AncestryDNA | You've Received Your Results. Now What? | Ancestry

hi everyone Christian here with a special ancestry aces exclusive look at ancestry DNA we've been getting a lot of questions on Facebook and through some of our social media channels and then via email and through our member services about people who have taken the DNA test they've gotten their results and they're either confused by them or they don't know what to do with them so that's some of the questions that I'm going to try and answer in the time that we have together tonight I expect this presentation to be about between 30 and 35 minutes long and if you're watching this live Stephens available on chat to answer questions as we go but don't inundate in with too much try to pay attention to the presentation your questions may be answered as we go of course if you have additional questions Stephen and I will both be available on chat immediately following the presentation and we can answer those questions as best as we can if you're watching an archived version of this feel free to leave your comments or questions in on the youtube channel here just right under the video and we'll monitor those and respond to those as appropriate if we need to have a follow-up session we will look at scheduling that may be in the future in the in the next couple of weeks with all of that said let me just tell you the approach that I'm going to take today it looks like we have several hundred people watching this live right now and I expect that you all have varying degrees of education about DNA in particular I happen to know a few people on the line who are experts in this and some of us who like myself for a little bit science challenged and really don't understand some of the basics of it so I have tried to just make this as simple as possible and yet still provide valuable information so hopefully that will come across my goal is to teach you so clearly you can't possibly misunderstand we'll see how I do let's dive into the top questions that we receive as we start talking about ancestry DNA and this is going to kind of be our agenda for the next half hour or so that we have together the first question that we get repeatedly is in one form or another what's up with all the different DNA tests and the different kinds of tests we'll cover that we're getting a lot of questions about so I got I took my DNA test I got my results and now I don't know what this all means what is it that I'm looking at so we'll take a look at the results from my DNA test and walk through that screen so that you know what the different things are that you're looking at one of the big questions that we're getting a lot is why does my DNA ethnicity differ from what I think my ethnicity is based on my family tree research so we'll look at some reasons for that and maybe some explanations about what that all means as part of your results we give you cousin matches so a lot of you are asking questions about matches that don't look like they match you're also asking questions about why you have so many matches and how that could possibly help you so we'll spend the last chunk of time this evening talking about those matches what you can do with them and how they are designed to help you in your ancestry research or your family history research so that's our agenda for the time that we have together this evening and hopefully that gives you an idea of what we're going to cover as we spend our time together let's start with the different kinds of DNA tests so the first DNA test and that ancestry has offered for a while is a Y DNA test that particular test can only be taken by males and it only traces paternal lineage so that Y chromosome that's passed down from father to son and from that man to his son and that man to his son so you can trace back along a patrilineal or all-male line an MT DNA test can be taken by anyone male or female but it only traces the maternal lineage so mitochondrial DNA is passed from a woman to her children but only her daughters pass it on to their children so both her sons and her daughters have her mitochondrial DNA but only her daughters pass it on to their children so as you can see with these two DNA tests you're only tracing if you're looking at a pedigree chart that very top top top angle or that very bottom angle were you to be tested so the new ancestry DNA test that came out at the beginning of this year is what we call an autosomal DNA test or a t DNA anyone can take this test and I want to be really clear about that because sometimes there's some confusion because of this old Y DNA test anyone can take the new autosomal test it looks at over 700,000 locations on your DNA and so it gives you a broader picture of your complete tree or the genes that you've inherited from the people in your whole tree rather than just tracing that very top line or that very bottom line of your pedigree that's the different tests ok let's talk a little bit about these results so one some of you have taken a test already and received your results as I was looking at chat in at our Facebook page earlier today some of you have not taken the test yet so this will be a preview of the results that you're going to get so let me just hop over here to a web browser so here's how I did this test and I don't want anybody to get confused so let me explain what I did if I had taken the test it would have given me my results based on the half of my DNA that I inherited from my father and the half of the DNA that I inherited from my mother if my sister took the test she might have slightly different results because while we both in Herot half of our DNA from each of our parents and we have the same parents the DNA that she inherited from them might be a little bit different than the half that I inherited from them so siblings can have different results but you will not have anything that your parents do not also have and so I made a decision because both of my parents happen to still be living that I'm going to have each of my parents take the test what that allows me to do is it allows me to separate out the half of my DNA that's my mother's and the half that's my father's as opposed to looking at them combined in myself hopefully that makes sense if you have questions I'll try to clarify that again a little bit later so these results are actually my father's results I had him take the test first here's what you're going to see you're going to find those results under your little DNA and tab here what I have done is I have a tree on ancestry.com so I have linked my results to my father so even