Genealogy: Finding Your Unknown Father or Grandfather Through DNA Testing

I am Sarah Ellen and I'm going to present on this topic today this is a national DNA day so yay for that and this is a complex topic so I'm hoping that you can follow along in the major principles that I'm going to give you and hopefully you'll be able to apply those to your own situation but know that I am available by email for help if you run into difficulty when you start doing this on your own so lots of people have an unknown father a grandfather great-grandfather and there is no other way of figuring out who this guy is and there's no paper records there's no family information or if somebody knows they're not telling so you basically have to try to do other things and one of those other things you can do is to take an S so these are the major principles that you're going to want to look at and I'm gonna explain them more thoroughly so this is just an overview test the right person take the correct DNA test complete a family tree for your known family members so most of the times you're gonna have known family members if you're looking for an unknown father you're gonna know who the mother is you're looking for an unknown grandfather you're going to know who the other three grandparents were so complete the family tree for those people that will help you sort matches and identify those from known family lines so this is after you get your DNA results you're gonna sort your matches out leftover matches are probably from the unknown line that's a great simplification but these are major principles and we're gonna go into them in more detail review the trees of the unknown matches and look for a common ancestor couple trace that descendants of this couple forward and time repeat for other Matt's groups look for a marriage or connection between two Matt groups the unknown father probably is from this relationship have I lost you already probably well like I said we'll go into this more detail contact and target test possible fire if he is living or you could test his children or grandchildren if if they're the only possibilities to test alright so those are your major principles now let's go into more detail about them so test the right person in the family so the correct person to test is basically the closest person to the unknown male who is still living so if it's your father then you the child of this unknown male would be the person that you want to test if there's no child living you can test a grandchild but eat but know that each generation and that you get removed from the unknown male of the less DNA you have from that unknown male um to work with so it'll be more difficult if there's no grandchild alive and by that I mean you need to search out grandchildren if this person this unknown male had more than one grandchild and maybe you're not in contact with that side of the family I would say get in contact with them just see whether you can get the grandchild to test because it would help you more than testing a great grandchild but if you have to test a great grandchild and in that cat in that case I would test several persons several great-grandchildren several different great-grandchildren so that you have more DNA to work with because it gets harder the farther back you're going okay also test if you have somebody from the known side of the family this will help you in sorting out your matches so if you have someone from the biological mother's side of the family or the biological mother herself that would be good to test her or a half-sibling if you're looking for your father or your biological grandmother if you're looking for the grandfather so all of those are you know things to do if you can obviously if those people are not living you can't test them move on okay take the correct test so there's lots of different types of DNA tests there's three to be exact there's the autosomal test there's the Y chromosome test and the mitochondrial test only the first two are going to be applicable to our question at all so the autosomal test will task your inherited autosomal DNA which you get 50/50 from your mom and your dad this is the test you want to start with this is the one that most likely will will help you solve the problem Y chromosome test is for males only if you are a male it may be useful in some cases but only after you do the autosomal test mitochondrial is a female line test so remember we're looking for an unknown male in this scenario today so a female line test is not going to be used - uh-oh okay testing companies there's four different testing companies that offer this autosomal tests and test 3 in 23 DNA MyHeritage and 23 and me so which one should you he's best with now I'm going to so you can take it or you can leave it and I'll tell you why it's my opinion so this is how I suggest that you do the testing if you've already taken testing you can't go back and undo it but if you're you're still at the point where you're ordering testing this is helpful to you I would suggest that you test at the company with the largest database first so this means that you figure out you find out which testing company has the most customers that have taken their tests and as of March of 2020 that company is ancestry it might change tomorrow unlikely but might change next year could couldn't be so you want to go with the largest testing company you want to get the biggest bang for your buck you are a lot of us are on fixed incomes we can't spend hundreds of dollars on DNA tests so if we can take one test that might answer our question we should do that if we have to take more tests we will but if we could take one test that would be great so my recommendation this is my opinion take ancestry test just because they have more people that have tested you can then upload your ancestry raw data file to my heritage and Family Tree DNA these are two of the other companies you can then test at 23andme if you can't figure out the answer from ancestry my heritage or Family Tree DNA so this would be buying a second test at 23andme after you've done step number one and step number two step number four as if the mail has still not figured it out after testing at the first four testing companies he couldn't take a y-chromosome test if he's thinking his father or his direct paternal grandfather but that's your last resort for males in my opinion that's my advice okay and after each step in that list that I just showed you you're gonna evaluate your matches follow the major principles that I gave you at the outset and try to find the unknown father reevaluate then proceed to the next step if necessary so the next steps