AncestryDNA | Cousin Matches and DNA Circles | Ancestry

hi everyone Cristian here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about ancestry DNA so if you are an ancestry DNA customer you will know that yesterday November 19th at 2014 we launched some new changes to the ancestry DNA program particularly what we're calling matching version 2.0 and DNA circles so today we're going to talk about both of those and answer a lot of the questions that we've seen come in over the last 24 hours since that launched now I have in my hands a banana and I want you to think for just a minute about what a banana has to do with genetic genealogy I'll answer that question a little bit later in the program but start thinking about that a little bit if you are watching this at our regularly scheduled time I will be on the chat immediately following the presentation to answer any additional questions you may have and if you're watching this on our YouTube channel at a later date or time please feel free to comment we will be monitoring those comments and responding as necessary now here's kind of the framework for today we're going to talk about matching and we're going to talk about DNA circles more importantly than that I'll walk through kind of some some information but I also just want to show you where you can go on the site to get the information in the education that you need for yourself genetic genealogy for some of us is brand new information and so we understand that this might seem a little bit overwhelming so we've tried to provide you with as much information as you can digest both in bite-sized pieces and in some really extensive white papers written by our team of scientists here at ancestry that work on ancestry DNA so with that introduction let's go ahead and dive in and let's start by talking about ancestry matching so here's how the matching process kind of flows or works when you submit a DNA simple now whether that was your own sample or I know some of you have had family members tested far and wide when any when anytime a DNA sample comes in that DNA sample is compared to all of the samples that we have in our database and as of the time of this video that is more than a half a million samples okay so we've got this huge database that we're comparing you to and when we find that you have matching DNA based on how much DNA you share we can estimate a relationship now here is some tricky stuff about that remember my banana human beings share approximately 50% of their DNA with a banana that seems kind of ridiculous when you think about it but there it is okay human beings also share about 99 percent of their DNA or more with other human beings and so what our scientists are looking for when they make this comparison is the difference like what are the differences right what do we have in common just because we're human beings or because we're European or because we're from the same region and what do we have in common as DNA because we inherited it specifically from a recent common ancestor okay if we have inherited DNA specifically from a recent common ancestor then that is what we call identical by descent and that is where we create a DNA match okay and so that you know when we first got started looking at these matching pieces of DNA and giving you DNA matches was really exciting but as our database grew our scientists were able to look at that and notice some patterns that hadn't been as readily obvious before one of the things that we have learned and is that there are certain chromosomes where we have what are called pileups meaning hundreds and thousands of people match on this particular location on a chromosome and they match there we've discovered not because they inherited that DNA by descent from a recent common ancestor but because they are human beings or because they are European or because they have some common trait or maybe they have some ancient shared family history and so we have to start to ferret some of these things out and that's what the new matching does is we have been able to eliminate some of those chromosome locations where there are these pile ups where there are these these shared DNA segments that exist not because you inherited it from an ancestor in the last five to ten generations but because you you know you have some deep shared ancestry we've been able to eliminate those from the matching algorithm and now we have taken that match list and many of you are seeing a significant decrease in your list of matches and that's actually a good thing because it means that the list of matches you're working with now are people that are actually cousins who descend from a recent common ancestor and your likelihood of discovering that ancestor than em is is much greater we've also adjusted our confidence levels so here is a page of my matches and you can see here here's this is actually a one of my parents and so you can see here I am the match in the parent-child category and the confidence level here is extremely high and if you just scroll down you'll see this first cousin extremely high third cousins extremely high and as you go down the list you'll see that that that number changes we have provided you with a lot of help materials to help you understand what those things mean and so one of the things we explained is the confidence levels so if I come in here to view all of my matches I'm going to see this little help icon up here in the top right hand corner if you click on that you're going to see all of the little help segments that we have created to explain the changes that we've made to DNA matching okay and here is the information about confidence scores and so I just want to talk about this for a minute and we have given you detailed information about exactly what those means so if somebody is an extremely high match at any level right so you saw I'm a match to my parent extremely high first