Ancestry® Genealogist Crista Cowan Works with ThruLines™ | Ancestry

hi there I am Christa Cowan I am the corporate genealogist here at ancestry and this session is going to be a little bit different for a couple of reasons one is we're being filmed so hello to our friends on Facebook and the second one is because I have nothing prepared and here's why I have nothing prepared okay it's because this is called watch a Jenny ologist work why I'll tell you how this came about I have six nephews and the world's only niece and they're all very big video gamers I think the niece is probably worse than any of the nephews actually right and they will sit and they will play video games and they will watch each other play video games and then they'll go sit on YouTube and on YouTube they'll watch other kids play video games and it makes no sense to me whatsoever but then I said I wonder if people would watch a genealogist do genealogy and so I tried it on YouTube and y'all did like you just sat and watched me do genealogy and so then our conference organizer said I wonder if they would watch you do jenny ology at a conference and I said well they could but then you have to stick a headset on me and make me talk while I do it and so that's what we're gonna do I don't know if it's going to work but if it does it's gonna be amazing but they asked me to focus specifically on three lines okay so if three lines for DNA is what we're going to kind of where I'm gonna spend some of my time while we spend this 20 25 minutes together so let me explain just a little bit about what that is then I'll dive in my three lines and you can see me maybe make some fun discoveries about things I didn't know we'll see how that works out so in order to get through lines you have to have taken an ancestry DNA test you have to have a family tree on ancestry and that tree has to be either public or it has to be private searchable if your tree is private unsearchable you won't get three lines okay so taking a DNA test on ancestry have a tree that tree has to be either public or private searchable and then the fourth thing is you have to make sure that your DNA and you tree are connected and the way that they need to be connected is to the person who spit in the tube because you can't talk about DNA I'm talking about spit I know it's gross okay the way you know if your tree is connected correctly is when you're viewing your DNA homepage if you look right across the top there it'll say this test is shown to matches as and then it says linked to and so I know that my test is linked correctly to me because I'm the person who took the DNA test if all of those conditions have happened okay then you will have three lines and three lines are going to show up right here on that DNA homepage you can access them right here to explore your three lines now here's what through lines look like people look like my parents apparently that's my dad and my mom these are my four grandparents okay these are my eight great-grandparents I still need to find a picture of that guy okay here's my great-great and so on just right down by generation so basically what three lines does is it takes your family tree your pedigree and it just turns it on its head okay so you've got the parents and and it's just broken out by generation then okay once we show that then what we do is we look at your DNA matches so you've taken a DNA test sixteen million other people have taken a DNA test and we have given you a list of about 55,000 people who match you oh my gosh Cecilia you're from vernal I was gonna make a joke about vernal and now I can't because she's sitting on just startled me so we take your tree we take your DNA matches the average person on ancestry has about 55,000 DNA matches it just so happens that my parents skew the average my dad has about 76,000 my mom has about 86,000 and part of the reason my dad has 76,000 matches is because part of his family is in Verna I'm all married to each other and everybody's related my dad and I even never my dad's never been to vernal and every time we talk about this and start working on our DNA matches together he goes the next time I come out to Utah we need to drive out to vernal and just walk down the street and say are you my cousin apparently related to the okay so so you have your list of DNA matches if your DNA matches have also attached their public tree to themselves ancestry uses this through Lions technology to see if we can figure out how you're related to those matches so what we do is we say okay you've got this tree and they've got this tree and sometimes we get really lucky and you have the same ancestor in both trees and so that's easy right we can say oh look you both descend from this guy here you go okay sometimes you have the ancestor in your tree but they don't and so then we have to kind of fill in the gap between where their tree ends up to the common ancestor well besides the fact that you have a tree in your match has a tree there are a hundred million other family trees on ancestry so we just go to work looking and seeing if we can find a path to connect them to that common ancestor okay sometimes neither of you have the common ancestor in your tree so your tree only goes back this far their tree only goes back this far and now we have to bridge this whole gap okay so when you both have the common ancestor in your tree that's easy it's pretty trustworthy you still probably need to verify it when one of you does not there's going to be a little bit of a gap that we're gonna try and fill in and you're gonna need to verify that and if neither of you do you're gonna have to bridge that whole gap or look at that whole gap so here's how you tell when you're looking at your through lines what you're dealing with parents grandparents great-grandparents I'm gonna have to get down a little ways okay do you see this Mary Coughlin right here she's green and there's you can't see it really well probably on the camera or here in the room even if it's got like this is a really thin dotted line around it you see that what that tells me then there's this little chatter