may not be necessary does that make sense just so start with ancestry keep moving down the list all right so while you're waiting for your DNA results to come back you're going to complete your family tree for the known family members so let's say you're looking for an unknown father this is Ken and Ken knows that his mother's through graves but his father unknown so Ken's gonna complete a family tree for su graves including information on William graves her father Polly Jones her mother going back to the fourth grade grandparents on sue graves aside if possible he's going to keep working on his family tree and this I'm stealing from Diane Southard Diane souther it's a great speaker and writer on DNA and you would say do genealogy so how are you gonna find out who's through grave sports great-grandparents are you're gonna do genealogy and which means you know look at the census records look at the birth and death records look at different genealogical records to try to figure out who sue graves family is okay unknown maternal grandfather so again here's Janet's situation Jana is looking for a maternal grandfather she knows who her father is Joe Hill she knows who her maternal grandmother is Alice Cooper so those are the lines she's going to trace going back four to the fourth great-grandparents at least on Joe hillside and on Alice Cooper side so she's created all so you created your known family tree and now your DNA results have come back so you're going to sort your matches by your known family lines so how do you sort your matches well if you tested some known family members then you can rule out their shared matches and I'll show you the shared matches tool in a minute all the testing companies have a shared matching tool that shows you a match that you share between that's shared between you and another person so you can also view the family trees of the matches and look for surnames that you recognize from your known family tree sometimes you'll recognize the name of your magic can be a distant cousin but you you've met at a family reunion or something like that oh that is great hey Uncle Bobby who's on your mother's side of the family and he's tested so you know that great uncle Bobby's on mother's side did you Mark function like I said I would start sorting all of your third cousin matches and closer and then later on if you have to go to fourth cousins you can it gets more complicated when you're doing this with fourth cousins okay so here is since we're we're recommending that you tests at ancestry first I'm showing you these examples basically in ancestry this is ancestry when you're viewing your matches you can see this as a mass named Henry and over to the right hand side of the screen there it shows that there is an add to group option so this is where I can sort my matches into different groups and I get to name the group whatever I want and I can add a colored dot through that group and I can do 24 different groups there's 24 different colors there's also a notes field where I can just enter free text whatever I want to of about this match whatever I know about Henry so you might want to take advantage of that as well so I'm gonna add a group for different known family members so in an unknown father example you could you could use any color dot you want so this is just my example you can say a pink dot is the known mother's family and then matches without a dot should be the from the unknown father's family so in the Ken situation here I'm putting a pink dot over by sue graves saying that anybody that I find that's from Sue grades the side of the family in the match list I'm gonna give a pink dot for the maternal grandfather example you could for example again you don't have to do this but you could give the father's family a blue dot and the grandmother's family a pink dot and then those without a dot could be from the unknown grandfather side of the family so in this case here we would give up a blue dot to anybody on the hillside of the family the father's side we would give a pink dot anybody on Alice Cooper's side of the family the maternal grandmother so this is how this would work out so this is Janet's matches you can see that her top two matches turned out to be hills from her father's side so I gave him a blue dot and the group in the grouping and then only one of them so far and I'm not only showing you a portion of her matches so this is just the first couple matches has a pink dot that means she's from Alice Cooper's side of the family then we have two people without dots what does that mean remember those are probably unknown grandfather and so we're going to work with those two matches and any others that don't have a dot this is the shared matching tool I was telling you about so when you view a match this is showing you that Veera has a match with a guy named Henry and when I click on Henry's name the screen will come up and this is showing me the shared Menashe between Veera and Henry and then if I go over to where the arrow is it's those fair matches so this will be the shared matching tool between Veera and Henry it will show me the list of the subset of matches that are shared between Veera and Henry and if I know who Henry is if I know outside of the family Henry's on I can then extrapolate that these shared matches are probably on the same side of the family as Henry is and I can give them the same color dot because I give Henry that makes sense okay so that's where you find the shared matches now we've we colored coded all the matches to the known family lines that we already know of and now we are left with people without colored dyes so again this is for Jeanette and her her unknown grandfather side the color coded matches are two different sides of the family that we do know but there's two matches so far here that have no dot those are going to be the matches we're going to start looking at we think they're from the grandfather's side now in a specific grandfather well in any situation if you're looking for an unknown person you're looking for you'll you should actually come up with two different match groups one would be two that purse the unknown males father and one to the unknown males mother doesn't always work out that way because of various reasons but for instance let's say the unknown father was from a foreign country so you hardly have any matches from that side so but most of the time you will you will fall out and you will see two different match groups at least and one of them would represent the unknown males father and one of them will represent the unknown males mother so now you're analyzing those matches is we're not color coded so you're