DNA Problem Solving (AncestryDNA, MyHeritageDNA and 23 and Me)

[Music] welcome to genealogy gems and elevenses with lisa oh gosh i've reverted back to genealogy gems well it is genealogygems.com but this is 11's with lisa i'm lisa louise cook do you have a dna problem maybe it's as simple as i have so many matches i don't know where to focus or i don't know how to keep track of them or how can i really use all this to do what i really want to do which is family history well today we're going to visit with somebody who has worked past those problems and not only solve genealogical problems for herself but she's also helping other people do it and she's here today to help you so my special guest is sarah allen she's a librarian at the allen county public library genealogy center which if you watch the show you are familiar with them and uh i wanted to talk to her today because she's not a biologist okay she's not a genetic genealogist guru she's just like you and me she's passionate about family history she shares with people and they've had some very popular webinars lately and she shares really practical easy to understand information about how to use dna records to solve genealogical problems and now we are really being lucky to have this episode today because the day that sarah and i were supposed to meet originally to record of course there was a huge snowstorm and the allen county public library was closed so we had to kind of move things around i'm here in texas and we are buried in a deep freeze with some devastating power outages our prayers go out to those who are without power um here at our house we were without water for uh some time my daughter still has no water and last i heard they were maybe gonna lose power um but you know we're all making it and our prayers go out to everybody and you're soon gonna hear that with amongst all this chaos that was going on trying to pull this episode together that i put my microphone on the wrong setting so i kind of sound like i'm sitting in a folder's coffee can during this interview but it doesn't matter because sarah is the one that we want to hear from today however they were doing some construction at the library so occasionally it sounds like we used jackhammers to do our dna but i know you guys will understand but whether look snow sleet construction zones coffee cans no water whatever none of it's going to get in the way of these genealogists bringing this show to you today so without further ado let's get started well hi sarah hey welcome to the show hello thank you for having me you know i was thinking about this uh you're a librarian at one of the largest genealogy libraries in the country if not the world and not every librarian is well-versed on dna how did that happen for you well um my mother became interested in dna back at the very early days of family tree dna in like 2000 2001 and she wanted to use it to solve a mystery in our family tree and she got me kind of involved in it so i was interested in dna from the very beginning because of my mom basically yeah and then i just pursued the passion basically since then well and i'm sure it helps you out just in everyday work that you do you're talking to genealogists throughout the day and so i'm sure that the question of how dna fits into this puzzle certainly creeps in doesn't it more and more yes we have more and more people coming in every day or um contacting us by email saying help i'm i'm trying to figure this out or i've already done my dna and i don't know what to do next that kind of thing yeah wonderful well i thought you know we do a little bit of a tune-up today and i'm so glad that you're going to help us kind of get off to a good start for the new year um for those who have never tested what are the dna choices these days i know some of the tests have come and gone and changed and companies have changed give us a little quick update yes okay so there's three different types of dna tests that you could actually take there's one test that is very popular um and everyone's heard of it but there's three tests and there's four major companies that do the testing nowadays there's some other companies but they're lesser companies and they're not really talked about that much so the three tests are autosomal dna which is the one that everyone's heard of this is the one where it gives you your ethnicity results and so people are very interested in that and um it also gives you a list of matches and these are people that are genetic cousins with you and so you can then contact them and work with them to learn more about the family and that is offered by ancestry.com it's offered by family tree dna my heritage and 23andme those are the four companies and then there's the y chromosome dna which is a very underused test and i really wish more people would take it this is offered by family tree dna testing company and this is the one my mom and i started on back in 2000 to try to figure out a problem on our mail line and we have to you have to have a male take this test so we had my uncle take it and because we were trying to find out about his lineage um going back on the direct paternal line and then there is a mitochondrial dna test and that is the direct female line test and this would be you either a male or a female can take this test and it's not as useful because you can have in an exact match with another person who has taken the test and they could be related to you a thousand years ago so um it may be a more recent type of match but it may not be and so you don't want to spin your wheels kind of on that so you want to kind of know your your situation that you're trying to um solve before you um take the mitochondrial test right exactly and i know with the autosomal it's when we're talking about matches we're really talking about six generations are back so right that's kind of where the real value is yeah yeah that's a lot more uh limited than the mitochondrial so uh not too long ago we had ran smear from my heritage dna