The i4GG genetic genealogy conference is coming to San Diego next weekend and it features a track for adoptees as well as one for genealogists. For those of you who want to hear me speak, I will be doing a talk about the tools at GEDmatch on Saturday morning.

DNA testing has broken many brick walls for family historians and has been a miracle for the adopted, helping them find their biological families where traditional methods have failed.

Cece Moore, the i4gg conference organizer, has pioneered this field and has developed a methodology that succeeds over and over again. She described this in her cameo appearance on a recent Dr. Oz episode that featured an adoptee who found her birth family with Cece’s help. Click the image to the left to go to the online clip of the episode.

A simple explanation of the methodology is as follows. An adoptee tests their autosomal DNA at all three major companies (see my DNA testing page) and then uploads those results to all the free third party sites as well. Sometimes they get lucky and find a close family member who has tested and who is willing to help. More often they must look at the family trees of their 2nd and 3rd cousin matches to see what ancestors are in common. Once a shared ancestral couple is found, they build a family tree forward in time, looking to see if one of the couple’s descendants was in the right place at the right time to be the adoptee’s parent.

To learn more about this methodology come to the conference, or buy the videos of it, or go to DNAadoption.com or join DNA detectives at Facebook and read through the files there. Or do all of those things.

There is also plenty to be learned at the conference for those of us interested in finding new relatives or learning more about our family using DNA testing. My own talk will be about using the tools at GEDmatch to do this. Plus Blaine Bettinger is covering many 3rd party tools among his numerous scheduled talks

The full schedule is listed at http://i4gg.org/conference-schedule/ – if the hotel is full already, not to worry, there are plenty of other hotels and motels in that area. Or stay anywhere in San Diego, the conference is about a 15 minute walk from the tram stop at Hazard Center Station and we have Uber and Lyfft here as well.

Currently the forecast is for unseasonably warm weather, sunny high 70s to 80 in the day time, but since it is almost never humid here, that feels fine. Bring a light jacket or sweater for the evening however, since it can drop into the high 60s at night.

Hope to see you next weekend!