An unknown father case has led to an arrest

Feb24

My work has identified an alleged serial rapist in Australia. This was very unexpected. We found a woman’s father from only 4th cousin matches many years ago because of her unusual ethnicity. I even gave a talk at i4GG which included this case. It was an extremely difficult one with such distant matches to work with. I had the help of an Australian search angel to build the tree down from the common ancestors on her paternal Australian side as well as an Italian specialist. Her bio dad, now charged with being a serial rapist, did not want anything to do with her. That turned out to be a good thing. It was her DNA that exposed him.

 

Click here for the article in the Guardian about this case.

Perhaps it was inevitable that my work would eventually help identify a rapist or murderer or unknown body. I have solved many unknown parentage cases and I always ask my clients to upload to GEDmatch so I can check if their parents are related. GEDmatch is the only site with that tool. None of the testing companies provide that information. I also encourage them to opt in to help find criminals, rapists, and identify unknown bodies. FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch are the only sites which allow Law Enforcement access (users have to opt in). There is also a site just for law enforcement called DNA Justice. Upload there too if you are interested in helping. Click here for my post about that.

DNA is so accurate for identification purposes that I do not worry about it being abused. I like that with DNA we can identify very dangerous people and get them off the streets. So why did I feel so conflicted to discover that I had inadvertently identified a rapist? Perhaps because I did not know that was where the case would lead. I was just happy to have solved an incredibly difficult unknown father case from distant cousin matches. Now I am sad for “Elana.”

Click here for the story of how many years back I was able to figure out the father of an Australian woman by harnessing her unusual ethnicity. I never use the names of living people in these cases, but Elana’s bio father has the same name as his father with a middle name, so I inadvertently named him.

My Fastest Father Find Ever

Jan9

Randi contacted me for help finding her unknown biological father. I advised her to test at Ancestry and get back in touch when her results were ready.

When they came in, it took only three hours to find Randi’s unknown biological dad! She had two second cousin level matches at Ancestry with good trees who did not match each other. That meant that the search would likely be easy, since all I had to do was find where those two trees intersected. Here is how I did that, step by step.

First I created a private searchable tree at Ancestry to use for this case. I started it with Randi and her mom. planning to make floating branches for related people by copying the relevant lines over from their trees.

The best DNA match on Randi’s unknown father’s side was Brad at 322 cM. So using ProTools, I sorted the matches Randi and he shared by his closest matches, as shown in the image below.

Clicking on the sort button brings up a box where you can select to sort by the match’s relationship

The idea was to find the common ancestor among those matches. This would be the line that Randi is related on. To do that, I should have looked at the best one with a tree, excluding close family, but I saw that there was one a bit further down the list, Bob, who had an unusual surname, call it Roper, that was the same as one of Brad’s great grandmothers. So I built her tree back up a few generations and down again. I then copied Bob’s paternal ancestors over, looking for an intersection. I did not find one, so I moved on. Later Brad told me that the error was two women with the same name and birth year incorrectly in various trees, including his.

So I went back to the common match list and found the best match to Brad with a tree (Peggy). One of her grandmothers shared a surname, call it Whistler, with the husband of the Roper great grandmother. So I built the Whistler tree. Quickly found a common ancestor for Peggy and Brad with an unusual first name born in 1830. Built the tree of all his descendants. Somewhere in that tree will be our man.

Time to look at the other possible second cousin match, Jim, at 268 cM. The plan was to repeat the process of finding the common ancestor to his best match with a tree. However, his surname, call it Wander, had already showed up in the Whistler tree. Having collected all the descendants of Brad’s Whistler great grandparents, I noticed that one of them had married a Wander. Was that Wander in Jim’s tree? Yes, she was his aunt!

That Whistler-Wander couple, who must be Randi’s ancestors, had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was the right age and in the right location. Could it really be this easy? Yes. The details of his life fit what was known. Since Randi’s presumed father is Jim’s first cousin, Jim is Randi’s first cousin once removed.

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My Newly Found Half Second Cousin Once Removed

Dec19

A few months ago, my family had a good DNA match (about 151 cm for my aunt) at 23andme to our Bavarian side. This was Mary, who had been adopted as a baby back in 1950 from a Munich orphanage. She knew her birth mother’s name but not her father’s. She had no other significant matches at 23andme besides my family, so we needed to get her into more DNA databases to figure this out.