on the show and he was talking about their new genetic uh i think they call them genetic groups and i know that uh ancestry has come out with the new genetic communities um how do you see these kind of impacting our research have you had a chance to jump into those a bit well i think those are really neat they tell us um kind of where our family's been living the last 100 200 years so this is on the autosomal dna test if you've been if you've taken one of those and ancestry and myheritage offer these and um so i have two genetic communities at ancestry one of them is new york settlers and the other one is tennessee settlers so it's telling me that after my ancestors got to america they lived in new york and tennessee for a period of time and that's exactly spot on because my grandmother's family is from new york and my grandfather's family's from tennessee so um if someone was adopted i think this would be really neat for them to um kind of get some background on the family without having to do really any research at all so it's really nice it kind of gives you at least a little bit more of a needle in a haystack to try to follow maybe confirm something that you've already found exactly have there been any other major dna updates recently that have caught your eye that you think you need to be aware of well um family true dna the company i was talking about earlier was just recently sold it was a family run company and now it's been sold to another group and i think it was a friendly sale so i think we can expect that things that family tree dna will continue along as they have been um there may be some new innovations there may be some new you know money coming into the company now and so they may be able to upgrade some things so um that was something that has happened so it's it's noteworthy yeah absolutely now uh some folks find that their matches kind of get overwhelming that's easy to happen because sometimes you get lots of a good thing um and they aren't really sure how to take good advantage of them and kind of where to put their focus uh what recommendations do you have to help people kind of get a fresh new look and uh make better use of the matches that they've got yeah so this would be with your autosomal matches sometimes we can get thousands of matches and people if they start thinking about i have thousands of matches i should be doing something with those matches they can get overwhelmed i would suggest that you don't think of it that way and kind of trick your trick your brain into thinking about it just in small manageable chunks so the the companies will arrange those matches for you from the highest match to the to the um lowest match meaning you're you're more related more closely related to the highest match and very distantly related to the lowest match so i wouldn't necessarily spend a lot of time on those really really low matches unless you're more advanced in your um in your research and you know kind of what you're doing i would just kind of take it in chunks and look at your top you know 25 matches maybe but the people that show up on the top 25 matches and see if you can just play around with the matching company's website and really try to understand what you're seeing there in those top 25 because you should unless you're adopted you should be able to figure out your relationship to a lot of them by looking at their trees by doing different things maybe you'll recognize their name um if they use their real name so there's different things that you can do like that i think that just kind of take it in manageable chunks and don't stress yourself out of about it and really you know to focus on our best matches i think that's a really good message that you don't need to deal with all of them necessarily but really take that close look at the best ones and i expose the ones that really fit into the question that you have that you're trying to solve like right to do with your mom right you know you um put together some examples and some things to show us um can i invite you to share your screen and let's talk a little bit more about how we can make the best use out of our matches okay well i love this so sarah's going to help us do a little bit of dna problem solving and um i like this beginning steps because i think sometimes that's the hardest part isn't it yeah yeah i think just getting kind of getting started sometimes people are in a state of inertia so just getting started and learning how to think about your dna problem your problems and if dna can solve them is a good good place to start excellent we'll take it away alrighty okay i'm going to give you some principles and then we're going to go through two short examples very different but two short examples so the principles are really the first principle is you're going to want to make sure that you've actually done the traditional genealogical research first so that would be you know the census records the birth marriage and death records um just the traditional genealogical research as best as you can for this particular genealogical problem and then you will add dna as a secondary tool that you will use and then you're going to follow the clues the dna will maybe give you some clues and then your traditional you're continuing to do the traditional genealogical research all along and so you might come up with more clues there as well and so you keep doing that and kind of working back and forth with them so that would be what i would suggest that you do and then if you're going to come to conclusion you really ought to be familiar with the genealogical proof standard and there also are dna standards that they have come out with kind of to give you guidance on how to use dna to solve problems so you should know about those now next i have this is sarah's plan i guess we can call it um that just some steps you should go through to kind of think through your problem before you start working with the dna and these are the five steps identify your research problem