Archive by Author | Kitty

Party with Me on Feb. 10 at Rootstech 2017!

Last year’s Rootstech saw the advent of a great new event, the MyHeritage after party on Friday night, with lots of fun games (no I cannot throw a bean bag well) as well as music, karaoke, prizes, food, and drink. A great tension reliever after a hard day focusing on wonderful talks.

Shipley Munson and A.J.Jacobs on screen and on stage at Rootstech

I have five free party tickets to give out to my readers for this year’s after party on Friday February 10th. Everyone who completes my survey about my blog (click here) will be entered into a random drawing. You can also answer inline after the read more below. In addition, you can choose to do the questionnaire and not enter as well. Winners will be notified by email very soon.

This will be my fourth year at Rootstech and my third year speaking. My topic will again be DNA Triangulation, updated from previous renditions. This is one of my favorite subjects and I love to demonstrate how we used this in my family to confirm a shaky paper trail, as well as ways you can use this technique at the different companies.

Another point of excitement for fellow genetic genealogists is that our own wonderful Cece Moore is doing a keynote speech on Saturday.
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Following an X match in the Etne farm books

Jan5

Having just received the Etne, Norway local history books (bygdebuker) for Christmas, I have spent countless hours looking at my ancestors in them. Naturally I have been trying to think of even more ways to use these books.

An idea that came to me was to look at my Dad’s one-to-many X matches at GEDmatch.com and see if I could find a match where I could follow the lines and connect them to Dad’s maternal grandad via those books

The largest X match he had with an unfamiliar name and email was to *k for 26.8 centimorgans (cMs) and it included a small autosomal match of 6.3 cMs. This seemed promising so I used the user lookup function on my GEDmatch home page and was delighted to see that she had uploaded a GEDCOM.

The GEDCOM number is clickable from the lookup result and it takes you to a page listing the individual. Of course what you really want is the pedigree to quickly scan for relatives in common and there is a button for that at the top of the page. Better is to use the compare 2 GEDCOMs feature from the home page to compare your match’s GEDCOM to your own. Works great if you both have deep trees but I had no luck with that for *k.

Next I clicked on the pedigree button at the top of her individual listing in the GEDCOM which took me to her pedigree page. Nothing jumped out at me and most of them were from Germany.

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Last day for Family Tree DNA Sales!

Dec30

This is it, your last chance for the amazing price of $59 for an autosomal test from Family Tree DNA, on this final day of 2016. Click here for my November post about all the sales with more details.

Happy New Year to all of you

I hope to see some of you at Rootstech in February at my Triangulation 2017 talk.

A special thank you whomever used my family tree DNA link to buy so many kits. My cost for running this blog is now paid until April. (Don’t stop now friends!)

Norwegian Pancakes for Christmas

Dec26

This blog was intended to be a personal blog with many gardening, cooking, and genealogy posts. However after I tested my DNA and talked other family members into doing it too, I found that they needed explanations of how to do things at the various DNA companies. Unlike me they were not willing to spend hours and hours experimenting, so I added a number of tutorials for my cousins which are linked to from the top menu here under DNA testing as well as from under Resources. Soon I found myself writing more about DNA: tips, techniques, and success stories. Thus this blog morphed into being mainly about genetic genealogy. The numbers for each category shown on the left tell the story.

So enough DNA for now. To me the holidays are about love, family, friends, and food. Happy Holidays to all of you. Now for some food …

My late father always made us “Norwegies,” the family nickname for Norwegian pancakes, on Christmas morning as well as on many other special occasions. So guess what I cooked on Christmas morning for my jewish husband. No I will not make them on every day of Hannukah! Yes he did say that they were just like blintzes.

We stuffed them with strawberry jam and then sprinkled them with confectioner’s sugar. Click here for the family recipe in a previous year’s holiday food post (towards the end).

My New Year’s resolution is to write more food and garden posts, maybe as often as once a month, in addition to the usual weekly DNA post and the occasional genealogy post.

Ancestry Composition Numbers by Segment at 23andme.com

Dec21

Did you know 23andme now provides the segment data for its ancestry composition assignments? This is a pretty recent feature and might even be useful. Unlike the other companies, 23andme does its admixture (aka ancestry composition) in chunks. This may make it more accurate than the others but in any case it means that they can give us the segment numbers. Then we can compare those to our matches.

To get these numbers, first pull down the reports menu and click on ancestry. On the initial ancestry page click on Ancestry Composition or the > symbol next to your highest group. Both are marked with my red arrow below.

The next page, the ancestry composition page has the pretty chromosome picture with ancestries displayed where you can change the confidence level from speculative (50%) to conservative (90%). To get a CSV file of the segments you click on Scientific Details at the top or the bottom of this page.

Then scroll all the way to bottom of that next page until you see this. You can select your confidence level as well for your downloaded data.