AncestryDNA | More Tips for Identifying Biological Family | Ancestry

hi Belen Krista came here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about ancestry DNA specifically we're going to talk about some tips for identifying biological family members I've done a video about this before but today I'm going to give you some basic principles to follow if you're looking for biological family members and then I'm going to actually walk you through a case study of one of the ways in which I am doing this with one of my family members now you don't have to be adopted for this to be useful information it could be that your grandfather your great-grandfather was adopted or that you've got your DNA results and it turns out that the person you thought was your grandmother isn't really your grandmother all these principles can apply regardless of where in the process or where in the tree you fit but specifically for those of you who are adopted or have adopted parents and you're using the ancestry DNA test to locate that biological family you're going to find this hopefully useful information for you so let's go ahead and dive in we are going to just start with some basic principles I'm going to give them all to you right up front and then we're going to walk through the example so and let's just hop over here okay here are kind of the four basic steps that I use when I am using the DNA results to identify biological family the first thing I'm going to encourage all of you to do is to start a tree and to connect your DNA results to that tree now of course those of you who are looking for biological family are saying but I don't know my family tree that's the whole point well I'll show you in a minute what I've done but the idea is you want to get your DNA results connected to a tree so that other people who match you don't just discount you right out of the gate so that they can see oh look this person has a tree with six or eight or ten or fifteen people in it rather than they have no tree at all the second reason it's important to start a tree is because you're going to be identifying common ancestors with your cousin matches and you want to be able to attach those people to a tree so that you can see what other things start to happen what other shared ancestor hints you get what other DNA circles or new ancestor discoveries you might be given as part of that process and if you have your DNA results attached to a tree it's going to allow all of those automated tools to work a little bit more in your favor now I know that there is a little bit of a movement afoot among some of the search angels and some of the people who work with adoptees to create what we call mirror trees and then to attach those DNA results to switch them from tree to tree to tree I would strongly discourage against that particular process you can create one tree and add all of that mirror tree information or all the information about the ancestry of your matches into one tree and then you can just attach and detach different sets of parents or grandparents or great-grandparents to to the tree so that you can audit you so that you can automate that same process but the idea is you always want to leave your DNA results attached to one tree because if you detach your results and then reattach them your whole tree has to go back into the queue for re-indexing and sometimes it takes a while for it to work its way through that process ancestry now has 1.4 million DNA customers in our database and that is growing every day and so that process gets a little bit longer a little bit more computer intensive the more people test and so it's easier just to leave your test attached to yourself in one tree and then to attach and detach relatives in that tree rather than attaching and detaching your tests now I'll show you the screens to do that here in just a minute let's move on to step number two step number two is just a reminder that the most success that you're going to have is going to be found in the third cousin range and closer now if you don't have any third cousins or closer you'll have to work with what you have but once you get into that fourth cousin range things get a little bit more difficult fourth cousins typically have a set of third great-grandparents in common so great-great-great grandparents and so we're looking at a couple that may have lived two hundred two hundred and twenty years ago and having to trace all of their descendants in order to locate potential candidates for the biological parents of the individual and so it just gets it just gets a little trickier it gets a little bit more complicated so if you've got those third cousins or closer we're going to focus on those once you've identified a common set of ancestors among those third cousins and closers then the next step is to trace the descendants looking for potential candidates for biological parents and some of you have identifying or non-identifying information so you have information like about how old that parent was when the adoptee was born about maybe where they where that individual was born so you have some of that non-identifying information some of you are going on very very little and or nothing and so it's just a matter of looking at time in place and trying to figure out what makes the most sense and then the the kind of the final step before we start reaching out to living people is that once you've identified potential candidates then you're going to trace their pedigree so you're tracing descendents from a common set of ancestors to a potential candidate then you're tracing the pedigree of the potential candidate and looking for the same surnames among your matches and that after step four is where we get to the point where we can start contacting hopefully with some sensitivity some living people and seeing if we can get other people in the family to test to verify our hypothesis so let me just walk you through a case study that I've been working on and this one is not solved yet but we are getting actually pretty close and hopefully this will help you understand what I'm talking about so this is the husband of one of my cousins and he has taken the DNA test now he was adopted but he was able to find out who his biological mother was she passed you know 30 some odd years ago now but so we had the information about his maternal side of the family so we know her name we know her parents names we know the name of one of her sets of grandparents we do not know the name of the other set of grandparents I could build that out a little bit further if I wanted to do that research just to have that in the tree but there's something really a unique about this particular individual when my cousin took the test his DNA was split almost 50/50 which I've never seen before 50% Eastern European and 50% Irish well his mother's parents are both Hungarian and so that's the 50% of Eastern European and there's probably not going to be a ton of DNA matches on his mother's side of the family because