number one number two summarize the genealogical research that you've already done these are both best done i think if you write them out you don't have to write them longhand of course you could type them but just kind of clarifying your thoughts that will help you and you will see gaps and things that you have missed at least i do when i when i um write it all out i think oh gosh i didn't do that or no i agree this doesn't make sense this i i didn't i wasn't logical here you know you just kind of catch things so then number three you're going to choose the most relevant dna test to order because remember there are three and you're going to choose the most helpful family member to test because you could possibly test different family members on different sides of your family super important for you with your y dna wasn't it you had to get you said you had to test a man but you had to test the right man in the tree right right right exactly we had to test my uncle because we wanted to find out about my mom's maiden name but she couldn't do the y test so if she if my mom hadn't had brothers we would have been a little more limited in what we could have done okay and then number five make sure that you have tried to complete the rest of your family tree as best as you can because you're going to get dna matches to all the different lines of your tree and you're going to want to eliminate the ones that are not applicable to the problem you're trying to solve okay so i'm going to spend a little minute more on choosing the relevant the most relevant dna test so and this is another sarah rule and other people might tell you different things so you know just kind of keep this in mind that um this is my advice that autosomal testing is almost always the best way to go when you're first starting out unless your mystery is about five or six great-grandparents back because autosomal testing will really stop at about five or six great grandparents you won't have enough dna inherited from them to really solve a genealogical problem and that's a little bit of a squishy number it could be seven great-grandparents back but somewhere around in there so if your problem is further back on your tree you are going to have to look at the y chromosome or the mitochondrial if you have somebody that's appropriate to test and you can recruit people to test you can definitely go out there and try to find somebody that is in the correct paternal line or maternal line that you're looking for um you may have to approach strangers my mom and i have just approached a number of strangers and asked them to test some of them actually say yes i mean when you introduce yourself and tell them what you're doing and show them the tree and how you're related and so forth but yeah that's awesome now people always ask and i've heard this before uh in our live chat so what was your ice breaker how did you kind of open the door so they kept talking to you well well this was a negative example of this but my mom and i went into the store once and it was owned by one of our relatives and we'd never met him before and i don't remember what she said to him i think she just said hi i'm so and so and we're related and should ask him and he said no but um yeah i don't know you just kind of have to start i think i i would start out with you know how you're related so these are obviously going to be people that you're somehow shirttail related to that you're trying to get to test because they have the dna that you need to solve your problem yeah yeah kind of showing where this the common ground is right right okay so then i have a handy chart here so this is just telling if you're having trouble conceptualizing what i'm saying so if there's a male named jerry i'm just naming him jerry um if he wants to test his y dna he's he's going to be able to answer questions on his paternal line going up that line there in blue on the top of the screen and if jerry wants to test his mitochondrial dna which would be his mother's line it would be the pink line going across the bottom of the screen and jerry's sister geraldine can also test the her mitochondrial dna but she cannot take a y test because she's not male and then this is just showing you the autosomal dna which is so powerful because you have it from all of the relatives you don't have it from just one particular line going back like i said about to your sixth seventh grade grandparents you will have some measurable dna and your percentages there really help clear me bring that to light don't they it gets small quick it gets small quick yeah yeah all right so then the best family member to test this is also my opinion but if you're going to do the autosomal dna and you have older family members that are still living of a different generation than you are you should test those older generation people first if they will agree to test you'll have to explain to them what's going on all of my elderly relatives that i've asked to test have said oh yeah you're the family genealogist we'll test for you you know so not everybody has that experience but um so if your parents are alive your grandparents a great aunt or uncle a first cousin of your parent is still alive i would test them first but if you can't do that then you test yourself and you you move on but um because the elder generation will have more dna from their sixth and seventh great grandparents that you would not have because it's kind of passed out of your autosomal dna and then of course with the y in the mitochondrial dna you have to find somebody on the correct inheritance path like we talked about before okay sorting dna results people have questions about this and i'm not really going to um go into this a whole lot but you can sort out your matches by family line or by common ancestor couple i do common ancestor couple so identify who the common ancestor couple is and i mark it somehow that that's how i'm related to that person um how do you find out who the match is well sometimes you'll