Touring the Family Tree DNA lab

Aug24

Some people when visiting Houston might want to go see the butterflies or visit the art museum but not me. On my first day here my choice was to go over to Family Tree DNA and take a tour of their testing laboratory conducted by Bennett Greenspan himself. Sometimes there are benefits to being a well known blogger!

The Tecan machine

Bennett points out the Tecan machine, which adds chemicals to extract the DNA

The lab is remarkable for its use of robotics. Bennett said something to us along the lines of “knowledge workers should be doing knowledge tasks and robots the repetitive tasks. Hard to compete with China any other way.” It was great to see all those automated pipettes. It would have been nice to have those in our science labs way back when.

All of us genealogists who are using DNA testing to solve family mysteries have Bennett Greenspan to thank for starting the personal genome testing revolution in 2000. All because he was a genealogist who wanted to know if he was related to some possible cousins in Argentina and could not find it with the paper trail. He also had time on his hands due to selling his photographic supplies business. Here is the story in an interview he did on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bq092MQUGQ

Continue reading →

Size Matters for Matching DNA Segments

Aug12

The more large segments you share, the more closely related you are to a DNA match. To learn more about segments, read the blog by one of my favorite DNA writers on the yahoo DNA-NEWBIE list, Jim Bartlett, called Segmentology.org
Brynne Ancestor MapHe explains why you share such large chunks of DNA with your closer relatives by showing how recombination works and how few cross-overs there usually are in a recent post at  http://segmentology.org/2015/05/24/segments-bottom-up/

While the total amount of shared DNA in centimorgans (cMs) is a fine indicator for your closest relatives out to second cousins, farther relationships can be more and more random in the amount of shared DNA. You can consult the charts and numbers at ISOGG here – http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics – to determine those closer relatives.

Continue reading →

Ancestry.com News

Aug1

So much to report, teach me to take a vacation! Ancestry.com has a new database: Social security applications and claims index, and DNAgedcom has a new tool to report your ancestry DNA total cMs, and I missed mentioning the Ancestry DNA sale at $79 instead of the usual $99 because it ends tonight. Hopefully there will be another one soon.

SocSecAppIndxI tried looking for my uncle in the index and it found him quickly. It listed his birthplace and parents names, useful information.

To learn more about the U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index read this post from Randy Seaver: http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/07/new-ancestrycom-database-us-social.html – I recommend following his blog for news about databases added to familysearch and ancestry plus many good genealogy articles.

I hope to review the DNAgedcom ancestry client soon. It requires a subscription which seems fair as increased usage is bound to be costing them money and it is hard for these free sites to exist on donations alone. I like this trend whereby you can subscribe to a site like DNAgedcom or GEDmatch and get extra functionality but there is still plenty of good stuff available for free.

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate of Ancestry.com and profit slightly when you click my links, see my footer here for all my affiliations.

Congratulations to DNAadoption on its anniversary

Jul14

You do not have to be an adoptee to benefit from a class on DNAadoption.com – they have several one day classes which are introductions, explaining how to use your results, tailored to each specific vendor. They also have a longer basics course and many more advanced courses.

Diane, Tim Janzen, and Kitty at the 2013 Rootstech

Diane, Tim Janzen, and Kitty at the 2013 Rootstech

The inimitable Diane Harman-Hoog wrote a blog post today announcing the two year anniversary of their classes. Along with Karin Corbeil and Rob Warthen, Diane has taken DNA adoption searches into the electronic age with online courses and much more information available on that site. The many success stories bring tears to my eyes.  A few are here – http://www.dnaadoption.com/index.php?page=reunions and more can be found in the archives of the DNAadoption yahoo group.

I got to meet Diane at the 2013 Rootstech conference along with expert genetic genealogist Tim Janzen and many other wonderful people I had corresponded with via email. Needless to say I keep going back to that conference; of course, the location next to the great genealogy library in Salt Lake City has something to do with that also!

Rob Warthen has written some wonderful tools that benefit all of us genetic genealogists that are hosted over at DNAgedcom.com and are linked to from the DNA adoption site.

Continue reading →

Talking about Triangulation

Jul9

Next Thursday, July 16, I will give my presentation on using triangulation with autosomal DNA test results over in Carlsbad for DIG, the DNA Interest Group of the North San Diego County Genealogical Society (click here for the where and when). This was last given at the Jamboree and might be given at the next Rootstech.

TriangulationSlidesMy slides are online, but without my speech, they are not much use. However I have written up the words that are meant to accompany them in my downloads area

I like to use examples from my own research in my talks to illustrate the “how tos.” My blog post on triangulation from earlier this year does just that, specifically discussing the case of a possible third cousin once removed, postulated from the paper trail, and then proven with DNA triangulation. Other cases discussed include unknown DNA relatives matching at the same spots.

Continue reading →