FamilyTreeDNA: Overview & Family Finder Autosomal Test (Part 1 of 3) Genetic Genealogy 2019

hey we're taking a deep dive in the family tree DNA's website its DNA tests such as family finder which is the broad view for genetic genealogy mitochondrial DNA which is the mother's line and why DNA which is the father's line in fact we have so much to cover that I've decided to break this up into a three-part series so today we are looking at an overview of the family tree DNA and how they got started their website and the family finder service that they offer which is the autosomal DNA which is similar to what ancestry does and the services that they offer throughout their websites so I'd like to point out that this is not sponsored by Family Tree DNA but it's here to provide you with a better understanding of what tools you can use to help you with your family research if you're interested in signing up or purchasing a Family Tree DNA kit I have put an affiliate link in the show notes below for your convenience also know that at the time of this recording some of the services are brand new and well they may not look exactly the same by the time you see this video because they're still in beta testing and they're still fine-tuning some of those resources but I managed to get a sneak peek at some of that stuff so hopefully you'll get a better understanding of some of the new tools that they've got coming up if you are new to DNA side of family history I have produced several videos about DNA and what tests to take what DNA strategies you can take to help you with your research I'll put a link for all of that in the show notes as well as appearing in a flag on the screen right now and well it'll also be on the genealogy TV website at genealogy TV org they will help you get started understanding how you can use DNA to help further your research Family Tree DNA is the only company that allows Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA testing to the consumer we're going to talk about both of those the Y DNA test we're going to talk about in part two of this series and the might conned real DNA testing we're gonna talk about in part three we've got a lot to cover but first let me introduce myself if this is your first time here my name is Connie Knox I am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research now don't forget that genealogy TV has a website at genealogy TV org a newsletter and a Facebook page for genealogy TV check out all of that all of those links are in the show notes below now this is a footnotes episode and well I use footnotes where I do interviews and so I like to call them footnotes because it's in the footnotes where the real sources are and well the real sources are this I reached out the Family Tree DNA and I asked them to help us understand what services are available from Family Tree DNA and how they can help you with your research well they sent me to two folks to help us out so the real sources today are Clayton Condor she is the marketing director over there at Family Tree DNA as well as Megan Peters who is a project manager they're together they're going to walk us through all of that right now [Music] welcome to genealogy TV I really appreciate you both being here to help the genealogy TV audience understand a little bit more about Family Tree DNA so thank you guys for being here we're gonna go through a lot of stuff so let's let's jump into if you can give me just a little bit of background first of all about Family Tree DNA and and a little bit about how it all got started yeah so um Family Tree DNA was founded in 1999 by Bennett Greenspan and Bennett was a genealogist a hobbyist genealogist and he hit a roadblock in his ancestry research and the story Bennett's told me is hit this roadblock it was really bugging him and he was outside walking his dog one night in the middle of the night and just thinking about this roadblock while he was walking his dog and all of a sudden this idea popped in his head of I couldn't I use DNA to figure this out and then at that point I think within the next day or 24 hours Bennett called Michael hammer at the University of Arizona and asked him if he could do a DNA test and basically Bennett was told you know no we can't do this test for you but by the way I get calls like this all the time and if you can start a company you should maybe think about starting a company and then that's kind of how Family Tree DNA you know began began with our own founders journey and his journey of hitting a roadblock so our first test that we ever sold at Family Tree DNA was a why DNA test and so we've been around for about 20 years now we were the founders of the direct-to-consumer DNA testing industry for genealogy and we're located here in Houston Texas fabulous well so ok so somebody's brand new to a Family Tree DNA and really don't know much about it all you know maybe perhaps they have tested at you know one of the other companies and done the autosomal DNA but now we've got options to do several different things between the Y DNA and the and you have the autosomal DNA with I believe you call it family Finder correct yes and and then the mitochondrial DNA so here you guys have this broken out right into three different options for people researching their family history correct yes well okay yeah we so we have three different tests or types of products they are y DNA and then mitochondrial DNA test and then a family finder and then within Y DNA we offer different levels of testing depending on your research the research that you're trying to do are the tests that we recommend out of the Y in DNA to get started typically as the Y 67 same thing was in mtDNA we offer two DNA test the mtDNA plus and the full mitochondrial sequence test / t full sequence and but we typically recommend users take the MT full sequence when they're getting started with their mtDNA okay so for the folks at home who might not be familiar with what we're talking about so the family finder is the autosomal DNA test which would be something similar to what ancestry does and the Y DNA test is only going to research the father's line or the surname line the male line and then the mitochondrial DNA is handed down from the mother to the children both male and female children but it only continues on down through the female line did I get that right yes okay so so let's jump into just kind of an overview