Congratulations to Linda Hall-Little who has won a free pass to RootsTech 2014 for her question for Spencer Wells, “What is the future of DNA in genealogy? – say 25 years from now….”
Linda is excited to be coming to the conference. She is also a family history blogger at http://passagetothepast.wordpress.com/ and “she enjoys helping friends and family get started with their genealogy.”
She lives in New Hampshire and has deep New England roots. I look forward to meeting her!
Many of the Rootstech sessions will be streamed to the internet and then available for about a year online. The schedule of those sessions is at the familysearch web site: https://familysearch.org/node/2519 so I will add this video symbol to the sessions I am going to that will be online.
Today is the last day for my readers to win a free pass to Rootstech 2014 …
In my last post I had looked through the schedule for Rootstech up until Friday at 1:00. Below I have laid out the rest of what I plan to attend.
I am excited to finally meet Daniel Horowitz with whom I work remotely on the IAJGS cemetery site. He is the Chief Genealogist at MyHeritage.com, of which I am a big fan. One of the problems for those of us with recent ancestors from Europe is finding online sources and our distant relatives abroad. MyHeritage and GENI.com, who are partnered now, are two of the best sites to assist with that.
So this is a must-go-to session for me!
Finding Family and Ancestors Outside the USA with MyHeritage New Technologies RT1278DANIEL HOROWITZ
|
Friday, 2:30 PMRoom: Ballroom Hall
Skill Level Intermediate |
Hopefully I will find some time for the Exhibit Hall
One of the best parts of a conference like RootsTech is meeting people in person with whom you have been corresponding about your beloved hobby. There are a number of folk whom I really look forward to meeting in person.
Reminder there are 2 days left to win a free pass so send me your questions for Spencer Wells.
Since there are so many presentations I want to go to I thought I would try using the Ipad app. So I downloaded it and as soon as I tried to use it though it wanted a username and password. I tried several of my usual combos to no avail and then used the handy “forgotten password help” which kindly sent me my username and a new password.
Meanwhile here are my picks for presentations to attend:
Searching the Digital Archive of Norway RT1486FINN KARLSENHow can you find your ancestors in the Norwegian sources? Many of the sources are available free on the Internet, but how do you find what you need? |
Thursday, 10:30 AMRoom: 251A |
I have used the digital archive but have great trouble with the search engine. I really look forward to improving my skills!
Next I am torn between Tim Jantzen’s presentation, much of which I know already and …
So many of these one segment DNA matches that I find with other testers are too far back to find the common ancestors. However those of us with Norwegian ancestry often have very deep trees thanks to the good records and the many farm books for each locality. So when you find a fellow genealogist with Norwegian roots who matches your DNA you get quite hopeful, and sure enough …
I had four matches, the colored lines in the picture below, for my Norwegian descended Dad on chromosome 16. However they span the centromere which is from 35335801 to 38335801, so initially these segments did not seem that promising.
Four people overlapping on Chromosome 16
from my one segment mapper tool
Luckily the most recent match had an extensive tree of which only a small piece was Norwegian. So perhaps it would be easier to find our common ancestor with less tree to look through. Note that using a tool to compare Norwegian GEDcoms does not usually work so well because of differences in naming conventions (patronymic, farm name, Norwegian characters, etc)
Here are the details of these segment overlaps from my master spreadsheet for Dad:
| Edith | 16 | 31000000 | 52000000 | 9.20 | 1301 |
| Nancy | 16 | 31000000 | 54000000 | 9.70 | 1359 |
| Loretta | 16 | 31000000 | 52000000 | 9.90 | 1423 |
| Aaron | 16 | 33000000 | 53000000 | 8.2 | 1241 |
It is exciting when you find a new DNA cousin who actually has a family tree. However it can take days to wade through it looking for the common ancestor and more often than not, you do not find it. Sometimes that is because the ancestor is too far back in time. Other times it is on a line that is not documented or is just wrong. Also there can be spelling discrepancies or if you have Norwegians, naming differences (father’s name or farm name used for surname).
You would think that there would be good automated tools to do this and you would be right. These are the ones I know of.
Partial results of a GEDmatch compare one GEDcom to all run