DNA Painter Interview with Jonny Perl

dna because it's we're celebrating it's yesterday was dna day and um but before we start talking about today's subject johnny will you introduce yourself and then edgar will you introduce yourself as well tell us where you're joining from uh okay my name is johnny pearl and i'm joining from london england where it's a beautiful spring evening oh my goodness okay where like how many hours ahead are you only 7 p.m for me okay okay so this is great we're all around the world okay edgar hi my name is edgar gomez and yeah we are part of a global celebration i'm joining today from santo domingo the dominican republic and i work for family search and we're just so happy to be able to celebrate dna day today with johnny and and you know wendy and with all of you and we have an exciting um session 45 minutes where you know you can ask questions but we're gonna show you a little bit of what a great tool it is uh you know that we have dna painter and in fact you know here when the family says we've been celebrating actually dna day for a while i think from um maybe late late february but also from late february since we had over a hundred classes at rootstec connect the conference that we sponsored you know for over a decade and and so a lot of those sessions tend to be on topics that you know cover different things about family history but more and more on dna and more of those speak about um dna painter you know in fact as family search we kind of teach a class about dna these days without mentioning one of the very helpful tools that dna painter that free website you know has for our users so that's pretty exciting it's like it's a fan favorite johnny so that's why i think edgar was talking about there were multiple classes about it and um there's so much resource and people are really interested in understanding how their dna can help them connect to their family which is something you know family search and rootstech does so let's let's get started and people who are watching let us know what questions you have and we will make sure and hopefully address them in the chat or here live and we're just here for the conversation and welcome everyone so let's go let's get started tell us talk to us okay so you wanted to hear a bit about my background and how i got into genealogy when is that right yes so from my perspective i was born in northern ireland but i grew up in england and i regard myself as coming to family history really late i think i was in my early 30s um and i say that because i know i would have loved it if i'd somehow been turned onto it earlier but it just didn't happen i was into history i was into old buildings but it was really only i was having a chat with my mother i think it was in 2006 or seven and she suddenly started mentioning all these names from her side of the family and she was only an only child and i'd moved from northern ireland when i was not yet two years old so uh i was suddenly like wait a minute who are all these people uh you know i need to know who they are and i i don't know what time i went to bed that night but it was not very long before i got up i was hooked from that moment if you like so yeah it was very sudden okay okay and white like so you became curious and interested but many of us are curious and interested but we haven't launched a product oh well yeah that that was a bit unusual i think that was just a confluence of different things happened uh i took the dna test again not an early adopter really you know i took it at the end of 2016 uh but i like like everyone else who takes one really there's a hard core of people who really know this stuff well i was just your average genealogist who'd run out of things to try and i wanted to see what i could get out of it and when i spat into the tube i had no idea what i was going to get out of it at all but then when i got the results back you know i'm a naturally curious person and i also happen to be a freelance web developer and so those things just kind of came together at that moment and i honestly i i when i started to build a website i knew very little about dna i'd learned a lot as i went along and it all kind of snowballed from there really because i was able to collaborate with a lot of great people and learn a lot very quickly well what a fantastic resource and i'm excited to to learn more about it thank you and have fun to learn about you being naturally curious i think so many people interested in genealogy and family history are um curious it's just something that we we have in common that's awesome okay edgar take it take it away yeah so johnny maybe we can start by explaining to some of the people in the audience what dna painter is so how would you describe dna painter for somebody coming you to design okay it is a website at dnapainter.com which is really for anyone who's taken a dna test and has questions about it and wants to learn about it now it's not a one-stop shop for everything by any means but it lets you do lots of quite interesting things to visualize your dna and also explore how you might be connected to someone so there are kind of three groups of things there we've i've got ancestral trees so that lets you make a kind of visualization of your direct line in a fan chart or a pedigree chart and then it lets you overlay the specific dna inheritance paths on top of that and also do lots of other cool visualization things i might show you later then we've got chromosome mapping which is definitely impossible to describe in 20 seconds but i'll try and that's where you take the segments of dna that you share