Ancestry Composition Numbers by Segment at 23andme.com

Dec21

Did you know 23andme now provides the segment data for its ancestry composition assignments? This is a pretty recent feature and might even be useful. Unlike the other companies, 23andme does its admixture (aka ancestry composition) in chunks. This may make it more accurate than the others but in any case it means that they can give us the segment numbers. Then we can compare those to our matches.

To get these numbers, first pull down the reports menu and click on ancestry. On the initial ancestry page click on Ancestry Composition or the > symbol next to your highest group. Both are marked with my red arrow below.

ac23starts

The next page, the ancestry composition page has the pretty chromosome picture with ancestries displayed where you can change the confidence level from speculative (50%) to conservative (90%). To get a CSV file of the segments you click on Scientific Details at the top or the bottom of this page.

ac23scidet

Then scroll all the way to bottom of that next page until you see this. You can select your confidence level as well for your downloaded data.

downloadrawadmix

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DNA lecture videos are now available from i4GG

Dec13

Cece Moore organized a conference just for genetic genealogy this past October in San Diego. It was terrific, the only problem was that I could not go to every lecture! Now that the videos are out, I can watch the ones I missed, including my own talk on GEDMatch.

For those of you who did not attend the conference, you can purchase all 19 videos for the amazingly good price of $99 or individual ones for $10 each. Click on the image below to order them. The quality is excellent.

i4ggvideoss

Those of you who were at the conference get them as part of the package so check your email inbox for the link and password.

Using Spreadsheets

Dec8

In recent discussions with a few of my genetic genealogy students, I discovered that many need some help with understanding how to use spreadsheets. So I went looking and found a series of excellent youtube videos that even taught me a few things. Here is the first one in the series.

He uses OpenOffice Calc which is free and happens to be the spreadsheet that I use.

The basic idea of a spreadsheet is to make a list of things that you want to keep track of, with the information about each of them listed next to them in columns. As you use it, you may decide to insert more columns, the things you are tracking for each, or more rows, the items you are interested in. You can also delete any of these and best of all, sort them.

For DNA tracking purposes, the only other important function to understand is formatting cells so that the numbers don’t surprise you by turning into dates or fractions when you do not want them to. Click here for a recent article claiming that 20% of scientific papers on genes contain gene name conversion errors because of this type of reformatting!

Personally I reformat the start and stop points to have commas so I can read the numbers more easily and make the centimorgans column (genetic distance) default to two decimal places so that they line up well. I also change the font to Arial.

Suppose you want to keep your match list in a spreadsheet. There are many articles on this blog that explain how to do that. Use the tag DNA spreadsheets to find them by clicking here – http://blog.kittycooper.com/tag/dna-spreadsheet/
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Holiday Sales and Specials

Nov24

This is a wonderful time of year for DNA testing because both Ancestry.com DNA testing and Family Tree DNA have great holiday sales. The Ancestry.com DNA testing sale does not start until midnight EST Thanksgiving day and lasts only until the 28th. See the banner below. What’s more, if you have already tested DNA, you can upload to DNA.land and perhaps receive a full genome test for Christmas (see the read more).

myftdnaholidayIn addition to the great bargain prices, Family Tree DNA has special coupons for existing users which are new every Monday. You have to log in to see yours. Click the green box marked Holiday Reward (like the image to the left here) located just above your matches on your home page there.

And let’s not forget that MyHeritage has also entered the DNA testing arena with a holiday sale price of $79. My understanding is that the Family Tree DNA lab is doing their testing so your results should be transferable to Family Tree DNA for more matching sometime in the future. Note that the National Geographic deep ancestry project is transferable already.

Also we have been promised another Christmas present, any day now, Family Tree DNA will be able to take uploads of DNA data from the new chips at ancestry and 23andme for only $39.

So give the gift of DNA testing this year … Happy Holidays all!


and for the information on the DNA.land holiday gifting …

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My German Second Cousin’s DNA Results are In!

Nov18

Second cousin DNA tests are my favorites. You share enough DNA with a second cousin to be really useful for genetic genealogy. When someone matches your second cousin, you know which of your four pairs of great-grandparents they are related to, so it identifies the family line they are on.

benedictrsmll

Benedict Reiner in the 1880s

Of course not all second cousins are created equal. Due to the vagaries of DNA inheritance some may have inherited more from the mutual great-grandparents and some less. For example, my Dad shares 608 cMs with my second cousin John from his mom’s side and only 389 cMs with my second cousin Dick from his Dad’s side. I discussed this variability in a recent post about how to tell the relationship from the shared DNA.

I thought I had no chance of a second cousin on my maternal side because my German-born mother’s parents were both only children, or so I thought. When I started researching my family history back in the 1990s, by asking questions of my aunts, I found a family secret or at least a story I had not known before. My great-grandfather Benedict Reiner had gotten the innkeeper’s daughter pregnant and then left town; he moved to Munich and a few years later married my great-grandmother. Further discussions had revealed that the child’s name was Xavier and he had visited occasionally so the families had been in touch. This was not enough information to find him or his family, since he had his mother’s surname, but thanks to GENI.com, I found them by accident. That story was a blog post earlier this year – http://blog.kittycooper.com/2016/01/thank-you-geni-com/

Now for even more good luck, my brother had a trip to Germany scheduled for a few months later so he was able to take a day off and actually meet our newly found cousins. Here is the picture.

Our German Second Cousins

Katharina, Brigitte, Shipley (my brother), Edeltraut

Even more exciting for me, we convinced them to test autosomal DNA at Family Tree DNA. We tested the oldest, my half second cousin Edeltraud, the grandmother of my correspondent Katharina. Today the results came in and I am so very happy!

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