DNA Q&A with Crista Cowan of AncestryDNA

[Music] ancestry dna is one of the leading dna testing companies that has added dna science to our genealogy toolkit and if you've tested your dna results have become one of those really important records that you're using to build your family tree but of course the interesting thing i think about these records is but they're quite different from other types which is they also evolve and they change now the results themselves aren't changing but of course our interpretation and the information that we're able to glean from them that is evolving and continues to do so as of course more people get tested so here to give us insight into the latest innovations over at ancestrydna is the corporate genealogist for ancestry better known as the barefoot genealogist krista cowan welcome to the show krista hi lisa thank you hey happy to have you here and uh dna is always a popular topic and you guys are always doing new things but of course at first i have to ask i'll bet you got a mug i do yeah yeah as a matter of fact an ancestry mug i've got some what have i got going on it is an ancestry market of course of course a little bit of um lavender and peppermint going on i love it love it i'm on my my decaf coffee which is you know straight up we're doing this in the afternoon so uh that's my go-to in the afternoon but uh wonderful to have you here and we always love to get together and chat about genealogy here at the levens's and um dna i think is always on people's minds and i know that one the the really common questions that i get a lot is around ethnicity and about changes in things that happen um and sometimes people they see them and they're really excited about you know oh they're gonna launch out a new update and and then things look different and it's a big surprise tell us a little bit about how often these updates happen what causes them and and kind of what are we seeing here why is it changing yeah i'd love to share that so in order to answer that question you kind of have to back up a little bit and understand the concept of reference panels so when ancestry dna started in 2012 we you know of course hadn't sold any dna kits yet but we had purchased scientific reference panels from others who'd been studying dna for about a decade at that point in order to create this group of people with deep roots in a particular place in the world that we could compare customer dna to so as a as a customer takes their dna test the first process we run it through for this ethnicity estimate as we compare them to this reference panel well as our research team has expanded their reach and then now we have 20 million people who've taken the ancestry dna test and we've been able to identify candidates in our customer pool who are eligible to be part of that reference panel that reference panel grows and so just statistically as it grows those results are going to get more refined they're going to change a little bit and then as the science advances we also learn new ways to compare the data so that it's more accurate so ancestry has been releasing an ethnicity update about once a year usually in the fall and it's just because we keep growing that reference panel and because of the advances in science about how those algorithms work so you get a lot of new people obviously on a regular basis who are testing so they're adding to it you started with that initial reference panel you got somewhere else do you ever bring in other ones that become available to you to kind of speed up the process of its growth yeah we do we've purchased a few different reference panels from research groups but primarily the growth now is coming not just from our own customer base but also our team of genetic scientists are looking for individuals in in places around the world that are underrepresented in our reference panel in order to increase the sample size there excellent so sometimes the updates they come out and and people look and they go that looks different and now it's saying this and not that and tell us a little bit about that because there's some rhyme and reason behind why that happens there is so there's actually two challenges that our science team faces one has to do with um place and one has to do with time so what we may know of as a place right now likely didn't exist 300 500 a thousand years ago the boundaries have changed the people that have migrated in and out of that place have changed and so we have to one of our challenges is to label those ethnicity estimate locations something that people will recognize and be able to associate with but fully recognizing that a thousand years ago that place may have had people there who were called something very different and so then the second challenge we have is that time based challenge yes um we use this reference panel of living people but what we estimate is with this data we're showing you where your dna came from 500 to a thousand years ago and most of us don't have trees that go back that right exactly so how do you zero in on that how do people make sense of when they they see it that they understand the context of the time frame yeah so we try to provide a lot of contextual data and a lot of people don't even realize it's there so when you're looking at your ethnicity estimate you can click on any one of those and there's usually two or even three drill down screens that give you some of that historical background and some of that information about the time period that we're covering and what the names of some of the people who lived there were so for example scotland was a big one in this last update a lot of people ended up with scotland as an ethnicity but really what we're looking at is who were the britons who were the celts you know who were the gauls and how do all those people so many hundreds of years ago how they did how did they migrate in and out of those places and and what what would that admixture look like so that we can tell you but if we said oh you're kelt or gaul or britain even some people wouldn't understand what that meant so we label it scotland and then we expect people to drill down into that other information that we've provided by clicking through do you find that people fully utilize this site i'm thinking about you know they go to so much trouble and expense to get tested and um i imagine you see a lot of back-end data what kind of usage and i i think