AncestryDNA | The Search for Biological Family | Ancestry

hi everyone Christa Cowan here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about ancestry DNA specifically we're going to talk about the search for biological families now when I first put together this presentation or the idea for the presentation I was thinking a lot about some of the adoptees and some of the children of adoptees who have been looking for their biological families but then I realized really that's what we're all doing with DNA and so there will be some specific things for adoptees in this presentation but I think there will also be some things for all of us now one of the things we need to keep in mind is that not everybody takes the ancestry DNA test to look for family some of them are just interested in their ethnicity results they haven't yet caught the vision or or the spirit of what's possible with the cousin matches and so we need to be a little patient with them and hopefully some of the connections we start making with one another will help spark their interest about what the possibilities are for them so with that introduction let's go ahead and dive in to a few of the things that I have prepared for our time together today let's start with just a basic piece of information that I hope you all understand the significance of our the importance of which is if you have taken an ancestry DNA test you need to have it attached to a tree excuse me um and I whether your tree is public or private is a discussion for another day but at least have it attached to a tree of some kind that's going to help you and it's going to help your matches make connections and one of the things that I have noticed is is that when I'm viewing my DNA results and let me actually just come over here and pull up an example I maybe should have had this ready to go and if I pull up a list of my DNA results let's go into my dad's matches here one of the things that you're going to see in that you probably see in the list of your own matches is that some people have very large trees and some people have no tree at all right no family tree three people in this tree right no family tree and yet the reality is is that my my little anecdotal information is that about half of the time when I click through to view one of these people who say they have no family tree and they actually do they just have not yet attached it to their DNA results okay so if you are have a suspicion that you might be one of those people what you need to do is just go into your settings and make sure that you have linked your tree not just your tree but you the person who took the test needs to be linked to that DNA test to that tree okay and so that way again it helps and it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if your tree is 100 percent accurate which by the way I'm fairly certain no one's is it doesn't matter if your tree is large or small it doesn't matter if your tree is public or private attach your tree because that's going to enable yourself and others to utilize not just the hinting feature but also the surname search feature and that becomes really critical for us to make some of these connections now let me talk to just those of you who are adopted and looking for biological parents or for those of you who are you who've had a parent or a grandparent take the test or who've taken the test looking for biological parents for a parent or grandparent if you if anybody in your first three generations or so was adopted and some of you may say well but I can't create a tree I don't have a tree that's the whole point it's little reason I took the test I'm going to encourage you to create a tree anyway and here's how I would do that if I was adopted and first of all I would not attach my DNA test to my the tree that I've built based on my adopted families information that's going to lead you and your di matches a stray okay because you don't share a biological connection with these people who adopted you certainly not the parent-child relationship that's reflected in the tree and so if you've attached your DNA results to a family tree that you've created about your adopted family again that's going to cause a lot of confusion for you and for your matches so create a second tree in that tree enter your information about yourself recognize that that information will be private because you're still living and then just enter in the names of the parents father biological mother biological so then what will happen is you'll have this tree match that just looks like you have three people in your tree okay so I've got this match here he's got three people in his tree okay the reason I tell you to do that well there's a couple of reasons but the main reason I tell you to do that is because there are a lot of users who haven't learned better who will just skip over any match that says there is no tree and if you're really anxious or really purposeful about trying to locate your biological family you don't want to be skipped over and so that reduces the chances of you being skipped over now you'll have this really small tree and maybe people will look at it and if they see the words father biological mother biological listed as the parents names they might be more inclined to help you in your search I know that I certainly have been with the few adoptee cousins that I have found on my DNA matches and I've been working with them now to help them and so it's just a way for those of you again for those of you who are adopted or of parents or grandparents who were adopted just add those words father biological mother biological into the parent spaces so that it's an alert to anybody who looks at your tree that you are specifically looking for your immediate biological family and so that hopefully they'll be willing to work with you now let's talk about DNA matches and how cousins work and I think we've talked about this before