this little label here it says potential ancestor so I do not have marry in my tree and the way I know that is because dotted line and it says potential ancestor everybody else here is actually in my tree okay but Mary is not so she's one of those people where the gap had to be bridged by other trees on ancestry but she wouldn't be showing up if there wasn't some kind of a DNA connection that was causing that to generate okay so there's DNA and now the DNA and the trees are trying to work together to figure out how these people are related okay we're gonna look at an example of one of my three lines here actually let's do this I talked about my dad all the time my dad and I use some of you know we spend every Sunday night on the phone we actually spend that time working on our DNA matches trying to figure out how they're related to us and so because my dad's tested and my mom's tested I don't actually use my own DNA results ever so he gave me permission to use his so we're gonna look at my dad's DNA through lines here and we're gonna scroll down to the second great-grandfather of his and the first thing that you're gonna notice here on through lines is that through Samuel my dad has a hundred and ninety-one DNA matches that we think are also a descendent of Samuel okay so I click on that and here's what I'm gonna see okay Samuel first of all you need to know he he had 18 children well okay he didn't or there probably wouldn't be 18 of them but 18 children okay so we take that those 18 children and we kind of lay them out in birth order right so based on the birth year of women each of them were born and then underneath each one of these children let's see if I can make the screen bigger I just learned this trick on a Mac okay you can see here we've got Jeanette Jeanette is his oldest daughter she was born in 1803 should end in 1904 and through lines thinks that 48 of our DNA matches our descendants of Jeanette okay and then here's Jeanette's younger sister Elizabeth and through lines thinks that 25 of our DNA matches our descendants of Samuel through Elizabeth and then here is their much younger sister because my wife Martha Jane and she was born in 1852 and 27 of the DNA matches our descendants to her so that's how three lines just takes your matches and your tree data and tries to connect the two in a way that you can just start to explore some of those things okay and then when you click on this okay what it's gonna happen is it's gonna reposition everything based on Jeannette and now here are Jeanette's children and her children who have children who have DNA tested now here's the interesting thing okay I'm seeing here's Jeannette and here's Catherine and Samuel and Edwin Jeannette had more children than that but these are the only children she has that have descendants who have DNA tested okay does that make sense any confusion question yes in order to show up in through lines you have to have a tree and your tree has to be attached to your DNA and it has to be either public or private searchable so you could have so it says I've got 43 DNA matches that connect through Kathryn I can have a hundred and six and the other 53 did I just do that math right in my head probably not okay my dad's an accountant he laughs at me all the time okay I've got these other matches that could be in my match list that are descendants of Kathryn but if they haven't attached their tree to their DNA or if they haven't even started a tree through lines isn't gonna pull them in right so do you see why it's so important to have a tree even if your tree just as you and your parents that's something right and that can get the system starting to work for you so yeah this is just the people who have DNA tested so Jeannette has more children than these three children but these are the only children who have descendants who've DNA tested here's the other thing and I got asked this question just I get asked this question online actually earlier today I did a little Instagram stories thing for ancestries Instagram account if you want to go check that out little QA and she said the further back in time you go shouldn't you have more people in a group of through lines for an ancestor okay so let's do this little mental math right Samuel up there he was born in 1809 January of 1809 in Scotland he emigrated to the United States with his wife and two stepchildren actually he emigrated to Canada first they had those two older daughters then they emigrated down into Ohio then they immigrated to the Midwest ultimately they ended up here in Utah so he ended up with eighteen children several years ago I had this brilliant idea I said we should have a reunion of all the descendants of Samuel owner for the 200th anniversary of his birth in the town he helped found Lehi Utah because I work there now and that's cool right if you ever hear yourself saying we should have a reunion and I should plan it just go take a nap the feeling will pass I promise okay so I said we should go we should have this reunion and I said so I'm gonna figure out if I can find all the descendants of Samuel Mulliner and this was just before DNA testing right and so now it would've been so much easier because here they are right but back then no and so I started tracing all of his descendants by the time we had to like draw a line in the sand and say we've got to actually invite people to this reunion I had 6,800 descendants identified your face is my favorite thing that just happened sixty-eight hundred descendants we sent out invitations about three hundred people showed up it was great then I just got going right people were like oh we heard you're collecting all the descendants of Samuel Molitor so they'd send me information then DNA testing happened we can literally look at these numbers shell let's go back here let's go back to Samuel okay we're gonna scroll back up okay we're gonna scroll back over okay Oh y'all max someday I'm gonna learn how to use them okay we'll start here Cynthia has four descendants here tested Robert has one albert has 36 Hiram has two Fannie my scrolling skills need a little work apparently