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When an Ancestry DNA green leaf is wrong

Oct28

By Richard Weiss, Director of Programs, DNAadoption.com

Ancestry.com does a great job of finding common ancestors between DNA matches when both parties have trees. The layout is easy to navigate, intuitive, and well integrated, but sometimes the WRONG person or couple is shown as providing the shared DNA. This problem can occur when you share multiple common ancestors with a match but you or your match have have not yet found all of them.

Let’s look at an example of this.

In September 2016, I received a new match at AncestryDNA – B41. Based on a comparison of B41’s tree and my tree, Ancestry provided a “Shared Ancestor Hint” indicating that Barnabas Pratt was our common ancestor and that we were 5th cousins three times removed (5C3R) as shown below.

richardcaseb41

Figure 1: Ancestry’s “Shared Ancestor Hint”

Note that Ancestry’s “Shared Ancestor Hint” in the above image indicates that B41 and I match through my paternal side.
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I4GG was a great conference

Oct23

Two days of talks in sunny San Diego with headliners Cece Moore and Blaine Bettinger, what a pleasure for the roughly 275 genetic genealogists attending. I always enjoy any talk by either of them but I had to miss a few to go to other talks, so I am really looking forward to the videos. The people who missed the conference will be able to purchase them in a few weeks from the i4gg site.

i4ggkeynote

Cece presenting the keynote

Those of you who overflowed the room for my talk on GEDmatch, thanks! My slides are always available at slides.com/kittycooper – this talk is called GEDmatch Basics. I also have a handout in the downloads section here on my blog.

So what other talks did I enjoy besides Cece and Blaine? Barbara Rae-Venter’s presentation of the Lisa project story had me on the edge of my chair and actually gave me nightmares. I don’t think I have ever had that happen before from a genetic genealogy lecture! Congratulations to all those DNAadoption.com volunteers who helped sort out that case!

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Leah Larkin presents endogamy

I loved that Kathy Johnston pointed out the ancestors that you can inherit X from come in a Fibonacci series of numbers for each generation.

But the surprise delight was Leah Larkin’s endogamy presentation. She is the new editor of the Journal of Online Genetic Genealogy (JOGG) at JOGG.info and has endogamy on her Cajun side. This is a very hard topic to explain and to deal with in your genes but she aced this talk and her slides were terrific.

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A DNA conference and a Methodology for Adoptees

Oct15

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.

drozcece3Cece 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.
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Text to GEDCOM Using my Ahnen2GED

Oct11

My Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter, Ahnen2GED, apparently has more uses than I realized. It was initially written to convert the output of DNArboretum (a tool to create ahnentafels from Family Tree DNA trees) to a GEDCOM, but many people are using it to convert other text files as well. So I have enhanced Ahnen2GED to accept any date format that ends with a space followed by the four digit year, so for example 10 jan 1920. I also fixed the known problem where it did not work properly if the lines for the grandparents were not there.

The URL for my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter is:
https://kittymunson.com/dna/Ahnen2GEDcom.php

Below is the documentation of the format Ahen2GED expects. Hopefully this will help you create text files that will easily convert to GEDCOMs using my tool. Especially DNAgedcom.com users!

myahnentafels

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Taking it to the Next Level – DNA Spreadsheets

Sep24

Perhaps this post needs the subtitle , “My Perfect Cousin Goes to GEDmatch.”

Most of us can keep track of information in spreadsheets. So how to do that with DNA? Well, the idea is to keep a list of matching DNA segments so that a new match can be compared to your known family members. That way you may be able to see where they fit in.

If you have tested at 23andme, MyHeritage. or Family Tree DNA, you can download your list of matches with their matching DNA segments either directly from your testing company or by using the tools at DNAgedcom. However AncestryDNA does not provide a list of matching segments.

Extract from my Dad's MasterSpreadsheet

Extract from my Dad’s Master DNA Segment Spreadsheet (click for a larger version)

Why would you want those? The short answer is to figure out which line a new DNA cousin belongs to. For the long answer, read on. For more posts about DNA spreadsheets click here or in the tag cloud, lower right hand column.

tier1smll AncestryDNA testers can make a DNA segment spreadsheet by using any of a number of utilities at the GEDmatch web site. Start by uploading your raw DNA data (click here for that “how to” post). Your results will usually be ready for full comparisons the next day. Then buy the tier 1 utilities for at least one month ($10).

My preference for making a first spreadsheet is to use the Tier 1 GEDmatch Matching Segment Search. Then I go through the top matches from the ‘One-to-many’ matches report with that spreadsheet as a reference. I add notes on what I discover to my new spreadsheet.

Here is the step by step of what I did for my perfect cousin J.M. whose AncestryDNA results I blogged about in my previous post.

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