let's stand over there time okay time um let me start by putting that on and then we can go yeah welcome we'd like to welcome you to the second DNA Day co-sponsored by the Southern California genealogy society and by the international Society of genetic genealogist otherwise known as isog first of all I'm going to do some little housekeeping things for you in your envelope all of you receive received a bag tag I know how easy it is to get your tags mixed up and since everybody has the same kind of bag so please take your bag tag out of the envelope and stick it in your bag then we'll always know which one is yours if you happen to leave it someplace second piece of information this is your Bible for today those of you who have been to any of our conferences before know that we always give one of these large sheets DNA day is in blue if you're coming tomorrow to jeree you will need to pick up a pink sheet it has all the schedules and at the top there's the rooms this is the convention center the hotel is that way you have maps on the back everybody wants to know where's the bathroom well in this building the bathroom's that direction and I'll ask you to look at the map to find the bathrooms when you're over in the hotel section do any of you have questions about what was in your bag if you have a luncheon ticket for today it's called the panel discussion that's also in your bag and it's very handy to put that sort of stuff in with your tickets it's very easy to get at them and if you're staying for jamere tomorrow you will have a red raffle ticket the raffle bin will be set up in the convention center it right you'll see balloons I'm not sure what kind of balloons my daughter's getting this time and be sure if you want to have a chance to get something at every single raffle you want to get your free ticket in the raffle bin approximately when we open jambur tomorrow we'll have the raffle bin up now I'm I'm not spotting him but I would like to have any board of directors of scgs please stand and if our president is in here I'm going there he is that's Dave bird president of scgs then I'd like to introduce Katherine Borges who is the head of isog so Katherine thank you and I have the privilege today of introducing to you my friend and project co-administrator strator on the Ireland mitochondrial DNA project Dr Morris gleon um we when you read his name in the program most people say Maurice in America but it's pronounced Morris so but he'll answer to either and um besides being a DNA project administrator and a really outstanding speaker he is also a psychiatrist and an actor and he's done plays on the West End he's also a administrator of the iara project which does uh Caribbean DNA so there's more about it in in your program too and he's also a suring project administrator for the spear project so we're very lucky to have him here today and he's come all the way from London but he's he's Irish um so please welcome Dr Morris gleon thank thank you very much for that introduction um can everybody hear me at the back excellent uh it's well welcome to jamere uh it's great to be here and um it's great to be back at another DNA day I was here for the first time last year and I thought it was an absolutely fantastic conference and I really have to congratulate the farsightedness of the scgs and isog in collaborating together to give us one of the very few conferences that we have available for genetic genealogy for discussing the work that we do and for sharing the uh recent advances in this new and emerging science with each other so um I I I want to thank particularly the uh co-chairs of this meeting uh Leo Myers and Paula HL who I think have done a fantastic job at organizing this conference if it's any way as good as the conference that was uh last year then I think we're in for a wonderful 4 day period uh the other people that I'd love to thank would be the members of isol who have put so much uh effort into organizing this conference in particular Alice fairhurst um Cathy Johnson and Bonnie cook and I think they deserve a round of applause now the topic of uh my presentation this morning is how DNA will change the face of Irish genealogy but uh to say at the outset that the points that I will cover during the next hour or so are of general applicability not just to Irish genealogy but to genealogy in general and how DNA is really going to make an impact in changing the way that we think and look at genealogy and the other thing to say is that these slides are available for download from um my blog at DNA and family tree research. Blogspot do.uk so if you want to you can download them and uh you can make your own notes on those slides so you will have that uh facility as well now this is a picture of my my family um there's the four brothers at the back and my sister at the end with the classic Leon nose and uh some of us have lost our hair in the meantime but uh that's just genetics for you um there are my there's my mom and dad in in the middle and the reason why I got involved in genealogy in the first place was because of my dad and he got involved because of my mom now my mom gave him a birthday present back in the 1970s it was a book and it was called the Great hunger by cesil woodam Smith and it describ the great Irish potato fam of the late 1840s and it was while reading this book that my dad suddenly thought to himself goodness my ancestors lived through this incredible time in Irish history and I don't know anything about them who were these people how could they survive this terrible National disaster and that's what got him interested in genealogy in the first place and I remember as a teenager back in the 1970s going over to Granny's house for the afternoon on the the regular Sunday afternoon visit and dad would sit down with Granny and he'd spend hours making notes on engineering graph paper and drawing this family tree uh mining her memory for all of that those those details I'm sure there's many people in the audience have done the same um so that was and that engineering graph paper is