i've seen some recent updates that you guys have been doing to kind of help prompt people to get more involved and drill down yeah for sure so one of the things that we've done is we have a mobile app and what we're discovering is that a lot of people their entry point both to family history and through dna is through mobile and so we've made some of the mobile prompts a little bit more prominent and a little bit easier to navigate and then of course we're learning some of that and and applying it to the desktop version so we are seeing some of that um another thing that we have that that is um it wasn't introduced when ancestry dna was first introduced it took several years is what we call our genetic communities and that helps to give some additional context to some of those ethnicities as well i'd love to have you talk more about the communities i think it's it's fascinating to see them and to see their evolution how they've really moved along quite quickly haven't they for just knowing that there are many people who maybe have never looked at this tell us what they're missing and how to take advantage of it yeah so that that first algorithm that we run against your dna is comparing your dna to that reference panel of people to give you those ethnicity estimates those are the ones with the percentages has a little solid college circle and there's always going to be a percentage next to it but the communities are a total evolution based on who's testing and the family trees that are available so ancestry has 20 million people who've taken the dna test 100 million family trees on our site and here's kind of how this works as you test you're matched to other people who have taken the test and the average i think the average ancestry dna test taker has something like 75 000 matches and so there's these right it's kind of mind-blowing um but the idea is that the data underneath all of that means that we're able to really clearly see networks of matches so even if we didn't know anything about your family tree or anything about your ethnicity just based on the matching data alone we start to see these clusters or networks of people who all match each other and so then because we have this rich family tree data we can go into that network of matches of thousands of matches and we can say what do they all have in common and what we start to see is the data very clearly points to specific birth locations within their tree within the last 200 years so your ethnicity estimate is looking a thousand years ago but those communities are where members of your family have lived within the last 200 years and we've now got more than 1500 of those around the world that's amazing and of course if the person's in the tree they have time frame associated with them as well not just place which is so cool because like you said it it's it's just lurching the whole thing closer you know in time to us which is really exciting right yeah and if you start to think about that time piece right so we're looking at tree data 100 to 200 years ago because of this network effect but what's possible is as the network continues to grow and as the science continues to get better we may not only be able to connect you to specific genetic communities but also show you migration paths from your original ethnic origins over time which then be allows people to have an entire complete family history story without ever starting a family tree themselves hopefully that then leads them into it because they want to know well which branch of my family tree does this represent i give us a sense um you know you're talking about some people don't have trees of course that's just the bane of everybody every genealogist right they go and they look and they go this person doesn't have a tree and they're my best match um but what kind of percentage of i know you get a lot of people who test maybe they saw the commercial on tv and they go that looks really cool i'm gonna do that but they were not doing genealogy how does that break down yeah so you know it's so funny that you say that because anytime anybody complains about matches not having trees i always send them to your roots tech presentation that you did with diane about you know no problem how many of you have a dna match that doesn't have a tree yeah this is a big problem because because the reality is like you can figure out a lot from a match even if they don't have a failing tree um but uh but yeah there are probably about half of my matches anyway do not have any tree at all and we see that that's pretty consistent across the board which means those are most likely people who this is their first foray into family history i actually was just on a call this morning with a woman who took the dna test about four years ago had no idea there even was a match list like didn't know there was a match list didn't think she could build a tree because she thought she needed a subscription so she just took the test to get the ethnicity estimate and somehow ignored all the emails ancestry sent her to tell her to check out her new matches or start a tree but but uh once she was she was contacted by a match so one of the best things you can do for those matches who don't have trees is send them messages she got this message from one of her close matches it peaked her curiosity she's like how does this person know who i am she discovered the match list she started a tree and she's now had this whole four-year family history journey where she's figured out who her biological father is and uncles and a half sibling and yeah and so so so for those of us who have trees and who are involved in family history recognize that those people taking a dna test that's their first step in the door and it's up to us i think sometimes to nurture them through that door by engaging with them through messaging or sharing information that we might have discovered in a you know non-threatening way hopefully so they're testing and they're thinking oh i'm gonna find out what my ethnicity is and not even realizing that there's this whole matching thing going on um do you find that a lot of those kinds of folks do they eventually get bit by the bug to make it like us and start you know going in and looking and i'd love to have you asking this question but i wanted to really also have you re-emphasize you don't have to have a subscription to add the tree and i think you're absolutely right