though I'm the one who has the ancestry account and he is in my tree of course because he's my father and so I've linked these results directly to him in the tree in my online tree so now when I view my results I get a page that looks like this and this is we'll spend some time talking about this but the first thing you're going to see is your genetic ethnicity so basically what it is is it's ancestry has taken your DNA and compared it against our database of thousands and thousands and thousands of other samples and where we know where those samples have come from in the world to determine what percentage of your DNA you have in common with people from those similar regions of the world so here you can see for example my father has 47% Scandinavian and there's a lot of Scandinavian blood out there we're discovering and 44% Central European with 9% uncertain now I can click this and view further Colts be sure to read some of these little pop-ups we give you some helps and some tips and some explanations along the way and and those are helpful right most of the questions that you're asking are almost all directly answered by some of these little tips and hints that we give you along the way so when I view my genetic ethnicity details right what it does is it takes me to a larger section of a map here right with the sections highlighted that contain the regions where my where my ethnicity shows up and then you'll notice I also have these little numbers on my tree now you'll notice my father on his side of the family we have a really a lot of ancestors that were born in in England and in Wales and in Scotland and yet no British Isles ethnicity and that's um that's to be expected if you think about the way that migration occurred and lots of that DNA got mixed up or even sometimes completely overtaken I'll explain that be patient I'll explain that in a little bit more detail here in a minute if you scroll down we also provide you with a lot of detail about that particular ethnicity so I have here a tab for my Scandinavian ethnicity and a tab for my Central European ethnicity read those and it will help you understand exactly what regions are covered by that particular ethnicity it'll provide you with a little bit of history and some information that might help you understand your results a little bit better and then of course if you have more than two s ethnic markers in your DNA then you'll have additional tabs here for what those are I just happen to just have the two and then the nine percent uncertain so that's the top section of your results is this ethnicity now the bottom section of your results is what we call our member matching and this is where we start getting into those cousins we'll look at this in detail here in just a minute but I just wanted to give you a preview of what this is going to look like what this is is we have taken your DNA and we have compared it against the DNA of other ancestry members who have also taken that DNA test and if we find sections of your DNA that match and we can tell with a certain level of confidence what the possible range of relationship is between you and this person so for example I have here a third cousin based strictly on DNA and this with 98% confidence this man is either a third or a fourth cousin to my father as you go down the list you get further away so now we're into the fourth cousin section and the confidence drops a little bit we're down to 96% that this person is a fourth fifth or sixth cousin and you just you can scroll your way through now you'll see here I have a lot of matches and then we get two distant cousins which is in the fifth to eighth cousin range and you'll notice that at that point the confidence level drops dramatically again all of those matches are based strictly on the DNA now once we've made a DNA match ancestry uses the tree that you've uploaded and the tree that the other person has uploaded and compared them because your DNA says you match now let's see if your if we can tell based on the information you've already discovered in your trees how you're related so here's my this is the third cousin of my father's and ancestry he has a tree online that is public and I have Tree online and so ancestry can take that and compare and can tell me exactly how I'm related to this person so here is my father and his mother and her mother and her mother and her father and here is another child of Henry Dip Moore and her daughter and her son and so we can see here that this person is actually not just a third or fourth cousin but my father's second cousin once removed I have actually contacted this man and not only is he a second cousin once removed but we knew nothing about this branch of the family he turns out he lives just a few miles away from where my parents live in another state and not only that he has visited the place in Germany where this particular great-great grandfather was born and where his family lived for generations and he had taken pictures of the church and he had taken pictures of all sorts of things in that village to give us an idea of what it was like so just with this one connection and it's the very first one on my list I have made a connection with a cousin who has immediate information that helps me enrich my family history story and that's our hope that's what we want these results to do for you now you're not going to be so lucky with all of your matches I happened to have great success on the very first match and you'll notice I clicked the little star next to it I made it a favorite you can toggle that on or off so that I bookmark this I've also now connected with him on Facebook and a few other places so that we can keep intact in touch and hopefully continue to share not just information we've already collected but maybe even collaborate on further research on that particular line now on some of these you're going to look at the match review the match and we're going to compare your trees and we're not going to be able to find the connection and I'll explain that I'll explain why in just a minute so hang with me but what we are going to show you are any common surnames in your tree so the DNA has shown that you're connected to this person that you're related to this person with a certain level of confidence and a certain distance of relationship so this is a 4th to 6th cousin but the tree data doesn't prove it out ok which means either we have holes in our research one or the other of us does or one or the other of us have straight has traced the incorrect family a lots of different possibilities there but we show you