Did one of those ancestry DNA tests and got connected to over 200 people with Johnson in their name as potential relatives. Now I'm wondering how many of them might actually be related vs just coincidentally sharing a super common surname. Has anyone else with the Johnson name done this? Was it helpful for actually finding family or just overwhelming?
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The Johnson surname makes DNA matching tricky. Because its so common, you get tons of matches that might be super distant or might just be coincidence from how far back Johnson as a surname goes. Focus on matches that share more than 20 cM of DNA. Those are more likely to be meaningful.
good advice. about how distant would a 20cM match be?
around 3rd to 5th cousin typically. so your great great grandparents generation or so. still distant but close enough you might be able to trace the connection with records
The funny thing about Johnson is that it literally means 'son of John' so everyone with this surname has an ancestor named John somewhere. That's a lot of Johns throughout history. The name doesn't really indicate one family line, it indicates having an ancestor with the most common first name in English history.
I did 23andMe and AncestryDNA both. Found a few genuine cousins I didn't know about, including one who lives 20 minutes from me. The trick is looking at shared matches, not just individual matches. When multiple people share DNA with both you and each other, thats when you can start building real family trees.
Kinda late to this thread but just wanted to add that i got matched with another Thomas Johnson through AncestryDNA who turned out to be my dads second cousin. Neither of our families knew about each other. We compared old photos and the resemblance is actually kinda spooky. The Johnson surname made it harder to find him through regular research but the DNA doesnt lie i guess. Definitely recommend it even if the number of matches is overwhelming at first