cousins third cousins extremely high right what that means is that you share more than 30 cent emergence of pertinent DNA that you have a most recent common ancestor within five or six generations and that the confidence of that is virtually a hundred percent and it is recent enough and a strong enough connection that it is fitted that it is fairly conclusive and then we just go down from there as you share less DNA you're going to see that the confidence level decreases and it gets more and more difficult to possibly identify that ancestor and excuse me that that ancestor also might be further back in time so again you're going to find this information in the help section and that particular section is called what does the match confidence score mean so this confidence level here this is about how confident we are about that and that connection it's not necessarily about that specific type of relationship again you'll see here extremely high on three different kinds of relationships listed here on this particular match list so that is DNA matching before I get away from that let me just tell you one of the couple of questions that have been asked one is well what happened to all my old matches while all your old matches are still available for you to download if you would like to see them you can go into your settings and one of the options we have there now is download v1 DNA matches and so it'll just download them into whatever download folder you have set up on your particular computer and in downloads I believe as a CSV file which can be opened into any kind of a spreadsheet software so that you then have that to work with another one of the questions that we've been asked about this well I had matches that I lost that I know were matches well you know that they were tree matches because you did the research or you had the shaky leaf or some other combination of things what we're telling you is that those those people are not a DNA match on a place in your DNA where it would note that you have a most recent or a recent common shared ancestry they may very well be a tree match okay but you do not share DNA with everybody that you're related to and the further back or the more distant that relationship gets the less the likelihood is that you do share DNA with that person those people are still on ancestry their trees are still on ancestry you can still find their trees and they're just not DNA matches DNA is a different a different thing and so we wanted to make sure that what we were showing you here in this DNA match section was only people that we know you share DNA with and that connect you to a recent common ancestor we have changed the look of things just a little bit here too as well so your ethnicity results are still available we haven't made any changes there and your DNA matches are here and we did give you some quick links so you can go directly to your starred matches now or directly to those those leave hints where you have shared ancestors so in this case you can see here I make this a little bigger I have 72 shared ancestor hints I can go directly to my list of starred matches I have 93 people on my list who are fourth cousins are closer I can jump directly to that list okay now let's talk about DNA circles that's the next new thing that was introduced yesterday if you scroll down okay past your ethnicity estimates in your matches you're now going to see what we call DNA circles I have a lot of them I think when I last checked I had 27 I had 28 but then I think I may have lost one I'm not quite sure um interesting thing actually just as a side note we had 2,500 people just in the last 24 hours since we launched this who have either made their switch to their tree from private to public or who had taken the DNA test who had not yet attached their DNA results to a tree who have done that and because of that just since yesterday we've had a couple thousand new DNA circles created so DNA circles are always going to be in flux depending on what's happening in the community and so I just want to make sure that that's really clear I also want to point out that there is a beta tag on this still ok so we have we've done our testing internally we've done our user our user groups you know we've gone through all of that process to make sure that we're presenting you with a a great useful well thought-out product but it is being shared with you now in beta which means if you have feedback about things you'd like to see or something please give us that feedback we want to hear that so these are your DNA circles you'll see here that DNA circles are created around a common ancestor so let me just talk about how we do that as we go through and we match people in our database in you know these one-to-one relationships one of the things that we've started to notice again because we have more than a half a million DNA samples in our data case is we start to notice these kinds of clusters of people who are related to each other all in some degree now some people just by again by the random inheritance of DNA some people might be related to more people in a particular group than others whereas some people may just be related to a couple of people in that group but we see these little clusters of people and so looking at those clusters of people we then as a secondary process take a look at the trees that are attached so here's the deal in order to be included in a DNA circle or included in this new process your DNA results have to be attached to an online tree so if your tree is not online I would encourage you maybe if you use a software program just export 10 generations the 10 gnome generations of your direct ancestry it can just be a stripped down bare bones it doesn't have to have photos attached don't you know I mean like it doesn't have to be a big fancy tree they can just be just a flat pedigree and upload that and then attach your