with a known relative and you think well how am i connected to this person that dna must have come from this ancestral couple in my pedigree chart because otherwise why would i have those segments of dna i have them via this connection and if you take that to its extreme you can build this kind of colourful tapestry that describes your ancestry and then i've got these probability based tools which i did in collaboration with a few other people actually so we've got the shared center morgan tools a big one and we've got what are the odds so these are ways to figure out who a mystery match is perhaps or maybe figure out a mystery in your own family tree and figure out how you might fit into another tree great so johnny i was wondering if you could tell us how did you come up with the idea of creating dna painter what what was behind the motivation of this um i think my own bafflements edgar when i when i got the results uh i had to kind of peel away when we were at the early stages of dna testing right and if we go back three four years when i took the test i had to kind of figure out what is this it's not just about a pie chart with ethnicity is it there's there's something there's something real in here but what exactly is it there's a lot of misinformation around i think there's a lot of people have a look at the pie chart and they say oh well that wasn't what i thought it was so therefore the test is rubbish it doesn't mean anything i knew there was something there but i needed to figure out what it was and from in my personal slightly idiosyncratic brain the way to figure it out was to to do this chromosome mapping yeah so i knew that when i'd identified one match i needed to have that information in front of me so that i could come back later on and then compare other matches with that person and those matches might be on different testing platforms so i i think that was what drove me to do it there were other ways of doing that but they weren't going to let you kind of put some stuff in and then come back and then put more in and then put more in and obviously i've been doing this for four years now so it's quite big now the map and so that drove me on um but after that it wasn't about me it was all about everyone else because it was more popular than i expected it to be and so it became a collaboration between me and the rest of the community because people came back immediately with all these great ideas and you know i'm a programmer and i can listen so that's how it all came to fruition fantastic what a great story i'm glad you like it wendy so for somebody new coming you um what are the benefits of dna painter you know like what's the average user getting out of it uh most users will come there probably for the interactive online tool called the shared center morgan tool so this is taking the results of a crowdsource project by blaine bettinger who's a very respected genealogist in the field he collected information from over 60 000 data points where people say okay well imagine you and i had go a third cousins like say okay well edgar's my third cousin and we share 80 centimorgans of dna so he got 60 000 contributions like that uh did some statistical normalization and then produce what's really a very very powerful kind of real empirical data resource so a few years ago i made this interactive online version of that which you can find on my website and i would say probably about 70 of the people who use dna painter are there for that because it's quite a nice kind of in one place uh version of that information and then there are probabilities added in so you can figure out well okay it's likely that edgar's a third cousin but maybe he could be more distant based on that amount of dna shared so that's a big one but it depends who you are it depends what you're trying to do everyone comes to this with different goals don't they some of us just have a vague idea i'd like to take my tree back further some people like i need to trace my my aunt or my great aunt what happened to it uh you know and they have they have a you know a massive mystery to solve so it really depends who you are and what you want to do but hopefully there's something for everyone yeah i mean many of us have taken dna tests and you know them at some point we feel overwhelmed with you know the information that we receive and we just don't know what to do with that so i think it's great to have tools like dna painter to help us figure it out you know how we connect and perhaps we can talk about some of those tools um what are some of the most popular tools that you see users um you know coming to the site for uh i guess the most popular one is the one i just mentioned should i share the screen and talk through a couple of minutes and let me tell you we're already getting questions about the w-a-t-o tool and its new feature so we'll get to that i'll see what i can do on that in a little bit wendy so the shared center morgan project tool looks like this uh and i'm sure a lot of people listening will be familiar with this but i'll just give you a quick chat through it because it's very popular so this is data compiled by blaine bettinger and it was updated actually just in march last year so this is all pretty up to date and if you enter a number in there where it says enter the total centre morgan i'm not sure if you can see that on your screen here i've entered 282. and what it's done is it's grayed out all of the relationships below we can't see them all on the screen but just imagine that you can and it's showing just those that are possible so in this case if i click on some of