Welcome back viewers and today I've got an interesting
question that we're going to be talking about that has to do
with hey your ancestor was a polygamist. How does that
impact your DNA results? Now for many people they may be
thinking that oh this is an easy question to answer. It's
just a matter of it's like you know in diagamy or pedigree
collapse where you have lots of people and that is not correct.
This is not the same thing as endogamy or pedigree collapse.
So that's the first thing to remember. The second thing then
is to remember is what does this entail? So polygamy is
basically having multiple spouses. Now that could be the
same thing as if you had somebody who their spouse died
and they remarried and had more children. And so you have
successive marriages or maybe they divorced and married
somebody else and had more children there. So you could
have somebody that actually has successive marriages for that.
And if you just ignore marriage completely there's some people
who just have lots of partners and maybe have children with
multiple partners. So all of these are really in the same
category as far as how they're going to affect your DNA and
you'll notice that none of them are endogamy or pedigree
collapse. If we have multiple spouses and then we have lots
of children because of that that's really going to to a
higher probability of having a large family. Now, in
particular, most of the time we're talking about polygamy or
successive marriages or lots of partners, we're really focused
on the men because when you think about it, if a man has
three wives, all three of those wives could be pregnant at the
same time. They could be having kids pretty close to one
another. However, if a woman had three husbands, she can
only be pregnant by one of them at a time and so it's going to
be you know nine months till that child's born and there's
going to be a time period before she can get pregnant
again with that same person or somebody else's child. So
really here we're talking about men having really large
families with multiple women. So what does this mean? Well if
you have a really large family it's actually a really good
thing for DNA. Because it is a much higher likelihood of
having more DNA matches. Let's Go and take a look at an
example so that we can see what I'm talking about. Now, in my
family tree, I have a ancestor. Lindsey Anderson Brady and he
was a polygamist. He's part of the Mormon Pioneers that came
to Utah and he had a at least three wives here. If we scroll
down, we can see that he had his first wife married in 1831
and they had 10 kids and then his second wife married in 1852
while he was still married to his first wife and you can see
that because of when some of the kids were being raised
there and then his third wife he married in 1863 and again
had some more kids with his third wife so in total there's
549 plus 1019 children just with those three wives and I
think some people have told me that there is actually some
more wives but I haven't done much research on him so I don't
know for certain. If we go and look at ThruLines, if this
is a great tool because what we can see is for each one of
these people, hey, there's four DNA matches. There's four DNA
matches. One DNA match, one DNA match. I can scroll down to my
fourth great grandparents. So, here is my fourth great
grandparents and Lindsey Anderson Brady is one of them
and we can just start to hover over each one of these to see,
hey, how many matches are they to get a rough idea? So, I've
got nine eight, 11, eight, eight, ten, nine, nine, none,
22, 22, twenty-six, you know, nineteen, 22, thirty-six,
forty-four, ooh ninety-seven and actually this is one of the
daughters of Lindsey Anderson Brady and here we see Lindsey
Anderson Brady. He has four hundred and thirteen. Now we've
seen some 30s and 40s and because I had up to 97.
Lindsey's wife, Elizabeth Ann, I have 392 for. Now, remember,
she was one that had ten kids. So, she already had a large
family as it is and then there was two other wives of Lindsay
that had another nine kids total but as I look at some of
these others, I'm back down, okay, fifty, 60, 27, seventy,
forty-eight, nothing in this fourth grade grandparents that
is anywhere close to what Lindsey Anderson Brady has. In
fact if you add up all of the fourth grade grandparent
matches except for Lindsey and Elizabeth. They
combined those two combined than all the rest of my fourth
great grandparents which is something interesting because
you have a lot of fourth great grandparents so 413 matches
let's go in and actually look at how these are distributed
alright so taking a look at ThruLines you can see here
through Tranquila and I have 57 matches through Lindsey Brady I
have 20 matches, which is the son of Lindsey Brady Jordan I
got seventy. Keziah I got sixty-nine. Elizabeth I got
twenty-six. Warren I got eighty-three. Marion I got
forty-four. And then through Daniel here I have one. Now if
you'll notice Daniel is a half third great grand uncle. So he
would be from one of the other wives of Lindsey Brady. And if
I scroll back to the other side I can see even more. And
there's some more from these half that have just as well as
some that have eight and seven. So, overall with Lindsey Brady,
I have 13 of his children identified that I have matches
through. So, getting to 413 matches means I've got lots of
possibilities to be able to trace these through. Now, from
a practical standpoint then when I'm looking at match lists
because Lindsey and his wife, Elizabeth, are the majority of
the fourth grade grandparents actually the majority of my
matches all follow through Lindsey Brady so for instance
when I made a leads chart sometimes I have a good portion
of them more than half that are through this one line in fact I
think it's almost 80% of all of my matches are through this one
line simply because they had more children in this family
than anybody else and then there was multiple wives that
also had children as well Now, there's one other thing that
you should be aware of and that is a higher probability of
having pedigree collapse and it depends on how far back in time
this line is but with these larger families, that means
there's more kids and better chance that those kids might
have children, grandchildren, great grandchildren that end up
marrying each other and so your your pedigree tree collapses in
on itself. Let me show you how that is starting to happen
here. If I go back to FamilySearch to this family. We can
see that Lindsay Anderson Brady shows up right here. There's
Elizabeth Ann Hendrickson and Kesiah Francis Brady. But that
wasn't the one that I had showed you that I was related
through because that is over here. Lindsey Anderson Brady
with Elizabeth Ann Hendrickson. So the same couple their
daughter now Tranquilla was about five years younger than
Kesiah and Keziah had a child when she was 20 and then that
child Cynthia she had a child when she was 17 whereas
Tranquila had a child when she was 35 and that person married
those two people married so in other words Sophia is the first
cousin once removed of Silas Tranquilla's daughter married
Keziah's grandson from this line basically everything back
from Lindsay and Elizabeth is the same thing as it is over
here so I don't branch out from those two those two are
basically connected together because they had this large
family they could have children that had children and
grandchildren that are actually closer in age because of when
they were being born so be aware of that as you're looking
at it if you have these large families or families that have
multiple marriages within it that doesn't mean that there's
going to be pedigree collapse but there's a higher
probability of that and so be looking for that in your family
tree. Now, if you'd like to learn something more about DNA,
watch this video right up above but if you want to learn
something else, then check out this video down below.