Archive | February 2014

Autosomal DNA testing confirms a suspected WOLD relationship!

A long time ago I received an email from the husband of a possible cousin wondering if his wife’s WALD family was the same as our WOLD family. Naturally I suggested a DNA test and the results just came in. Yes she is a member of our WOLDs and is descended from my gg-grandfather Jørgen Oleson Wold via my g-grandmother Maren Wold’s brother Carl (Charlie) Wold. Below are the faces of four generations of my new 3rd cousin once removed’s ancestors.

4 generations of WOLDsNow for the details of how we used autosomal DNA testing to confirm this …

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How to figure out what Y SNPs are tested at 23andme

Those of us who are tested at 23andme and have also done the Y STR test at family tree DNA may wonder when some family tree DNA project manager says “Test SNP so and so” whether that SNP is already tested by 23andme. This post explains how to figure that out. If I have already lost you, then this post may just be too technical or else not your cup of tea. To better understand Y testing read this Y lesson by Kelly Wheaton.

For a good explanation of what a STR versus a SNP is, read Roberta Estes’ post – http://dna-explained.com/2014/02/10/strs-vs-snps-multiple-dna-personalities

So to figure out which SNPs my Dad has already tested, I first created the L11 subset image below of the R1b Y haplogroup SNPs from the beautiful diagram created for R1b by Mike Walsh because I need visuals:

R1bL11

Back to the original question. My Dad is an R1b etc and 23andme uses a four year old haplogroup designator rather than the current ISOGG R haplogroup listing. A visitor to this blog suggested that we test DF100 because that is an interesting subclade we may belong to since we have these SNPs according to 23andme: L11/PF6539/S127, L52/PF6541, P310/PF6546/S129, P311/PF6545/S128.

The diagram shows that the possible downstream SNPs for Dad are U106, DF100, and P312. So how to find out if they are tested at 23andme? Since the haplogroup at 23andme shows L52 as the last SNP can I assume the others are tested?

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GEDmatch: A free website to compare and analyze your DNA results

GEDmatch.com is a tremendous free membership website for analyzing your DNA data. Although I have previously blogged about the terrific ancestry composition tools at GEDmatch, I never did a step by step tutorial.
GEDmatchLarge

So I am pleased to announce that Barton Lewis from the DNA-NEWBIE list has contributed the documentation he wrote for his family to the downloads area of this website. Thank you Barton!

I added lots of pictures and we worked together on the presentation and wording. Let us know if you find it useful and what else we should add to it.

Help index Obituaries in as little as 20 minutes a week

KittyandPirate

Family Search has launched a massive indexing of obituaries project that needs citizen helpers. They had a very clever promotion at Rootstech – “Dead men tell no tales but their Obituaries do!” – with a pirate who strode about getting his picture taken with anyone who wanted to do that. That’s me with him in the picture on the left. Then they had prizes at their booth.

So the url for working on the indexing project is – https://familysearch.org/indexing/ – this one is fun! Please join in.

Making Genealogy Interfaces More Engaging, a Rootstech Talk

Charles Knutson, a professor at BYU, had a very enticing title for his talk, “Genealogy Meets Angry Birds: Making Interfaces More Addictive.” You can see how I picked the presentations to attend … by catchy title.

Play is part of being human and a mammal. All mammals play. Playing develops our skills in a safe environment. It’s great fun to run from a dragon in a game but in real life getting burned while you scramble over the gold would not be fun at all.

So why is genealogy like doing taxes for most people and not more like playing? In a game like angry birds, you know what you have accomplished so far and what your goals are. Genealogy programs do not save your place nor do they set your goals. They are just tools to manage your data and do not engage you the way a game does.

In a quick display of numerical scale he mentioned that there are 2.7 million paying ancestry.com members which sounded impressive until he pointed out that there are 2 billion Angry Birds players …

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