DNA results to that and your tree does have to be public and the reason is because we're going to show the connections in these groups and if you've said you want your tree to be private well then we're not going to include you because we don't want to show the information in your tree that you've deemed you want to be private so your tree has to be online your DNA results have to be attached to it and your tree has to be public in order to participate in DNA circles okay what that means for the rest of us who have attached public trees is that as new people make their tree public or put their tree online and attach their DNA results we may see new circles pop up so you need to make sure you check back often to see if new circles have shown up also in order for a circle to be created there has to be at least three unique sets of individuals with matching DNA who also have a common person in there now here's what I mean by three unique sets of individuals in my match so I've had myself tested I've had both my parents tested and I've had my one living grandparent tested so so that means that myself my father and my grandmother all kind of sit in a little line right my dad inherited DNA from his mother I inherited you know 50% of his DNA and so of course the three of us match there are also cousin matches that my grandmother has that I don't have because by the time two more generations have passed her DNA has been diluted enough that I don't share DNA with some of those people that she shares DNA with so that's why it's always a good idea to get that oldest living generation tested wherever possible okay so my father my grandmother and I we sit in this little line and basically what we've done is the three of us will not make up a DNA circle because there's nothing there's nothing unique about that DNA that connects us to a common ancestor right my grandmother is the common ancestor so we are grouped as a family group and so then there needs to be at least three other unique family groups with a common ancestor in their tree in order to create a circle I'll show you an example of that again here from my tree so let me just um hop over here here you see my circles and here is my cute fourth great-grandfather Thomas smoo in he was from from Radley England and he emigrated to the United States in the in the mid-1800s this is his wife Sarah Hooke and they had several children what you can see here is at a photo of them some basic information about my relationship to them his lifespan and then how many members are currently in this circle so you'll see I have some circles that have 27 members I have some that have 22 this particular circle happens to have 12 if I scroll down you'll see that some of these circles have eight or nine I think I had one circle yep here we go down here at the bottom that only has four okay so you have to have at least three to make a circle but some of these are going to have large large numbers of people so here is my Thomas smoo n' and here is what we're going to learn as we come into this particular circle so I could come here and learn more about him okay find out tree information about him over here on the right-hand side you're going to see my line of descent from him so how I'm related to him and then if I scroll down I'm going to see the people that are in this circle now I've made a little bit of a sort of privatized version of this so that I'm not exposing information about my cousin matches to all of you so here is a screenshot of that with just some names blurred out so here's what you're going to see you're going to see all of the members of this DNA circle you're going to see their relationship to the common ancestor okay you're going to see a confidence level about their membership in that circle we'll talk about that in just a minute you're going to see their connection to you or to the person whose DNA test results you're reviewing so in this case this person so this is actually my grandmother this person is a DNA match to me and also a tree match to me okay this person happens to be my father is a DNA match to me and a tree match to me this person is not a DNA match to me but he has a tree match to me okay but in order to be in this circle he has to be a DNA match to somebody else in the circle he can't he can't just be in because he has the same ancestor in his tree okay now I happen to know this gentleman and I know that he is actually a DNA match to both my father and my grandmother so just because his DNA doesn't match mine right um doesn't mean that he doesn't share DNA with other people in the group I hope that's really clear okay in order to be in a circle there has to be shared DNA and a common ancestor in a tree okay it just means that I don't share DNA with this person which actually when you start to think about it is really really cool because previously all we could see were the people that we had DNA matches with now with the creation of these circles not only do we start to compare matches across generations or shared and tests that you've had other family members take but there are also going to be people drawn into these circles because they match different cousins so this guy could match if he didn't match my father or my grandmother but he did match four of the other cousins in the circle he's still in right and I would have never known about him if you know because I don't match him so it's just a really cool cool way to start to group together some of these people I love this in particular because I'm a big fan of descendancy research meaning you pick an ancestor and you trace all of their descendants I find that fascinating a fascinating aspect of genealogy and this lends itself really beautifully to that one of the reasons I love descendancy research is because very often these people are going to have information sometimes photographs research that they've done on certain people