trying to see their family trees so some of them are gonna have family trees and some of them are not you want to copy it so you can look at it again you can copy it electronically no problem I like to print them out on paper I kill a lot of trees this way but this is what I do I like to spread them out on a big table and look at these trees together as a big group that's why I do it on paper but you certainly don't have to do that that's just my way of doing it I'm analyzing these trees so I'm comparing and contrasting each tree with the other trees I'm looking for and names and places and again the best-case scenario is that you find two family groups representing the father of the unknown male and the mother of the unknown male and this is your best case scenario it doesn't always work out that way now this is an example of where I put four trophies up on the screen here and I don't know whether those are gonna be able to be read room but where I have the arrows you can see that I'm pointing at a surname that is the same and all four trees and the surname is over Peck it's a very unusual surname this is from my own family tree it's a real name um they're German Pennsylvania German and so if I got four matches and I did not know how he's related to these four people I opened up their trees and I evaluated them against each other I think the name overpack would stick out at me and say whoa hey hold on here this might be the connection between all four of these matches and if I had an unknown person I was looking for I would think well maybe this over Peck is a person in his family tree so I need to look at them more closely so this is what I mean by printing out or evaluating the trees side-by-side and trying to figure out how they connect the trees connect to each other so this is how my matches are related to each other once I figure out how those over pecks are all related I need to find a common ancestor couple so I may have to research their trees and go back even further back and what I when I do that I find out that the common ancestor couple is Jacob over Peck and Magdalena over Peck and yes this is a two people name to overpack that marry each other is very upsetting but that happens I think they were cousins to one another first cousins or first cousins once removed something like that then for your purposes of finding an unknown male in your family you're gonna build the tree forward - so Jacob and Magdalena's descendants so you want to get all their children and I think they probably had ten or twelve children as a lot of people dead back in those days your unknown father or grandfather will be as descendant of this couple most likely because you found them and at least four family trees of your matches we don't know where we don't know on what descendant line he's comes from yet and that will become clear later on hopefully with when you analyze our matches more carefully so then I like to add DNA matches to the tree so I can see where I have matches to which line to take about Magdalena and I'm going to talk about centimorgans later but basically if you have a high centimorgan matched with a mat or you have a high number of centimorgans in common with a match that means you're a closely more closely related to that person and the centimorgans let me see if I can go back to the match page here this centimorgans is right here you see this right here on the match page as saying how many centimorgans I'm matching with each of these people 933 with that person two hundred forty two thirty three etc okay to understand what the centimorgans mean a little better you can consult a centimorgans chart like this one this is from DNA detectives you don't have to use this when there are various ones online so over here on your reading it left to right over here you can see that nine hundred centimorgans you read across here could be any of these relationships so you can see a nine hundred centimorgan match is actually quite a close connection to somebody a first cousin half aunt uncle niece nephew great grandparent great aunt or uncle so some of the categories overlap so you want to make sure you're watching that but so this will help you learn more about centimorgans you can find this chart online just by searching DNA detectives autosomal chart okay next steps now we just identified a possible connection to these over pecs but there are more we're gonna need to find another set of ancestors that we can trace down to current time that would be probably from the one would be from the mothers the grandmothers side I want to be from the grandfather's side of this unknown male so we need to find another match group and repeat this whole process look at the trees again find a connection we would hope to find a connection between mass group one and two either a marriage or a relationship that resulted in a child and when that happens then your unknown grandfather or father is probably from this union of the person from mass group one and the person from mass group two then you're gonna have to investigate candidates and do genealogy to figure out who would be the right person in that family treaty who's in the right place at the right time your next step and I'm kind of glossing over this woman is to contact the father if he's living the unknown father if he's not living you would contact his children or another person that would be able to test for you to make sure that you are on the right track so you're identifying candidates and then you really have to probably DNA test some people to figure out whether you are right or if you are wrong on who you identified if the possible father or possible grandfather contacting the family of an unknown father or grandfather is very touchy and you should definitely investigate that whole situation before you do it I would get advice from people about how to do what I searched online for suggestions on how to contact make good contact with family because you're basically calling these people up or writing them a letter and saying hey I think your dad is my dad huh so um that could go you know really south or it could go really well or could go kind of in the middle so you want to just do the best that you can to make it go as well as you possibly can um can go so as far as it's up to you you know you're gonna do your best to be very polite respectful Pleasant non-threatening and so on and so forth so definitely research on how to make contact before you do anything like that when you get to that step all right now I'm gonna go through some examples that go through these principles again and hopefully will help you to see the principles in action a little