just some matching surnames to kind of give you a jumpstart into knowing where to look like I said we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail here in just a minute I just wanted to give you this view of this is what your results are going to look like if you haven't already looked at them the ethnicity at the top and then the matches to other ancestry members who have taken the test is available here if we have DNA matches and then if they also have a tree online we give you the opportunity to view that tree if they don't have a tree online and I think I have a few of those in here somewhere and if they don't have a tree online er if their tree is not public you can of course send them a message and ask to either be to view their tree or to share your tree with them so that you can make some of those connections and we hope that you'll do that so that's that's the results page that's how we've laid it out that's what you're looking at ok and let's talk a little bit about these ethnicity results so the question always is in some form or another why does my DNA ethnicity differ from what I know about the countries of origin of my ancestors and I thought long and hard about how to present this in a way that makes sense to most people and hopefully this works hopefully this will make sense to you and if you have questions feel free to ask so this is the pedigree chart of my great-great-grandfather so we've got him in this first position right here you'll notice that his father was born in Scotland and his mother was born in Tennessee so my question to you is this if you were to describe his ethnicity based on that knowledge father born in Scotland motherboard intent in Tennessee how would you describe it a lot of people would say well he's half Scottish and he's half American although interestingly enough American is not considered a separate ethnicity unless you start getting into Native American ethnicity so let's go back a generation his grandfather was born in England his mother was born in Scotland and both of his mother's parents were born in the southern United States so again how do we describe his ethnicity do we say he's a quarter English and a quarter Scottish and 50% American if we go back another generation we've got England in England and Scotland in Scotland and Virginia and Virginia and Tennessee and Tennessee go back one more generation you'll notice here's Ursula Stockton we don't know who her parents are what if both of her parents were born and raised in Germany now all of a sudden this man who was half Scottish and half American has great grandparents who were German so my question is this at what point do you start breaking down the percentages of your ethnicity when you're talking about your family tree ethnicity is something that we just really identify with well I'm a quarter Italian and I'm a quarter German and we do that based on what we know about where our grandparents were born or where our great-grandparents were born but how deep in the family tree do you have to go before those people were from entirely different places before that ancestor that you thought was Scottish was actually English was actually German or before that ancestor that you thought was from Virginia was actually from Spain how deep in the tree do you go well those DNA links that get passed down through your DNA go really really deep so you just may not have discovered yet where in your family tree some of those ethnic links are that got passed down in your DNA let me explain it just one other way that might make a little bit of sense many of you have probably seen this I did a blog on the ancestry blog a while ago about this and discussed it with our our aces group here is just a simple chart to show how many people you descend from in 10 generations so if you are generation 1 and we go back 10 generations um we're talking there are 1022 people right because well you count but not in this equation there's a thousand 22 people that you descend from and 7 generations is is really just a few hundred years ago how many of those people have you actually already identified in your family tree with documentation well I've been doing this since I was about 12 years old pretty seriously and I inherited much of my genealogy or some of my chiny ology from people who had spent a lot of years working on it and here's where I stand I only know 365 of those people which is really not that many so if I only know a third of my ancestry is it possible that the genetic material that I carry comes either from the other 60% of my ancestry that is completely unknown to me or that it goes back deeper in the tree than where I know these people happen to be from so that's just something to keep in mind as you start looking at this data that doesn't make it meaningless by any stretch of the imagination and people have argued back with me about that and it's still very meaningful and I'll show you what to do with some of those but start to think in terms of things a little bit deeper than just your parents or your grandparents your great-grandparents now when we start talking about these cousin matches right so let's look at some of those we'll get back to that I promise let's talk about some of those cousin matches just to make sure you understand how that works okay let's just run down this chart if you have the same parents your siblings if you have the same grandparents your cousins what we call cousins but which technically are first cousins if you share a great grandparent that makes you second cousins great great grandparents makes you third cousins fourth cousins fifth cousins sixth cousins seventh cousins and eighth cousins so as you start looking at those DNA results where it says right that this person is related to you as either a fourth fifth or sixth cousin you have to come back here and say okay well if this person is my sixth cousin it means that we share fifth a fifth great grandparent well I only know seventy five out of my hundred and twenty eight fifth great-grandparents so it's possible that they are related to me absolutely the DNA says so but that they're related to me by one of these people that I don't know yet that I haven't yet discovered on my tree okay I hope that makes sense so that's how I look at those cousin matches okay now before we start diving into what we do with those cousin matches let me just go back to this this is a silly analogy and it's very very very simplistic DNA's a lot more complicated than this but I am NOT a science person and so this is the way that I came up with to explain it to myself