My presentation on GEDmatch Tools is this Thursday in Carlsbad, CA

Aug19

If you live anywhere in the San Diego area, you might enjoy hearing me talk about the tools at GEDmatch this Thursday evening, August 21, at 6:30 to the DNA Interest Group of the North San Diego County Genealogical Society (known as DIGG – click this link for location details) . I will link to the presentation in the comments here by Thursday. Instead of powerpoint, I am using a cool online HTML 5 tool at slides.com to create the presentation. Here is one of the images I made for the talk.

Sample Admix MDLP World-22 Calculator

In the left image, the pygmy is actually the smaller red slice and Sub-Saharan the larger – can you tell the colors apart? I cannot.

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How many ancestors do we all really have?

Aug16

In a post back in May, I discussed how there were not enough people on the earth in about the year 1000 A.D for all the ancestors we theoretically have.

Recently I found a great Utube video via a facebook post that explains the “how many ancestors” problem brilliantly. So here it is:

One can postulate that everyone alive at about 1000 A.D. in Europe, who has descendants, is the ancestor of every European person today. Therefore we are ALL descended from Charlemagne. I have at least 3 documented lines to him, how many do you have? See this page on my family history site for more.

Are you in the DC area? Going to the conference?

Aug14

Have a look at Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist’s, post today about the Genetic Genealogy conference in Washington, DC starting tomorrow, Friday. Her post says it all. Wish I could be there!

Using my segment mapper for cousin Katy

Aug12

I finally got Katy’s data uploaded to GEDmatch so that I could compare it to all my other WOLD cousins. Naturally I had to make a spreadsheet of her overlaps, save it as a CSV file, and then run it in my segment mapper tool to get a pretty picture Here it is! Click on the image below to get to the full html page that includes the mouse-overs showing the actual cM size and the base pair boundaries.

One thing I find interesting is how large the segments are for us fairly close cousins.
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A Success with my DNA Spreadsheet

Aug7

The other day I got an email from Katy, a new close cousin match for my Dad at family tree DNA, a 2nd to 4th cousin. I went and looked at where she matched Dad and saw two quite large segments, 34.47 cM and 18.87 cM. So I added those segments to Dad’s master spreadsheet and saw that the smaller one overlapped an 11.9 cM match with a known 3rd cousin on my WOLD line. But he was tested only at 23andme so I could not compare them. However because I am tested at both, as well as Dad, I could use the comparison with me to determine if they matched each other (see my post on alternate triangulation) and yes we all matched. So I wrote Katy back that she looked to be related on my WOLD line and she replied oh yes, my grandmother was a Wold!

My Gg-grandparents Jorgen and Anna Wold from another cousin

My great-great-grandparents Jorgen and Anna Wold

Her grandmother was the granddaughter of my great-great-grandparents whose pictures are shown above. So they are her gg-grandparents too, making us 3rd cousins and my Dad her 2nd cousin once removed. I had received these photos from another 3rd cousin some time ago. My family no longer had those pictures. One delightful thing about finding new 3rd and 4th cousins is that they often have photographs and stories of ancestors that are new to you.