better and solidify them in your mind so that you can definitely remember them by the end of this program so the first one is an unknown grandfather example we've already seen Janet's free before and this is a totally made-up example I have made-up names I've made up details if you do find real people with these names I'm sorry but they're not really real people and be what weird coincidence so Janet has an unknown maternal grandfather so her father's known her grandma Alice Cooper had it had burn in 1920 I did not tell anybody who the father was so basically this is what we know about grandma Alice so Alice was born in 1901 in Lansing Ingham County Michigan daughter fern was born 1920 in Lansing so Alice is about 19 years old Alice worked as a secretary at Michigan State University at the time of her pregnancy these are Janet's top matches so Janet's the granddaughter ferns not alive so we can't test fern so we're testing the granddaughter and we've color-coded the matches as from the father's side of the family and the pink matches is from grandma Alice's side we've got the to at least two other matches there that do not have color coding those are from unknown grandfather's side and we have more so Janet has researchers from known family trees she's categorize from matches and she's found to match groups so she's already analyzed the family trees and she's found two different match groups and I have to admit I made up this example and so I made it easy I hope I made it easy for you we only have two different match groups for our top matches and they very clearly separate into two families it's not always going to be like this this is kind of the best case scenario so but I hope you'll understand the principles a little butter by seeing what I do here so to match groups have been found so this is our unknown match group number one we found five matches and there's fries lead back to John Nolan and Mary McKinney of Detroit Michigan so this is the common ancestor couple and so what you're gonna do is you're gonna make a tree for this family you're gonna research them you're gonna do genealogy a science Diane Southard would say you're gonna figure out who all their children were who all the children spouses were and add your DNA match this tree I do it on paper again you know I'm paper I'm old school you could totally do this on a computer on a computer program you can make a family tree in ancestry you want to make it private and unsearchable so that nobody else could find it because it's your DNA tree that's showing kind of potential information and it could be explosive if you made it public and people other people could find it and they would see that you're basically saying that somebody in this family had a child but they would tell anybody about so keep it private and unsearchable but you can do it online in an online on format I do it on paper so here's the results of my research on this couple John Nolan and Mary McKinney they had four children and I've got the names of their spouses there one of the reasons to look up all the names of the spouses it's just make sure that there's not a double relationship sometimes brothers will marry a set of brothers will marry a set of sisters and so you're you're looking to make sure there's not a double relationship between two families because we're trying to narrow down where in this family the unknown grandfather could be and if it's if there's only one connection between the two families then it seems obvious there's only from that one family but if there's two connections two brothers made two sisters you'd have to search both of those lines to try to find the unknown grandfather so in this scenario we've got all the children of John and Mary marrying different people so we got a herring espoused and Harrington espoused and Alan espoused named Meyers and the spouse named Jenkins and then here are our DNA matches can you see those over there we have DNA matches coming down from daughter Susan and son Robert and these are kind of low-level DNA matches and I put in their DNA match name and again these are totally made-up names not real people um you can see they have like 75 cent Americans 150 Center Morgans 80 cent emergents these are all about third cousin level second cousin once removed second cousin level so I've kind of got the son of Morgan chart memorized at this point but you wouldn't know that yourself you could refer to the Sunna Morgan chart to figure that out so you've got DNA matches to those two sets of children leaning back leading back to John Nolan and Mary McKinney now remember I said we had to match groups the second match group is another unknown family but coincidentally we have five good trees and this doesn't always happen either but we have five good trees in the matches and we analyzed them and they lead back to another common ancestor couple and that is Robert Jenkins and Helen graves of Lansing Michigan and so you're gonna repeat the steps for this match group that we did for the first so I make a tree I trace down all of their kids and so on and so forth and you can see here that they also had four kids coincidentally and they have other kids married spouses of difference their names so we don't have any double double relationships in the family that we can see and you can see I put the DNA matches over there again so we've got Valerie Pam CG these are all matches in Janet's match list and we looked at their trees and we trace them back to Robert think it's aunt Helen graves now is there an intersection between the two families now those of you that were paying attention might have seen the intersection already was there a marriage or a relationship between a member of family group one and family group two that could result in the birth of the unknown male yes we found a marriage between Peter Nolan and Susan Jenkins this was in Wayne County Michigan and I'm going to say from the purposes of my example this was not an online marriage that I was able to find I had to contact Wayne County and asked them to search their marriage records for this marriage so you're not always gonna find this information online you may have to you know do a lot of old-fashioned genealogy to try to figure it out calling up places ordering records offline 24 houses between two libraries really searching now because we found this marriage we want to know who all Peter Nolan and Susan Jenkins children were right because we're thinking that we have closed in on gannets unknown grandfather and that he might be a son of Peter Nolan and Susan Jenkins does everybody get that so did they have male children so yes they did so I put them in here on my treaty