Thaddeus and Katharina (Kern) Koechle were my 3x great grandparents who immigrated to America in 1851. They had 6 children who lived to adulthood and had children: Anna, Theresia, Reinhard (my direct ancestor), Gertrude, Louise, and Lena.

ThruLines

Ignoring a few close family matches, my uncle’s ThruLines suggests DNA matches for 16 descendants of this couple. Adding the shared matches for these 16 matches makes a total of 46 possible DNA match descendants from this couple. AutoCluster clustered 44 of these matches into 10 clusters.

Identifying Matches with Traditional Genealogy

Using traditional genealogy, I traced half of these matches back to children of  Thaddeus and Katharine Koechle. I still have 22 matches to trace!

What’s next?

1. 1. I am currently contacting the unknown matches and trying to work with them to determine if/how they are related to this family.
   2. I plan on asking these matches to share their DNA on a site where I can compare the actual segments. The first match on this list shares 9 segments with my uncle; the rest share 4 segments or less. I would like to visualize how these DNA segments are matching.
   3. I also plan on sharing a link to this post to these matches and telling them where they fit on the graph so they can also see how they possibly fit into this family.

Other ideas?

Do you have any other suggestions? I’d love to hear them! You can leave a comment on this post or email me at leeds_dana@yahoo.com