recognize their name sometimes you'll be able to view their tree and look at it if you see names in common or even ancestors in common you'll know um so you have sometimes you have to research their tree let's say their tree only has like three people on it but one of the surnames is a surname from your family then you could probably do some research on it yourself and figure out who this person is perhaps um and then you can use known cousins to help you sort so let's say your cousin bobby has tested his dna you can look and you're only related to bobby in one particular way that's the important key there um you're not double related to him um so anybody that matches both you and bobby should be related to you the same way that bobby is on that same line of the family and so you can sort people that way as well so those are some little quick tips that's great yeah that's a very common question yeah okay so are we ready to go into the examples yes okay so the first one is a traditional genealogy kind of question like we that we all have who are the parents of one of my ancestors and i don't know who they were this is one of my ancestors who are the parents of dovie reynolds allen and dovie was born so first we need to define our problem so debbie was born around 1822 in north carolina she was married in 1846 in owen county indiana to phillip allen my name she died in 1901 in jefferson county kansas and no records have been found naming her parents so then the research summary this is the research that i have done i found lots of records about debbie as an adult when she was already married i've sought out her obituary which did not name her parents there was no death certificate because i don't think kansas was keeping death certificates at that time so that was kind of a bummer i went to owen county this would have been 20 25 years ago and i did a lot of research unfortunately i don't remember what i did i remember being there and i didn't take good notes so i really probably need to this is kind of an oopsies where you kind of you know think back on it and are like oh i should have known better but i didn't i really should go to owen county again and redo some of this because i don't know what courthouse books i looked at i know i looked at some courthouse books i was in the courthouse but what did i do no idea so my research on dovie has been kind of not the best quite frankly yeah well that happens to all of us doesn't it and i love your summary i mean the fact that you won put that statement together so you had all the details in one paragraph but then you are summarizing what you've already done and i think it's a step easy just to jump over but it helps you kind of really get the clear picture where you've been so you know what to do right yeah so i do have another part of the summary though um so i did identify a possible father for dovie and this was from census records and this is pretty you know standard work when you have you know somebody getting married in 1846 you might want to try looking at the 1840 census and see whether you can find people of her maiden last name and what you know what you can learn about the family now those censuses are harder to work with they're not they don't name people they have little tick marks but i found only one household in owen county that had a female 15 to 18 or 15 to 19 which would be debbie's age so it's all i really had to go on so i investigated this household and it was headed by a man named william reynolds he died he left a will he named some children in his will but not all of his children because i knew he had had like 10 kids in the census so his his will was not completely naming all of his heirs so debbie could still be related to him but i couldn't prove it at all so that was where we stood with debbie and then we went to dna can dna help us and the answer is yes because she's my third great grandmother so remember i said dna autosomal dna will help with going back to probably your fifth or sixth great grandparent so i should have enough of debbie's dna to really help me but can i go back oh let's see oh yeah and why dna would not be appropriate and mitochondrial dna is not relevant in this case because of the inheritance so here's the tree and you can see that dovie is over on the right hand side she's on my dad's side and so my mitochondrial dna is going down here my dad's mitochondrial dna is going over here so we could maybe find somebody but i think autosomal will help us and which relatives should we test so i'm fortunate to have my dad alive he's 89 and i have his dna and i have his sister's dna so um we're going to use my aunt's dna to get back one generation closer to w because debbie is her second great grandmother and i've completed my tree to the other lines so then you're going to go into your dna matches is what you're going to do next and this the strategy that i decided to follow in this particular case is to search for a surname in my matches and all the companies allow you to do this ancestry myheritage and 23 are my heritage and family tree dna 23andme used to allow you to do it but now it's kind of limited in what you can do with that but hopefully you've tested it one of the other companies for this example um so we're going to just search our dna matches for the name reynolds and you can see this is the ancestry page here and i'm going to show you ancestries so this is my aunt's dna matches up at the top here you can see this search over here on the right this is what you want to click on and then it brings up this whole screen here and this box in the middle says surname in your matches trees that's what you want to do because you want to find other people that are researching reynolds right so we're going to put reynolds in that box then we get a bunch of people we get a bunch of um hits and so these are all matches of my ants that have reynolds in their tree and i have to go in and look at every tree now it's not going to be like magically telling me anything