tons of people don't realize that yeah if you've taken a dna test and that's the only thing you've paid for you haven't paid for an ancestry subscription to access the 80 billion records on the site then you can um you can still start a family tree that's a free service on ancestry for anybody who has a free registered guest account or anybody who used to have a subscription and canceled it at some point you can still work on your family tree and yeah that's something that a lot of people don't realize you can also and this is something else people don't realize respond to messages from other users the message center is a free service and you can send messages you can initiate contact with any of your dna matches without a subscription as well fantastic so you're really getting to take full advantage of the whole dna thing even if you aren't currently doing the subscription and doing the genealogical records and and all of that wow i was uh watching your video recently i guess it was the june update and you were talking about um how you got to see some of that back in data and saw that people weren't really um interacting and i love these buttons and these abilities to add this is a son this is a nephew whatever tell people a little bit about that and um how is that going is the rollout done yet and are you seeing some great response yeah so we do continue to make innovations to the match list and how people interact with it of course two years ago at roots tech we introduced the custom groups with the 24 different colors and it was innovative for those of us who were deep into family history we had this hypothesis though that new users would find that fun and interactive as well and unfortunately new users especially those who never considered family history before didn't have the mental construct around a pedigree chart or sides of the family so they didn't even have any idea how to group their matches and so that it had really low usage the usage it had was among really core hardcore genealogists and people into genetic genealogy so we've been doing a lot of testing over the last year trying to figure out how to solve the problem of new users coming to the match list and looking at it and going that's great now what right we wanted to give them something actionable to do so now and this has been released it's been rolled out to all users i think as of last week um every match has a little button on it that just says do you know this person yes and if you don't you can click learn more to find out more about that experience but as soon as you click yes it then asks you to assign a side of your family so you can say oh yes i know this person they're on my mother's side and then once you do that it asks you if you know the specific relationship and here's another little nuance that we're helping train people into in both interaction but also what family history really means we give them a list of the possible relationships based on how much dna they share so one of the things that dna sometimes uncovers is surprises and you might think this person is your full sibling that the dna says otherwise or you might think you know whatever the relationship might be so we give you those options to assign that relationship and then that fills another customer request which is it when you select the relationship it updates from a predicted relationship on that match which is usually a range of cousinship to what the specific relationship is based on your assignment i love it i mean you guys are in the driver's seat in terms of knowing and understand the technology it's so wonderful that you're helping to guide people to to get more out of it you know and to get on board quicker i have to ask you this question because i imagine you have gotten this question and i'd love to know how you answer it how accurate are the ancestry testing the dna test results i heard somebody ask that at a conference once and i i almost want to sit by and listen and see what the person said what do you tell people when they ask you that you know it's such an interesting question because accuracy can be measured any number of ways and we need to know what you're talking about when you say accuracy so when you ask is this person on the top of my match list listed as my parent or child how accurate is that it's it's like 100 accurate that that is how much dna you share with this person and that that is either the nature of the relationship or you've got a parent with an identical thing right so so accuracy in that case super confident when you ask about accuracy of ethnicity results we call it an estimate for a reason and one of the things you'll discover when you click through to view it is that there's actually a range that top level percentage you're seeing is an average of a thousand different times that the algorithm has been run against your dna and that reference panel because you know just the nature of the way that those results are analyzed and compared to that reference panel means there's going to be some swing around an average and again we release those updates every year because again as the reference panel grows there's more refinement possible yes exactly good answer i like that answer what are some of the most common questions that you get about dna i imagine there might be some folks watching who are going yes yes yes that's what i was wondering what do you hear i will tell you what our number one question isn't i bet a lot of your you your viewers have the same question and a lot of um people at conferences have the same question we see it on social media all of the time it is where is my native american they still want the princess they're looking for or whatever it's it's amazing to me how how prevalent and pervasive that narrative is in so many families and they take a dna test with full confidence that it's going to tell them that there's you know 17 or 12 or 8 percent indigenous north american when the reality is if they do have a native american ancestor it is most likely that that person lived three or four hundred years ago and that they just didn't inherit those bits of dna because of course the inheritance of dna is random and a lot of new people into family history haven't really wrapped their brains around what that means yet they think they get half of everything and haven't done the math to calculate what that means or they were told that a parent or grandparent