of the website and and whatever you can show us as far as now I understand you guys are getting a new dashboard we are and we're really excited about it we are getting a new dashboard the dashboard that we're going to show you is still in our QA testing stage so that also means that some of the text that you might see on the dashboard is going to be a little different when it's released but okay happy to get a tour of it but we do want everyone to know though that you know if you see a typo or some kind of error in it it's because you're looking at our QA dashboard it's not in production at this point no worries no worries and hopefully by the time that this video is released this new dashboard will be out to the public for those at home we are pre recording this prior to its release so bear with us while we work through some of the unfinished product but why don't you go ahead and share your dashboard with us and give us a give us an idea of what what we're looking at okay great okay so this is our going to be our new dashboard it will be released in early middle of September and it is just kind of a refresh we're hoping it's gonna be easier for users to get to their results and and understand their results in the beginning as well here you've got your actions and this is going to be we have a lot of times where we have updates and maybe people don't realize that we've done some type of feature update maybe we've changed our Terms of Service or you know they've ordered a test on invoice there's all kinds of different scenarios where people have different actions or things that need attention and so we've created an area here for people to quickly see anything new that it's going on or any important updates that we want to let them know about here and we will get into this at some point in time during our call but right here are your group projects one of the things about Family Tree DNA that differentiates us from the other guys are our group projects and we really encourage members to people who take a test of Family Tree DNA whether it's autosomal wire mtDNA to join group projects and there's a ton of them out there I think the last time I checked we have over 8,000 group projects and group projects are run by what we call group project administrators and group project administrators are avid genealogist who are doing research for that particular group it can be we have surname group projects you've got haplogroup group projects we've got geographical group projects so you know as you can see this person has joined quite a few different group projects and it's kind of their kind of neat because you're gonna share your information with the group project administration you have different sharing options and giving them access to certain things but it's kind of like having someone do the research for you and you know like I said all the group projects have a different goal in mind but and they can educate you as you get deeper into the research and the testing they can kind of advise you on what other tests to go into they are not employees a family tree DNA these are volunteers so they're just a really good resource for our customers here you know how does somebody let me ask you real quick if somebody wants to become a group administrator how do they do that I mean that's probably a whole not to get into the weeds too much but I'm just curious is that just something they apply to or so why Meghan I'll let you answer this one yeah on our website we have a section where you can search for different groups regardless of if you're a Family Tree DNA member yet or not and so you search and see if there's a interest-group that it's your research if there's not then there's a section there for you to like apply to be an admin and so we'll create a project that meets your specific research goals and you can kind of start that and kind of get more people to join to help your research cause fabulous thank you I just not to get off subject but I decided that maybe somebody might want to do that so all right it just so you know if you come across a good project and you're an avid genealogy and you're going I want to help with this group project there can be multiple group project administrators assigned to that are part of a group project so you know you can always reach out to those guys and you know see if you know you can also become what we call gap a gap but you know the the project administrators would probably love to have help then next on our dashboard are these cool little this is a new addition to our dashboard it's called badges and these badges are for instance if you've taken a Y DNA test this is your Y DNA haplogroups and then as well as an empty DNA test here's your mtDNA haplogroup and it's just a quick reference to for you know you've taken a test you can see here you've got your haplogroups but you know sometimes I mean people do art do memorize their hypo groups but a lot of times you're you know what's that one last letter I might have but it's just a quick easy way to get to and see your haplogroup and so so then we'll go into our different section other sections that have to do with the tests on our new dashboard so we've got the Family finder test here and then these are going to be all of the tools and features associated with the family binder test and then same thing with your maternal your empty DNA test here you can see the level that you've tested at the this person has tested all the way to the MT full sequence so it shows up that they would have both plus and FMS results and then you've got your Y DNA test this person has taken all the way up to the big Y's 700 test which is the highest level of our Y DNA testing that you can do so all levels of the Y DNA test shows up here it's just a good reference on what you've taken I believe if you haven't taken something these will be grayed out so it can just you can see the available options too here you will have our additional tests and tools we partner with different companies that we think that our customers might be interested in and dip in their products I don't think I mentioned this before but another thing that makes Family Tree DNA very different from everyone else's we have our own in-house lab we are the only company out of all the big guys it has our own in-house lab and so just creates opportunities for us to do some different partnerships specially