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In defense of Ancestry.com’s DNA offering

The recent good sales prices got to me, so I broke down and tested my brother with the Ancestry.com DNA test. I had held off testing there, not because of the low opinion of their DNA tools held by serious genetic genealogists, but because my ancestors emigrated to the USA so recently that I doubted whether I would have many useful matches in a database that is 99% American.

So why do the serious genetic genealogists complain? My DNA cousin and blogger Kelly Wheaton  on the DNA-NEWBIE yahoo list described ancestry’s offering as “a dumbed down product on steroids;” which really says it well.

ShipleyAncestryDNAsmllShe went on to say, “What Ancestry.com DNA testing does better than anywhere else for people with a decent sized tree (1,000 people or more), and who are American or Canadian, is make matches for you. If you have a DNA match and a tree match it does the work for you. Although these suggested matches may not be accurate in terms of who the ancestors in common are for two people who have multiple relationships, for most they do a fine job.” I completely agree with her.

By the way, the serious genetic genealogists do not like it because you cannot see where the DNA segment match is and thus triangulate with another cousin to prove that this is the right common ancestor. You have to load the raw data from ancestry to GEDmatch in order to look at the segment overlaps and not all your matches at ancestry will do this. But you have to give Ancestry.com credit for good marketing and for making it easy for folk who are not interested in doing the hard work to prove these relationships.
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My presentation on GEDmatch Tools is this Thursday in Carlsbad, CA

If you live anywhere in the San Diego area, you might enjoy hearing me talk about the tools at GEDmatch this Thursday evening, August 21, at 6:30 to the DNA Interest Group of the North San Diego County Genealogical Society (known as DIGG  – click this link for location details) .  I will link to the presentation in the comments here by Thursday. Instead of powerpoint, I am using a cool online HTML 5 tool at slides.com to create the presentation. Here is one of the images I made for the talk.

Sample Admix MDLP World-22 Calculator

Sample Admix MDLP World-22 Calculator

In the left image, the pygmy is actually the smaller red slice and Sub-Saharan the larger – can you tell the colors apart? I cannot.

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Using my segment mapper for cousin Katy

I finally got Katy’s data uploaded to GEDmatch so that I could compare it to all my other WOLD cousins. Naturally I had to make a spreadsheet of her overlaps, save it as a CSV file, and then run it in my segment mapper tool to get a pretty picture Here it is! Click on the image below to get to the full html page that includes the mouse-overs showing the actual cM size and the base pair boundaries.
KatysWOLDmatches
One thing I find interesting is how large the segments are for us fairly close cousins.
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A Success with my DNA Spreadsheet

The other day I got an email from Katy, a new close cousin match for my Dad at family tree DNA, a 2nd to 4th cousin. I went and looked at where she matched Dad and saw two quite large segments,  34.47 cM and 18.87 cM. So I added those segments to Dad’s master spreadsheet and saw that the smaller one overlapped an 11.9 cM match with a known 3rd cousin on my WOLD line. But he was tested only at 23andme so I could not compare them. However because I am tested at both, as well as Dad, I could use the comparison with me to determine if they matched each other (see my post on alternate triangulation) and yes we all matched. So I wrote Katy back that she looked to be related on my WOLD line and she replied oh yes, my grandmother was a Wold!

My Gg-grandparents Jorgen and Anna Wold from another cousin

My great-great-grandparents Jorgen and Anna Wold

Her grandmother was the granddaughter of my great-great-grandparents whose pictures are shown above. So they are her gg-grandparents too, making us 3rd cousins and my Dad her 2nd cousin once removed. I had received these photos from another 3rd cousin some time ago. My family no longer had those pictures. One delightful thing about finding new 3rd and 4th cousins is that they often have photographs and stories of ancestors that are new to you.

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