this is the Nolan and McKinney side of it I put in Peter there's Peter he married Susie Jenkins so Susan Jenkins is the dog come back up here Susan Jane as a daughter of Robert Jenkins and Helen graves which is our second match groups so basically we got a marriage between a member of each match group and that's why we had the DNA going back to those two families because Janet's grandfather is most likely from a marriage between somebody in the Nolan family and somebody in the Jenkins family we found a marriage as Peter and and Susan and Peter and Susan ended up having three sons they also have daughters but I didn't list them because we're not looking for an unknown woman looking for an unknown man they've got three sons though we had who's never easy you've got three unknown grandfather candidates it could be any one of the three sons so you're gonna need to do more genealogy on these sons are the males the right age to be ferns father were they in the right place at the right time recall what we know about Alice and firm and then you're going to expect censuses the directory obituaries marriages and death records and so on to learn more about each of those three sons so here's the three sons and here's what we found out about them we've got son John born 1899 son Edward Board 1902 we have son Lawrence for 1906 our time period of 1919 is when Alice got pregnant so firms born in 1920 so in 1919 we find a city directory that says John is living in Detroit so theoretically he's not in Lansing which is where Alice is living but Edward on the other hand his younger brother born 1902 was enrolled in Michigan State University at Lansing in 1919 now again I made this super easy for you so you can kind of see Lawrence the younger son was born in 1906 and he was presumably living in Detroit in 1919 he's pretty young he could be a father of a child I'm born in 1920 but it would be it would be yeah so we're gonna kind of put him to the side and we're gonna concentrate on the two older ones and out the two older ones we've got Edward definitely in Lansing in 1990 at the universe at Michigan State which is where Alice worked so chances are looking good for Edward right Edward is in the right place at the right time he's the right age his brother is not so much although John is still in the running and so is Lawrence I guess if we have to get down to Lawrence but at this point in time we don't know we can't really find anything else by DNA you're gonna have to go and this is where the contact and the family would go you would have to we know and we know all these boys are obvious sons are dead so you're looking at contacting descendants of the those sons and you would start with Edward because he's the most obvious um and you would try to see if you can get the member of his family to test and whatever the son Morgan's that you share with this number of Edwards family will tell you whether Edward was the father or if you need to move on to the next brother which would be John and then Lawrence would be the last resort that sort of makes sense to everybody I made it I think pretty simple for this first example the second example we're gonna kind of go off the range a bit um so the second example not everything works out as nicely as that first example does sometimes your your DNA results will confound you and you will say this does not work out what I know is not working out with the DNA results and so this example will hopefully kind of talk you through when that happens so this is an unknown father so this is Ken and I think I introduced you to him earlier to Ken Kenseth does not know who his father was his mother's through and he knows who her fund of the family is Ken was born in Fargo North Dakota in 1957 sue is deceased who never told anybody who the father was it's not on the debt on the birth certificate there's just no record of this that we know of so ken has to take a DNA test if he wants to try to figure this out and he took the ancestry test he's already prepared his mother's family tree he's color code the matches that are from the graveside of the family and those left over from the presumed unknown father he has lots of matches though Ken seems to be in good shape so he's got to match groups the first match group is over 21st the third cousins that are all sure matches to each other Oh and they include Marku cysts man at 600 Hargens at Grace who is 950 50 centimorgans his second match that's small he hasn't won hurts a third cousin so we assumed that this is a second root second the other side of the family of the unknown father so we're obviously going to concentrate on the group that has 20 people in right we can't do a whole lot with a group with one person in it so mass group one very interestingly has 15 second a third cousin matches that are related to a southern family named Solomon King at the Nancy uy Rick and they are based in North Carolina now this is a real example so Solomon King and Nancy Wyrick are actual real people you can look them up on on ancestry I changed the names of the closer family matches but this Salman can see why we got real people ken has DNA matches to descendents of the entire family a different children of settlement and Nancy but he has closer matches to Joseph and Amanda bush it is descendants and I'll show you on a tree what that means they're closer in centimorgans leading one to believe that perhaps the connection is through those of King and wife Amanda Bush then also in Madrid one are the top matches mark and grace who have who live in North Dakota and have no known connections to North Carolina or two people named Kane so this is intriguing isn't it so here's your Solomon King tree we've got someone King and Nancy wiring they're in Gulf 'red and Caldwell counties North Carolina they had 13 children at least and Ken has DNA matches through a lot of descendants of those 12 children a lot of those matches are low level like hundred centimorgans 110 150 and below leading one to believe that they're kind of more distant relatives to kin but one of salman king and nancy wyrick stuns joseph was married to Amanda Bush and they moved Illinois which is closer to South the North Dakota then North Carolina is and they had eight children and Ken also has multiple DNA matches to those descendants of those eight children and you can see that those matches go up in centimorgans like 200 300 500 so if you had to guess right now just based on what you see on this chart where on the tree they would be looking for Ken's father I would say in Joseph's line right can you see that why because because the DNA matches are have more centimorgans and the more centimorgans you