll be able to make a proper connection soon. It certainly feels closer than the majority of my Irish mysteries. Wish me luck!
Postscript
As luck would have it, John and Agnes’s son James Burns Dawson has a comprehensive biography which seems to be from one of those vanity books that were common around the turn of the century (at least in Illinois). These can be really amazing, with levels of biographical detail and nuggets that just aren’t available anywhere else.
Anyway, with a heavy heart I have to report that John and Agnes Dawson emigrated to Pennsylvania where John died around 1869. So my recurring dream of using a Scotland-residing relative to crack through an Irish brick wall has been thwarted again.
DNA Diary
This is a new type of post I’m playing with, partly for selfish reasons (as a log, plus if I write research up, it helps me do it more comprehensively). Also, thanks to the Genealogy Blurring Tool by Dan Maloney, I can easily blur pages for privacy. Anyway, I hope it will be of some interest to others!
Footnotes
- This is confusing at first, since the amount I share with W is 51cM. But when I click the amount on the shared match page, the popup reveals that both me and my mother share about 65cM with W; it’s just that some of it has been removed by Ancestry’s Timber algorithm ↩︎
Contact info: @dnapainter.bsky.social / jonny@dnapainter.com