these relationships and perhaps i think it's a half second cousin for example but it says it's a 16 probability what does that really mean if i click on the half second cousin i can actually see this histogram which um blaine produced as part of his project and this lets you see what 282 there that's the the block there that ends in 300 so only seven submissions is right over there on the right hand shoulder of the data only seven submissions did that so it could be a half second cousin that is a genuine probability but i guess i'd probably be looking at other ones and see if there's anything else where it seems to be more likely if you like so it's really a way of exploring the data that you have it doesn't magically tell you the answer because guess what recombination is really random and the amounts of dna you share with people is gonna they are gonna vary massively but it can hopefully give you bits of evidence that can help you uh so that's a really big one um what are the odds then it's taking that a bit further so you've got not just one data point but in this tree here we can see we've got three different matches uh who elizabeth matches and this is their tree and we're trying to figure out where elizabeth might fit into this tree so we're trying to figure out which of these people could be her father so again it's doing lots of maths uh behind the scenes to figure out which position in the tree makes most sense based on that amount of dna shared so that is a very popular tool as well that was developed in collaboration with another genealogist called leah larkin and she had some mathematical models that were set up by a fellow englishman a guy called andrew millard so that uh that's another really popular one uh my heart obviously is always with chromosome maps because i think they're fabulous and johnny i have to jump in and say dawn is saying that she used dna um and dna painter to discover a little secret that her grandmother had about the grandfather so people are responding with yes they've used some of these tools and so this is awesome i'm pleased to hear that um because i've got on the screen i'll just evangelize about chromosome mappings for a second if you don't mind yes of course so in chromosome mapping we're trying to figure out kind of who we're made of if you like as in what what are the who gave us which bits of our dna so what we're looking at here is the kind of easier version of chromosome mapping that's when you do someone from a younger generation so this is my son's chromosome map now all four of my son's grandparents have tested their dna and in fact i've done a visual phasing project for both of my son's parents for me and for my partner so i was able to make um this chromosome map which shows the bits of dna he got from each of his eight great grandparents which is obviously science fiction for most of us to be able to do that but because he's a generation below and he's lucky enough to have all four grandparents alive in this era and able to test for him we can do that but then a more realistic chromosome which probably looks more like those of people listening is this one which is my mother's where i am actually able to figure out mostly if it's maternal or paternal and there are some very prominent family groups but in general i'm still working on it it's a work in progress if i wasn't building tools i'd probably spend more time on this and it would be better but yeah chromosome mapping is not uh you click your fingers and you get this amazing thing it's um it's about engaging with your dna and your family history and seeing what the possibilities are and just imagining where could this have come from and it's like a logic puzzle i love it okay and i think you know that's what dna really celebrates we celebrate today the fact that we have all of this amazing information and that we can drag meaning out of that and as a creator you know for dna painter it seems like you excel at collaboration and creating new useful tools how do you go about deciding what new tools to add uh i listen to what people say and i spend when i'm not programming i spend a lot of time responding to queries both via email facebook and twitter so i kind of get a sense of what which areas people are most hot on and most you know most in need of of help with if you like but in general you know i'm open-minded um i see what comes along i've also as you as you'll gather got my own hobby horses and if truth be told a lot of the things i've developed is because i i particularly need a tool to do a specific thing for me and i hope that other people will want it as well but for example my son's chromosome map there i built a tool to help me do that because i needed it because i wanted to do that there was nothing else i was going to do that day when his results came in um so yeah i'm spit between selfishness and altruism really where um i i do want to work with other people and i want to find out uh what the community most needs i guess i think that's great and i think it shows in your tool you know being so useful to so many people we've seen classes as tech now in french and swedish and other languages you know showing you know how they are using your tool and i think that work of listening closely to the user is paying off so what's next what are some of the tools that are coming up next okay well i've just released something that i could show you very quickly because very proud i'm so proud uh i've just released uh this thing called dimensions um so that looks a bit well if i introduce trees to you first so i have these ancestral trees so this is my son's