Genealogy

Given the way that autosomal DNA tests for genealogy work, there are two things that are important for success in using that DNA data to find matches: finding your ancestors back to ten generations, and finding all possible descendants from them. I came to this conclusion after reading the excellent blog post, How Much of Your Family Tree Do You Know? And Why Does That Matter?   where the author says, whenever we make a conclusion about a particular ancestor or ancestral couple based on segments of DNA shared with a relative, we absolutely must address whether we do, or could, share other ancestors with that relative. The author made a nice little chart summarizing how much he knew, so I did the same thing. Mine is not as pretty, but here it is anyway: Key:   Generation: from me; Relationship: to me; Date of Birth: roughly averaged; Matches: description; # Poss. Anc.: total number of possible ancestors in each generation; # Identified: number of ancestors identified...

* Outreach - finding cousins and other relatives * Research - answering questions and solving mysteries * Paying respect - finding and telling the stories of those who can no longer speak All of these aspects of family history research have energized my interest in the past, and I'm liking the new tools available to support that. A few years ago I was fascinated by the new use of DNA in genealogy research, and have used 23andme, Ftdna, and Gedmatch. I started using MyHeritage because 23andme chose to use that site to display family trees. When MyHeritage offered a special deal ($99) for one year of access to their research resources, I bit. One feature I particularly enjoy is that when you find a person in, say, the census, the MH software queues up the rest of the family as well. You can quite easily not just link the family together, but also attach the source attribution to each of them. Another nice feature is their software matching each person in your tree to resou...

It's been about a month since I gave up waiting and started "making something happen" on 23andme . I have 983 "DNA Relatives" there, and Gedmatch shows me my top 1000 matches. I've messaged all of the 23andme matches, with mixed results. First, only about one-third of the cousins have a name or profile that I can see on 23andme. Those people I have messaged by name, and if they have surnames and/or localities listed, I often mention those if they sound interesting or familiar. Many people have nothing listed in their profile but a name. Those folks without a name can be messaged, but it has to be generic. A few of those nameless people have accepted contact, and some "sharing", which is what 23andme calls comparing genomes. Of course sharing genomes is the whole reason I'm doing this, so it has been a lot of work just to get to starting line. For those who are not interested in doing this work to get matches, my advice is: use FTDNA or An...

I've loved the search for genealogy and my family's history since my children were young. I wanted to understand my roots, and why some of the difficulties my family endured happened, and how those events changed all those who were touched by them. I found young orphans, babies born before marriage, rape, and tragic death by fire among the more normal events. I've also found some family lines that are rather well-researched, which took away the challenge. For some years other projects took my time. Then, the yDNA tests became affordable, and I bought an Family Tree DNA kit for my dad for Father's Day. Because those "beginner kits" don't tell you much, and have far too many meaningless matches, I kept paying for upgrades, all the way up to 67 markers. This took his high-quality matches down to under 10, but as we followed up on these matches, we realized that this line of Cowans came from Stirling, in Scotland. The recorded part of the family went to t...

It took me a year to really start using 23andme. I think it was because it is hard to know what to do. Recently I got tired of waiting for something to happen, and decided to just wade in and make it happen. As of now, I have over 85 people I'm sharing with, with another 252 invitations to share. Altogether, tonight I have finished contacting all 962 matches that they report, unless I skipped someone inadvertently. The page where you can make this happen too is https://www.23andme.com/you/relfinder/ . This page links every match up to 1000, and you can sort it various ways. What I did first was sort it this way and that, randomly messaging people, with very few responses. When I got serious, instead I made a little text: We may be related according to 23&me. I've been doing genealogy research for quite awhile, and my old GEDCOM is online at Rootsweb: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~valoriez. And GEDMATCH: kit # M186808 Main surnames are Baysinger, Booth, Cowan, Disn...