it's like we help service some of these these companies and we also have factoid testing which you can do for example we've got the warrior gene test or I think another one is the freckles test things like or the alcohol flesh test so we do offer those and then we've got some other tools here which is our public haploid trees it's the Y DNA public aperture Peplow tree and the mtDNA have a haploid tree which we can get into further and then next is going to be our family tree tool and I know we're going to talk about that also but another exciting thing about the family tree is we're doing a we're about to release a new family tree so we've got a lot of really cool new things going on um so in regards to your dashboard layout we are also creating a more customizable dash because different people have different reasons for testing different interests and different you know they want different the certain features or tools are more important into them than they are to maybe another user so here you're gonna be able to rearrange your dashboard set up your view press preferences to hide and show certain things and then you're also gonna be able to create these quick ask access links access links which will you can choose up to five and these links will show up here across your dashboard dashboard depending on what you choose give you an example so the next time you come into your dashboard and functionality isn't quite there yet because you'll be able to select them all at once once the live version goes but you can have up to five of these here and then you can quickly access the things that are really important to you fabulous that is cool that is nice that's a nice feature really well let's jump into the family finder you want to talk about the family finder yeah I think that that's a great place to start so as you said our Family finder test is our autosomal DNA test we also refer to it as the family ancestry test we have a so our family finder features and tools are matching database the my origins which is the breakdown of your ethnicity as people refer to it as the matrix the chromosome browser ancient origins and we've got advanced matches we've also got an option I think is really important to a lot of people because people like to have their raw data you can download your family finder raw data here so my origins is like Clayton said our ethnicity percentage where it'll list the high level regions that we provide to people and you can click for further information further breakdowns here we also have a concept of trace results to where they don't quite meet our thresholds for giving a full breakdown of them but they are things that we feel like it's important to share with customers my origins is our ethnicity percentages that we offer our customers and so this is a kind of synopsis page where you can see the high-level overview of where you were you know ancestry is coming from and so you can click on these to kind of get a deeper dive into further refined subgroups we also have a concept of trace results where you have tiny amounts of different populations but they may not be large enough amounts for us to actually classify it in our breakdown of your origin this map will give a better detail of where these origins are coming from and so this user has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry from Central Europe and so that's represented here if we click on this origin we'll see that it is a part of the European cluster and it's southern Europe and then there's more information and down here when you click on that region to learn more about that specific origin we are always trying to make as many advancements as possible with I mean all of our products but this one you know definitely trying to make as much advancement as we can and so we do have a family ancestry survey that allows users to tell us where their ancestry is from and that way we can better provide these origins to to our users with that information that they're providing us I can see how that would strengthen your ethnicity estimates by doing them we can go through ancient origins now which is which is a very interesting kind of deep history anthropology dive into European origins and so this will tell you what percentage of ancient groups your DNA still kind of carries and so we have metal age invaders farmers and hunter-gatherers as well as a non European component and so if we view this map we can see these percentages we can click on them see the paths that these groups took to get to different areas there's information as well as information about different dig sites where this ancient DNA components were found and that we analyzed the DNA from fabulous fabulous wondering when archaeology was going to get involved with uh you know with did with family history you know yeah exactly this is I find it very interesting being able to analyze DNA from dig sites all across the world and it's kind of nice to have it relating to you and your specific ancestry as a just user that is definitely unique tool I've not seen that anywhere else so tell us briefly about the cousin matches these are gonna be your autosomal DNA matches so this is our family finder matching database it's gonna be anyone in our database that has matching turned on I think that's another thing to point out it because there's some people out that want to just get their ethnicity ancestry reports there's some people that you know aren't really interested in doing the true genealogy research or and so they turn matching off so you can turn matching and off and you can turn it on and off at different levels of testing as well so this is gonna be your family finder matches you can see that this person has a lot of matches in the system this is what we will call in your matches it's going to be your familial matching what we like to refer to as bucketing so I just want to point that out this is if you and we'll show you the tree later but this is connected to your tree and once you start building out your tree and you can I then identify on which side of of your family these matches derive from whether it's your maternal and paternal side and then there are those cases where you have the both especially in different different like groups of individuals you'll see one of the times these these long-distance cousins falling into both on your maternal and your paternal side here you can see a