Good morning from Brooklyn,

I am sharing my DNA success story from this weekend, notwithstanding both endogamy and pedigree collapse in my family ancestry. I tested family members a few years ago on FTDNA and also uploaded their results to MyHeritage. Last month, I re-tested my maternal aunt, but with Ancestry. The results came back this past Friday. One of her highest matches was to someone with a surname of SWIMM and the match was 3% shared DNA | 232 cM across 14 segments, Unweighted shared DNA: 232 cM, Longest segment: 34 cM. There was a tree with only 3 people, but SWIMM's father was SWIMMER. I had Schwimmer's in my tree and wondered if this was a match. Using Blaine T. Bettinger's quick-n-dirty tree methodology, I was able to bring this family back two more generations, and tentatively back to Munkacz (a town now in the Ukraine) to connect this tree to my g-gm (using the unindexed Hebrew name on a tombstone in Pennsylvania). My g-gm's parents were both married before; both had spouses that passed away after starting a family. I have found birth records for many of her half-siblings, but was never successful in finding a paper trail to trace any of them forward. Now, with this DNA test, I found a family that immigrated to the USA in 1895. I never found them because of the changed surname. Looking up the match on the Shared cM Tool, it indicates a 33% chance for Half 2c, which is what I believe my aunt is with this match. And then serendipitously, a day later, I had activity show on my tree at FamilySearch, with someone linked to another of my g-gm's half-siblings; a full sibling to this SWIMM. This was through a much larger match to my maternal great-aunt, and this one was via MyHeritage, with a family now residing in Hungary. This match had Shared DNA of 280 cM, 10 Shared segments, Largest segment 51.5‎ cM. I believe the match to be a half 1c2r. The Shared cM Tool shows 17% for this, but notes: † this relationship has a positive probability for 280cM in thednageek's table of probabilities, but falls outside the bounds of the recorded cM range (99th percentile). My paper trail is not yet conclusive enough, but if they test on Ancestry, while I do more paper genealogy in Hungary and Ukraine, I hope to prove all three families link the way it seems to me. I hope my experience encourages others.

Stay safe.