in my tree that I haven't gotten to yet or that I haven't done or things that I will never find because they've been passed down a different branch of the family so that's that's how we create these DNA circles and then the other thing we allow you to do is to view their map the view their details and this will take you just to the match page just like it always has not match page hasn't changed okay and however I do need to just make a quick note because we got some questions about this yesterday this gentleman here remember not a DNA match to me so if I go view his details it's going to look a little different I'm not going to be able to put any notes or stars or not gonna be able to work with that match in any meaningful way right now and again remember this is in beta because he's not my DNA match he just is in this circle so I can still work with my DNA matches the same way I always have just it's just going to be a little bit different if they're not a DNA match to me hopefully that makes sense okay let me just scroll up here and show you again when you are viewing your circles we've done the same thing like we've done when you're viewing your matches and that is up here in the top corner besides giving you a link to provide us with some data feedback we've also provided you with some help material this help material has been put together by our product managers and by our genetic scientists and it explains how we create the circles how we calculate the levels and let me just talk about that briefly here there are five levels that are assigned to each individual in a DNA circle those levels are strong good some emerging and weak and basically what those are is those are degrees of evidence that this person shares the DNA of that ancestor okay and so so you'll see here in this particular group and if I say again if I just scrolled actually if I come back over here you're going to see most of the people in this group and if I scroll down further and you would see this is not consistent for everybody but most of the people in this group are strong strong evidence that I share DNA that I inherited from Thomas mewhen and that evidence is strong because of the way that that I connect with all of these other people now some some of those confidence levels may be emerging what that means is there's not yet enough evidence to confidently say that that I inherited DNA from this particular ancestor and so I just need to get more people tested or wait until more people are tested and join that circle become part of that circle so we do provide you with some details about how we calculate those exactly what goes into that how those relationships work that determine the strength of the connections and all of that we we have given you as all the information we have available we've provided you with some information about what you can do with your DNA circles how we calculate the confidence scores how close family members are grouped together like I talked about my dad my grandma and I what getting other family members tests it will do for you some more information about DNA inheritance how your circles can change over time why we created them and this is this includes a little bit of a vision and kind of excitement for the future right you can start to see the possibilities of what some of the next steps might be in genetic genealogy as we move down this path and having created these kinds of circles and then there's this extensive DNA circles white paper I've already read it through once I plan to read it through two or three more times I do not have a science brain and so it takes several readings before I fully digest the information enough to understand it and then to be able to to RER tick you late that or to share that with other people and requires a lot of study sometimes for me so great white papers both on the circles and on the matching and available and again all of that's available under help when you're in a circle or the match help is available when you're viewing your matches and it's going to be found there now a couple of final thoughts here before I wrap up several of you I know administer multiple tests okay because we needed to use this real estate down here the screen real estate for your circles we had to change the way that you view your other tests so if you just look right here you're going to see this link select another test if you click that you'll see the other the names of the other tests that you administer so you can just click through and view any one of those from there okay so we didn't didn't get rid of that just just moved it a little bit well that is all I have planned for you today I hope you are as excited as I am about the new matching and it just has tightened it up and made sure that the matches that I'm seeing are actually genetically related to me and that we have a most recent common ancestor that's a big key I want to be able to discover who within the last 10 generations is the common ancestor between me and these particular cousins and then these DNA circles the that are just this great step in moving us forward into connecting with some of these cousins and improving some of the relationships to some of these most recent common ancestors as more cousins join these particular circles as I mentioned at the beginning of the program if you're watching this at our regularly scheduled time I will be on chat in just a few minutes to answer any additional questions you may have if you're watching this on youtube please feel free to leave a comment just below the video and we will monitor those and respond as necessary until next time this is Krista Cowen have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 116,922

Rating: 4.8263388 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, AncestryDNA, genetic genealogy, TBG

Id: GSnGzLCgmw0

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 20 2014