If you would like to hear me talk, I am doing two presentations in the San Diego area this weekend. One is genealogy related and  the other is on Jewish DNA.

On Saturday morning at 10:30, I am giving my talk about The Advantages of Working with a One World Tree  for the Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego  which meets over on the campus of UCSD, University of California, San Diego. Click on the image to get to my online slide deck. The notes and handout for this talk are in my downloads area.

I will explain why I think the best way to preserve your wonderful genealogical research is to contribute it to a One World Tree. Then I will tell you what I love about the trees at GENI, WikiTree, and FamilySearch, as well as what can be improved at each. Click on this link for more details: http://www.cgssd.org/

The other talk is on Sunday afternoon at 1:00 pm at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.  It is on a subject I find fascinating and difficult: how to use DNA testing for genealogy when you have Jewish ancestry. I will lead in with some basics about DNA testing. See the San Diego Jewish Genealogy web site at http://www.sdjgs.org/ for more details.

Frankly those of us that have even one Ashkenazi grandparent, like myself, look like a 4th or 5th cousin to almost every other person of European Jewish descent. This makes it very hard to work with these tests.

My 100% Ashkenazi husband has about 150 matches at 23andme that are marked as 2nd-4th cousins or better. Compare that to the 2 or 3 my 100% Norwegian Dad has at that level. It is possible some of my husband’s matches are actual 3rd or 4th cousins since he, like many others of Eastern European origin, does not know his family tree past his great grandparents, if that far.

Here are some statistics from my family testers. Note that since Family Tree DNA does not have a category 3rd to 4th cousin some of those matches will be falling into the 2nd to 4th group. I really need to look at these matches by total cM > 7. Also I do not have statistics for Ancestry.com DNA testing because almost none of us have tested there, however I will say that they have an algorithm that seems to remove most of the extraneous Ashkenazi matches for my brother.

There is a recent terrific paper on the problem of DNA test results for Ashkenazim that was originally published in Avotanyu and is now available online on academia.edu at https://www.academia.edu/7236789/Why_Autosomal_DNA_Test_Results_Are_Significantly_Different_for_Ashkenazi_Jews

I covered many of its points in my talk. Here is my slide deck URL – http://slides.com/kittycooper/jewishdna#/

Here is what I had planned to say to go with those slides Download and my handout is here: Download