The 23andme Family Tree built from DNA

May31

The dream of every genetic genealogist is to be able to build a family tree from just DNA. 23andme made a terrific start on this with their Beta family tree released in October. Now it is out of test mode and they have added good editing facilities. Being slightly obsessive, I tried it out with almost everyone whose login I have (my family and many friends and clients).

My paternal side tree built with DNA at 23andme is accurate (fixed one cousin)

I find it useful to fill in the names of my ancestors and the child from which my cousins are descended. On my own tree I was able to remove an incorrect generation turning a 3rd cousin into a 2nd cousin. I also like the compact display with nodes for each ancestor and the ancestors of tested relatives. Click here for an excellent and detailed help document at 23andme.

Major missing features are 1) no ability to export the tree and 2) no capability to share it with family members. Those are big drawbacks for serious genealogists like me. The other problem is that I cannot figure out how to get it to recalculate a tree although the documentation refers to that a number of times.

The family tree that 23andme builds from your DNA relatives only includes those who have opted into open sharing or those with whom you have “connected” via that button on their match page. According to the documentation there is a limit as to how many people you can have in a diagram plus the initial trees are built from your closest 20 matches. You can add people to the tree and there seems to be a provision for new relatives going into a side box and getting added from there. I did not see any cases of that.

My Norwegian Dad’s tree is completely accurate. The right side has just relatives on his mother’s tree and left his father’s. I have figured out or been in touch with all his listed matches. The only one I cannot vouch for is a woman who, based on her other family matches, has a different great grandfather from the one on record (it seems to have really been one of my grandfather’s brothers, a widower preacher in that neck of the great plains). No, I have not pursued this after no response from her to several delicately phrased emails a few years ago.

The only inconsistency is that there are several matches from Dad’s Halling great grandparents that do not show on his tree but show on mine.

My Jewish husband Steve’s tree was most interesting as it showed all his DNA relatives as being from one side which was incorrect. Possibly because Jewish people from the same geographic area, Galicia in his case, will always have some shared DNA from past cousin marriages. The key with Jewish matches is to look at segment sizes.

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Who is my great great grandfather’s daddy? A ThruLines experiment

May3

My great great grandfather Jørgen Oleson Wold, 1816-1892, from Skougar near Drammen, Norway, was born 9 years before his parents tied the knot. Although his father is listed as the man his mother eventually married, DNA testing has stirred up my doubts.

Having a child out of wedlock was not uncommon in rural Norway of the 1800s. It was not considered shameful in many areas. Often the couple would marry later on; you had to be able to support a wife in order to have one. Another reason is that people wanted to be sure they could have children before marrying, since many hands were needed on the farm. The data shows that quite often women were pregnant at the altar. Click here for an article showing that having a sexual relationship and getting pregnant was the normal way to start a marriage in at least one area of Norway at that time. Night visiting, fully clothed, was a customary way for young people to get to know each other.

According to the 19th century clerygyman and sociologist Eilert Sundt (my 10th cousin 3R), who looked carefully at many population statistics, 43% of all Norwegian children were conceived before their parents got married back in the mid 1800s. Click here for the article that cites this.

The problem for Jørgen’s parentage is that there are no DNA matches on just his father of record’s line. It is always possible to get less DNA from one 3rd grandparent but it seemed that all my family’s matches to the descendants of other children of that marriage were smaller than expected. We also have many matches quite far back on Jørgen’s wife’s line, suggesting it was possible we just had more DNA from her side but also demonstrating that when there are many generations of large families, DNA matches to 5th and 6th cousins will be found. This is also true on our other Norwegian lines.

Could Jørgen have a different father? If so, I would expect to see a group of 4th cousin matches who match each other but are not assigned to any of our known lines. Since Norwegian records are good, our ancestors are well documented back into the 1700s or even earlier.

There is a large group of matches that fits that scenario, all descended from one Torkild Westby b 1810, Drammen, Norway. It so happens that Westby/Vestby is a farm in Skoger just outside of Drammen where Jørgen may have lived as a youth. Norwegians did not have surnames back then, they used their father’s name plus their farm of residence which could change. Also W was pronounced as V in Norway so they are interchangable in the spelling. When Torkild’s children came to America they used the surname Westbye. I found the birth record for Torkild in the Norwegian archives and sure enough, he was born on farm Westby in Skoger..