probably still up in the attic somewhere but since then of course uh we've had software programs he's still using the one that I gave him back in 2002 I think and uh that's how we got interested in in genealogy now um of course you can only go so far before you hit those brick walls and uh that's where DNA comes to the rescue now uh this is a particular relevance to this audience here because um Ireland has a population of 6 million but a diaspora of approximately 7 million people now I read recently that 125% of Americans have Irish ancestry how how many people in the audience of Irish ancestry oh well it looks like all 12 and a half% of you made it here today that's a little unexpected um do you all talk to each other or do you have a network anyway but um uh so many people have Irish ancestry and uh immigration was the solution to the problems that the Irish faced after and during the Great Famine you can see that the population of Ireland Rose exponentially really between uh the late 1600s and the middle of the 1800s it it went from a population of approximately 1 million in about 1700 to about 8 million in 1850 and then with the Irish potato famine a million people died over over a relatively short period of time during those five years between 1845 and 1850 and a million people immigrated and that immigration continued over the course of the following decades as landlords cleared the lands and made them available for more efficient farming and many Irish came to America so The Great Potato was responsible for much of the hardship that Ireland faced during those those early years of the of the 1850s or so because people over relied on it they were over dependent on it so when the crop failed completely the solution was was death or immigration and the Irish came to America in their drones and many of their descendants are sitting here in this room today now New York was a great Port of Call for the the Irish and many of my ancestors and many of my relatives came through that Port so for example my my great aunt Mary and this is a photograph we found in her passport application of 1916 she arrived in America she spent 5 years in Alaska what was she doing there was it the Gold Rush was she fishing what was she fishing for these are these are some of the tantalizing family Mysteries that we still searching for she had a daughter that was given up for adoption we're still looking for that daughter or for the children of that daughter perhaps DNA can help us find them but these are the kind of family Mysteries that you're going to find when you're researching your Irish ancestry or indeed any of your ancestry because a lot of the stories of the immigrants to America are very very similar and of course here in California there was a great attraction the Gold Rush of the late 1800s and it even attracted my great great grandfather Joseph of Carol who ended up going bankrupt in Dublin in 1878 he lost five of his children in childhood and then in 1883 he turns up in San Francisco what was he doing here we don't know we don't know where he's buried we don't know when he died did he did he abandon his family or did he return to Ireland and look after after them but died shortly afterwards so these are the kind of mysteries that we encounter looking at Irish genealogy um and when you start looking at trying to find where in Ireland your ancestors came from I'm sure many people here in this room will just know that they're from Ireland but won't have any further information so for example in the censes of 1881 it's it has under place of birth Ireland and that's all the information it has you go to other uh sources of documentary information such as ship's manifest list and you'll find it just say Ireland it doesn't give any further information even on burial records it has birthplace as Ireland and that's as far as you as you can get now if you're lucky perhaps your ancestor registered with the Immigrant Savings Bank and it will say something like a native of davidstown Wexford Ireland and that PIN points the source of origin of your ancestor but that's a lucky find and I think many many people will just have be brick walled at that point of immigration they will know only that their ancestors is from Ireland and they won't have any further information does anybody in the room have that kind of problem okay the same 122% okay but this is where DNA comes to the rescue now now you can use surname distribution maps and there are many free maps available online uh the Irish Times newspaper has a website called Irish ancestors and they have surname distribution Maps based in Griffith's valuation um you have uh for bears. co.uk which has C distribution Maps based on the 1881 census for the UK and the 191 census for Ireland uh you have public profiler again based on 1881 and 1901 censuses that's quite good because it shows you Europe as well so if you're looking for a uh your surname from a European ancestor uh the public profiler Max are a very good place to go and then you have Irish origines and genetic Homeland which again have Maps based on the 1911 census but just looking at the farmers the people that held on to the land and those people that held on to the land that land was passed to them from their fathers their grandfathers and their forefathers and it takes you back into land ownership in Ireland so these are very useful um the trouble is of course that and here's my gleon family in the uh 1901 census it will help you perhaps pinpoint a likely area of origin for your Irish ancestor but it doesn't guarantee that that's where they come from because even though the Clans are uh concentrated in temporary they are really quite widespread throughout the rest of the country so they could have come from anywhere but at least the cend distribution Maps do give you a starting point to start your documentary research DNA can even take it a step further and we've come a long way with DNA since family tree DNA launched the first direct to Consumer Testing in May 2000 that was quickly followed by well not too quickly