share with somebody the closer the match you are so based on this and nothing else we can kind of focus in on Joseph's family as we go forward and again here's your search sharing son and Morgan's chart that you can look up your son and Morgan relationships and kind of get an idea of what those are this is a online tool that will do the same thing this is DNA painter calm that's the website it's called the shared centimorgan tool and you would type in the son of Morgan's that you share with a match right here in this box and then you would they would it would provide you with a list of possibilities and probabilities of that relationship so this is an online way to do the chart that I show you there now let's go back to our closest match remember our closest match who can on the father's side is mark mark sure there's 600 centimorgans with Ken's that means he could be first cousin he could be a first cousin once removed can be a half nephew those are all good options we don't know yet of course mark is age thirty he's from North Dakota which is where ken is from his German and Scandinavian origins on his family tree no North Carolina connections does not know grace so that's interesting because grace and Mark are the top matches and they match each other but does not know grace so when Ken asks mark do you know grace though and so he says no here's Mark's tree you can see we've got Scandinavians you've got Germans these are all people in North Dakota nothing to do with North Carolina whatsoever so very interesting right next match is gray its G stairs 350 centimorgans she's age 22 she's also from North Dakota also German and Scandinavian also has know North Carolina connections he does not know mark and does know has anybody in his tree either [Music] so here's graces tree again you got Germans you got Scandinavians they're all up here and the only difference is that great or right of his tree hole ken that she thinks the connection might be through Richard Larsen okay great so it's good when your matches want to help you they don't always do so sometimes they will never write you back you'll write then and they will write you back and so on and so forth and you shouldn't overly focus on that you can do a lap with just looking at their trees and looking at your matching you don't have to contact them but in this case Ken did contact grace and she agreed to help him so he says that maybe we should look at the Larsen side of her family okay so we'll do that but let's go back to the Kings first so after we have looked over this whole situation remember all of these people are shared matching to each other so the kings of north carolina race and mark our all shared matches with each other this means that grace and Mark must be related to the Kings in North Carolina some way and it means that we probably unearthed a problem in their trees we don't know what the problem is we don't know if they know that there's a problem in their tree but it could be an unknown adoption it could be where somebody's daddy is not who they think it is and that's sometimes called an NP e or non-eternal event so Grayson mark told showed us their family trees we looked at him we say to ourselves this does not add up we do not tell grace and Mark this because at this point is not our place to tell them but there's a family secret in there near line we just quietly think this to ourselves so back to mark and grace because they're our closest matches we're gonna work on them first as they're actually in North Dakota where ken is whereas these other people are still off in Illinois we don't know why we're matching the Kings we don't know what's going on with that exactly but we want to look at our most our biggest matches first our highest Sun and where they match this mark says he has no idea how ken might be related but remember grace said he has a great-grandfather that was a scoundrel and his name was Richard Larson and she thinks it's possible that he is a guy that we're looking for so grace is only 22 years old remember that - so for her great-grandfather theoretically could be the right age to be Ken's father circumstantial details line up with Ken's known information so this sounds good too so here's more about Richard Larson this is Grace's great grandfather he's born in 1922 in Minnesota he's the son of fan Larsen and Sara Kessinger and I've made up these themes so these are all made-up names um raised in North Dakota South Dakota married and divorced multiple times known to have had extramarital relationships and to a father up to 17 children 17 children so the family already knew like I said that Richard was a bit of a scoundrel and this helped Ken because they weren't trying to hide anything really and they were like had they didn't have their head buried in the sand saying that grandpa is wonderful and he was you know the best and nothing bad could have happened in our family so anyway she was known to have lived in Fargo North Dakota in the 1950s which is when Ken was born and so that's another circumstantial kind of piece of information so here's Richards tree so again his father's been Larsen his mother Sara Kissinger we've got the Larson's going back to Norway so and the Kissinger's are going back to Germany both sides of the family from what we know and we did genealogy research on this seem to have come into this country and gone straight to North Dakota they did not pass North Carolina they did not involve themselves with anybody named King that we know of so we're still puzzling over the King connection Richard Larsen seems like a good candidate but we're gonna have to dig deeper so remember here's our big fundamental rule for DNA you follow the DNA where the DNA takes you not a surname so if we got to come up on the surname Larsen because that's Richards last name and we kept trying to make the name Larsen work it wouldn't work because our DNA matches are leading us into the name King so people can lie but DNA does not lie you have to interpret it correctly but DNA doesn't lie so again grace and Mark must somehow be related to the Kings we just have to figure out how now we had that second group of matches [Music] had two groups of men ax fist his second group of matches only had one person in it and it was a guy who has no tree now the guy's name the name of the match is Kessinger now remember that Richard Larson's mother was a Kessinger so when we see that name we should go ding ding ding ding ding this could be a clue but we're not there yet we need more matches to make sure we're on the right track we need to go we need to build a street for Sara Kessinger so who's Sara Kessinger who are her parents who