but there still seems to be a little bit of confusion about it and I always need a reminder so I made this chart I love this chart it helps me understand what exactly it means to be a cousin to somebody and what the possibilities are for my connection with that person so for example I lost my cursor there we go a first cousin means you have a common grandparent and you have four grandparents okay if somebody is your second cousin it means you have a common great grandparent and there are you have eight of those okay third cousins have common great-great grandparents you have sixteen of those and so on down the line now most of us do not have very many third cousins or closer okay which is unfortunate because most of us know all 16 of our great-great grandparents it's when we start getting into that fourth cousin range where we have lots of DNA matches and it's also where some of us start losing some of the information about people in our tree okay so let me just give you a different visual representation of this let me go to my tree so this is my grandfather here let me make this just a smidge bigger okay this is my grandfather here so anybody who also descends from him is going to be my either my sibling or my first cousin right and so so this is the surname that I would be looking for for a first cousin match then if I go back one more generation these are going to be the the ancestors of my second cousins my third cousins and my fourth cousins and now if you look in this generation look what's happened I have a giant hole right here in this generation this is a very very very big brick wall for me this John O'Brien fellow who was never consistent about anything he reported about himself or his parentage and so I have not yet discovered who his parents are and so if I have a fourth cousin match on this line I probably won't be able to make that Nexen unless I do a little bit more work or start doing some triangulation of some of those cousins and see if we can figure out that we all come from the same time or time period in place and and then we can work together to figure out who these parents are maybe one of them knows maybe one of them's already identified who those parents are and I just haven't yet okay so that's kind of a math problem that we're dealing with here which is by the time I get to my third great-grandparents I only know thirty of them because those that John O'Brien his parents are I don't know who they are by the time I get to my fourth great-grandparents and I've lost even more and and as I get all the way up here to my eighth cousins which is usually about the outer range of DNA matches I probably know only about half of the 512 seventh great-grandparents that should show up in my tree so I have some holes those people who match me have some holes and sometimes the connection the biological connection falls in those holes and so it's just a place where we can work together okay so here is one of the tools that I've devised or that I've created for myself to work with both my own matches and to help some of these adoptee cousins that I have and work with their matches to see if we can make some of those connections I have created my own surname list and so what that means is is that if somebody shows up on my list as a third cousin I have a list of names that I can send them so that they don't have to troll their way through my tree if they you know if I'm feeling generous they could create the list themselves but I've just got it handy and so it's just as easy to to message it to them so I've created this list of surnames based on the generation or the degree of cousinship okay so here are the four surnames for example that if anybody is my first cousin they're going to have one probably two of these surnames in there tree okay if they're my second cousin they're going to have all four of these and maybe what they're going to have one of these or one of these in their trade right so I've just taken the four grandparents and now I've got four more great-grandparents okay for a total of eight then if they're my third cousin I've got a list of eight additional surname so I've got a list here of eight additional surnames so I've got the original eight and then eight more for a total of sixteen now this if they're my fourth cousin they're going to have one of these sort of one of these surnames than here on this entire page and you'll notice again if you were to count I only know thirty of them okay and so that's what's going to show up on the list I don't know all 32 of my great-great-great grandparents and so this is the list or the surname list that I send to my matches when they when they communicate with me so that that we can start to search our matches for surnames that we might have in common now I've done this in a spreadsheet just to keep because I don't live my life in PowerPoint I've done it in a spreadsheet so that I can kind of keep track so I just made column headings here first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth cousins remember eighth cousins is kind of that out set of DNA matching and then I've just listed the surnames four that are unique to that generation so it's cumulative and i hope i hope i explained that clearly right these are the these are the first cousin possibilities these plus these are the second cousin possibilities these plus these and these are the third cousin possibilities okay that's how it works so I've just added the unique surnames that show up in that generation and then send them a copy of that entire list now again theoretically and if you had all your research done is that is there even such a thing this number would double every generation so I've got or grandparents eight great-grandparents 16 great grades right so there should be double the number of names in each generation but there's not not just because I lose people like with my O'Brien family but also because of intermarriage