Archives

Ancestry’s Updated Ancestral Origins

Oct13

Ancestry.com has just completed a major update to its DNA bio-ancestry predictions that has broken down European countries into many smaller areas. They have added 68 locales, mainly in Europe. French Canadians are no longer listed as France, now they are either Quebec or Acadia. They have also made four jewish groups from one: Central and Eastern Ashkenazi plus North African and East Mediterranean Sephardic. Almost all my Jewish friends have no Sephardic listed, giving the lie to some family stories. There are some interesting new categories like Germans in Russia and one combining both sides of the English Channel into a new category called Southeastern England & Northwestern Europe.

I am enjoying looking at the updated origins of many of the people I have helped. On the next page I will show images of the more interesting mixtures. Here is a classic North European mix of a Tenneseean with colonial roots.

I do recommmend scrolling down and clicking on the link to what has changed. Below is the image of how the predictions for our Tennesseean are different from last year. Notice that Germany has gone from 21% to 2%. Some of that must now be Denmark and some SE England & NW Europe.

While 1-2% could be a 4th or 5th grandparent, it could also be just noise or too far back to find. I have often told people not to worry about a 1% call as it is too small to be sure of. In my own case, I lost my 1% Finnish, which I actually thought was accurate because its location matches one of the two where my Norwegian American dad has Finnish, according to 23andme. Additionally, 23andme has my brother matching the other location. We have yet to find that Finnish 4th or further back grandparent, but we do match many Finnish people on those segments over at GEDmatch. Perhaps they just have some Norwegian. More on that in another blog post.

To quote my own blog post from 2020 comparing the origin predictions at each company “predicting the ethnicity for people of Northern European heritage like my brother and myself, is very hard to do accurately because there was so much mixing of those populations.” The book “Who We Are and How We Got Here” by geneticist David Reich makes that point well and goes into the details of what ancient DNA teaches us about European migrations and mixtures.

I found the explanatory Ancestry white paper (click here to read it) hard to understand, so I enlisted two different AI platforms to summarize it for me. A fun use of this technology. To be fair, after the quite technical many paragraph summary ChatGPT gave me, I wised up and asked Claude to summarize it in plain English. That went better. Here are a few take aways:

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A Breakthrough in my German DNA

Jun17

Modern day Germans do not seem to do DNA testing. I have one German grandparent born in Munich, with several generations of Bavarian ancestors, whose line I never get any matches to. Since this is my mother’s mother’s line with the paternal lines proven, the lack of matches is not due to an NPE (non parental event). For example, I have one German half 2nd cousin on my maternal grandmother’s father’s side who tested at my request (click here for that post).

Ancestry has a nice new feature where you can filter your matches by Journeys (where your ancestors came from); see image to the left. I was disappointed not to have any German journeys, but my brother has something called Franconia. When I used that filter I found a good match at the top of his list. Richard, from Pennsylvania (think Pennsylvania Dutch aka Deutsch), with an Italian surname, shares 72cM with my brother, 62 cM with me, and 25 cM with our first cousin Margaret. Richard’s tree had no ancestors listed, but his closest shared match to us, a great nephew, did have a small tree. One thing I like to do with my Pro Tools is to change the way matches are sorted to be by the best ones for the match I am looking at, rather than the usual sort of those closest to me (see image below). Their close matches often have better trees or have notes I wrote to myself when I figured them out long ago.

That nephew has all but one person showing as private in his tree. Luckily the one person whose name shows has the same surname as Richard. Next I clicked over to her profile page and used the Ancestry search function to find a more complete tree for her, which included her parents. Her mother Frances had a surname, LANG, that I knew was in my tree. She was even born in the same town, Eslarn, Bavaria, as my great grandmother Margaretha Wittman! Another search at ancestry found Francis’ Eslarn grandparents’ names in yet another tree, whose owner was also a distant DNA match.

There is a useful German website – https://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/ – which has genealogy information from many German town lineage books, including the one for Eslarn. You can list everyone with a specific surname in your town to search for an individual. Be sure to check alternate spellings. Armed with the names of Frances Lang’s grandparents, I went to that source and traced her mother back to my great grandmother’s grandparents. This was not easy because the same names were used over and over again. Frances’ mother had the same name as my great grandmother. Also their fathers, who were uncle and nephew, had the same name, Joseph Widmann/Wittman. Complicated to figure this out, but birth years helped.

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23andme: Now and Then

Sep23

23andme started out by being a leader in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing business. Time Magazine named it the 2008 Invention of the Year![1] It was the first place I tested my own autosomal DNA and that of many family members back in 2011-2012. Originally it had the best cousin matching tools, best ethnicity estimates, and had a well designed interface to examine the health implications in your own genome. Now I recommend to most that they start with Ancestry DNA and then upload that data to several other sites, including Promethease for the medical analysis, although 23andme still tests a wider range of health related genes.

