Ancestry has a feature with their DNA results called DNA Circles. In these circles they show members who have both DNA and family tree evidence of descent from a common ancestor.
With Amish ancestors you can have some really big DNA circles since the Amish had large families and also share a lot of DNA with intermarriage between families.
This DNA circle has almost 150 members. My mother and her close family are represented by the blue dot. You can see that they do not have DNA links to all the other members.
The DNA circle is for Henry Hochstetler who is my mother’s 4th Great-Grandfather. In this case then it represents six generations. At six generations you would only expect to have about 3% of an ancestors DNA, so the chances of having DNA in common are slim.
I switched to another person in the circle and they do not share DNA with as many of the other participants in the circle. In this case the person has only one set of Amish ancestors or about 1/32 of their DNA being Amish. In contrast my mother has about 50% Amish DNA.
Many of the members of the circle have high percentages of Amish ancestry, so the DNA matches are very high as they may be sharing Yoder, Miller, Gnaegi, Kauffman or other DNA when they don’t share Hochstetler DNA.
My mother also has another circle with 100 members. It is for another 4th Great-Grandfather Jacob Kauffman.
Again, it is an Amish DNA circle so there are a lot of matches for my mother.
I have not looked too closely at the members without DNA matches, but most of the ones I have looked at have limited Amish ancestry.
There is also a DNA circle for Jacob the son of the Jacob Kauffman above. You can see that the number of members has dropped substantially. There are only 28 members in this group.
My mother is in 52 Amish DNA circles with 10 of them having over 75 members. I have only had the DNA results for my parents for a couple weeks, but already several of the circles have added multiple new members. I am sure that the numbers will also go up as people who took advantage of the recent lower prices for DNA testing get their results back.
What is the biggest DNA circle you have seen on Ancestry?
Steven
Braman's Wanderings 