lot of our users will have their images uploaded here again it helps you see is the bucketing tool where you can see whether or not this is on your maternal side or your paternal side with these little pink and blue squares you can also contact your matches all of our matches have email addresses if they have matching turned on so whether it's to further your research or you're looking for somebody in particular you know you have the ability to communicate and connect with your matches you can also view your matches trees if they have tree sharing turned on by clicking here you can also do little notes so throughout your research if you need to start making little notes on different particular people you have a little area where that old space you've got the date that they matched with you their relationship arranged the remote this person is most likely a mother father then you've got the father or son and so on and so forth your shared centimorgans your longest block your ex match and you're linked relationships and then your ancestral surnames and I think that one thing we didn't point out here is your ancestral surnames we get these because whenever you go in you log into your account for the first time we really would like people to give information about like all the surnames that they have in their family and theirs in your account settings there's the option to do this and provide some additional information as and as you can see it's helpful because say you're you know you are looking for somebody you have a surname but this person's surname doesn't match yours but then you can see a list of a lot of the surnames that they know and they've researched and they know are part of their family so you know it's kind of a give and take situation on the platform the more information you give is better for other people researching their ancestry as well as it helps the more people information other people give it helps research your own research I like the fact that you guys have the centimorgans listed right there can you explain what X matches yes so next match is your X chromosome and so your mitochondrial DNA is based on mitochondrial DNA and not your X chromosome which is kind of one thing that some people kind of don't know or get confused about so an X chromosome you get males just get that directly from their mother whereas females get one directly from their mother and a combination of another one from both their mother and their father and so if it's a male tester there will be an X match to their mother but not an X match to their father or any of the cousins who kind of come from a male on their tree and there are lots of really good diagrams out there that kind of show like X inheritance and that's another way to sort your match list to kind of give you a better idea of where these matches might be found on your tree fabulous thank you for that explanation so tell us about the I know that we can go and check on a couple of these people and do an in common with or not in common with can you explain how that tool could be beneficial sure so an in common way we have the family matching buckets like Lillian was mentioning and that is a way for the system to automatically go in and say these people are in common with your mother but you could also do just a basic in common with or not in common with so if I were to do an in common with a mother relationship then I would get everyone who matches me and who matches the other person so in this case the mother so it could be assumed that all of these people are found on the maternal like mother's side of the family or they are your child so they would be you know on both like as this father and son one with this kit it's a little not quite as clear because this individual is from an in dogmas group and so a lot of his matches will be on both kind of in that both categories so they will be matches too on both sides of this family good point I'm glad you pointed that out awesome and so that tool could also be used when we're trying to separate out certain cousin lines or something to say not any help with if we can find somebody that like I was using this example and I did this with and I know we're gonna talk about why DNA a little bit but I did something similar when I was trying to discover the father of my first cousin and he didn't he did not know who his father was so what I did was I went in here on the family finder on his account and I said okay I know my DNA's here so anybody that's not in common with me and his DNA separates out my side of the family so we can discover who's on his father's side of the family because his mother's side is is is where I come from and so that way we could separate out this is great tool for people who are looking for missing parentage mm-hmm yep that's a perfect example so explain from this view how the chromosome browser might work so when you're on your family finder matches page and you've done a little bit of research and you have a few people who you are interested in comparing between each other um you can click on a few people and you'll see that there's a list here that kind of keeps track of everybody who you're selecting and so we can select a couple people and then I can come up here to the chromosome browser you can have up to seven people to compare at one time so you'll see that these are the three people that we selected from the family and finder matches page and as we go down we'll see that each of these is disliked depicting a chromosome and so this first person we have listed as a half-sister or a grandmother granddaughter situation or get our niece and so we would expect to have a lot of DNA in common and long blocks in common with this person and the second one is a first cousin or it's pretty likely that it's a first cousin and so we'll have smaller blocks of Cinna Morgan's or DNA that we share with that user and then the last person is a child and so we'll see that most of the chromosomes are shared with that person because it's a direct you have more blocks shared with a person closer to you closer relationship to you and so you can see that some of these are overlapping each other in like where they're found on your chromosomes and so you can see that you can make assumptions on this is the piece of DNA that's being shared between these users and so we can with cousins we can say you know all of these people are