The genealogy cartoon strips done by Esto Frigus at geneapalooza always lighten my mood.
This week I am too busy polishing my talk for Rootstech (this coming Friday at 2:30, Ballroom C) to write any posts. So instead I offer some humor from Esto that is quite relevant to the fact that I am flying to Salt Lake City tomorrow for a genealogy conference!
cartoon used by permission of Esto Frigus
Next week is Rootstech 2015! I can’t wait. I had such a great time last year. I met many of my facebook friends, fellow genetic genealogists, and genealogy bloggers in person and got to enjoy their talks.
I am pleased that this year I will be giving a talk, about the advantages of contributing your research to a one world tree. I will also compare the features of the big three, FamilySearch, GENI, and WIKItree. A topic that I blogged about last year.
Rootstech has a cool app for your Ipad, Iphone or Android which will track your schedule, your friends, and more. You can get it from the app or play store, just search for Rootstech 2015.
Hans Martin Gunderson
The randomness of DNA inheritance always amazes me. My Norwegian-American father seems to have inherited more DNA from his Skjold grandad, “Dada,” than his Wold grandma, “Mormor.” Dad shares more than the expected amount of DNA with 3rd and 4th and double 4th cousins on his Skjold line. Of course this could also be explained by the slight endogamy in the area they come from, Etne, Hordaland. By comparison, Dad shares no DNA with a Wold 3rd cousin once removed and only a small amount with her mother. He shares more with a few other Wold cousins but it tends to be less than the expected amount with the more distant cousins on that line.
Recently I found two new Skjold cousins via DNA testing, Maria and Irene.
On Ancestry.com, a 3rd cousin match appeared for my brother which turned out to be a real 3rd cousin, a Gundersen relative who is descended from Dada’s sister Margareta. Her son who immigrated to Brooklyn, Hans Martin Gundersen, is pictured on the left.
On 23andme.com, I found a new 3rd-4th cousin on Dad’s list, who was found to be from another branch of our Holland relatives. The Hollands descend from Dada’s Aunt Mette (see my post with her portrait). My father’s newly found 3rd cousin twice removed shares 1.10% of her DNA with him: 4 segments totaling 84cM. This is on the high side, more like a second cousin once removed (click here for the article at ISOGG about the expected amounts of shared DNA).
So read on for the details of how I figured out the actual relationships with my new cousins.
While I have many spreadsheets that I use to analyze DNA results, what I also want is a field in my genealogy program where I can put simple DNA information like haplogroups, where the person tested, and the GEDmatch id number.
To my delight, the free online one world tree at WIKItree.com has all those features. Plus you can see whom you might have gotten your X DNA from, as well as your Y and mtDNA ancestral lines. Another feature is that a person’s profile page shows the tests of relatives that are related by DNA. Here is my mother’s page:
So what is the impact of MyHeritage doing the family trees for 23andme? We can all agree that the previous family trees at 23andme were difficult to use. So this has to be an improvement, right? Maybe not.
To try it, I connected my own 23andme account to my existing MyHeritage tree and then looked at it from my aunt’s account, after logging out of MyHeritage. It was hard to find it on my profile. All the way at the very bottom were the words Family Tree next to which were the linked words View Kitty Cooper’s Family Tree. When I clicked on it I saw this:
Oops. My Dad is set as the home person. Maybe Google can help me figure out how to change that. Clicking on the image above will take you to my tree so you can judge for yourself how well you like it.
MyHeritage is an excellent site in many ways, but to take advantage of the record matching you have to buy a premium membership. Also if you want more than 250 people in your tree, payment is required after those first free 6 months for 23andme folk. The premium or data membership gives access to many European records not on ancestry and also some newspaper articles I have not seen elsewhere.
For me, the biggest issue with MyHeritage is having no pedigree view on the family tree. When generation after generation had eight or more children, their tree view is very unwieldy.
In the rest of this post I will walk you step by step through setting up your 23andme tree at MyHeritage which you must do by May 1, 2015 to take advantage of the offer.
Continue reading
