The story was that my second great-grandfather’s sister and her husband had adopted the child of a neighbor some time before they moved to Nebraska in the 1870s. The child was born a few years before their marriage and the story sounded reasonable. I had traced a few generations of the adopted child’s descendants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was surprised when one of the child’s descendants showed up as an autosomal DNA match to me. They had a reasonably complete tree going back five generations and, from what I could see, it looked accurate, but the line going back to the adopted child of my second great-grandfather’s sister stopped at that child. The rest of the DNA match’s tree contained family from Sweden and other areas where I had no family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I looked at the shared matches I had with this person. Over half of them had been identified and they were all individuals who connected with me through my second great-grandfather or one of his ancestors. It was then that I realized that the adopted child of my second great-grandfather’s sister was not one adopted from totally outside the family. That child was either her child or the child of a very close relative based on the amount of shared DNA. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Descendants of an adopted child may be in your DNA matches after all. Adopted children can easily be a biological relative of the person adopting them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story was that my second great-grandfather’s sister and her husband had adopted the child of a neighbor some time before they moved to Nebraska in the 1870s. The child was born a few years before their marriage and the story sounded reasonable. I had traced a few generations of the adopted child’s descendants. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153978,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153978"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}