This summer, I finally asked my maternal great-aunt (we’ll call her “Victoria”) if she was interested in testing her DNA for me. She agreed, and we sent off a sample of her DNA to Family Tree DNA for mtDNA and atDNA analysis. A few weeks later, the results were back and ready for digging in!
I found a close match that shared 201 cM (including 47 cM on the X chromosome). This close match had a tree, and I immediately found the most likely common ancestor. The shared X-DNA interested me the most, and I decided to review that a little closer.
Mom and My Great-Aunt Victoria
My mother is the daughter of Victoria’s brother. Now, that means that my mother has an exact copy of her father’s X chromosome (daughters receive a copy of their father’s single X chromosome). Any X-DNA that my mother and her aunt Victoria share, is the same X-DNA that her father and Victoria shared.