so that I understood where some of the confusion comes from okay so let's just imagine for just a minute that this is what makes up your DNA okay we're fruits and vegetables today for the sake of our analogy this is what makes up your DNA here at the bottom of the chart now you get 50 percent of your DNA from your father and 50 percent of your DNA from your mother and they got 50 percent of their DNA from their father and 50 percent of their DNA from their mother hopefully this makes sense right so here are your 1 2 3 4 grandparents now one of the misconceptions when we start talking about DNA is that if I get 50 percent of my DNA from each parent that means I'm getting half an orange and half a watermelon and a half a strawberry and a half an apple and that is incorrect right you're not getting half of everything that makes up their DNA you're getting half of their DNA so you're not a fruit salad or a stir-fry right what you what you make what's make what makes up your DNA is half of their DNA so this particular grandparent passed along a strawberry in a watermelon that's 50% of their DNA and this grandparent passed along a cantaloupe and a lime and that's half of their DNA right and then this parent passed along the watermelon and the strawberry to you now I want you to note real and again remember this is a very simplistic explanation of a very complicated thing right but notice now you don't have anything in your DNA from this particular grandparent right the water or the cantaloupe and the lime didn't get passed on to you now maybe you have a sibling who got the lime in the watermelon right they got 50% of their DNA from your same parent but they may have got they may have received a different 50% hopefully that makes a little bit more sense as you see the way that DNA comes down through the generations and some of the stuff can go so deep some of this stuff could been passed on literally for thousands of years and yet some stuff disappears mathematically it's probably not likely that it disappears this quickly right I did simple numbers and simple things to explain a complicated process but it's very possible that you lose strands of DNA from relatives as you go so keep that in mind again as well as you start looking at those ethnicity results we have people who are saying but I know I am this thing that's very possible based on a straight pedigree chart but based on the way that DNA gets inherited it's possible that some of that gets lost over time okay so let's spend our last few minutes talking about these cousin matches in particular first of all what do you mean what do they mean and what do you do with all of them so I showed you for example that first let's close this that first match that I have here on my tree turns out it really is a cousin and we really do show you the connection as I scroll down this list you'll see that I do have a few others where ancestry was able to find the match in the tree right so it's able to tell me exactly how we're related because both of us both both on my side and on the side of the person that matched with me have been able to trace back to a common grandparent or great-great whatever grandparent however on the majority I think I've got three of those on the majority what I'm seeing our matches that look like this where ancestry is not able to compare enough information that there's not enough information in the trees to compare to decide whether or not this person is really related to me so there's a couple of things that you can do with these search results the first thing that I would recommend is to click on this maps and location button what that does is it takes the birth locations from both of your trees and it puts them on a map now remember okay and I I feel like I need to say this because I've seen some confusion about this we're not mapping the birthplace of every single person in your in your tree we're only mapping and comparing the people in your tree who you directly descend from you don't have the DNA of your your aunt or your great-uncle you have the DNA of your parents you have the DNA of their parents who have the DNA of their parents so this is just it seems like a redundant phrase but just direct ancestors right hopefully that's clear so we put on this map those places that are the birthplaces of those direct ancestors now you'll notice in this case the true their tree has birth places in blue if it's from my tree it's in gray excuse me and if it if it's a shared location it's in green so I can then zoom in on these locations to see exactly what's going on here now you notice that six just split out into a 2 and a 4 let me show you that again that 6 right as we zoom in the map refines to more specific locations because you're zooming in and those numbers start to split up into specific locations I can then see zoom in a little bit more here and I can then hover over this and it will tell me who in the tree who in my tree is from that place I can hover over these again who in my tree is from that place so that I can start to see what some of those shared locations are if there are clusters I can look at those people in my tree compare it with those same people in their tree oftentimes particularly as you start to get back into the 1700s and the 1600s if you have family in the same place at the same time chances are that's going to be where you're going to make those connections because the population in those places at those times was often very low so so use the map as kind of a visual if you're a visual person to start to zoom in on some of those locations to see which what you share what some of those cluster groups are okay also you're going to want to pay attention to the detail that you've included so for example on my tree in almost every case that I've looked at here I have the town and the county and the state listed but for some of them all I have listed is just the county or in some cases just the state and so it may be that they're from the exact same place I just haven't done enough research to narrow down to a very specific location so start to pay attention to some of those things and collect more information look for those clusters in that map now here's how these surnames work again all we've done is anybody who matches your DNA we've taken and compared your trees and then we just show you common surnames in your tree now you're looking at my surname list here that matches this person and you're laughing I know you are because two of the surnames on that list are Jones and Smith and so it's very possible that we don't match on either