pedigree chart and so you can kind of put custom color coding in but you can also add what i've called dimensions and it can pull extra data out of your jedcom file so this is a fan chart and this shows the age at death for my son's ancestors so it's almost like a kind of heat map with these different shades of blue and you can see the areas with the darker blue are where people live longer and the areas that are more pale blue turquoisey color that's people who who lived less long um so we can see i've got a great grandmother for example who died at 47. so you can maybe see things you didn't see before you might have had the information but you might suddenly notice that for example one one part of the tree is much darker than another if you like and then another dimension that you can generate is the country of birth uh again these aren't specifically dna related things but you could use this feature for dna which is which is a fun thing so for example you could combine some of the other filters within the trees with this you might find that most of your x chromosome came from england for example as opposed to germany or ireland uh that might be might be one way that you could use it so again it's trying to pull this information out of your jedcom file to kind of normalize those strings of text that says belfast northern ireland it will try and figure out which which country you're talking about but fundamentally obviously i intended this as an add-on to the dna aspect of the site to the chromosome maps so one thing you can do is you can overlay those x dna inheritance paths or y dna so this shows that my son statistically is likely to have inherited one quarter of his dna from edith louise samples who is his second great grandmother um but in terms of what's next edgar the aim would be to integrate this fully with the chromosome maps so that when you're mapping your chromosomes you can start potentially supercharging it and saying okay well this bit came from this anatarful number this person in my in my ancestry and therefore did i have a recombination point here so maybe this bit must have come from the other grandparent on that side or was there a recombination point in a different generation and i want to start getting serious with this with the dna education and try to supercharge that that's my next big plan that's exciting um you know for people that are coming in new or maybe they already have an account but they just don't know how to make the most of it do you have any tips for either new users or for people that could be doing more with the with the many tools that you have uh i do um the first thing i say is one thing i've made myself do in the last six months that is quite hard work but i'm glad i did it is i made myself write blog posts every month uh it's funny you're grown up and you set yourself homework but basically i started a mailing list so i have to write articles and so that forces me to actually express stuff maybe a bit clearer than i normally do so i'm not saying all the articles are amazing because i'm sure they're not but some there's some of them break it down quite a lot and the first thing i would say to a new user is think about what it is you're really trying to do before lurching into a specific activity like chromosome mapping or the probability trees you know think to yourself am i do i just want to learn more about dna do i want to just immerse myself in that or am i actually looking for a specific mystery grandfather um for example because you probably do two very different things for example if you had a mystery grandfather you wouldn't just start mapping your chromosomes and say well where's my grandfather that isn't really how it would work it'd be much more powerful probably to start to cluster your matches and figure out other family trees that you seem to be related to and try and fit yourself into those trees potentially using that the what are the odds tool uh whereas for me chromosome mapping has been brilliant because it's made me really embrace dna and learn so much more about it than i would have done if i wasn't doing it so the the main thing to do is just figure out what it is you want to do yeah go ahead wendy i was just gonna say we have a question from someone it's now a good time yeah absolutely um anita is asking and this is you know kind of along the lines that we were talking about she has a very complicated um italian family tree and she is wondering what you would recommend she start with to sort out her dna matches with her family tree regionally specific that you recommend or if it's just ubiquitous regardless of where well you you definitely should take into account the region and my advice would probably depend on the degree of intermarriage and or endogamy within that community because if you have a remote mountain community you may find that the same kind of families have been marrying each other over many many generations which can can lead to some interesting outcomes in terms of trying to evaluate relationships um but the uh the other thing i'd take into account is how big are those matches yeah because you if you're looking at smaller matches and as a european tester often i am dealing with important matches who are only maybe 15 20 30 centimorgans you have to just be open-minded that you don't really have an easy way of knowing if that's a 20 generation old match or a four generation odd match so you have to tread a bit carefully i'm always jealous of americans who've got you know a thousand uh third and fourth cousins on ancestry probably not many of them have that but i'm always