23andme has been in the news this week because its entire board, except its founder, Anne Wojcicki, resigned over her plan to take it private again. It went public in 2021 but has yet to turn a profit and the WSJ reports that it will run out of cash next year [ref WSJ]. However there is at least one company interested in buying it according to a post on the DNA-Newbie list.

How should those of us who have tests there react to this news? Personally I am not worried, mainly because I hardly ever use the site anymore. I have long since downloaded my data and have contacted most of my closer matches. Roberta Estes has done a thorough blog post (click here) explaining how to save your data from 23andme.

The reason I rarely use 23andme is because it no longer allows you to compare your DNA to a relative in a chromosome browser; the feature I liked the best. I now do that at GEDmatch, Family Tree DNA, and MyHeritage. That tool was removed because of a data breach over a year ago where a hacker got lists of Jewish and Chinese testers and posted them for sale on the dark web. The break-in took advantage of users who had the same email and password on multiple sites, some of which had been exposed elsewhere.

Perhaps it is the resulting class action suit that caused part of 23andme’s financial woes. Click here for an article about how that is being settled with users.

My understanding was that the inspiration for the founding of 23andme was that Genia Brin, the mother of the then husband of founder Anne Wojcicki, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1998 [ref michaelfox org]. The focus of 23andme has always been on discovering the genetic basis of various medical issues, not genealogy. However they have been quite supportive of adoptees (click here), since it is helpful to know what issues may lie in your DNA when you have no known family health history.

One way to look at the genetic basis of various diseases is to crowd-source lots of genomes.

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Riding the Rails

Aug5

​One of the benefits of doing genealogy is seeing history through the eyes of your ancestors. Sometimes helping another with their family history has a similar advantage. Cathie’s father wrote up his experiences in the 30s for her. I was so charmed by them that I asked for permission to publish a slightly edited and condensed version on my blog. Here it is:

I left home when I was just 16 in June of 1929. I worked on a farm, a golf course and spent the winter in a home for homeless boys in Chicago until clement weather arrived.

I then “rode the rails” with a vengeance when real Spring weather arrived — April or May 1930. I had made up my mind I wanted to reach the West Coast to become an apprentice seaman and, (for some obscure reason), to reach Japan.

Let me digress here a moment. Hitchhiking was the optimum way of traveling for a “wanderer” (later, a “bum”) in densely-populated areas. One could get to the outskirts of a town or city easily and there was considerable traffic from whom rides could be cadged ​with the thumb. But when it came to crossing the vast distances of the West, freight trains were the only answer. (You could starve to death hitchhiking in say, Wyoming or Nevada.)

So I took up “riding the rails”. ​It was not easy. You had to find the freight yards, seek out​ other bums who were going to take the next west-bound freight to assure yourself you had the​ right train and then position yourself strategically between where the train was made up, beyond​ where the railroad “dicks” kept the train under surveillance but still close enough to its point of​ origin before it reached dangerous speed. Then jumping into an empty car was no simple task.​ The outside door latch had to be​ unfastened, the door pushed open; then you used both your​ arms to lift yourself so you could slide on your stomach into the car. If your travelling​ companions had already gotten into the cars, they would give you a hand thus making the entry​ in a lot easier.

One had to be prepared for the monotony of hours, or days of travel. The scenery was generally​ entrancing. Freight trains stopped a lot, as you could dismount and stretch your legs or seek​ out a drinking water source. The brakemen riding in the caboose knew they had unauthorized​ passengers but normally took no adverse action against them. Chasing bums off trains “was not​ their job” (they left that to the railroad dicks).

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Using AI for Genealogy by Steve Little

Feb26

One of the most unusual talks at the recent i4GG conference (videos coming soon) was the one about the use of AI for genealogy by Steve Little, the AI program director for the National Genealogical Society (NGS).  I learned that it was how you phrased your question that could lead to more accurate answers, e.g. “you are a professional genealogist … ” I found out that AI, particularly the paid versions, could extract text from documents, even handwritten ones and translate in context. Here is my favorite slide from that talk. Personally my first impression of ChatGPT had been that it was great at sounding good while making stuff up.

Slide from Steve Little’s talk, used by permission

Steve will be speaking at RootsTech at 8 am Thursday this week and will also be available at the NGS booth as per his post on FaceBook.

Amusingly, in my own talk about using bioancestry to solve unknown parentage cases, I had experimented with using AI generated images to illustrate a few of my points. For example, when I asked the deepAI image generator for a Hungarian violinist I got this image whose hands are imperfect, but it still adds pizzazz to the slide.

No sooner has my favorite DNA conference (i4GG) ended, than it is time to get ready for Rootstech! No I won’t be there in person this year, too much to do to prepare for our move to Connecticut. Hope everyone has a great time. I will attend virtually, so if you are logged in there, you can click here to see if you are related to me! As all my ancestors are fairly recent immigrants (earliest 1860s), I have only 434 relatives at Rootstech, the closest being a fifth cousin. Oh well.