without me kind of going to and doing the work but when i do that i'm going to look for reynolds in owen county indiana first that would be my first choice reynolds in indiana and reynolds in north carolina because that was where she was born would also be helpful and maybe some in kansas but if i find somebody with a tree that has reynolds in new england or reynolds in canada or something like that i'm gonna say i'm gonna pass them right now because that's not where i think i'm headed with this if i get new information and i need to go back and you know suddenly to find out they were from canada then i could do that so when i do that fortunately we get 24 matches from my aunt's dna match list that had owen county reynolds in their tree and these people all were descended from william reynolds the guy that i thought might be debbie's dad but i couldn't prove it and so he had at least 10 kids and my aunt has matches to six of those kids multiple matches now they're low level matches so there are 27 centimorgans down to eight centimorgans and that's just the unit of measurement a centimorgan is for your dna and those are small matches but they are consistent with someone being a third fourth fifth cousin with you and this would in this case it would be with my aunt where all this information are you putting that in an excel spreadsheet or how are you kind of tracking as you're digging through the trees you could do that i um i do things on paper sure yeah yeah yeah i'd scribble it down on a piece of paper yeah but you can also make notes in your um in each of the testing companies including 23andme you can make notes in the match itself there'll be a place that says you know add a note or something like that and you can write a note to yourself you you're the only person that will see at the note um so you could you could kind of put it in there as well but yeah excel spreadsheet would be probably a great idea i'm just not that organized so what does this actually tell us i don't have a good um conclusion for this because i haven't finished doing the genealogical work that i need to do remember i want to go back to owen county and do more work and um i haven't written it up as a solved case but i think it's very conclusive that we're somehow related to william reynolds and if dovi is not his daughter she's probably his niece is what i would say based on just the relationships that we've seen um and you also want to check the shared matches just to be sure that you're doing the right you're on the right track so when i look at my aunt's shared matches with the william reynolds matches they are on her paternal line which is who who it should be if they were somehow matching my aunt's maternal line which is from eastern europe and not at all related to reynolds then we'd have a problem so you want to check your shared matches to make sure that they're sharing with the right side of the family um i think more genealogical research will actually solve this if i go back to owen county i'll probably find some records in the courthouse that i missed the first time um if i was able to identify who dovey's who william reynolds reynolds wife was i also might solve this because if if my aunt and i have matches to that woman whoever she is um then that would mean that i'm descended from william and his wife but we don't know his wife's name right so i think we're really close to solving this i i feel like i've gone in a good direction it sounds like it absolutely well let me make a good case for why source citation is so important you know a lot of people who are maybe watching are new to genealogy that's the thing it's recording as you go but like you say you can go back and kind of fill in genealogically and it all comes together with the dna that's exciting yeah all right so are we ready to move on to our second example okay so this one is a real different kind of examples but everybody has a mystery in their tree and some people have a mystery that's more recent in time frame a lot of people who are adopted would have this this situation or you might have a mysterious grandparent and in this case this is somebody that um allowed me to um present their information today i changed some names but um she has a mysterious grandfather and his name is leroy porter and so the problem was that leroy porter was born in 1897 in either france or in pennsylvania he married aina hill and he died in michigan he told tall tales and so he was known for that in the family they knew he kind of stretched the truth sometimes and he told he liked to tell people that he'd been born in paris france and that his last name was not porter but portier french pronunciation and but they kind of had their doubts about this and so they wanted to know what the real story is so the research was kind of inconclusive because he's very mysterious and when you have a mysterious ancestor they don't show up in the records like you think that they should so after he died his death certificate was filled out the informant was his wife and aina said that his parents were daniel porter and married bashley of pennsylvania so nothing about france on this death certificate but they can't find leroy on any census prior to 1920 so when he's a boy he's not found he's not found with parents named daniel and mary not found at all under the name leroy porter so it leaves you to wonder whether he possibly changed his name or some you know some un unknown thing happened in his wife a story right yeah yeah yeah so this is the problem so the dna testing will definitely help solve this we have a granddaughter that wants to test and she's taking the autosomal dna test and so she's going to have about 25 of leroy's dna so that should be plenty to work with and she should get a lot of matches unless he really is from france or a foreign country because many of the people that are testing are us based people not all but recent immigrants will have trouble sometimes finding good dna matches but if leroy was really from