they're recent immigrants within just a couple generations here and an ancestry has not yet opened up in Eastern Europe and so any matches he would get from his biological mother's side of the family are either going to be you know like her nieces and nephews if they're if any of them get tested or if any of the descendants of her grandparents also emigrated to the United States and we just aren't aware of them so this Eastern European ethnicity here and this side of the family we're probably not going to have to deal a whole lot with now because his ethnicity was so cleanly spit split 50-50 now we know that we're probably looking for a group of Irish descendants or Irish immigrants on this side of the family on his paternal side of the family so he has this unknown parent I just put in a birth year of 1930 he he could be younger he could be much older we don't really know but I put that in kind of as a placeholder for myself just so that I knew that I was looking for somebody who's probably around that age not much younger and based on the birth year of the biological mother and the birth year of my cousin could be older than that but that gives me kind of an idea generationally of what I'm looking for or looking at now you notice then I added unknown grandparents and unknown great-grandparents and I did that again very intentionally because I want anyone who looks at this match to see it and say oh you know this tree has so many people in it and then when they come in and actually look at the tree they can see well this person is not that they just didn't put up a tree it's that they don't know half of their their ancestry they have no idea and so I find that when I see that on somebody's tree I'm more inclined to help them or to help them make those connections now under settings on your DNA homepage if you click that button you're going to see a section called family tree linking and if you have not yet that's where you're going to link your DNA test to yourself in your tree that you've created don't link it to somebody else in the tree that confuses you and others and remember DNA is a collaborative thing and you may think oh I'm just doing this for myself or or you know I'm the only one who can see this well you're not all of your matches can also see that connection and if you want them to help you you need to keep it clean so link your tree to yourself and then people will be able to see this information excuse me okay so then I'm going to pull up this list of his matches now I've grayed out the names for privacy sake but you can see here he has a parent-child connection and that's because his son actually took the DNA test as well so you know it's easy to get really excited and you have to remember oh eight that's not his father it's his son and so we have that there just for kick for comparison sake also just for curiosity's sake he was just interested in taking that test now he did have a second cousin match that popped up there's only one of them but a second cousin matches is good stuff now the second cousin match has no family tree you'll notice that on several of these people but always click through to the match and check sometimes it's not that they don't have a tree sometimes it's that they just haven't attached their tree yet to their DNA results and there's a lot of reasons that happens sometimes it happens because they have multiple trees and they weren't sure which tree to attach it to like if they created a tree for their mom's side true for their dad's side being they didn't know which side of the you know they don't have one tree to attach it to and so there was some confusion sometimes people say it says they have no tree and it's because they took the DNA test and then they started a tree and so when you activate your kit there's a process that actually walks you through attaching it to the tree but if you didn't create the tree till after that process they just may not know how to attach it and so maybe that's something you could send them a message about if you click through to your match and you see they have a tree then maybe you can just send a message and say hey notice you have a tree if you attach your DNA results to your tree then you know here's how you do that then we can all work a little bit easier with the automated tools to see how we connect now some people you click through and they have no tree and it's because they actually have no tree in my cousin's case this particular individual that is his second cousin match and we were so excited about it sent her a message and ultimately turns out she is also adopted so she is looking for her biological family my cousin is looking for his biological family and they are the most closely related out of any of each other's matches so it was a little bit frustrating but we are making headway ok then he has this set of third cousin matches so there's 1 2 3 4 third cousin matches and then below that is those fourth cousins now like I said I would focus on the third cousins in closer but those fourth cousins are going to come into play and you'll see how here in just a minute so I've got these third cousin matches and you'll see that on all of them there's a little bit of a range as well as the the category label then when you actually click through to the match you have this little eye here next to the confidence level if you click that it will tell you exactly how many centimorgans of DNA are shared between the individual and the match so in this case she's under the second cousin category but she shares 444 centimorgans of DNA and if you click what does that mean or if you go to the I SOG is OGG I SOG wiki it's the International Society of genetic genealogists they have a chart where you can look it up and it just says that if you share that much DNA it actually means that you're probably first cousins once removed okay so what that means is that either she and my cousin's parent our first cousins or my cousin and one of her parents our first cousin so I don't know who's in the older generation at this point but I know that with this much shared DNA unlikely looking at a first cousin once-removed not a second cousin okay now the other thing that I paid attention to in this particular case is the ethnicity the shared ethnicity information over here this particular individual has no well has very little she's a trace of Eastern European but her large regions are going to be Europe West and Ireland and remember my cousin is 50/50 Irish and Eastern European and so this match very likely connects on his paternal side of the family because we know his mother is a first-generation American of Eastern European parents so that ethnicity in this case might give us some additional clues or lead us in a particular direction now when I'm viewing the match I also want to make sure that I click on shared matches and this is where some of those third and fourth and fifth well third and fourth cousins are going to start to coalesce into groups so here under shared matches with