I am curious about the significance of the number of matches with other Lost Colony/Melungeon Lore Project participants in my Ancestor-projects.com research. A certain percentage of participants in the Melungeon Lore project are quite certain of their Melungeon heritage they have a paper trail or perhaps have lived in the same area of Tennessee, North Carolina or other known Melungeon areas for centuries. There are others who have joined the project just to see if they have Melungeon heritage. Perhaps they are adopted or they simply curious.
The purpose of this post is to discuss a unique way of looking at the data to see if we can draw any conclusions.
So here is what I did, using the grid in ancestor-projects “Comparison matrix showing relationship between all project participants” in Lost Colony/Melungeon Lore Project I counted the number of matches with other participants. In other words how many other kits predicted a match within 8.1 generations . Using my kit as an example I matched 262 of the other kits out of a total of 391. I then sorted the list from most number of matches 281 to least 1.
It is important to note that the kit with the most matches or number 1 on the list had 281 matches. The average predicted genrations to my match was 7.13 That happens to be exactly when my Cottrell ancestors lived in the Kingsport Tennesseee area in what is now Warriors Path State Park. Interestingly I have two cousins with kits in the project with a most recent common ancestor between 5 and 6 generations ago. One is number 4 with 270 matches and the other is number 33 with 250 matches.
So my cousins and I are all in the top 10%, I am concluding that the odds of us being clustered in the top 10% if we were not related is significant. In addition all three of us share 199 of the same kits in common. There are some other really interesting aspects of this data. The average number of matches is 82 the median was 73 . Three quarters of the results were less then 91. The number of matches drops below 200 at number 46 and below 100 at 55 . The clustering of virtually all of the results in the 0-100 and 200-300 is indicative of something that differentiates the two groups but I have no idea what. I want to make it very clear I am not suggesting that those with fewer matches do not have Melungeon Ancestry just that there appears to be a significant core cluster that have ties to a huge number of fellow project members.
In conclusion I believe that those of us clustered in the top grouping must have some sort of significant relationship to each other. I would welcome thoughts about this.
For those who are interested here is the procedure I used
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