I found another first cousin on my birth father’s side yesterday as I was updating my Jerry Banister Ancestry site. Dean W. Rigdon is one of three children born to Opal, Cecil Banister’s older sister. I assume the middle initial stands for Willard, a family name dating back to 1881. In past conversations with my half-sister, I heard that Opal Jean Banister was an oddball and there wasn’t much interaction between the cousins. I sent a note to confirm this but have yet to hear back on if there has been any communication from that side of the family. No one apparently knows where Opal Jean is or if she is even alive. She would be 92 years of age, born in 1929, with various married names including Woods and Soledad. I did a quick search for obituaries but came up empty. 

Dean Rigdon is my third closest DNA match at 1,045 cM. Half-sister, Julie, tops the list at 1,719 cM and her sister Kristi’s daughter, Ashlee, is second at 1,109. Centimorgan or cM is “a unit used to measure genetic linkage. One centimorgan equals a one percent chance that a marker on a chromosome will become separated from a second marker on the same chromosome due to crossing over in a single generation. The centimorgan is named after the American geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan.” An additional scientific source indicates that “the total length of all your chromosomes combined is around 7400 cM. Since a person inherits half of their DNA from each parent, you share about 3700 cM with each parent.” 

Susan Colleen Barker Smith is number four on my list of Ancestry.com matches with 991 cM. She connects me with my birth mother, Edna Faye Banister, as the daughter of her oldest sister, Helen Banister and husband, Walter Barker. Gabe Burkman is next at 894 cM. He is the son of my half-sister, Julie, that tops the list. I have yet to identify Sue Ramsey that follows him at 654 cM. There are 51,879 other matches on the Ancestry site that range from 1st cousins down to distant relatives like Barbara Ryker at the 6 cM minimum, making her last on my current match list. New connections are added every day as more DNA tests are confirmed. So far, I’ve only managed to link 737 to my tree, as the rest remain unidentified.

This total includes 23andMe matches that are sometimes duplicated as people like myself submit saliva to multiple testing sites. I have 1500 matches on 23andMe that sorts by percentages rather than centimorgans. They both apparently use the same testing lab. My highest percentage match on 23andMe is currently Joyce Gourley at 7.22 percent. This would rank her in my Top 10 if combining the results from both website sources. I share 25% DNA for example with my half-sister and 13% with her son. First cousin, Dean W. Rigdon, that I found yesterday genetically shares 15% with me. Each match that I’m able to accurately trace is then marked with a green DNA symbol on my family tree. Currently that number stands at only 737 out of 35,740 relatives identified on it’s sprawling branches – or about 2%.