was a full native i grew up with that narrative in my family my grandfather boasted of the fact that he was a quarter quarter native american he was born in indian territory i think that's probably partially where that started from um and you know everybody claims the features but the reality is he was not there is no evidence of that in the family tree once the research has been dug into but i still have cousins taking dna tests and fully expecting it to show up and kind of freaking out when it doesn't so well that brings up the number one question i am not surprised yes um i'm wondering is the is the native american a large reference panel is that well represented so it was not in the beginning but we have been collecting additional samples so it used to be back in 2012 when we started doing dna testing if you had native american dna we would just tell you native american and that was all of the americas north central and south we now have i think uh nine different regions of indigenous american so we can split it out across the two continents and now we're starting to see some communities around some of those as well so the reference panel is growing and the number of testers are growing as well so so here's what i tell people and they don't always like this answer but if you have native american dna it will show up on an ancestry dna test right right and i and you made such an important point but you could have a native american ancestor and not have native american dna or any other type of of uh segment i guess if you will right yeah absolutely it just depends on how many ancestors have native american dna and how far back they were whether or not you actually inherited those give people a sense of how many generations back does it become minute in terms of what you might be inheriting from something so so i am not a math person either like that's why i'm asking you i know math and science but yeah but dna has changed my world and it amuses my accountant father to no end that i can do this now in my head wow right so everybody inherits exactly yeah right exactly 50 of dna from their parents those parents inherited 50 of dna from each of their parents but what they passed down to you is going to be about 25 of your grandparents dna and then it just gets cut in half every generation back so you're going to have about 12 and a half percent of your great grandparents dna and about six percent of your two two greats and about three percent of your three grades and about a percent and a half of your four grades and by the time you get to your fifth great grandparents it is possible when you consider all of the people in that generation that you did not inherit any dna from one of them because you got all of it from one of the others so so fifth fifth generation fifth well not fifth generation five times great grandparents is the generation where we start to see some of that fall off in but that means that you're getting it from somewhere so some of those lines of your family tree will go back to the seventh and eighth and sometimes even ninth great-grandparents well and that makes the case why when it's focused focus focus on best matches right you were talking about some people might have 75 000 matches but uh you got to start with and really identify who the closest closest were and work on these because they probably have the most potential to give you information right well not only the most potential to give you information but also to build a solid foundation so that you can explore those those more distant matches because unless you've built that solid foundation and validated the relationships all the way back to third or fourth or fifth great grandparents the hope of connecting with a eighth or ninth cousin on one of those other lines further back it's going to be a lot more difficult and a lot more shaky of a conclusion yeah you know when people get a best match oh yeah they want to reach out and you were talking about the messaging system is free it's part it's part of what you have access to when you test i believe you're on the phone you talk to people i've seen you at the conferences you know you're talking firsthand to your customers and really um hearing from them what kind of coaching do you give people on how to approach somebody or even more so if they get resistance is there one more thing they might be able to say just to kind of keep the door open or somehow nudge somebody what do you recommend okay so lisa i am single i have never been married and that might seem like a funny segue into i'm wondering where you're going with that that means i have a whole i know right that means i have a whole lot of experience dating yeah that's what that means and i approach communicating with unknown or unpreviously connected to cousins a little bit like i approach dating like you're not going to spill all of your deepest darkest secrets on the first date or you're going to send them screaming into the night okay um or they may just like entirely ghost you right that's the new term for people who just ignore you after a date um and that happens sometimes people just go on for paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs and that initial message they send a cousin and my guess is those cousins are seeing some of those messages and just being like i don't even know what to do with this information it's overwhelming right so you have to tone it down but but the same token right i'm not going to go on a first date and just sit there and not answer his questions or not try to initiate a conversation and so again similarly when you send out that first message you're going to want to provide enough information that that's something they can respond to so i've seen people send messages that say something like hi we're dna matches do you know how we're related i put it all on now and they give them nothing to nothing to work with so you have to give them just enough that they will want to respond and that they have something to respond to but not so much that you overwhelm it maybe something just a little intriguing you know i know that when i've talked to people who we are sharing ancestors on a family tree you know one of the things i'll say is you know i have some photos you know i'd love to talk to you about that maybe you do too versus i remember in the old days oh i just lost my earphone in the old days i would send them oh i think oh i'm