AncestryDNA | Using Filters to Focus on One Family at a Time | Ancestry

hi everyone Cristian here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about the filters on ancestry DNA we're gonna just spend some time going over how to use them and or at least how I use them we did a presentation about these DNA filters last month when they were introduced if you remember Anna Swain joined me if you haven't watched that presentation I would encourage you to do so today we're gonna do this a little bit differently and it's gonna be even a little different for those of you who join me regularly a little bit different than how we usually do things I'm actually just gonna walk you through how I do something it doesn't mean it's the right way or it's the only way but it's what I found that works for me in working with my DNA matches one of the things that we've discovered is as more people take the DNA test of course you're getting more cousin matches so there are a couple of things that I just want to reiterate if you haven't watched a presentation about DNA before or if you're still not really clear on things when we when we test your DNA we compare your DNA sample against 130,000 other people who've also taken the DNA test and we can then tell you with a degree of certainty here are the people that you are related to and the degree to which you are related your first second third cousins fourth cousins distant cousins that is just a DNA only exercise then once we've found those matches based on your DNA if you both have trees online we compare the trees so that we can see if we can find a common ancestor if we do we're going to provide you with a little leaf and I'll show you where to find those if we can't then we check your tree for some other things are there common surnames are there common locations we're going to show those to you as just a tool or a wave for you to say oh yeah like they have these same people in my tree well now with the new DNA filters that came out a little over a month ago we just kind of expanded your opportunities to work with those matches because what happens is as new people take the test every week and that database just keeps growing more cousins are being added to your list so I just want to make sure that you understand and and have some ideas or at least some some thoughts around how to work with these matches so that you can connect with cousins and grow your family tree that's one of the reasons why we do this so long introduction for a not very long presentation but hopefully that makes some sense to some of you so let's just talk first about where to start when you're working with these DNA filters the very first thing you need to do is just become there's a typo already become really familiar with how cousinship works and we'll talk about that here in just a minute then you need to become very familiar with your own family tree and we'll discuss some tools available in some ways you can do that and then you're ready to use those filters to search for surnames and look for patterns and then I would encourage you to connect with other users contact other users and work together to find those connections so let's talk through each of those things first let's talk about how cousinship works and there's still a lot of people who just don't quite have this straight in their mind and so a lot of times I'll use this chart to help you understand how the generations work so you are generation 1 and you being either you or the person who took the DNA test and there's only one of you right and so that's great you have two parents in generation two and you have four grandparents in generation three and you have eight great-grandparents in generation four and so on so here are the numbers of the generations up to ten here is the relationship to you and then here are the number of people in that generation so by the you get back to your seven times great-grandparents you have 512 of them that's a lot and chances are you probably don't know very many of them you probably haven't identified them yet but here's how cousinship works right so you are related to yourself as self you're a child of your parents and their children are going to be your siblings your grandparents other grand children are either going to be your siblings or your first cousins and then you just work your way one generation at a time if you have common grandparents your first cousins if you have common great-grandparents your second cousins third cousins fourth cousins fifth sixth seventh and eighth cousins so when we look at your DNA matches we can tell pretty much ten degrees here or up to your seventh great-grandparents we can we can identify connections which means that these people that are that have common seventh great-grandparents with you are going to be eight cousins hopefully that makes sense that's how cousinship works now if you if you like in my case I I know well I don't even know how many of these people I know anymore very few of them though probably less than a third of these people I've identified which means if I have an eighth cousin match on DNA I'm probably not going to be immediately able to tell who they are or how they're related to me because I'm missing huge chunks of my tree and you'll see that here in just a minute so one of the things that I do and that I've done is created big charts so that I can see right off the bat where my holes are but also so that I can see at a glance where I do know where I do know some information so there are a couple of ways to do that so here is a chart this is a 9 generation chart and it's for my grandfather so my father took the DNA so he's generation 1 so his parents then our generation 2 and his grandparents are where we're going to start seeing those cousin matches so if I look at this chart here the you you probably can't make it out really clearly because it's super teeny on my screen I'll show you in just a minute where to go to make this and how to make it a little bit larger for yourself but this is just to give you kind of an overview and maybe you can see this on your screen I have giant blank chunks in my tree right because I have only been able to trace some of these family lines back to the 3rd 4th 5th generation so generations 6 7 8 9 and 10 are empty and that is important to understand about your own tree just where it's at the reality of where it's at and so charts like this give you a really clear indication of where your holes are so where you might need to focus some of your research and where some of those lines go way back like I have some here like I said you can't read what's on the screen I can't even read it because it's so tiny in this view but you can see that these things here are filled in so here's what I'm gonna go to make a chart like this when you're in ancestry.com if you have a tree online