so I have for example a Jones family here who in this generation he married a second cousin so I didn't retype the name Jones just because that was his wife's name as well her maiden name and her married name of the same name I just left it off the list so again what I'm creating here is a list of unique surnames that show up in each generation in my family tree and the way I created this list is I just went through my tree so here's my grandfather okay I put his name in the first cousins column I put these the surname in the second cousins column unique names from here in the third cousins column fourth fifth okay then I extended it back a couple generations did 6th 7th and 8th then I went to my other grandmother I went through all four my grandparents and did a similar exercise so I was able to create this list having this surname list is not just useful to sent to my cousins it's also very useful for me to start to sort through some of my own matches so one of the features that I think is being underutilized on ancestry DNA is the surname search so when I come here and to look at my dad's matches I have this search matches button here and I can come here and I can say you know what I want to see every one of my matches now he has a hundred and sixty-three pages of matches at 50 matches a page that's a ton right and so I want to see I want to filter this list I want to see anybody in my tree who has a Mulliner in their tree and so or anybody in my matches and so I can see there's myself and my grandma that makes sense right and but then I end up with all these fourth cousin matches who also have moaners in their tree and if I scroll down here I have some distant cousin matches who also have owners in their tree and I'm able to make those connections because of because they have those people in their tree and then I'll just work my way through that surname list right so you know how many people have a Cowen in their tree and of course it's going to be easier the more unique that surname is but it's certainly even worth investigating some of the more common surnames to see if there are connections now very often like with my Jones family for example if I was to do a search on Jones on my mother's side of the family on her DNA results I would come up with probably thousands of matches so what I might want to do is look for a more uncommon surname in that line and search for that is there is there a more uncommon surname you know like Dobin or din woody right and maybe even love is there a less common surname in that same line that I might be able to narrow in or focus in on to help filter through some of those more common surname matches and I've got them all I've got Smith and Jones and Kelly and Williams I mean you know every possible common surname I think out of the top five or ten I've probably got on my list so I understand that that gets a little bit frustrating but like I said all I'll focus oftentimes on those less common surnames like my own given my own maiden name for example in order to make some of those connections and then I can just go through these matches one at a time you can see I've still got blue dots so I haven't been through all of them yet to see if I can discover the connection and then what I do just um just this is how I've chosen to approach my research I do a couple of things one is I send a message to the person to let them know that I figured out the connection so this woman only had 82 people in her tree this gentleman well he had 82 people in his tree there is no leaf hint which means we did not have a common ancestor but I was able to identify it because um there was an actual discount descendent who was in his tree and so I just make a note that the actual really of that what the actual relationship is and who the common ancestors are and then I start at I star things that I put notes on so that I can quickly filter to those when I want to review some of that and then I would send a message to this person and just say you know what here here is who our common ancestor is here's some of the you know you can look at my tree for additional research and you know I'd love to know more about who shows up on your match list who also has this surname that's going to start to be important when we start doing what we call triangulation where you can start to see that you have cousin matches and they have cousin matches and some of those matches you're going to have in common and some of them you're not even on the same surname lines and that has to do with just the random inheritance of DNA so let me just kind of wrap up with this concept some of you have had siblings tested and what you may have discovered as you've been comparing your matches to the matches of your sibling is that probably between 70 and 80 percent of them overlap you will have about 70 to 80 percent of your matches in common but about 20 percent or so of those matches are going to be unique to each of you and that's because you did not inherit everything from both of your parents you each inherited 50% of your DNA from your father and 50% of your DNA from your mother but you did not inherit the exact same 50% that your brother did or that your sister did and so some of those matches will be in common and some of them will be unique which just means you don't share DNA with that cousin but it but you do share common ancestry with that cousin and so the more siblings or the more people in older generations you can get tested in your family the more connections you're going to start to make now of course that does not work really well for those of you who are adopted and are looking for some of that by a lot chuckle family and so for you one of the suggestions that I would make is to send out as many messages as possible to anybody that shows up well obviously in that first or second cousin range most of you are going to be dealing with third and fourth cousins to