jealous anyway okay and i have one more question and then we'll go back to okay and this one's very specific so um brian is asking if you have talked to anyone um nhs in in the nhs in england about dna painter or the genome campus at higgs hinston kingston um i have not i have not i i've never really delved too much into the medical side of it and mainly because i'm obsessed with genealogy and there's no room left in my brain but when i was when i was last in salt lake city at rootstech i did launch a feature which slightly got forgotten by everyone including me to be honest which enabled you to um check a button and you can show traits on your chromosome map so that was the step in that direction that i took because i know it's very interesting to a lot of people and quite important so if you have a chromosome map a dna painter and you go into the settings the little cog above chromosome one anyone can check that button and then lots of little pins will appear and i collaborated with uh a lady called christy who works with diane sutherd who helped me because i'm not really a scientist as it may be clear from what i'm saying so she she actually helped me um make sure those those were meaningful and i kind of have the descriptions of the of the genes which is very interesting but no i have not spoken to any of the nhs if anyone calls me i would be delighted to talk to them let's recommend that okay thank you yeah so i think again to emphasize how important it is to have an objective you know when we start doing anything with dna and if you want some help on defining an objective we have free consultations with family search you know online now and you can just sign up for a 30-minute consultation and you know we can help you set up an objective and then figure it out what tools may be better depending on your objective but let's just talk about connections now because this is really what it's all about right we are excited about dna but really it's about the the fact that we can connect with uh family members or that we can actually extend our family trees so johnny i was wondering if you could tell us more about some of the genetic connections that you have personally made using dna whether it's with your tool or just you know before yeah i mean one thing that i've learned actually is if someone writes to you and they want to work with you and they appear to have some idea about genealogy then the level of the dna match doesn't really matter at all i mean there may or may not be something you can trace there but getting someone who wants to work with you is most of the battle right i don't i don't know about you guys but for me if i send i try to send message whenever i find a connection or i think i i've got an idea about a connection with a match i always write to them and i don't expect a response i'm long beyond the thing of oh they haven't written back when i wonder what i did wrong i don't expect them to write back they normally don't write back and that's fine because not everyone is me not everyone is interested in this stuff and that's not a problem but i i got an email i think two months ago from someone and it was a living dna where you don't have segment data and you don't have that bigger database but but it's still valuable because there's still people who aren't anywhere else potentially and someone wrote to me uh and she thought that she had a connection that was interesting and i looked at it and it was about 18 centimorgans it might even have been less it was a bit like well i'm you know i'm a nice guy and she seems nice so i'm going to write back but i had no expectation whatsoever but because i've done all this phasing work she was on jed match and i was able to get the segment so i knew which line it was on and then finally amazingly it was a smith line there's the last name smith smith in london right but we got it we figured out what that was right and that's because she wanted to work with me i wanted to work with her smith in london unbelievable so we were actually able to break a break a brick to break through the brick wall because she was a better genealogist than me and she had done some work some speculative work then when we put our ideas together we were able to figure out who this guy james smith's wife was it was absolutely amazing because i had no expectations of that going in so i think it's like anything you just need you need someone you can collaborate with on a genuine level because if you if you think about what i just said to you compare that to sometimes you might get a message that says hello cousin how are we related um that's a different there's a different level of engagement there isn't there so it's about finding people to work with and how do you find them i mean you've to be lucky obviously but i think obviously you have to play the averages don't you so you write to as many people as as you can don't write a really long message because it would only put them off anyway people get creeped out when i write people long messages explain exactly how i'm connected to them most of the time they don't reply because they're like who is this guy you need you need a short snappy message that has a promise of something good and maybe you're going to get someone who wants to collaborate and yeah that was just really pleasing for me because it was smith in london and because i'd had no expectation whatsoever so good those are some really good tips i think you know part of it is as you said lock you know actually sometimes there's somebody else that is working on some of those lines and you just happen to have a connection