this individual this first cousin once removed we see a parent-child relationship here well that's my cousin's son okay so she matches him as well and then one of the other third cousins also matches well then I click on that third cousin match here and I click on shared matches and the list grows okay so one of the things that that tells me is my cousin has more DNA in common with this third cousin match then the second cousin has with this third cousin match and so that might be an indication or a clue that he is in the closer generation so that's the theory that I'm working with right now is that my cousin oh and his and this second cousin match of his our first cousins once removed and that one of her biological parents is his first cousin which means that he and her parent share a set of grandparents okay that's really close but remember she's adopted so what I have to do then is I have to use the trees of these individuals these third cousin matches this fourth cousin match and see if I can't come up with a common set of ancestors now remember how I said some people say they have no family tree but when you actually click through they do have a tree and so in a couple of these cases they actually did have trees some of those trees were very small they just had four or six or eight people in them and so I had to actually build a tree for that person I just did that in my cousin's tree I just created a person started building their tree and so I've got this person now in the tree and I'm building out their ancestry trying to see if I can find common ancestry between this third cousin match and this third cousin match and eventually you're going to start to make some of those connections so here's another thing that I do and I do this usually on scratch paper right I have lots of what we call little DNA circles basically that I've created out of the information that I have available so here's my cousin here's this that first cousin once removed match she matches this individual okay and so the three of them all match each other and then this individual also matches the two of them well these two a C and M H both have trees and according to the shared amount of DNA they are both second cousins once removed to my cousin and so what I'm looking for likely based on what I've projected about the ages of these two individuals is that they are a generation older than my cousin and he is a generation older than this second cousin match okay and so what I'm looking for then likely is a common set of great-grandparents between the two of these people and that's going to be the great-great grandparents of this of my cousin and the great-great-great grandparents of this match so that's the hypothesis that I'm working on so what I've done then once I identified that common set of great-great grandparents for my cousin is I just drop them in the tree and it doesn't matter where you put them the point is just to get them in the tree and to start to build their ancestry and to start to connect with some of the automated tools the shared ancestor hints and some of those things that you can work with a little bit easier so I just took this common set of ancestors okay so that couple is her great-grandparents and they're her great-grandparents and so I put them in a spot that is on his tree in the great great grandparent generation and you can see them there now he has two other groups of cousin matches that I've been able to identify but they're another generation back so you can see here one here and then there was one here and I think I've been able to identify you know to pull it down another generation so I just plugged them in in the tree wherever now ultimately our eventual I might have to rearrange these people based on the actuality of the relationships as I get closer but for now doesn't matter where in the tree that they are remember my DNA is still attached to him and so I'm just adding and moving people around back here at this level building their trees out so that I can take advantage of some of those shared ancestor hints and seeing what else I can discover now for the next step I've identified this common ancestor couple in this case it's this Thomas Cummings and Kathryn Coggins both of them are of Irish descent they both ended up in Lackawanna County Pennsylvania which is not far actually from where my cousin was born and they had a whole slew of children here so you can see one two three four five six seven children and you'll see an eighth child listed there and that's actually the dummy child that I needed to create in order to attach them to the tree so they really didn't have eight children they really had seven children and eventually what I'm going to do if I once I determine which one of their children is likely the ancestor then I will just merge this dummy child with the correct child in the family tree and and just keep working it and you're just working down one generation at a time so what I've done with each of the children of Thomas and Kathryn is I have traced their descendants so I have researched their lives to determine and if they married if they had children and just research their lives really well and I have just started using little icons as images to attach to help keep them straight for me so in this case this oldest child Richard he did live and you know a fairly long life he lived to adulthood but there is no indication that he had any children now he could have fathered a child he could have fathered a child that was given up for adoption he could have fathered a child and not even known about it but all indications that I currently have state that he had no known till Drance oh I just put a little it's a picture of two children with a slash through it's the icon I've chosen for that now some of these matches Mary and John for example they're the other DNA matches connect through these lines and so I know that this person cannot be the ancestor of my cousin because then he would be more closely related to those DNA matches and so I just have a little DNA symbol with a line through it so that I know that there's a DNA connection but that it is not the line through which my cousin descends and then as I start coming up with possibilities here's this Thomas's son Thomas had several children who had children who had children who were in the right time in the right place and I remember in my case I'm looking for a biological father so I know what gender I'm looking for and I know in what generation I'm looking and Thomas has descendants who fit that category and so I just put a little DNA icon as a note to myself that there is a possibility that Thomas is the ancestor now I still have to finish researching this family I need to research Patrick and I need to research Edward and come to a conclusion about that and if Thomas ends up being the only one well then what I'll probably do is start contacting some of Thomas's descendants living descendants and just letting them know that I am doing work for an adoptee