Archives

DNA news this past week

Jan22

When you are home and sick in bed what better to do than catch up on reading your favorite DNA blogs? So I decided over today’s bowl of chicken soup to make a page listing the blogs I like to read. It is listed under Resources or click the image on the left.

Also I feel guilty since I am so behind on my own blogging when there is so much news to report. So here are my favorite recent reads to replace my lack of posts:

Legacy Tree Genealogists is releasing their free grandparent/grandchild DNA mapping chartmaker tomorrow, Monday (yes I helped, yes the code is based on my mappers, yes I am an affiliate)
https://www.legacytree.com/blog/chromosome-mapping-grandparent-inheritance-charts

Roberta Estes has a new post on segment size and false matches in her terrific concepts series
https://dna-explained.com/2017/01/19/concepts-segment-size-legitimate-and-false-matches/

She also gives the new 23andme ancestry timeline feature the thumbs down. I do not completely agree with her assessment but as my own post on this is unfinished, perhaps read hers …
https://dna-explained.com/2017/01/17/calling-hogwash-on-23andmes-ancestry-timeline/

Blaine is doing a study that I need to send to all the adoptees I have worked with to fill out
http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2017/01/08/adoptee-testing-a-study/

Amy Johnsons Crow’s post on DNA testees and genealogy
http://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/2017/01/17/lets-stop-hand-wringing-dna-genealogy/

Debbie Kennett reports on her Living DNA results
https://cruwys.blogspot.com/2017/01/my-living-dna-results-part-1-family.html

And to tantalize you (I hope), here is a list of my in progress unfinished posts:

  • A jewish adoptee finds his birth family in spite of endogamy with DNA and my help!
  • New Tier1 features at GEDmatch
  • The New Grandparent Mapper released by Legacy Tree Genealogists
  • The 23andme new ancestry timeline feature
  • Ancestry shared DNA from member profile feature
  • DNA.land follow up
  • Exploring 23andme transferred results at WeGene.com for an asian adoptee
  • My Updated Triangulation talk for Rootstech

Now back to bed with my latest science fiction read …

Following an X match in the Etne farm books

Jan5

etnesogabooks

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

gedmatchdadx

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.

gedmatchuserlookup

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.

Continue reading →

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!)

bigsurnapenthe

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.

ac23starts

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.

ac23scidet

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.

downloadrawadmix

Continue reading →

DNA lecture videos are now available from i4GG

Dec13

Cece Moore organized a conference just for genetic genealogy this past October in San Diego. It was terrific, the only problem was that I could not go to every lecture! Now that the videos are out, I can watch the ones I missed, including my own talk on GEDMatch.

For those of you who did not attend the conference, you can purchase all 19 videos for the amazingly good price of $99 or individual ones for $10 each. Click on the image below to order them. The quality is excellent.

i4ggvideoss

Those of you who were at the conference get them as part of the package so check your email inbox for the link and password.