whether it's a you know remote small connection or a big one so i think it's important to keep connecting as you said i think the connecting is the most important thing because particularly for me but most of the most of the people who connect to the lines the brick walls for me they're going to be quite far back they're going to be towards the limit of autism or dna aren't they you know if i'm looking for someone who's a third or fourth uh or fifth or sixth cousin then we're not talking about 80 centimorgans we're talking about 20 30 40 probably the most so open mind yeah so another big theme at rootstech is connection and you've attended several of these rootstech you know conferences over the years and actually i've you know seen you there several times presenting and interacting with all these people how has roostech help you improve dna painter um and or maybe even you as a researcher and user of dna uh yeah in many ways really i mean i'd heard of roots tech honestly i never really dreamed that i would get to go there which is kind of funny we think about it now because it came to me in 2019 uh but i am yeah i i had to go for it it was very out of character for me to go to salt lake city in february 2018 but i went because you had this dna innovation competition so i entered that and then i actually won it amazingly it won yeah which meant that i got to lots of people wanting to meet me which is amazing because i'm not very good at putting myself out there actually but so it meant that i was on a stand and lots of very interesting people came to talk to me and i talked to them and unfortunately i didn't get to go to that many classes because i needed to be in my stand talking to people about this website i just built but it was great and i enjoyed it so much that i wanted to to try presenting perhaps um how did that i didn't know how that happened i i think i i just thought i'll give it a go because it would be a great experience and then i was very lucky because of some friends here in europe also asked me to talk at genetic genealogy ireland so i had a little practice i did my first talk in i think it was belfast in february of 2018 was it was it dublin one or the other and then suddenly i was in roots tech and i was talking this massive massive hall full of people absolutely terrified uh but yeah i mean what an experience it was incredible and i got to also be on a panel with other people who basically taught me essentially most of what i knew so that was intimidating but very exciting as well and obviously you meet so many people in the expo hall as well you network but also you meet new companies doing different interesting things uh and yeah it's uh it's an exciting exciting event definitely and i for to be honest i didn't know what to expect with the virtual version but it was incredible as well absolutely incredible this year we had over a million people that you know interacted with the site and yeah it's different the reach is just unbelievable i i when you when you can really think about how that compares with the number of people who could possibly make it on site just incredible and in fact you know those classes remain there throughout the year now with through connect we can just go and watch it or re-watch it because some of these topics are complicated that yeah you know they're re-watching don't they you know several times you know to get over what you really need uh to move forward so i think um you know rootstech has been an interesting place to foster connections and now online it's even more so for those that are thinking about developing a tool you know like you did do you have any you know tips on you know or words of encouragement i would say you know for them well with the main encouragement i suppose would be we're really still at an early stage of this there's a lot of room for more innovation and actually a very receptive welcoming user base potentially i mean i worked professionally as a web developer previously so i'm always terrified of the idea that something might not work properly but obviously in practice stuff breaks sometimes and people are very tolerant and cool about it they just they want to help you get it right and make it work um and that yeah there's so many communities of kind of enthusiastic people so i'd certainly recommend to anyone developing a tool even if like me you may i never really used social media until i developed um well until i got into genealogy and then developed dna paint and now i use it all the time don't really use it for social stuff but i use it for social dna stuff but so even people who don't really tend to use facebook or twitter i would recommend doing that just to get to know people and hear ideas and get feedback um if you just take the shared center morgan tool i did that in isolation and i kind of sat on it i did nothing with it and i put it up in a facebook group one day and i went off to pick my kids up from school and i was in the playground i had a quick look on my phone and i was like oh this seems to this is 600 likes or something on the post but then people kept saying oh yeah why don't you just do this so it'd be brilliant if you could bookmark the the number of sentiments so many really really brilliant ideas just came in those few hours and so i just did them because when people are saying this is really brilliant make it better then what do you do you make it better so that was very powerful for me so i'd recommend that everyone try and do it that way because it worked well yeah we could definitely see the love and the big drive behind dna painter you know because