going to get them all interested i'm going to send them these my best pictures they take them and they never respond you know so it's like you don't want to give away the kitchen sink right that's what you're saying i think it's a good strategy it's a good strategy and i know sometimes too um also back then i would get a message from somebody and they sounded so like a phd scientist i was i felt intimidated like i can't keep i'm going to say something and i'll be wrong you know they'll be able to say oh my gosh you don't know what you're talking about so i mean there's also that intimidation factor i guess we don't want to even if we do know all that stuff we don't want to necessarily wipe people out with it i like those strategies right yeah you want to yeah you want to just keep it um i used to have a saying about intriguing but intriguing but not overwhelming that's kind of the most that runs through my head when i craft those messages i like that anything else when it comes to ancestry dna that we should be keeping our eyes eyes out for anything you want to tell us about what's coming in the future what what do you got yeah so there's a few things and most of them well we can kind of divide it into two categories around the ethnicity estimates in the communities so the way just to make sure this is clear we update ethnicities about once a year in the fall so watch for that we usually send out an email or put a banner on the site but one of the things that we've learned is that a lot of people don't know that and so they don't know to come check and see what's been updated so just watch for those announcements or those emails but genetic communities can be updated at any time for two reasons one is you may all of a sudden just have enough matches that you're pulled into an existing network that has been labeled as an existing community so those communities could just pop up at any time and then the other is about every six or eight weeks or so we're releasing new communities our science team has been working fast and furious to identify new network clusters and make sure that we've got them labeled correctly and that we've worked with history professors and others to understand the cultural and historical implications because we want to be accurate and informative but also sensitive to all the nuances around race and ethnicity and history because history is messy and and as people dive into it you know those of us who've been doing family history understand that but again a lot of people new to family history and dna is their first foot in the door and we want to make sure that we're a little sensitive to how we present some of that information so yeah so always new communities and so that's on that dna story side of the house and then we are working on some additional features for the dna match list and we've previewed them with some customer customer experience groups um we've previewed them with influencer groups um like yourself and so just we can say that those are coming but uh can't talk a whole lot about them but but they're we're listening to our customers and we're really trying to make sure that that dna match list experience works for casual customers just taking their first steps into into family history and those of us who are hardcore into this and trying to break through 40-year brick walls using our dna results well and you said you listen to your customers and i know you guys do what is the best way for somebody to get in touch with you or just share feedback or a question yeah there's two primary channels for that though we listen in a lot of ways but ancestry has a facebook page so if you go to the official ancestry facebook page you can send a direct message to us with your feedback or post it just there on the wall our product managers do follow that and keep track and and put that into our feedback system and then the other one is if you just do a google search for ancestry feedback it'll bring up a feedback form that's in our help center it's a little easier to find it that way sometimes um it'll bring up a feedback form i think i was just talking on my show about the fact that somebody was saying well how do i get help and i was like sometimes googling it for the ancestry help ancestry's website is so well organized it will grab exactly whatever page you're looking for probably even faster than navigating well how fun to uh get a chance to catch up with you on the latest with ancestrydna now i uh we recently followed each other over at instagram and i see that we share another passion which is gardening have you been into gardening these these days this summer it um you know i always had aspirations but with all of the genealogical conferences and the traveling that i do for ancestry my summers i've never been home until this last summer and so last summer i tried it and i failed miserably i grew one tomato um and a little bit of basil that was what i did but i'm in it again yes this year i've got some zucchini going and some a little herb garden and we're trying tomatoes again we'll see how that goes so good job are you planting in the ground and you're doing containers um both so i have a little garden patch in my backyard but then i also built some standing um like garden racks for my herbs and stuff very cool i've been in the same boat as you it's like after 14 years of constant traveling and which has been great i've missed it but um i i started all these container gardening i'm doing the self-wicking tubs i saw a guy on youtube doing it it looked awesome so we'll see how it pans out here in the heat of texas but um yeah anyway there's there's always uh never enough time to do all the wonderful things that we would enjoy doing and certainly genealogy is that way but uh it's exciting to hear about the new stuff that you guys are continue to roll out and i think one of the real takeaways here is get back in there and check fairly regularly your communities you might see something new right well again thank you so much krista cowan if somebody wanted to get uh in touch with you or your website blog instagram where should they go check you out yeah the best place is on instagram and it's just uh my instagram handle is just my name christa cowan that's c-r-no-h i-s-t-a-c-o-w-a-n wonderful so fun to talk to you i hope next time we get to do it in person [Music] absolutely [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 3,975