followed by the National Geographic project and last year Spencer Wells was one of the keyo speakers here and that came on board in 2005 and that's how I got involved in DNA testing I was surfing the net one day and I came across National genographic and I thought that looks interesting uh let me buy two kits one for my y DNA my father's father's father's side one from my mitochondrial DNA my mother's mother's mother's side and I thought okay these results should be interesting I'm not sure if they going to tell me very much but it'll be interesting to find out what they say um and then I suddenly thought to myself hold on these would make a fantastic Christmas present for my dad why don't I do that because I'm I'm absolutely terrible with Christmas presents I I buy the worst presents in the world I have no idea what people want I go out and I shop for hours and I usually end up bu rubbish um in a moment of desperation when Christmas I bought my sister a trumpet so anytime that I see something I think now that would make an excellent present I will buy it and I will keep it until Christmas and then I'll give it to somebody so that's what I thought I would do with my two DNA kits from the national g graphic project I thought because that's fantastic because my dad's his father's father's father line is the same as my father's father's father SL because the ydna was passed down and my dad passed his y DNA to me right well I think he did I mean I don't have any reason to believe he didn't but then I started thinking and that's when the Panic set in because how would I know what guarantee would I have that he actually passed his y DNA on to me I mean supposing I was swapped at the hospital as a baby and and it was with some trepidation that I approached these first DNA test because I thought you never know what you might find but I went ahead and I gave him the test and the results came back and a couple of years later we did another test and it was confirmed that he was indeed my paternal ancestor so that was a uh that was a relief um but then after family tree of DNA we had 23 and me we have Ireland's Britain's and Scotland's DNA ancestry DNA African DNA which is a subsidiary or an affiliate of family tree DNA and we have specialist groups like African ancestry uh the full genomes Corporation and Y seek so there's a variety of different companies that are coming on the marketplace that are providing us with a wider range of DNA tests and that creates a lot of healthy competition between the different companies keeps the prices down and the prices have been falling considerably in recent years but the other thing that's that has developed over the last 14 years since May 2000 is the nature of the actual tests themselves so for example with Y DNA we started off with just 12 markers and then we got 25 then 37 671 and now we have 350 Sr markers very very powerful for surname studies we also have snip markers the other type of Y DNA well the other type of of uh DNA marker SNP snip markers and again we started off with a very low low number but we have over 50,000 snip markers on the Y chromosome now and that has created the snip tsunami of 2014 so this is really emerging science we are we are on the crest of the wave of scientific Discovery and that's what makes genetic genealogy so exciting the fact that everybody in this room can be part of those new discoveries um ydna also very useful for deep ancestry and for anthropology so as time goes on we are finding out the finer and finer branches of the genetic human tree and that is going to end up with some very that is going to change the face of Irish genealogy for sure I'll tell you why in a moment with mitochondrial DNA we started with the basics hb1 we then progress to H2 and the coding region and this is very very good for ancient DNA in particular and many of you will have heard the story of Richard III the king in the car park who was found buried in the car park of Lester Social Services Department where he had been waiting for 500 years apparently it's not unusual lots of people have been waiting longer and um not only have they managed to extract the mitochondrial DNA from Richard the turd remains they also have managed to extract the Y DNA and the autosomal DNA so whereas previously ancient DNA really just concerned itself with uh mitochondrial DNA ancient DNA is now moving into a new tomorrow and we will now be able to sequence the Y DNA and the autosomal DNA of our ancient Kings ancient royalty um ancient uh remains dug up by archaeologists so that creates some interesting possibilities and that too will change the face of genealogy in general with autosomal DNA we have over 700,000 snip markers available now uh very useful for looking at your ethnic makeup uh your ethnic ad mixture for finding distant cousins for looking at what percent in the anle your husband is don't need DNA for that um presentent and a Soven and for looking at Medical risk or at least we were looking at Medical risk until the Food and Drug Administration shut down 23 and me's medical risk side of the business so hopefully in the next year or so that will all be resoled D and we as Citizens will be allowed to take greater responsibility for our own Health Care by looking at our own DNA profile from a medical point of view uh just to mention in the UK uh the UK is very very much interested in giving the responsibility for health care to the individual and seems to be a lot more trusting about the individual's capacity to make decisions based on medical risk assess assessment with DNA being a component of that so there are many projects ongoing in the UK such as the 100 Genome Project there even start of the 10K UK project which is going to genotype uh 100, genomes of people with serious uh medical conditions such as cancer to see if we can find out if there is a genetic risk and how to modify it so the work that 23 and me have been doing which I think is very very interesting and Sterling work is being complemented by the work that the academics are doing in the United Kingdom