Archive | 2015

I am traveling to Norway in June

Mar15

Excitement! I am visiting Norway with a cousin from June 18-26 to walk where our ancestors walked. Any Norwegian cousins I have not already contacted please get in touch if you want to meet up! I will put my exact travel plans, as they develop, at the end of this post: roughly Bergen to Etne to Bergen to Oslo to Drammen to Kristiansand …

EtnePastures

Pastures on ancestral farms, photo by John Quinn 2010

I visited Norway in the 1980s. I went to Stavanger for a tournament and I had no idea where my ancestors had lived nor did I think much about it, other than announcing proudly to my hostess that I was descended from King Harald the Finehair, according to a cousin’s research. She gave me a funny look.

Now I know that everyone in Norway is probably descended from that king who lived in 850 A.D. Various mathematicians have proven this concept (see my blog post on how many ancestors for more on that). Since Norway lost about 2/3 of its population to plague in the 1300s, I would guess that everyone who survived that, and has descendants, is an ancestor to all of us of Norwegian descent.

However after almost 20 years of doing family history research, I have learned a great deal about the farms my ancestors lived on and the lives they must have lived. Norway has these wonderful local history books, called bygedebuks, and often referred to as “farm books” which tell you much about the farm as well as everyone who lived there and how they are related. So I am making an itinerary which includes many of our ancestral farms.

Also I was lucky to have ancestors who liked to write, so I have many family stories preserved on my family history site at kittymunson.com – one of my favorites is my grandad’s story of their immigration trip from Kristiansand to Brooklyn, NY.
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Lets All Help Collect DNA Statistics

Mar9

The DNA relationship statistics listed at ISOGG are invaluable for figuring out how you are related to new DNA relatives. This diagram shown there is a big help too:

DNA relatedness cousin tree courtesy Dimario, Wikimedia Commons

DNA relatedness cousin tree courtesy Dimario, Wikimedia Commons

More statistics would be even better so I am delighted to make the following request.

Genetic genealogicist Blaine Bettinger has decided to collect cM numbers for known close relationships from all of us who have tested. Read about it on his blog and then contribute yours. He wants family statistics out to 3rd cousins.

Blaine explains how easy to provide those numbers if you are tested at Family Tree DNA, but 23andme includes the X in their totals which skews the results. Plus they include segments smaller than 7cM which is not what Blaine wants. So I decided to make a step-by-step how-to for 23andme statistics collection.

Better is if your 23andme or Ancestry.com tested family members are all uploaded to GEDmatch.com. Then you can easily get the statistics there. Just run the one-to-many with the normal default of 7cM for each family kit and look in the columns Total cM and largest cM under Autosomal.

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I will be interviewed on a Genealogy Radio Show

Mar2
Photo of Scott Fisher

Scott Fisher, photo used by permission

Scott Fisher of Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Radio Show, will be interviewing me about genetic genealogy this week for his Radio Show to be aired next monday. Not sure how soon it will appear in the Extreme Genes archives, presumably sometime after the broadcast. The show is carried by 27 stations so check yours.

There are lots of interesting podcasts in those archives! Wondering if any of you already knew about this show and are regular listeners.

I will post more information here when I have it.

Triangulation: Proving a Common Ancestor

Feb26

The same question seems to come up over and over again among those new to autosomal DNA testing. If I match A and B on the same segment why is that not enough to prove they match each other and we have a common ancestor?

The reason the ancestor is not proven is that you have two strands of DNA on each chromosome (remember there are 23 pairs of chromosomes) and the testing mechanism cannot differentiate between the two of them. So A could match the piece from your mother and B could match the piece from your father or one of them could even be a false match to a mix of alleles from both parents (see my post on IBC for more on that concept)

The way to prove the common ancestor is to see if A and B match each other in the same place that they match you. This is what we call triangulation.

Triangulation example

Kristine’s shared DNA with other Wold descendants, relationships are to her (to me in parenthesis)

About a year ago I blogged about how, after many years, a change in spelling on the paper trail had led fellow genealogist Dennis to think his wife Kristine was perhaps descended from my great-grandmother’s brother Carl. To prove this I suggested he test her autosomal DNA.
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