pennsylvania for instance she should have good matches to him um i think of my heritage as maybe being a dna company that has a little more international exposure i know when i spoke in oslo i was surprised how many people from different countries at their myheritage conference and many of them had tested so that might be a good way to go yes yes and you i always tell people to kind of if they have a mystery that they're trying to solve to get their dna into all four of the autosomal testing companies because you never know where somebody is going to test that would be very useful to you you're solving your mystery [Music] okay so and then test the correct person so leroy has several daughters that are still alive these would be kathy's aunts but they are not agreed to take testing so basically kathy's gonna have to do with her own dna at this point in time and here's the tree and i have marked out um the mom's side just for privacy's sake but kathy knows who her mom is and has that information about her mom's side of the family so you can see leroy's on her father's side and aina her family is also known so aina's family is known mom's family is known leroy's family is not known and so just to reinforce for the viewer uh the reason she asked her aunts is because they're going to have bigger portions right because they're one generation back and that's the advantage is it correct that you might look for the oldest person within your line because they've got more to work with yes her aunts would have 50 of their dna from leroy and 50 from aina exactly so that would be an advantage so if now you can see that leroy could this this situation could benefit from a y chromosome test if kathy had a family member who was in the correct inheritance path and i'm not certain if she does she may have a brother she may not so that would be something to look into possibly but i think it can be solved by autosomal dna okay so this is a feature that is only available at ancestry ancestry dna allows you to create groups of matches up to 24 of them and you will be able to assign colors to each group of matches and so this i'm just showing you real quick how i have mine arranged like i told you earlier i do them by ancestral couple and so this is a match of mine henry and over here to the right you can see this add to group by the the um arrow it also might be under some three dots they're changing their site over right now so there might be three dots over on the right and you click on the three dots and it will say add to group but anyways i created these groups and you can see i have a group called adam klein and sarah black i have a group called george klein and elsie hill and a group called jackson edgett and ruth dayo these are all ancestral couples of mine i believe adam klein and sarah black are my fourth great grandparents so anytime i find a match who is also descended from adam klein and sarah black i can stick them in this group and that way i sort them by the ancestral couple so that is a neat feature and we're going to use this feature to sort kathy's matches for this leroy porter situation so kathy doesn't need to do a whole lot of complicated sorting she really just needs to sort out her mother's line and i'm going to give them a pink dot so anytime she finds somebody that's descended from an ancestor on her mother's side of the family she can give them a pink dot like this and anytime she finds someone that is descended from one of these ancestors on eina's side she can give them a green dot and then she should have quite a few matches left over that are not marked with dots and those would be from leroy's potential family right and i'm had her give them an orange dot so when we do that here we have sorted kathy's top matches and you can see some green dots i don't know what the yellow dots are i'm not really sure but the green dots are aina and if we see a pink dot that is her mom but you can see there's a lot of orange dots and so these were people that did not descend from anybody on eina's side did not descend from anybody on mom's side so they must be leroy's family so what you're going to do then is look at the trees of all these people so there's a there's a tree here there's a tree there's no tree there there's a tree here there's a tree here there's a tree here we're going to open those up and look at them and you're going to evaluate them now clearly you would hope to see some porters if leroy was really a porter but you don't want to get wedded to the idea that you're going to find porters and discount everybody else and say well i don't find any porters it's not it's not it's not helping me no it's going to show you something and you have to figure out what it is it's showing you so what it showed us was that two families kept showing up in the match groups and one was named hedges and one was named croote and these families because leroy had or because kathy had so many matches to these people they had to be leroy's parents or grandparents this is probably a line coming down from um leroy's either parents or grandparents and you want to try to find a marriage between the two because if they're if it's like if this are his parents lines then you would hope that to find a marriage or a relationship i guess between the two the two groups that resulted in leroy and yes we were able to find a marriage between these two families we have a daniel hedges who married an alice croute around 1894 in warren county pennsylvania and we figured this out by doing genealogy so once you the dna kind of gives you some clues then you go back to genealogy and you do more genealogical research and so here's the 1900 census just showing this family you've got they're living with a grandma they've got alice and daniel as the daughter and son-in-law and leroy and mary as the grandchildren and you might notice that leroy hedges in this household is born in 1897 the same year that leroy porter from michigan was born so that's interesting and it stood out to me