are her grandparents who are her you know what search know her tree we need to keep looking at the shared matches to the third cousin so third cousin we need to add more people to his match group so we'll look at fourth cousins that are related to the third cousin and the shared map and we did we looked at their trees we found more Kessinger trees so we found out that group 2 is actually a number of matches all going back to the Kessinger line so they linked exactly to sarah Kessinger x' line which means that richard is probably our guy because we've got DNA matches to his mother now remember his father supposedly is Ben Larsen but we're gonna need to investigate this more so far we've done online searching but in order to kind of pull this all together we're going to go offline Richards born in 1922 in st. Paul we order the marriage certificate for Sven and Sarah and we find out they got married in 1924 so this is a suspicious gap where Sarah gets married two years after her son Richard is born so we ordered the birth certificate from the state of Minnesota and what do we see what on this birth certificate this is God's honest truth this birth certificate said William king of North Carolina and then it said mother's name stearic acid her I just about died when I saw that um so this turn this confirms to us that Ben is the stepdad not the bio dad so we need to revise our tree so the tree that grace gave us for her family he said that Richards father was spend Larsen but we had to do more research and figure out that that was not true the DNA was already leading sleeting us in that direction but this kind of solidified it for us so spend Larsen is the dad is not the dentist so we're crossing him out he's the stepdad and as such he should have been labelled stepdad on the tree but he wasn't so these people in Norway not related so on so forth so back to our Solomon King and Nancy why Rick tree Joseph's son Joseph in Illinois had a son named William he was born in 1891 and his death plays on all the family trees that we could find was unknown nobody seemed to know what happened to William he's seen him - he was on several censuses as a young man and then he disappeared so I say that he's possible father of Richard because he's the correct name the correct place the correct age the correct family but we can't know for sure and why is that because we we don't know what happened to William King on that tree we don't know what happened to William King the son of Joseph and Amanda we can't track down a descendant of his because nobody knows whether he married had other kids where he lived we know he was in st. Paul if somebody was in st. Paul impregnating Sarah Kessinger but we don't know we can't find out exactly so I put down he's the probable father of Richard her but this is not really confirmed by DNA now in the future we might get a lucky DNA max from some descendant of William King and that will help us um solidify this but in the meantime we're left with kind of probable is what we've got so we can add in the tree here William King probable father Joseph King and Amanda Bush the grandparents of Richard and this makes much more sense given our DNA matches right now how do grace and Mark tie in remember that we couldn't figure out so Grace's grandmother Janet ended up taking a DNA test for us and she matched Ken as a half sibling meaning that Richard is both of their fathers and that was what grace told us all along she said I think Richard is the father and Janet took the DNA test and it confirmed it then mark poor mark who was very confused mark had his mother take a DNA test because he can tell that we were not matching that ken was not matching his father side of the family he knew that Ken was matching his mother side of the family so marks mom took a DNA test and she also matched Ken as a half civil claim this means that grandma had a secret relationship with Richard and so marks family kind of went into an uproar over this information and it was kind of a bad scene but because Graham is still alive and grandma is not talking about what happened so we don't know what kind of relationship he had with Richard and whether it was consensual or not actually um and so you have to be really careful about things like that um Richards dad was probably William king of North Carolina and that's why we had all those DNA matches to the Kings does that make sense to everybody sort of we went on a long convoluted tour of this family but we eventually got there now I have very little time left but I'm going to try to go through my last example quick okay unknown second great-grandparents this is from my own tree so this is my family line this is my aunt Joanne that we're sewing the three wins because an jo-ann's the one that took the DNA test and joanna is looking for her great-grandfather's parents so george brown up there on the top of the tree where the arrow is they don't know who his parents were so we're helping to find out george brown born 1852 in illinois or Pennsylvania depending on what you believe he is found for the first time in 1878 when he marries Sarah Kennedy in Washington County Illinois he died in 1901 in Logan County Illinois there's no death certificate and no obituary and no naming of his parents this is his real name so this is my family I'm telling you the real names of people here there are many George Browns for in about 1852 in Illinois but no indication which one can be the George Brown that we're looking for and I followed up on most of them doing traditional genealogical research in censuses and marriages and death records and so on and so forth so we turned to DNA jo-ann took the DNA test she completed her family tree she color-coded her matches and her leftover matches maybe from the unknown second great-grandparents line this is much more difficult to do when you're looking for third great-grandparents or the second great-grandparents I should say by DNA because you're gonna have a lot of loose ends and it's not gonna be as straightforward and clear-cut as when you're looking for an unknown father unknown grandfather so we do our color coding we're gonna color code purple the Allie matches we're gonna color code blue the Caesar matches we're gonna color code pink the Kennedy matches and magenta them a bride matches can you see all those on the tree there and then we're gonna have matches that are from the Union of George Brown and Sarah Kennedy and we're gonna we're gonna count those as orange but the problem is that they're gonna have some brown and some Kennedy in them and so we're gonna have to really work to kind of separate out those two lines in those matches so once