make some of these connections and ask them to share surname lists and then start creating I've been creating spreadsheets so I'll just show you a couple of examples of some of the things that I've been doing and I've tried to make these a little generic so that I didn't give away any privacy information about these particular and people that I'm working with but um in this case we have somebody we have two somebodies who are adopted and it turns out that they are second cousins to one another and so I just made a little chart showing that information so user number one obviously is related to himself but he is a second cousin to user number two and then we have a third user who showed up on both of their lists as a third cousin to user number one and a second cousin to user number two and so I added that person and started looking at their matches and started you know communicating with them about who shows up on their list and the point is is that we're talking to each of these users trying to figure out what information they have in common these two people both adopted don't know who their biological family is this this person has a pretty good family tree and so we started looking at some of the common surnames in the trees of some of these matches and we were able we're getting closer to identifying and potential candidates for the parents and grandparents of these two users here another just another example this is actually somebody who is related to me who is an adoptee so the adoptee turns out is came back as a cousin match to my father and to myself because a third cousin match to father and a fourth cousin match to myself which makes sense and so we started looking for other commonalities between this adoptee and some of these other cousin matches that we had in common and then we started looking for again what some of those common surnames were with some of those families because of some of the additional research that we've done into the matches of this adoptee we're fairly certain that we have identified who his third great-grandfather is even though we haven't identified who his parents are or even which side of the family this third great-grandfather is from we've we're fairly certain we've identified who his third great-grandfather is because of the number of his matches that also have this person in his tree in the way in which they all connect so these are just some of the Spry you spreadsheets to keep track of some of the changes that I'm making and some of the connections that I'm making is I communicate with users as I look at their trees as we share surname lists as we go through this process of trying to discover who the biological family is for some of these adoptees and for ourselves as we try to fill in some of the holes some of the information about the daughters that got married and we didn't know who they married or the women in my tree who I don't have a maiden name for yet but all of a sudden I have a bunch of matches who I keep noticing this certain surname showing up in their tree and and the more I've investigated it turns out I'm fairly certain that's going to end up being the maiden name of one of my third great grandmothers and so it's given me a direction to go with my research to either prove or disprove this theory that's come up because of these DNA matches so DNA super fascinating super exciting to see the things that we're able to do with it now and there are more tools coming a for ancestry DNA in the coming year and so that's exciting as well to know that there's some additional tools that are being created for us to work with these matches but right now I'm having great success at lot of fun and working with my own matches and some of these lists and spreadsheets that I've created and communicating back and forth with them about what new matches are showing up on their list this week and there's been something particularly gratifying about working with a few of these adoptees and trying to help them discover their heritage and certainly a couple of them would like to connect with biological parents or grandparents but even just being able to share with them some of their their deeper heritage because we've been able to identify some of their more distant relatives has been has been kind of an exciting and fun thing to engage in so for those of you who are looking for your biological family's recent or ancient I hope you'll get a little bit more involved not skip over those small trees be willing to reach out to each other and communicate back and forth share those surname lists particularly those of you who have private trees I would ask you we can search and you'll come up if you've got a surname in your tree it'll tell us that you have that surname but sometimes sharing a whole list of surnames is really useful to us as we're trying to narrow down some of those connections so be willing to communicate and share this information and all of us will be able to have a more positive experience with ancestry DNA that's all I have prepared for you today if you're watching this live I will be on chat in just a few minutes to answer any additional questions you might have and if you're watching this on youtube feel free to leave a comment we monitor those and respond as necessary I'm also putting together the July I can't believe I just said that out loud July calendar for our live stream events for that month so if you have any suggestions for topics that you haven't seen covered in our show over the last couple of years please feel free to email me at ask at ancestry.com with those suggestions for topics for future shows until next time this is Krista Cowen have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 143,856

Rating: 4.8738256 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, Ancestry DNA, autosomal DNA, TBG, genetic genealogy

Id: wwLty5r3GPE

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 19 2014