that that adoptee and is related to their family and that we're trying to figure out how and see if they would be willing to take a DNA test to help us and you have to be really sensitive about that conversation particularly if you suspect at all that the individual that you're contacting could be the biological parent or sibling or grandparent of the individual that you're working with or that you know or or yourself if it's you doing the work and so if you're really sensitive to that and I usually just try to couch it in the context of the family unless I have a degree of certainty that I could be actually speaking to the biological parent particularly if I have multiple family lines that are possibilities and you know I can say that with a little bit more certainty that it's in the family but I'm not certain where and then just inviting other people to to DNA test to be able to draw that closer a little bit now there is one other step that you can take that will give you a little bit more certainty so in this case for example I've identified Thomas as the potential you know one of the potential children in this family that could be the remember so Thomas here then Thomas jr. would go here in this spot and that means I'm looking at the potential great-grandfather of my cousin and so then I would trace Thomas's ancestry or pedigree so here is a potential candidate for the for the biological father here's Thomas jr. here's Thomas and Kathryn that common ancestor couple among the matches and so I've got now Thomas's Thomas juniors wife and her parents names and their son John and his wife and her parents names and you'll notice lots of Irish happening here on all lines which is consistent with what we know about his genetics that we're looking for a biological father who is likely 100% Irish and so so we start you know kind of looking for some of these other surnames and then what I would do is I would go into my cousin's DNA matches click on that search matches button and start plugging in some of these other surnames right we already know that comings and Coggins are represented in his matches but what about Brady or Egan or Gallagher or Flanagan - any of those names come up over and over particularly in that fourth cousin range and that's where those fourth cousin matches start to have some real significance is if you start seeing some matches there well then maybe it's time to trace some of these people back another generation or two and see if you can't find another set of common ancestors and if you do you could be on the right track now there are some families where there's a lot of intermarriage and so you may end up with you know a family on this side that intermarried with a family on this side on multiple lines but it's certainly something worth exploring so that's the that's the process that I use and like I said I've been working on this case with my cousin and now I've contacted that second cousin match who was also adopted and she has given me permission to work on her family at the same time and and I'm hoping that if I'd if I identify you know her some of her matches then I know whether I'm looking at her father or mother to be the first cousin of my cousin starts to you know all of this information starts to to gel into specific times and locations people of a specific generation so here's just one more time is the process that I use start a tree even if you don't have any clue who any of your biological parents are and start a tree and put in unknown and connect your DNA results to that tree so that as you start looking at those third cousins and closer as you start identifying common ancestors among them then you can plug those people into the tree and see what falls out if you give me shared ancestor hints see if you start to see some of those same surnames popping up among your matches once you've identified a set of common ancestors trace their descendants now one of the challenges of course is not too long ago people used to have really large families and so it could be possible that you're tracing 10 12 14 children in a family and sometimes you end up with two or three of those who died as children or did not have children so you can rule them out sometimes you end up with people who you know they're their families did not have any children so they may have had children but then those children may not have had any children so you can rule them out you just start working through those descendants one generation at a time keeping in mind that you're looking for people who are in the right generation in the right time at the right place to be the candidate for that biological parent and in some cases you even know what gender you're looking for in the case of my cousin we know we're looking for a male born probably sometime between 1900 and 1930 and and probably living somewhere in Pennsylvania they're not necessarily he could be living elsewhere and have been passing through town if you've got people in the military or if you've got somebody who's born at a time of military conflict or high in enlistment numbers around the country you've got lots of different historical factors that play into that that you need to keep in mind but sometimes you can narrow it down to a pretty good profile of the individual that you're looking for as you look for those potential candidates and then of course once you've identified those potential candidates you want to trace their pedigree and then search your matches for other people with those same surnames to give you some higher degree of confidence that this is really a potential candidate and then you can contact that person or that person's children or siblings to see if they would be willing to test to get you closer to the information that you're looking for well hopefully that was useful information for all of you again whether you are an adoptee looking for your biological parents whether you just took the DNA test and discovered that the person you thought was your grandmother was not your grandmother or whether you've always known that your grandfather was adopted and you're looking to find out who his biological parents are these steps still work and so I would encourage you to just take the time to dig into your matches a little bit more closely reach out to them send messages those of you who have taken the test check your messages respond to messages if we communicate with one another it makes it a lot easier but not everybody wants to communicate and we have to we have to recognize that a lot of people take the DNA test for different reasons but we're happy to work with the data that we have and make some of those connections until next time this is Krista Cowen have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 88,159

Rating: 4.855319 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, AncestryDNA, autosomal DNA, DNA, Adoptees, Search Angels, mirror trees, cousin matches, ethnicity

Id: MOHhxZN_GHA

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2016