sharing this area and so we can then use groups of people to sort our matches as we go forward and sort them into like family groups at that point in time another feature of this is the kind of threshold and so we can change it to be higher and higher thresholds so this person or because people must have set a longest block of 7 Center Morgan's or more and so that can kind of lead out segments that just happen to match each other based on how the DNA is recombined but when the chat when the user gets that DNA from their parents and so you can also go you know kind of I would have one set of Morgan personally but yeah exactly we highly recommend using about seven or five Cinna Morgan's but there might be some use cases and some families where that once in a Morgan might make the difference for people for the audience at home how this might be beneficial for genealogists is if you take a group of DNA matches either siblings or first cousins from the same side of the family you can almost rebuild the DNA of your ancestors which could be very beneficial down the road plus they have the ability to download the segment's here so then you can then compare that later with other cousin matches that you might not know how they fit but if that other cousin match that you don't know how they fit matches with this cluster that you have created here and you can see where segments are overlapping then you know that they're from the same side of the family so it's those areas that are overlapping that you can start rebuilding that that line of your ancestor takes a little study and figure out how it works but it's kind of cool yeah exactly we also have this detailed segment data which is instead of having to download all of your segments and you know know how to use Excel and all that kind of stuff you can see the information here and you know sort by columns and things like that and so that way you don't have to download and do all these things to manipulate the information outside of your chromosome browser page you can do all of that here very cool if they want to if anybody wants to find out more about help with how do they if there is there a Help section on the website where we can get more information yes so we've got a lot of different resources for people who you know if you're wanting to take a test but you don't know which test to take or you know you've gotten your results and you need someone help someone's help better understanding your results we have a lot of different resources first and foremost I usually recommend that people always like I said join a group project because group project administrators are they understand the platform they know the platform and they're they want to help you understand your genealogy they enjoy people especially their group you know their group project members because they think that you know other people doing their own research is going to help further their research so joining a good project you have your group project administrators emails and you can contact them with questions we also really advocate for users to go to our Learning Assistance Center we have a really great Learning Center it is located you can access it by at the bottom if you're not logged into your account you can access it at the bottom in the footer of the website if you're logged into your account all you have to do is go into the top right hand corner where your image and your kit number are and hover over that and a drop-down will come out where you can go to the Learning Center we have tons of information tons of topics in the Learning Center we also have Family Tree DNA forms where people find that people find very very useful and you can locate the forms by scrolling down into the bottom of the in the footer of the website again I would be logged out but you can go and ask questions there then we also have an in-house customer service department and a lot of our customer service people are avid genealogists themselves so I think that's really helpful they're also our people with like anthropology backgrounds in degrees and so they're very very knowledgeable people and that you can contact them by submitting a form again you can find it in the drop-down in the under your actually you can find it at the bottom in the footer you go to contact us and from there you can either fill out a form and customer service can contact you via email you can call the customer service phone number and then we also have a live chat available to people fabulous well thank you ladies appreciate thank you well that was a ton of information to absorb you may need to watch these videos again in part two we're going to talk about the yDNA and how it can help you with your genealogy this one is specifically for the male line in your family it is a very powerful tool for researching the men in your family history you'll definitely want to see this one in part three we're talking about the mitochondrial DNA and how it can help you trace the female line of your family history as a reminder if you're interested in signing up for any of the Family Tree DNA products I have put an affiliate link for your convenience in the show notes below if you have taken a DNA test I would love to hear about it put it in the comment sections below in fact which test did you take and where did you take it I'm most interested to hear okay so don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time we upload a video genealogy TV has a newsletter a website and a Facebook page make sure you're hooked up with all those those links are also in the show notes below if you want to learn more about DNA there are cards on the screen now to help you with that and it's time for you to go find your ancestors so until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 7,873

Rating: 4.8923769 out of 5

Keywords: ftdna family finder, family finder, how to use family finder, familytreedna, how to use familytreedna, ftdna instructions, how to use family tree dna, Family tree dna, ftdna results, #GenealogyTV, family tree dna test, familytree dna, what is genealogy tv, FamilyTreeDNA: Overview & Family Finder Autosomal Test, genealogy research, family history, genealogy, autosomal dna, best dna company, genetic genealogy, family tree, #genealogy, #familyhistory, dna kit, Dna test

Id: 6fXgeNba6bY

Length: 40min 23sec (2423 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019