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IAJGS conference and talking with Greenspan

Jul29

If this were a financial blog you would assume a different Greenspan than Bennett and in fact they may be related, but since Alan won’t do the DNA test, we may never know. Today at the annual IAJGS conference I spent some time chatting with Bennett in the Exhibition Hall.  I asked him if they could implement a triangulation feature where when two people match me on a specific segment I can check if they match each other on that spot. He said yes but gave me no time frame …

Selfie with Bennett Greenspan

Bennett Greenspan and Kitty Cooper

Bennett Greenspan is the founder of Family Tree DNA, one of the big three in personal DNA testing. This came about because a newly retired Bennett wanted to prove that the possible Argentinian relatives he had found were related when there was no paper trail showing this. He had read about Dr. Michael Hammer’s work with DNA and the cohanim Y chromosome marker and wondered why that sort of test could not be used for his case. Dr. Hammer laughed at him and said something like “If you knew how many crazy genealogists have been calling me … someone really ought to start a company.” The rest, as we say, is history.

Tomorrow at 1:45 Elise Freeman is going to speak about  “Understanding Your DNA Results in the Context of Ashkenazi Ancestry.” I can’t wait to hear her.

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GEDmatch is back up!

Jul21

GEDmatch.com is back up at last!

GEDmatch.com is the site where you can upload your DNA results from any of the three main companies and compare them to other people’s results uploaded there. I have numerous articles on GEDmatch on this site, just click GEDmatch in the tag cloud on the right or click here. There is also a guide to using GEDmatch in my downloads section.

Also for anyone in the San Diego area, I will be giving a talk on using GEDmatch on the third thursday in August for the Carlsbad group of ISOGG members. More details on that soon.

Having that site back is great news for those of us who love it!

MyOrigins name changes make better sense

Jun21

Family Tree DNA has simplified the names of the population clusters in the myOrigins feature to better match the way we think of those areas. For example, “European Coastal Islands” is now called the more sensible “British Isles.”

NewMyOrigins

my origins: before on the left and after on the right

The full list of name changes is at this URL: https://www.familytreedna.com/learn/ftdna/introducing-new-population-cluster-names-myorigins/

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New features for my tools: color selection and more lines

Jun10

My tools for showing segments on a chromosome picture now allow you to pick the colors yourself. Here is an example of the ancestor DNA mapper with some very different color choices from the ones the program would use.

Sample Chromosome Map ColorsHow to pick the colors is documented on the page for each tool.

My ancestor mapping tool:
http://blog.kittycooper.com/tools/chromosome-mapper/

My segment mapper, up to 40 relatives
http://blog.kittycooper.com/tools/segment-mapper/

No changes were made to the one chromosome mapper so if you want color choice on that tool as well just let me know.

Another recent enhancement is that the segment mapping tool now allows you to specify as many lines as you like for relatives in your chromosome picture. See an example in my post about four generations of inheritance.

Another way to triangulate: using close relatives

Jun6

I have been mainly working with my Dad’s Norwegian DNA at 23andme and at Family Tree DNA. Often he will have a match at one company and there will be a match to someone else on the same segment location at the other company. So how to tell if they match each other? Since one could have the DNA segment that Dad got from his mother and the other could have the segment Dad got from his father, the only way to be sure it is the same segment is if they also match each other on that segment. This is what is known as triangulation.

If they have both uploaded to GEDmatch, I can compare their two kits there and see if they match on that segment. Often however one or the other has not uploaded or the GEDmatch site is down. So I needed another way to figure this out.

It occurred to me that I could check if the new match also matches me there, since my results are at both web sites as well.

Obviously when they both match me on that DNA segment, I know they match each other. If one matches me and the other does not, then I know they are not a match. But what if they both do not match me? Then I must have inherited that segment from one of Dad’s parents and they are matching the DNA piece from his other parent.

In the case above, Dad has a 23cM match at Family Tree DNA with an adoptee at the same spot where he has many smaller matches over at 23andme. So do those folk match DM?

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