Sellers Cluster

Do you have DNA matches that don’t seem to fit anywhere in your tree? I recently wrote about my Sellers Mystery Cluster. About the same time, Blaine Bettinger wrote about Unlinked Family Clusters.

After reading (and re-reading) his blog, I think my SELLERS cluster might be an ‘unlinked family cluster.’ On Ancestry, my potential cluster can be identified in several ways.

• ThruLines descendants of Sarah Crawford Sellers and Mary Crawford Sellers – 28 matches
• Shared matches with descendants of Sarah Crawford Sellers and Mary Crawford Sellers — 126 matches
• DNA Matches with SELLERS in tree (NOTE: This does not guarantee they have SELLERS ancestry)
  • 107 matches identified on my PATERNAL side
  • 86 matches identified on my MATERNAL side
  • 33 matches that are still UNASSIGNED

For the purpose of identifying this ‘Unlinked Family Cluster’, I’m going to use those DNA matches that I was able to ‘trick’ Ancestry ThruLines into identifying. (To ‘trick’ Ancestry, I attached Rebekah Douglass Crawford as the mother of my ancestor, James Crawford. Since many people have Rebekah identified as the mother of Mary Crawford Sellers and Sarah Crawford Sellers, the ThruLines algorithm identified the descendants of Mary and Sarah in my list of DNA matches.) Thus, the 28 DNA matches I’ve identified all have trees going back to either Mary Crawford Sellers or Sarah Crawford Sellers.

So, does this cluster of 28 DNA matches meet Bettinger’s criteria for an unlinked family cluster?

• Forms a cluster — Descendants of Rebekah Crawford
• No Recent Ancestry — These are all ‘distant cousins’ with no known connection to my tree
• No close matches — The shared cM ranges between 7 cM and 20 cM which means there is a risk of this being a ‘pile up’ region and not unique to any SELLERS connection.
• Large number of matches — 28 in the ThruLines cluster with even more when considering shared matches
• Same ancestral family — descendants of sisters Mary and Sarah Crawford
• Not in my tree —
  • I don’t have any known SELLERS ancestor.
  • Current research of Rebekah Douglas Crawford supports her being the mother of the James Crawford who married Martha Knight and NOT of my ancestor James Crawford who married Martha Duggins

Now that I’ve identified this cluster, I need to figure out how we connect.

All of my paper research of the families of Mary Crawford Sellers and her sister Sarah Crawford Sellers suggests a potential link to my CRAWFORD line. However, my recent assigning of colored dots to my Ancestry DNA matches, suggests these SELLERS matches do NOT connect thru the CRAWFORD side of the tree. When I look at shared matches, I find matches assigned to both my paternal side and my maternal side.

When it comes to ‘doing genealogy’ with this cluster, I have already done research on the descendants of Rebekah Crawford and shared that research in my Ancestry tree. I have also researched the descendants of my 3rd great grandparents. So far, none of that research has revealed a tie with any of my SELLERS matches.

To move forward, I need to

• Identify this cluster on GedMatch and MyHeritage.
• Continue researching my ancestral lines.
• Continue identifying descendants of my 5th great grandparents.
• Identify locations and time periods where I can find both my maternal and paternal lines.
• Contact these various matches to work together to find our biological connection.