so watch this space hopefully as it becomes more acceptable then 23 and may will be back in Action again the other thing that has really developed over the course of the last 14 years is that we have developed a community of avid genealogists thanks to the farsightedness of people like Katherine B the president of the international Society sorry the director of the international Society of genetic alogy and uh certainly in Ireland uh isog is very active uh there's a variety of people who have been involved in isog such as Jared corkran who is the Irish representative for isog um but also Tyrone Bose Margaret Jordan Elizabeth aduno Ross Nigel McCarthy Finn B mahany Paul Duffy Dennis Wright Barry McCain there are loads of people involved in uh projects with an Irish uh aspect to them not all of them are based in Ireland these are a few of them that are and the reason I put those up there are because these are some of the speakers that we had at Ireland's first genetic genealogy Conference in October of last year I'll say a little bit about that later on so with all of these advances that we've had in DNA testing over the course of the last 14 years and with the advances that are going to emerge in the next 5 to 10 years this is one of the most exciting times in our lives it really is going to help us move forward and change the way that we think about ourselves and about the societies that we live in and it's really going to help us answer those two basic questions that everybody asks especially if you're involved in genealogy who am I where do I come from and those are two of the most fundamental questions that anybody can ask about themselves but one of the things I love about genealogy is that it takes one on a journey into the past into the lives of your ancestors the ancestors that actually got you to where you are today and I think I was Marvel I find it very very moving when I see some of the hardships that my ancestors had to live through and I think to myself as a psychiatrist especially would I really have had the courage and the resilience to survive what they survived if I'd been in the same situation losing five children before Hood losing a wife to the Spanish Flu losing a husband because he died of TV halfway across the Atlantic and was buried at Sea as far from Land as anyone can be those are the kind of questions that fascinate me and um I think DNA is an aspect of that um it answers one of the first brick walls that many people in this room come across which is where in Ireland did my ancestor come from and this is the brick wall in the US there is another major brick wall when you get to Ireland but the first brick wall to overcome is where in Ireland did my ancestor come from but the good news is that using DNA there are a variety of ways in which you can break through that break war and I'm going to talk about four of them autosomal DNA serame studies match mapping and uh BGA or biogeographical analysis now autosomal DNA uh if you take an autal DNA test that's probably the easiest way of connecting with your Irish ancestry and finding out where in Ireland your ancestors came from because if you match somebody in Ireland who has a family tree that goes back in Ireland back into the 1800s there's a very very good chance that if you match them and figure out how you can con how you connect with them that will give you the location of your Irish ancestor and a zonal DNA is one of the most popular tests that is being undertaken by people in Ireland today we'll have a look at that in a second now there are several companies that offer the autosomal DNA testing and each of them have their pros and cons uh family tree DNA has a total database of approximately 670,000 people which is a huge number of people um 23 and me are 650,000 and ancestry DNA are approx 400,000 um now in terms of the autal DNA in the family tree DNA database the estimate is 85,000 people but I think it's probably more than that uh the interesting thing about Family Tree DNA is that 70% of their customers are us-based but 30% of them are non us-based so family tree DNA has the largest database of people outside of the US and uh certainly people in Ireland would preferentially use family tree DNA rather than one of the other uh companies um having said that 23 and me have approximately a 9% us Bas uh and the reason for that is because they charge $80 to deliver it to Ireland so the postage and shipping almost costs as much as the test itself uh lastly ancestry DNA they probably have a 99% us-based uh us customers in their Database The Reason for that is they don't actually Market the test outside of the US and therefore it is available to only those Irish people like me who can hop on a flight to New York stay with a friend for a week and then do some swabbing while I'm there so um those are the various databases um the other major advance that we've had is the work done by Curtis Rogers and John Olsen for example on g match which is a wonderful example of of how the community and the the army of volunteers that we have in the community have got together to to produce these tools for the benefit of everyone so I really have great admiration for Curtis Rogers and John Olsen for putting get match together um It's a Wonderful facility it's it's a little bit slow at times it's it's currently down at the moment but it allows you to compare your DNA and the database you have tested with other people in other data basis so it's a really wonderful um gift that these guys have given to the community the other people that I really want to Big give a big shout out to are the DNA adoption group here within the US people like Diane Harman hug Karen cor uh gay Tenon bomb Rob waran there's a host of people there who have been working to try and help adop tees find their biological families their birth families and the tools they've developed to help these adops find their families are extremely useful for all of us in general because when you think of it that ancestor that is sitting on that brick wall that you have is similar to