Archive | September 2019

Talking About Many New DNA Tools

Sep22

Tuesday I will be presenting the latest version of my talk on solving unknown parentage cases in a virtual conference hosted by the Utah genealogical society (click here for more information). In the past, I relied heavily on the tools at DNAgedcom, but now there are several new tools that are even more exciting.

The basic methodology for unknown parentage searches is to DNA test everywhere. Then look through the trees of your matches to see what ancestors are in common. Build trees down from those common ancestors looking for where the different families meet in a marriage. Then find a child of that marriage who was in the right place at the right time to be the missing parent or grandparent or …

A major difficulty is that many people test DNA without providing a tree. Usually you have to try to build trees for them. Another problem is that building trees down from those common ancestors is incredibly labor intensive when the families are large and the matches are distant. My latest strategy for difficult cases is to recruit several search angels to build the different trees.

There are now tools that automate building trees!
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Why you might want to test for DNA health results at MyHeritage

Sep9

The live streaming from the MyHeritage conference in Amsterdam this past weekend was both informative and enjoyable. I was even able to watch without getting up in the middle of the night as they stayed available afterwards. Many of the talks included information that was not new to me, although I was pleased to finally be able to watch Leah Larkin’s WATO presentation.

Yaniv Erlich

The talk that impressed me the most was the one by Yaniv Erlich in the middle of day 2 about the DNA health results that MyHeritage is now providing (on a reduced price sale just through Tuesday, Sept 10). With the acquisition of Promethease and SNPedia they have greatly expanded their access to medical genetic knowledge. SNPedia is always my go to resource for looking up specific genes, for example click here to see what it says about the BRCA genes. While Promethease is where you can upload your raw DNA from wherever you tested to get health results (sadly written in formal medical talk) based on current but not always solid research (see comments below) and is linked to SNPedia.

One of the important take aways for me was that if MyHeritage finds a bad mutation in your test, they will use a different method, Sanger sequencing, to confirm the result! This almost completely eliminates false positives. Still if you are diagnosed with a really bad variation, my opinion is that you should double check even further by getting a doctor ordered test like the one from Color Genomics.

Yaniv also emphasized that they have worked hard to present the results in an understandable format. There are some examples of this on their blog (click here).

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MyHeritage is Live Streaming from Amsterdam right now!

Sep6

An exciting weekend in Amsterdam has just started! MyHeritage will live stream the genealogy and DNA lecture tracks online throughout the conference! The following announcement is almost verbatim from the press release email I received. I will be watching and you?

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The live stream will be available on the MyHeritage LIVE website and on the MyHeritage Facebook page, so please tune in from 9:00 a.m. Amsterdam time on September 7th. If you need help calculating the time difference to your local time zone, you can use https://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/.

Make sure to visit the conference website to see the full schedule.

Don’t forget to post and share all your MyHeritage LIVE experiences using the conference hashtag: #MyHeritageLIVE, and follow MyHeritage on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

UPDATE: 7 SEP 2019: Even though we sleep while this is streamed, if you go to the streaming page at https://live2019.myheritage.com/ you can rewind the video, I am now watching Ram Snir explain many basics of DNA matching which is the first talk on the DNA track.

 

Too many figs this year!

Sep4

It’s a wonderful problem. I have way too many figs this year. I eat two or three every morning while I pick about twenty or thirty more. Below is a picture of two days worth of picking, Time to dehydrate them.

My tree is about 60 feet tall and the wild parrots eat the figs on the top half. Sometimes the parrots are lower down where I can take a video …

Click image for my video of this wild parrot in my tree

I dehydrate the figs and then freeze them but there is very little room left in my freezer and I have not talked my husband into buying a separate one for the garage. So I posted on my neighborhood facebook page that I would trade for lemons (my tree is on hiatus til October) or cucumbers or squash.
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