Rating: 4.983871 out of 5

Keywords: ancestrydna, crista cowan, dna, genetic genealogy, dna questions, dna ethnicity, dna ethnicity test results, ancestrydna ethnicity, dna ethnicity test, dna ethnicity results, dna ethnicity test accuracy, best ethnicity dna test, genetic communities, ancestry.com, what to do with dna matches, unexpected dna results, contacting dna match, dna test results, dna test

Id: Zz2r_V8GAKQ

Length: 33min 33sec (2013 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Throwaway_Huff]

I like how they explained the "Scotland" Estimate isn't actually Scottish but a simplified version of telling us that we're just broadly Celtic.

[u/LiquidLuck18]

For those that don't want to watch here are the highlights:

She said genetic communities get added every 6-8 weeks and you might also be pulled into already existing genetic communities as the data for those communities builds and your DNA makes a link.

She said ethnicity updates happen in Autumn (or Fall as you say in America). As we know the new update is coming this month (hooray!)

She said you have 50% DNA from both parents. 25% from grandparents. 12.5% from great grandparents. 6% from 2x great grandparents. 3% from 3x great grandparents. 1.5% from 4x great grandparents. Then by the time you get to 5x it's possible you did not inherit anything from them, but some of them you will and on those specific lines of the family tree your DNA could go back to 7th/8th/9th great grandparents.

[u/ULI_H]

I am hoping my ancestry will be finally southern european, at least a bit.

[u/shoegamethrilla]

Hope spanish shows up for me, crazy that 23and me update last year gave me more and I have none on ancestry super sketch

[u/cat_snipe]

Great video. Thanks!

[u/KickdownSquad]

Too long to watch. Did she say what specifically will change or any new features coming?