Great Grandfather Benedict Reiner

I sent her an Ancestry kit I had on hand and ordered a MyHeritage kit for her as well. Germany does not have very many people who have tested their DNA so typically my matches on those lines are Americans with Bavarian ancestors. However, there are a few tested Germans at MyHeritage.

While we waited for the new test results, I had her upload her DNA to GEDmatch so I could compare her to my known German cousins there. To my surprise, she matched my half second cousin in Bavaria at 91 cM. This is a line I have not researched deeply. I was hoping she matched my grandmother’s other side which I have much more information on. Luckily I am in touch with that cousin’s granddaughter Katharina, who enjoys doing genealogy. We found each other on GENI because she is descended from my great grandfather Benedict Reiner via a different partner (click here for that story)

Benedict’s mother Anna Reiner had several partners and at least two husbands so my plan was to start by building the trees of her other descendants. Naturally I fired off an email to Katharina and asked her what she knew. She sent me quite a bit of information and got involved in helping. She said to me “Now I remember why genealogy brings me so much joy — it’s just so fascinating!” Sadly many of Anna’s children had died before reaching an age to have children themselves and only one had moved to Munich.

The Ancestry results came in and Mary had two good matches (167 cM and 160 cM) who did not match each other or me, although one had a whole family of testers, all matching. Next I copied the Bavarians from their trees into Mary’s tree and then built their trees further back. There were some surnames of interest ….

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Ancestry’s Updated Ancestral Origins

Oct13

Ancestry.com has just completed a major update to its DNA bio-ancestry predictions that has broken down European countries into many smaller areas. They have added 68 locales, mainly in Europe. French Canadians are no longer listed as France, now they are either Quebec or Acadia. They have also made four jewish groups from one: Central and Eastern Ashkenazi plus North African and East Mediterranean Sephardic. Almost all my Jewish friends have no Sephardic listed, giving the lie to some family stories. There are some interesting new categories like Germans in Russia and one combining both sides of the English Channel into a new category called Southeastern England & Northwestern Europe.

I am enjoying looking at the updated origins of many of the people I have helped. On the next page I will show images of the more interesting mixtures. Here is a classic North European mix of a Tenneseean with colonial roots.

I do recommmend scrolling down and clicking on the link to what has changed. Below is the image of how the predictions for our Tennesseean are different from last year. Notice that Germany has gone from 21% to 2%. Some of that must now be Denmark and some SE England & NW Europe.

While 1-2% could be a 4th or 5th grandparent, it could also be just noise or too far back to find. I have often told people not to worry about a 1% call as it is too small to be sure of. In my own case, I lost my 1% Finnish, which I actually thought was accurate because its location matches one of the two where my Norwegian American dad has Finnish, according to 23andme. Additionally, 23andme has my brother matching the other location. We have yet to find that Finnish 4th or further back grandparent, but we do match many Finnish people on those segments over at GEDmatch. Perhaps they just have some Norwegian. More on that in another blog post.

To quote my own blog post from 2020 comparing the origin predictions at each company “predicting the ethnicity for people of Northern European heritage like my brother and myself, is very hard to do accurately because there was so much mixing of those populations.” The book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” by geneticist David Reich makes that point well and goes into the details of what ancient DNA teaches us about European migrations and mixtures.

I found the explanatory Ancestry white paper (click here to read it) hard to understand, so I enlisted two different AI platforms to summarize it for me. A fun use of this technology. To be fair, after the quite technical many paragraph summary ChatGPT gave me, I wised up and asked Claude to summarize it in plain English. That went better. Here are a few take aways:

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23andMe Update

Sep25

23andMe is now owned by​ Anne Wojcicki’s new non-profit The 23andMe Research Institute. An email has gone out to all of us users (see next page) explaining this, which also makes it clear that the focus will be on discovering the health issues in our DNA. Click here for my previous post on 23andme explaining why ​Anne has this interest. 

While crowd sourcing DNA health issues is certainly a worthy cause, it is not the main interest for many of us. Most of my readers consider genetic genealogy a tool to find relatives and uncover family stories.

How the former chromosome browser at 23andme looked comparing a new match to me and my family

The feature I miss the most at 23andme is the chromosome browser that showed ​where my genome matched that of my relatives. Because I have collected an excel file of all my father’s matches with notations as to which I or my brother share, I could frequently tell which family line a new match belonged to,  even a one segment match with no clear relatives in common. ​ Click here for the blog post where I discuss this.

I no longer recommend testing at 23andme unless you want health results or are an adoptee and thus need to test everywhere.

The next page has the text of the email they have sent all of us users.

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