okay but what you're seeing here is all these groups of DNA matches that are starting to collect just based on the taking the test and send showing up here so you've got 27 DNA matches that are descendants of 25 and 48 you start collecting all these people that are descendants of this individual and what's happened now with DNA testing in the last six years as I've started adding these people to my tree we've now identified more than 10,000 descendants from one guy born just 211 years ago right so so you think about it right if he has 10000 descendants shouldn't I show DNA with all those people okay not necessarily here's why he's my third great-grandfather which means anybody that I'm related to through him that's in the same generation as me is a fourth cousin and you're only gonna share DNA with about 75% of your fourth cousins because the way DNA is randomly inherited it means by the time you get to about third cousins you could be related to somebody you could have the same ancestor and it's possible to just not share any DNA with them about a 10% chance 6 to 10% and by the time you get to fourth cousins it's about a 25% chance you won't share any DNA with them so yes theoretically every time you go back a generation that ancestor has more descendants but you're not going to share DNA with every single one of them and so it's super curious to me as we start to collect more data and I start to play around with this and I mentioned my dad's an accountant and he like he knows all the numbers and so he plays these little numbers games in his head right and so we've got 48 descendants of Jeanette who was my you know my dad's half second great-aunt okay so the her descendants are gonna be his half third cousins and he matches 48 of them but he only matches 25 of elizabeth's so the question is does he match 48 of Jeanette's because Jeanette passed on the same chunk of Samuels DNA that somehow got passed on to my dad and so there's more of them that match or the CEO does he match 48 of her descendants and only 25 of elizabeth's because Elizabeth had fewer children and Jeanette had more children let's try that again okay so always click on the amount of shared DNA and check the chart and make sure that what the chart is saying the DNA says matches what the tree or the three lines are saying the tree relationship is does that make sense okay it's kind of like a DNA to 301 concept but are there any questions about it yeah say that one more time okay so what he's saying is if I know that this relationship is accurate is there a way to adjust the chart now that chart is put together by our science team and what it is is it's strictly just based on the science of if you share 13 centimorgans here's the possible relationships and the probability that it is one of those relationships as we get more data we will adjust these charts to reflect what the realities of the science are but that's yeah you don't need to worry about that I will give you a sneak peak how are we doing on time okay with five more minutes I will give you a sneak peak of a new thing that we're doing with the DNA match list and this is brand new as a matter of fact it is so brand new where's my dad it is so bright here that the product manager said hey we're gonna announce this at RIT's tech next week and I said well that's awesome and she said it's not gonna be ready yet but you can tell people about it and she said I'm gonna give you early access to it and she did this to me at 4:30 on Friday and I had an entire bunch of presentations for routes tech to work on all weekend's and guess what I did instead I played with the new tool okay that's what I did literally all day Saturday so here's the new tool these are my dad's DNA matches there's my brother right there at the top of the list and what you'll see right here is a new icon oh okay see this new icon right here when I click on my brother I'm also going to see that new icon right here on the match page and if I click on it it's gonna pop out a little side panel and what it's gonna let me do is it's gonna let me say this person and my match list is the same as this person in my tree and then I can click view entry and it's going to take it from my match list to my tree and show me here here's that person in your tree and I'll see life changing over here okay click on it in your tree same icon you can go right back to the match page so it's a way to toggle back and forth between the people in your tree that are also on your match list okay again at a parent-child relationship that's maybe not all that important but by the time you get to your half third cousin one time removed being able to quickly find them in your tree I think is really really important okay I spent way more time talking than actually just playing with the site but hopefully you got the idea like I said sometimes it's a little bit awkward to do these watch the Jenny I'll just do her thing and sometimes it feels a little bit like I'm rambling but I love the concept just conceptually the idea that three lines can just take all this data and present it to me in a way that makes a little more sense to my brain then sometimes that long list of DNA matches so make sure you've got a tree make sure your tree is attached to your DNA to the person in the tree who took the test make sure your tree is either public or private searchable and then you can go play with these tools yourselves okay thanks guys and thanks to Facebook you

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 84,286

Rating: 4.8976798 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, ancestry, genealogy, ancestors, dna discovery, dna test kit, dna kit, dna tests, dna test kits, dna analysis, ancestry com, ancestry genealogy, ancestry search, ancestry commercial, ancestry family tree, family history, family secrets, lineage, family connections, ancestry family, family ancestry, ancestry tree, ancestry health, ancestry dna health, dna health, health kit, health test, health results, dna test ancestry, ancestry dna results, Christa Cowan

Id: 68IlobGfAlg

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020