but it's not you know a done deal it's just interesting um so then we do more genealogy and this is what i meant when i said i do this on paper i have i um i write out a chart on paper and so what i found out was that this couple had at least four kids i think they might have had more but they had four kids and they had ethel raymond orris and leroy and kathy has dna matches to grandchildren of ethel grandchildren of raymond and a great grandchild of orris and i put down these are um i i changed the names so they're not the real names of the matches and i put in the amount of centimorgans that they share remember that this is telling you um basically how much dna you share measured in centimorgans and these people are all second cousins to one another because they come from the same great grandparents and then this is a second cousin once removed and then i added kathy over here as a potential granddaughter of leroy hedges assuming that leroy porter and larry leroy hedges were the same guy we don't know that for sure yet but if we put her there in this hypothetical situation does the amount of dna shared actually work out so that would make kathy a second cousin to rob e and r and a second cousin once removed h right so then you need to go to so let's let's take this top amount of dna we have here with 407 with r and we're going to go to dnapainter.com this is a website and this is a free tool that you can use under the tools at dnapainter.com there's something called the shared center morgan project you could type in 407 centimorgans and you will get down here the relationship probabilities and you can see that 77 percent of the time it would be one of these relationships but 23 percent of the time it could be one of these relationships and second cousin is one of them it's a lower level probability but it's not out of the question and so really with with uh let me go back one really with um kathy having matches to both the crute family and the hedges family and we were only able to find one marriage between those two families and the amount of dna she shares with these people descended from this couple there really i think is only one explanation and that is that leroy hedges turned out to be leroy porter that he changed his name and went off to michigan and um that's how that happened but kathy was able to make some contact with somebody from the hedge's family and they told her some backstory that even makes it i think more probable that this is what happened they said that alice and daniel divorced they both remarried other people they put those children in an orphanage for some reason um we don't know the story there um and that leroy hedges the one that was born in 1897 ran away and they never heard from him again so probably ran away from the orphanage is what i'm thinking um did he go to michigan and start over as leroy porter i think so i think that's the answer um kathy probably won't find an official name change document because at that time period this is like 1920 people didn't have to change their name in the courts they could if they wanted to but most likely i mean he could just turn up in in michigan and call himself whatever he wanted right it's not like he has a social security number yet no right so i think that that's probably what happened um i was hoping that maybe the hedges family had some photos because you know the porters have photos of their leroy and they could do some comparison that way and then they could if they were able to find somebody in the right inheritance path they could find a male porter and a male hedges to do a y chromosome dna test and that would tell us that yeah they have the same y chromosomes so that that is the answer but i think i think autosomal has already given us the answer do you think that this um paris story maybe came from service in world war one or something like that or just a glamorous way to kind of come up with a completely different story that couldn't be traced yeah i wonder if that's what it is but he was in he was in world war one i believe so it's possible and it's possible that it was so painful he didn't want to talk about it at all and he was diverting them in another direction like oh yeah my family's over in france you know i've lost contact with them don't want to talk about it or whatever yeah a way to get the family yeah not to question them too closely so i imagine you get a lot of really interesting stories of people who walk into the library they discover that you know a little something about dna and do you find that you're uh helping patrons how what kinds of folks are you helping when it comes to dna well we do get a number of just people walking in and more and more um indiana recently opened up its um adoption birther to pre-adoption birth certificates and so within the last couple of years adoptees from indiana have been able to request their pre-adoption birth certificate and so we get a lot more people walking in now saying i got my pre-adoption birth certificate it's got some names on it i can't figure out who these people are i can't find them i don't know what to do next that kind of thing so we're getting walk-ins like that we also get email and queries and because we're doing webinars all the time now because of the pandemic um we we're reaching a wider audience of course i mean we have people watching our webinars from other countries even so a very once in a while i'll get an email from somebody that's like oh i'm over in you know this country and can you help me and i'm like well maybe if you have folks from indiana right although you guys are very much an international library as well i know the collection is just vast we had allison on the show not too long ago in fact in the video this video i will have a link down in the description and on the show notes page linking you over to watch that video to see more about the allen county public library and all the work we're doing there sounds like you got a little bit of construction going on these days