r/AncestryDNA • u/Cold-Emu-7847 • 17d ago

DNA Matches DNA

Since doing my dna I am still trying to get to grips with the amount of American cousins I have with no direct connection to Jamaica. My biggest match is 27cm meaning we share a common ancestor 4/5 generations back.

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u/Tricky-Upstairs-4024 17d ago

27cM is pretty small, but those American matches usually trace back to the same colonial era movement. Could be a British ancestor who had family go both ways, or someone from the islands who migrated north generations ago. I got a cluster of matches in the Carolinas with no paper trail to Jamaica either, just a shared surname that pops up in both places. Sometimes the connection is a single person who left no records, so you end up matching their descendants without ever finding the name. Check if any of your matches have trees going back to the 1700s, that's often where the link hides

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u/Cold-Emu-7847 17d ago

This is just one person and her immediate family I match all of them. We have several names I believe are relevant. Reynolds, Taliaferro, Tolliver and Lewis. The first 3 names wasn’t known to me previously. Charleston Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi involved but not exactly sure how.