Torkild’s birth and baptism record in the Skoger Churchbook for 1810 – http://urn.digitalarkivet.no/URN:NBN:no-a1450-kb20070402610138.jpg (3rd from bottom on right)

I decided to try a ThruLines experiment by changing Jørgen’s father to Torkild’s father, Jahn Jahnsen Westbye, in my Ancestry tree and see what happened. For Jørgen’s father and grandfather of record, Thrulines listed no DNA matches that were not also listed for his son.

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Super Large Numbers Do Not Work in my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM Tool

Apr29

Alert, there is a bug in my tool to convert text files to GEDCOMs: very large Ahnentafel numbers like “46406041600” will cause it to hang.

I will add code to ignore large numbers by May (end of this week). If you are a regular user of this tool, check this post for the update when the new feature is released.

Something must have changed on the collection of trees because I had three emails in the last week complaining that my tool hung and did not complete the conversion. In all cases, the Ahnentafel went up to extremely large numbers, so eliminating those last few lines fixed the problem

Here is an example of the last several lines of a file that did not work:

Here are the last few lines of the same file after removing the lines with very high numbers. This version worked.

Do you really need these people born in the 1200s? What is the probability that they even are actually your ancestors?

This appears to be some sort of limitation in either the storage space for the program or the number sizes. Thus I propose to modify the code to ignore ahnentafel numbers with more than seven digits and to have it tell you that it did that.

Any other ideas out there? Remember I make almost no money on this, just the occasional small thank you donation, so I am not looking for a solution that will take lots of my time.

New Ancestry DNA Feature: Connecting Matches to Your Tree

Apr22

New Icon: Match connected to Tree

 

Ancestry has unveiled a new convenient feature: the ability to link a DNA match to their entry in your tree. No one can see the resulting tag but you or someone with whom you have shared your DNA results.

In the past, I would add the pathway to the relationship in the notes for a match. Below is how the match to my second cousin John looks now. The tree icon with a check next to his name means that I have connected this match to my tree. Clicking on that icon will take you to a view of him within my tree. On the right you can see how I explained his connection to me in the notes next to the notepad icon.

Over in your tree, each person that has been connected to a DNA match also has that icon on their image. Here is how my brother looks in the pedigree view in my tree now with the new icon next to a green leaf. People I have shared BOTH my tree and DNA with can also see that icon but not on the living unless they specifically have permission to see living people in your tree. Also they have to have turned on “connected DNA Matches” from the DNA icon at the bottom of the far left tower of icons. That icon is only there when a DNA test is connected to that tree. Clicking it slides in a panel on the right where you can select which DNA icons you want to see. For example, since I have turned on the ThruLines indicator, my parents and grandparents have the ThruLines icon showing in the image below.

Pedigree view of my brother, yellow arrow pointing to the DNA icon added by me

Why is this useful you may ask? Well for me it is most useful on those distant cousins with no trees whose relationship I figured out a while back and have probably forgotten the details of by now. Or maybe Ancestry found it for me and I added that family branch to my tree (click here for my post for how to easily do that).

Since I have shared both my DNA and my tree with my brother and a few interested cousins, they can look at my match list for those icons to see if I have already figured out how a newly found cousin connects to us.

The other time I have found this new feature to be really useful is when I have a research tree for an unknown parentage case and have built out the tree of a match as a floating branch within that tree to much more depth than they had in their own tree. Now I can connect those matches so that I can quickly click to see what I have built for them.

Here is the step by step of how to set up a connection with this new tool using my brother as an example.

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When the found father needs help understanding the DNA results

Apr13

image from a late 19th century Kunisada print owned by Kitty

Often when I help someone find their biological father with DNA it turns out that he never knew about the pregnancy. His reaction when contacted varies greatly, perhaps his memories of the 60s or 70s are quite faint… Frequently his first question is “How did you find me?” Or “What makes you think it’s me?”

Sometimes my answer is because a close relative of yours tested their DNA and helped us. More often I explain the basic methodology of pedigree triangulation that was used, as follows.

We look at the family trees of 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th cousin DNA matches to see what ancestors they have in common with each other. Sometimes we find two shared ancestral couples, then we look for the son of a person descended from one couple who married a daughter descended from the other couple.

Other times we just find one ancestral couple and some common surnames. We build that couple’s family tree downwards, looking for some of the other surnames we found until we find a descendant who was in the right place at the right time to be the missing father. There are a number of posts here describing specific success stories that are tagged Adoption Success Stories. Click here for my favorite and easy to understand story.

Click here for a more advanced explanation of pedigree triangulation with informative images from DNAadoption.org

Next we ask the found possible father to take a DNA test. To encourage him to use the testing company that his probable child used to confirm the results, rather than a commercial paternity test, I send the following plus more details of how he was found including images of the family trees.
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