an adopte in many ways you don't know who their father or who their mother is so H having these tools from the DNA adoption community and again they are freely available is a wonderful resource for all of us within the community so I have huge admiration for for these people now serame studies and why DNA matching in particular is also another very useful way of breaking through that brick wall and finding out where in Ireland your ancestors came from um there are approximately 7,800 surname studies at Family Tree DNA and family tree DNA has the best infrastructure for these studies and if you want to you can just Google your name just Google ftdna and your name and you'll find if there's a certain name study there um that could be waiting for you incidentally how many people have done a DNA test in this room the same 12 and a half% what's going on and how many people are thinking of doing a DNA test okay okay well this is a perhaps a place to start uh with a surname study um getting a male relevant to do the ydna test and taking you back in time connecting you with other people with the same same surname and trying to find out where that particular surname came from in Ireland and I've had great success with that and I'll talk a little bit about that in a while the other thing to uh remember is that a lot of these surnames are run by by people from The Guild of one name studies the goons I am a goon myself and I'm very proud of it are there any goons in the audience excellent so you know you're in good company when you're with a bunch of goons that's what I say um and uh so these Ser him studies are very very useful and can be uh lifechanging when TR to find in your your ancestral uh Homeland in Ireland the third type of uh technique that can be very very useful and anyone can do this is called match mapping and this is a technique that was first introduced by Dr Tyrone Bose of Irish Origins um it was also is also being used used by um genetic Homeland which is a website run by Brad Lin here in the front row and um it's a really clever technique because you might you won't be able to see this here but this is a list of the typical list of the surname matches that you would get in uh when you get your ydna results back and what you will find is that there are going to be some people with your uh surname um as and this particular instance it's duly uh but also and DUI is the Red Arrows but you'll also find that there's people there who match you genetically but have a different surname to you and the reason for this is either because these matches with different surnames indicate a common ancestor before the time of cames so pre- serame era which in Ireland would be before about a th ad um or it's a nonpaternity event okay now nonpaternity event when I first heard this term I immediately thought of the Immaculate Conception because I didn't think there was a father involved nonpaternity but that's not what it means um another way of expressing it is not the parent expected NP not the parent expective so and it it's not just about illegitima and birs out of wedlock but certainly from an perspective it's about fostering and adoption so a lot of children were given away to you know a sister would give a child away to a sister that was not able to conceive um also the legal name changes were important as well a uh prerequisite of a will might be you can marry my daughter but only if you change your name to my name so that the name is continued down along the line um similarly you can only inherit my land if you change your name to my name so there's a variety of different reasons why an NP might occur uh a case in points Oliver Cromwell he was not a Cromwell his wife was a Cromwell and he took his wife's name because she was of higher Social Status than he was so that's another reason why an NP might uh occur and why the DNA that you receive is not necessarily the DNA with the original name on it so um but the the interesting thing about these different surname matches uh whether they're uh pre-s serame era ancestors or whether they're nonpaternity events is the fact that they were all probably neighbors so they all came from the same area in Pro in all probability because there was very low social Mobility you know before before the 1600s uh people in Ireland really didn't move around that much uh with the cromwellian conquest a lot of the Old English families were moved across the shanon into the west of Ireland into conut uh but and then during the 1850s there was and the 1800s there was a lot more migration but you'll still find that a lot of people in Ireland are living on the same land that they live that their ancestors lived on for hundreds of years if not thousands of years so because of this low social Mobility what you can do is you can take your cname distribution maps and you can look at the serame distribution map maps for each of the different surnames that you match and the point of intersection between these different surnames is the most likely origin of your particular Irish ancestor with the surname that you have ydna tested that's the theory at least it gives you a working hypothesis and it takes the use of surname distribution Maps up to the next level so you can either do this yourself and it's it's a fairly easy technique and you can introduce whatever kind of waiting you want for um uh the distribution of the names within Ireland you can introduce waiting based on whether the match is a 37 marker test match or a 67 marker test match uh or you can ask uh Tyrone to do it on Irish origines website or you can go on to the genetic Homeland website and use the tools and resources available there so that's a very interesting way of trying to pinpoint where in Ireland your ancestors came from and it probably gives you an area of the highest probability that allows you to start your documentary research now the last way of breaking through this brick wall of where and Ireland your ancestors came from is by biogeographical analysis now uh it's also known as ethnic makeup eth ethnic ad mixture