of those surnames as a matter of fact it's possible that our common ancestor is not any one of these three surnames this is just a little jump start to give you a possible location in the tree where you could start looking so I'm going to click on pack because that's the one that's the least common surname and here's what it's going to show me so for example in my tree I have an ancestor whose name is Abigail Peck what I have recorded about her is that she was born in about 1758 this person whose DNA matches mine has a Rhoda Peck born in January of 1760 in Ashford Connecticut that's really specific you'll notice I don't have nearly that much information so looking at these birth dates it's very possible that these two women are sisters or maybe first cousins in order to prove that there's a couple of things that I would need to do I would need to first find out more information about Abigail Peck right if I don't even know where she was born if I don't even know what state she was born in right then I then there's no possible way to rule out that she is related to Rhoda now if I go in and find out that you know that Abigail Peck was actually born in England in 1758 the chances that she's rotas sister go down exponentially not that they couldn't have migrated in that two-year span but probably not so those are the kinds of things you want to look for is where can I do more research that might help me figure this out now I would also want to look and see if I know anything about Abigail's parents and that I would want to check this tree and see if she knows anything about rodas parents or maybe she knows something about rotas brothers and sisters she may even have Abigail in her tree as a sister to Rhoda but if she doesn't know who wrote as parents are and I don't know who Abigail's parents are then there's no direct connection because we descend from different members of that family so again remember it's not just anybody in your tree that we're matching we're only matching on those direct ancestors so look for these kinds of things where you can do more research or where you can maybe share or solicit information from the other tree owner to determine if this is indeed a match or not it's one of those opportunities to connect and collaborate with people in Jenny ology that is really just going to grow our family trees so much faster other people have access to information that we might not have other people have had artifacts family bibles letters pictures passed down through the family branches that could have ended up anywhere and all of a sudden this becomes a whole new adventure in technology because we're doing our research in a really focused very directed way based on the surname information or this mapping information looking for clusters and locations to make some of these connections you're going to be able to see really quickly where the holes are in your tree you're going to be able to see really quickly where the possible connections are again if we just go back to that pedigree chart for my great-grandfather there's this giant hole right here where Ursula's parents should be and let me explain to you why that's significant so I did a research project for Samuel Mulliner here and I've shared this with some of you before so you may be sick of this story but it's a really powerful example Samuel and I decided that I wanted to trace all of his descendants I wanted to find everybody anybody possibly living today who might be able to claim him as an ancestor and it took me several years and I'm still finding little branches of the family even now even though I'm not actively working on it but what we discovered is over 8,600 descendants from this one man born just over 200 years ago so imagine how that number increases exponentially every generation you go back so by the time I get here to Ursula's parents who were likely born and probably oh the seventeen maybe the mid 1720s and we could have tens of thousands of descendants from that one couple and yet I don't know who they are and so as this DNA as these cousin matches show up in your tree pay attention to some of those common surnames and some of those clusters on that map it will give you a really directed way to start doing some of that research and to start doing it in concert with others who are just as motivated many of them to find the answers to some of those questions one last thing I just want to point out about these cousin matches and as new people take this test and new results get entered into the database and new matches are made you're going to see those show up on your list so for example see here I have a little blue dot next to this match right here and it's because I haven't looked at it it's an unviewable is okay so look for those little blue dots to check those new matches you'll notice I also use this star system where I have looked at these trees and either there is a definitive match as in the case of Colleen and James or in this case and I have looked at it and I think I know where the match might be and so this one I'm actually excited about doing some research to see if I can figure out exactly how we're related so that's how I use those cousin results those cousin matches that's what I do with them to further that research and to focus my research and to help me collaborate a little better with some of those cousins hopefully that has been helpful to you again if you're watching this presentation live and you're on chat right now I will be on chat in just a few minutes as soon as we conclude you feel free to ask any questions that either were not addressed or we're not clear during this presentation if you have additional questions that weren't addressed or if you're watching an archived version of this feel free to leave a comment on our youtube channel once we get this video archived or you can email it ask it ancestry.com just be sure to include DNA in the subject line so that we can filter those emails and and if we need a follow-up presentation we'll schedule that or watch our blog posts and we'll see if we can't answer some of the more common questions that are coming up as you get into these new and exciting DNA results until next time this is Christa Cowan have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 448,524

Rating: 4.7109513 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, ancestry, ancestry.com, genealogy, family tree, family search, ancestor, crista cowan, barefoot genealogist, dna test, ancestry dna, dna

Id: KiClHKiWcGI

Length: 39min 30sec (2370 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2012