you can use this publish feature so I'm going to click this publish button and it's going to take me to our my canvas product which is a way to just create books and posters and charts I'm gonna click here on family tree poster and if I scroll down just a little bit here on my screen I want to create a standard poster so I click that and I get this little dialog box that asks me how many generations I want a 9 generation chart that's the biggest I can go okay you can do them for you know you know eight seven six five but what you want is you want to see as many people as possible and remember ten generations or up to eight cousins is what you're trying to get a view of for your DNA and so you want to do a nine generation chart you find the right family tree here and I want to do it for the parent of the person who took the DNA test because that person is generation 1 and then this will be in let's do let's see I don't think I've done one for this grandmother yet then this person will be generation 2 all the way back to this tenth generation here so it's gonna take it just a moment what it's doing is it's looking at my tree that I already have online at ancestry.com and it's creating this chart for me and then it's going to here we go ok so here is the chart for my grandmother and then I can print that out or I can just preview it if I want and when you preview it you can actually use these zoom features to just zoom right in on it so that you can actually begin to read things again as you can see I have lots of holes in my family tree things where the research has just come to a screeching halt but I have some lines that go way back and this is a really good view to be able to look at and just say okay here's where I need to spend some time and work or here are some places where I can start to search for some of these family names to see if there are other people who are doing this research that I can work with to to discover this information so this view of your family tree is going to be really useful to you again that's a 9 generation a family tree chart and you want to start it with the parent of the person who took the DNA test now I've got one of these for each of my four grandparents because I had my parents take the test and so that's what we're gonna work with then is the results of this so let me just save here there's one more thing I want to show you okay let's come over here okay here is my grandmother's tree we're gonna look at that in just a minute the other thing that you might want to do if it helps you is label just right across the top your family trees so that you understand the generations so again remember I started this with the the parent of the person who took the DNA test so that means that anybody who has this generation is a common ancestor is going to be a first cousin anybody who has a common ancestor in this generation is going to be a second cousin third fourth fifth sixth seventh and eighth so I just labeled right across the top of my family tree what the generations were so that I can look down and say oh well if this is the our common ancestor we'll then were fifth cousins it's just an easy way to keep track so that you can start to understand how you're related to some of those DNA matches exactly and then you might want to start to making notes of that so now let's talk about the actual filters so when I am in my ancestry DNA so here are the results my father's DNA results you have of course the ethnicity summary at the top which is interesting but not the point of what we're doing today and so I'm going to scroll down here to the filters we have our standard filters which are hints new and starred so in hints are selected it just means that anybody for whom you have a little leaf that's who's that's who's gonna show up in the list so it just filters that list right down to people who have leaves and that's great because it means we've we've done the DNA test we know you match we've also now checked your tree and we can tell where you have a common or a shared ancestor so I can go through these and hopefully you've done that I can go through those one at a time and take a look at those today I want to talk more about the surname filters though so if I undo this hints filter I'm going to come over here to this search matches button click on that you'll watch it just slides over my filters here at the top and now I'm going to search by surname so what I want to do is I'm going to want to focus on one family at a time so pick a set of ancestors on your tree it's really tempting to just kind of be all over the place and when you're just trying something out or trying to figure out how it works that's fine but when you really want to get serious about making this work pick a set of ancestors on your family tree and focus on them stick with them so for the purposes of our exercise today I am going to come over here to this family tree and you'll notice I'm going to use one of the the lines that is really well documented and I'm going to do that because this is going to give me a good place to start to learn how to use the filters and also its if it's a well-documented line in history like historically chances are that a lot of other people have tied into it so I'm going to use this couple way over here on this ninth generation on this chart let me just drag this over here so you can all see what I'm looking at and their names are John Barry and Mary Dudley Kimbrough so this is the couple that I want to focus on as common ancestors I should have people who are related to me through this couple add either an as either eighth cousins or less so I'm going to come back over here to my filters and I'm going to type in the name Barry and what we're going to see is it searches through all of my matches as it's going to filter down that list of matches to people who have the name Barry in their family tree now that's a pretty common name and as you can see if you look through this list of matches you're gonna see I think there's like three pages worth if I come down here to the bottom don't get seasick okay if I come down here to the bottom yeah there's three pages of matches of people who have this name in their family tree so what I could then do is I could filter it even further by location so if I go into my family tree and I pull up let's go to Jessie berry here actually I think his name is John there we go if I go to John Barry John Barry was born in Christchurch Middlesex Virginia so if I add a location of Middlesex Virginia and then search again what it's now going to do is it's going to filter those lists of people who have berries in their tree looking for people who also have Middlesex Virginia in their tree and now there's just one you'll notice this is in the fifth to eighth cousin range there is no shakey leaf which means there's no information here