i heard a little something in the background i'm afraid we do i'm sorry we're a lincoln um collection um room so people can go in there and learn about abraham lincoln because we have a large lincoln collection well i was so happy that uh both of us had power today i think we had no water today due to snowstorms but uh you guys were closed yesterday but i am so glad that you've been able to join us here today and talk about um real life situations things i think people can identify with you've given us lots of things to kind of keep in mind so many ideas okay well so uh can you tell us real quick how can they find the genealogy center online at the allen county public library what's your weather doors it's um genealogy center dot o-r-g and if they want to send us an email it is the word genealogy at acpo dot info and then helen county public library right acpl yes yes and they can address it to me if they wanted to ask me something about dna and i will get it oh fantastic well sarah allen thank you so much it was such a pleasure to get a chance to really sit down and talk with you and uh show that you can meet some folks in the future thanks so much for joining us here on the show thank you it was very fun [Music] thank you so much to sarah allen for sharing her research it really helps to see somebody kind of walk through the challenges that they have because that can spur ideas for ourselves and i know i've been seeing some uh tremendous conversation in the chat so if you're watching on the elevenses with lisa's show notes page later into the future and you're interested in seeing what's going on in chat if you go over to the youtube channel youtube.com genealogygems you can watch the video and i believe you can still see the chat as it was live now one of the things that um people were asking in chat was about roots tech so i just wanted to take a little second here at the end of the show to talk to you about what i'll be doing with roots tech which is nothing so the scope is that i was slated to speak at roots tech and then back in december when the videos uh were coming due for submission um my you may know if you've been watching the show that my daughter was in a really serious accident and so we totally switched gears and went into full-time care mode and she's doing great and i had to make some tough choices about where i was going to spend my time and the most important thing to me in addition to taking care of my daughter was getting this show back up and running and so that's what we did in january so i will not have videos at the roots tech conference this year it'll be the first time since the conference began that i haven't been presenting but i am really excited to tell you that i have the most exciting fun show set up for you well i'm working on it for next thursday and fun is the key word here this is going you're going to be surprised and you know if all the the snow doesn't get in the way um everything is going to come together this week and i have got a really fun show for you next week i'm so excited about you've got to be here at foreign's is with lisa um and so i'm filming this today february 18th of 2021 so it's next week and it's the same day that roots tech starts um we're going to be doing the live show right here at 11's with lisa at the genealogy gems youtube channel 11 a.m central and um i i can't wait to i just can't wait to tell i'm not going to tell you what it is i really want to but i can't because if i do that'll jinx it and then you don't know what's going to happen but uh one of the fun and cool things about next thursday is also it is exactly the 14th anniversary of genealogy gems it's the day that i started this whole thing and it has turned into something that has certainly been a joy in my life i hope that you have enjoyed it as well and also um i know some of you you guys have all been so wonderful keeping my daughter lacey in your prayers over at instagram i posted this just the other day that uh she is up on her feet and she is walking and i'm so excited um she actually went home this last weekend and so she's well on her way back to normalcy and back to walking thank you so much to all of you for your good wishes and your prayers and um instagram is where i'm going to actually be announcing what the pretty cool exciting thing is for next week first so if you um if you're not on instagram you can check it out it is a social media platform i really like it compared to facebook because it's just a really nice fun upbeat environment particularly if you're following other genealogists and i certainly hope that you'll follow me genealogy gems podcast or i think you can search on my name as well but that's kind of where we talk about what's happening in the cook life and in the genealogy gems life and some of the newest announcements so that's where we will announce our very special program for next week and with that thank you so much for joining me here each and every week i hope that you will give us a thumbs up on the video below here um after the video is over wow if you leave a comment here at our youtube channel that is just tremendous i love to hear from you leave questions um leave comments i saw a couple of questions in the chat i'll be running those past sarah and we'll put the answers in the show notes and you can find the show notes at genealogy genealogygems.com slash elevenses thank you so much for joining my joining me my friend i will talk to you soon have a wonderful week [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 5,520

Rating: 4.9534883 out of 5

Keywords: lisa louise cooke, elevenses with Lisa, genealogy gems, Genealogy podcast, free genealogy webinar, lisa louise cook, geneology, family history, how to find ancestors, genealogy how to, genealogy research, genetic genealogy, DNA, ancestrydna, myheritagedna, 23andme, family tree dna, ftna, 23 and me, dna adoption, find birth parents, adoption research

Id: EXVB-Jr5IQw

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021