we do all that this is Joanne's man you can see the color coding that I did we've got orange matches and blue matches and pink and magenta and I I've written in notes there so you can see kind of what they are different family and we continued color coding and after we finished color-coding all of the known family lines we didn't have anybody left there was a second or third cousin that was not color coded so then we had to move on to fourth cousins and fourth cousins are hard to work with but we had many matches that were not color coded so I actually created had to create seven match groups of fourth cousins and I grouped them in seven groups by looking at shared matching so I put all the ones that share matched with each other in a match group and I ended up with seven match groups I made sure they're not matching the known matches so the Alan's the Caesars and my Brides the Kennedys and then I viewed the trees of all these matches looking for common surnames and ancestor couples just like we did before right and I had a negative result so these are all the max groups that I made this is what I called them unknown group one unknown group two unknown grow three and so on but you could map you could call them anything you wanted um when I analyzed the trees I found no shared ancestors their names or couples I couldn't track any of those groups back to a particular surname or a particular ancestor couple now why would that be while many of my matches have no trees so I had no tree to look at to try to analyze some of the fourth cousin matches were smiling centimorgans so you could share ten Sunim organs with us fourth cousin match or twenty sentiments with the fourth cousin match meaning that they're pretty far back in your tree and then brown is a very common surname I found some Browns in the trees of these matches but I was never connect any of the Browns to anybody else so I decided that they were brown matches that work was done all not because they were related to my branch of the Browns but because their ground is such a common surname that they're just other Brown matches that were in the family lines unrelated Browns to me so basically this was a negative result but this is what you would do you would do the same steps now remember our testing pathway at the beginning I'm going to need to follow my testing path very carefully so I have reviewed my tan Joanne's ancestry matches and we did not spear it out right you didn't figure out the answer to our question or who were her second great-grandparents so our next step is to upload our raw data file to my heritage and Family Tree DNA our next step after that is to take the 23andme test right then we review our matches again and we try to solve it using our principles that we'd have and the steps that we follow if I can find a male Brown descendant I can try to test him on the y chromosome that would be an another step that we could take but this is all adding up remember all these tests that I'm buying on more tests and more money so that's what I was really hoping we could solve it by ancestry but we didn't we might even have to use advanced analysis tools and this is advanced this is not for your beginners but these are things you can learn about there's dead match there's DNA painter there's genetic Affairs and DNA comm that all have advanced tools that would help you analyze your DNA in a problem such as this problem that we're looking at it you can triangulate you can paint your matches you could run auto clustering and I would say read up on all of these ideas and see whether they would work for you or not I don't have time to go into them now today at all but that's what we're gonna have to do with this Brown question now to review here's our major principles again you can read over those this is what you're gonna try to apply to your own problem that you have them going on and the second half of the major principles okay now I talked about educating yourself about DNA and trying to learn about those advanced tools so here's a little bit about educating yourself about DNA you should read blogs there's a lot of blogs out there I only mentioned a couple Roberta Estes blank Bettinger Kitty Cooper do you Russell all have blacks read your DNA testing company's website and help screams they have a lot of information there learn how to use gen max do you learn how to use DNA painter learn how to use Dana leads com attend educational opportunities like local DNA programming at your local library or genealogy Society go to a national conference go to a national seminar Institute like grip or Slig online webinars look at those especially right now in this time period where we're all stuck at home family search offers office webinars the American ancestors legacy ancestry they all offer webinars some of these are paid like you would have to pay to watch the webinars and some of them would be free books here's two books that would be very applicable to what we were talking about today the first one is a general beginners book - DNA and genetic genealogy it's by Blaine Bettinger you see it there the family tree guide to DNA testing and genetic genealogy the second book is more towards someone who has an adoption in their family or an unknown father unknown grandfather and it's by Brianne Kirkpatrick in chain and combs Bennett and they are also experts in the field also for people with unknown parentage and adoption there's two Facebook groups that I would recommend there are others but DNA detectives and surf squad these are both founded by DNA by Cece Moore who is very reputable and they both are free health so you join the Facebook group and you will get free health surf squad it you'll actually get a search angel' that will try to help you and solve your problem help you solve your problem DNA detectives is more of a learn as you go kind of thing you may not find somebody that actually solves your problem for you but they will walk you through the steps that you need to go to to solve your problem and finally I offer consultations so right now normally I would offer them one-on-one at the library in person we're not open so we are offering email consultations and zoom consultations so you can just email the library there at our website or our email address there or you can also PM us on social media to set up one of the consultations I'm very happy to help and have had a lot of experience with these kind of cases so thank you for coming and that's the end of my presentation

Channel: Allen County Public Library

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Length: 65min 25sec (3925 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020