you do spend a lot of time listening to people and then yeah and so what some of those uh big drivers for you that keep you going like you know when you said when things don't work or when they seem to be just taking too much of your time and you don't have that what keeps you going uh well i make the time for it because it's important to me and the main things that keep me going are one i need to keep educating myself i never for a second claim that i'm some big expert who knows everything at all i definitely know a lot more than i knew in the beginning of 2017. i'll tell you that but um i'm definitely still learning all the time so how do i learn more by interacting with people and listening to their problems and trying to help them solve them but the main thing that drives me on is you have people people feeding back either saying it didn't work so i'm like quick quick make it work or they're saying um this is really good but how about if you do this and sometimes yeah sometimes i might get 10 of those in a day and i think oh not that but then you read it and you're like oh well you know what there's generally something interesting and positive that you can get out of any email even for some complaining which does happen sometimes so so it's important to remember as you said that we are still in the very early years of using this information and the information that we'll be able to get in the future and i think people need to understand that that even though it's been 20 years since you know we've had these tests available for the public and several years since millions of people have tested we still have you know many things that to come and you know consider that yeah and yeah go ahead and i i really like what you said as well that uh you know that you shouldn't feel afraid of asking questions or because you know everybody's learning at some point you know everybody is just using this technology and and i really one of the things i admire you johnny is your ability to connect and to listen to people and to just you know really pay attention to everybody i don't i try yeah i would love it in future uh in the near future if somehow the whole genome testing became a suddenly affordable uh and b everyone could just be resequenced using existing samples and see there was enough computing power to do the comparisons because it would add this layer of precision that would be a thing of great beauty now whether it would really bring about amazing breakthroughs and what we could know i don't know i can live with the kind of fuzziness we have now with the snip testing but i would love it if um yeah if that can come forward and obviously there will be a time in the future when it does and that does happen but i don't personally know if it's going to be within five years 10 years we'll see we'll see so if somebody wants to collaborate or has um you know some ideas for you on things that you know may be good to have as tools in your in dna painter how do they get a hold of you how do they reach out to you uh there are a couple of primary ways i suppose i've got a user group on facebook that's often how people do that so that's the dna painter user group on facebook i think it's got 12 or 13 000 people in it so it's moderately busy but quite kind of calm polite and then also you can email me i just have a johnnydnapainter.com email address that's j-o-n-n-y uh yeah those would be the best ways probably we've got one more we've got one more question as we're wrapping up do you can you share one of the favorite mysteries that dna painter has helped solve uh for me or for any anybody everyone um yes he says slightly you struggling in his head for one um honestly the probably the key thing for me isn't exactly when it solves a mystery it's when it verifies that you were definitely on the right track all along like people always say well chromosome mapping must be the answer to that must be the way i solve my mysteries and i always have to somehow say well no it isn't but it's still brilliant and you should do it because for me chromosome mapping helps to kind of label on the line and make things clear but what i love to do is um yeah use something like one of the odds so i've used one of the odds to help people find out who their parents were which is incredible like a lost father but if you then map the chromosomes and you see it all kind of slot into place and you can see that you were totally right um that that's a big one for me oh that's fantastic it's been so exciting well thank you johnny for spending time with us today in this day celebrating dna and many accomplishments and if you have any more questions for johnny feel free to reach out to him or if you just need help with general dna questions please sign up for our free consultation at family search at the library and we hope to see you again in one of these wonderful podcasts you know that wendy is always coming up with and and i think this this has been just a delight to have you here johnny thank you pleasure thank you edgar and thank you wendy yes it was delightful and everyone will

Channel: FamilySearch

Views: 2,699

Rating: 4.8499999 out of 5

Keywords: dna test, 23 and me, ancestry dna, family history, family tree, ancestry dna results, dna test results, dna results, genetic testing, genetic genealogy, familysearch, DNA, genealogy brick walls, genealogy brick wall strategies, genealogy research, family search, genealogy research methodology, DNA Day 2021, genealogy, ancestry, genealogy basics, how to

Id: sdZ2qzl_z-c

Length: 38min 44sec (2324 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021