about finding a common ancestor but this person does have a tree and so I could then go review this match and see if I can see anything in her tree that that looks like it matches the first thing I'm going to want to do is look for that Berry surname okay oh it did load I was gonna say we don't need to wait for it to load but so here is the name Berry in our shared surname list and then I can come here and I can start to look to see where her berries are from it looks like the oldest one in her tree is a Thomas born in 1727 in in Virginia my oldest ancestor is a berry born in 1695 in Virginia so this could be a son it could be a nephew or it could be no relation so but that gives me a place where I can start doing some research I can look in my tree and I can say do I have all of the children of John Berry identified and in this case I believe that I do so Thomas is not listed as one of his children do I know who the father of John Berry is yes do I have all of his children listed no I don't so here might be a place where I could spend some time find all of the children of Garret and Elizabeth berry and is one of them named Thomas or as one of their grandchildren named Thomas so this has just given me a place to focus that research on that one family now one of the other things that we need to do is not forget the okay so John Barry is a common ancestor but his wife is also a common ancestor and since her surname is a little bit more unique maybe that's the surname that I want to focus on here so I can come in here and her name is spelled k IM b ro ug h and i'm gonna do a search on that and now you can see there is a few more matches but this is a manageable list it's not pages and pages and pages it's just one partial page and in the spirit of looking for patterns if you look at this list one of the things that you might notice is that the person who was on the last list is not on this list again that's just a reinforcement that that person has not traced their tree back far enough in order to connect with this common ancestor doesn't mean they're not related doesn't mean they're not related through the berry line it just means that they don't have this surname in their tree anywhere so start to look for some of those kinds of patterns now the other thing that you might notice if I scroll down this list here I'm gonna see I think I saw one here we go here's a little lock now those of you who have been doing this for a while know that this little lock right here on this tree means that this person's tree is private which means if I were to go and click on review matches I would not be able to see their tree but it did come up in my list because ancestry.com peaked at the tree and said they have this surname in their tree so for those of you who are working with a lot of matches who have a lot of private trees and everybody has their tree is either public or private for their own reasons you can at least start to see who has some of those common surnames in their tree and now you can email this person when I click on review match one of the options I have here is to send a message to this user I can send a message to this user I probably would and say I have been doing some surname searches and I understand you have berries in your family tree how you know who is your oldest berry relative or ancestor so that we can work together to figure out how we might be related so again I'm going to search on both this couple both the husband's surname and the wife's surname to start to get some information on some of those lists then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to search by the married surnames of their daughters again that's gonna if you have the children in your tree and even the grandchildren of your in your tree of of your ancestors chances of you making a connection are gonna be exponentially greater that also works both ways right so you may have information in your tree that somebody else doesn't have in theirs or you may come across other people who have information in their tree that you don't have in yours so the more often that you can come down a generation or two at least in your tree the more likely you are to make some of those connections so I would encourage you to do that to do that as well okay like I said today's presentation was was super short but it's just to give you an idea of how I work with some of those filters so the first thing you're going to want to do probably if you um want to if you're a visual person and want something tangible is go in and create one of these charts 9 generation charts that you can print out start with the parent of the person who took the DNA test and then print this out if you can print it on legal size paper that might make it a little bit easier for you to read even better if you can print it to a PDF and take it to a copy shop to get it printed on large paper I have a large one just tacked on the wall in my office so that I can refer to it as I work through these couples one family at a time trying to determine where some of those connections are the next thing I would do if if you know as I worked on this after I've searched for Barry and Kim bro I would come down a generation and look for anybody who has the surname Bradley in their family tree so now I've got this list of people who have kin bros in their family tree now I want to see do any of these same people also have Bradley's in their few in their family tree maybe we're not eight cousins maybe we're seventh cousins as I come down a generation and here we can see I've got a fourth cousin match with that particular surname so just you just have to kind of work at one generation at a time look for some of those patterns search for the names of both men both the couple both the husband and the wife and then also if you know the married names of some of those daughters search for those as well and look again you're looking for patterns you're looking for in a single family does the same DNA match show up when I search for all three or four of these surnames in this family and if they do then at least that gives you a place to send them a message and say let's start focusing here so that we can figure out how we're related hopefully that's useful and helpful information as always if you're watching this live I will be on our live stream chat in just a few minutes to answer any additional questions you may have if you're watching an archived version of this on our youtube channel just leave a comment and I would try to review those as often as possible and respond as necessary this is Krista Cowen until next time have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 14,483

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

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

Id: hLll8UWZ_Pc

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2013