Braman's Wanderings

Amish families have historically been big, and this can be seen in DNA results on Ancestry.

Ancestry used to have a feature called DNA Circles and I had some Big Amish DNA Circles.

The DNA Circle for Henry Hochstetler has 149 members two years ago when I wrote a post about Amish DNA circles.

Ancestry has since replaced DNA Circles with ThruLines and the ThruLines for some of my Amish ancestors are even bigger.

In ThruLines I have 708 DNA matches for Henry Hochstetler. You may notice that in this image he is shown as 5th great-grandfather. This is because when I wrote the DNA Circles post I had not been tested and I was using my Mother’s DNA results.

You can see that there was a large increase in the number of matches. This is partly because of an increase in the number of people taking tests, and also because family tree data is also used in determining the DNA matches so it finds more possible matches.

But, are there bigger ThruLines than the one for Henry Hochstetler?

John Hershberger and Veronica Dilabaugh are another set of my Amish ancestors. They have 768 and 757 DNA matches.

Can we go bigger?

Here is Jacob Kauffman with 869 DNA matches. In the DNA Circles he only had 100 DNA matches two years ago.

The ThruLines only go back to your 5th great-grandparents, so I then decided to check my Mother’s ThruLines to see if by going back one more generation I could find one bigger.

I found a couple of Amish ancestors with over 1,000 DNA matches, but the biggest was John Hochstetler with 1,066 DNA matches.

Not all Amish DNA ThruLines are so big. I have one 5th great-grandfather, John Schrock, who has only 80 DNA matches.

The number of people with Amish ancestry who have had their DNA tested continues to grow, and the ThruLines will only get bigger in the future.

Do you have Amish ancestry?

Steven