and I've tested with all of the companies uh family tree DNA came back and said you are 100 100% Europeans I said thank you very much ancestry DNA came back and said you are 78% British ises but you are uh 9% or is a 12% Scandinavian and 7% central European and I thought okay well I don't think I've got any Scandinavian ancestors and since then they've changed it and they've updated it and that's the problem with biogeographical analysis it really depends on the type of database that you're comparing the results to and I think over time we're going to get uh better databases to compare our results too and the biogeographical analysis will improve over time with uh the National Geographic project I am 19% Southwest Asian and I am 43% uh Mediterranean and I am 19 uh I'm something else there as well northern European so again it's a little bit of a hodg Podge it doesn't really tell me a huge amount about where to pinpoint my ancestors from and then with uh 23 and me I'm 99.8% European and I'm 0.1% subsaharan African that's fascinating I want to I want to find that ancestor and soon as I saw as soon as I saw that result I thought I need to find that ancestor where is he or she as the case may be um um there's 0.1% missing though I'm 0.1% on assigned so that must be leeor the good news is especially for anybody with British as well as Irish ancestry is the people of the British Isles project now this is a project that has been running for for about eight years or so now and uh the people uh uh at Oxford under the leadership of Walter bodmer uh Bruce Winnie is one of the the main uh scientists involved in this project they have collected a DNA samples from 8,000 people across the UK but with a stipulation and that stipulation is that every person they collected DNA from had to have four grandparents within a 30m radius of each other so they are localizing the DNA to a specific area four grand parents brings you back to the early 1900s and because social Mobility was so low we know that people tended to stick together so this is an attempt to really localize the DNA to specific areas very interesting what they found because they looked at the results they used something called linkage disequilibrium which is very very important and in simple terms it means that they found that one part of DNA is is frequently passed on with another part of DNA the two pieces of DNA are somehow linked to each other the unusual thing is they were not necessarily on the same chromosome so you might get one part of DNA on chromosome 3 that was linked with a portion of DNA and chromosome 17 and for some reason there was a tendency for the two to be passed on together no matter who the person was and when they took this linkage disequilibrium into account and reweighted their uh analysis as a result of that they come up with a very interesting map because they were able to divide the entire United Kingdom into 29 distinct genetic groups and this is what you see on this map here in the different colors uh look down at Cornwall and Devon in the very very bottom Cornwall is in blue Devon is in yellow there is a river between the two communities they found geographical features where keeping people apart and genetic diversity developed because of these geographic features look up at the very very top in the ory Islands at the very top it's green that's the North Island and the bottom of that is the South Island in yellow there was a there was a very very distinct difference in the genetic makeup in the people between North ory Island and Southern ory Island the reason being that neither of them allowed the others to own land on the other Island up until the 1940s so because of that law people didn't mix that much and it allows the two islands to develop a very distinct genetic profile independent of each other the good news is and this is from Bruce winny uh when he spoke uh with a group of us from isog last February as as you think you are in London he said within the next 12 to 18 months we should be able to compare our autosomal DNA to the autosomal DNA that he has in his database what will that mean it will mean that you'll be able to get a report that says 40% of your DNA is from Devon 20% of your DNA is from Cornwell 30% of your DNA is from orne and 10% of your DNA is from Cardiff that's going to be an absolute G changer the good news also is that from an Irish point of view the Irish DNA Atlas project is joining forces with the people of the British Isles project so uh the Irish DNA Attis project again has been running for several years uh they have recruited over a 100 people so far they have even stricter recruitment criteria you have to have eight grand great grandparents coming from the same uh general area so it's even stricter still so it may need fewer people to produce similar types of results but again this is an exciting advance in terms of genetic genealogy and certainly within the next couple of years we are going to rethink the way we think about ourselves we're going to rethink the way we think about who we are and where we come from so those are the four uh techniques that are very very useful in in trying to get through that brick wall of where did my in Ireland did my ancestor come from but even when you get back to Ireland you are faced with a second major brick wall and that major brick wall is how do I get back before the 1800s and this is the big great big wall great big great big brick wall in Ireland that um I'm facing at the moment um and that many Irish researchers in Ireland are facing and the reason for and to give you an example of um the typical Irish family treat this is my own one and you can see that there are some blank uh circles and squares there at around about 1800 uh and the this is uh I've identified maybe 50% of my three times great grandparents and that's after exhausting all the usual sources such as the family law the letters in the Attic Family Bible with something written on it um the 1901 and 1911 censuses Griffith's valuation from 1850s and the subsequent canel books at the valuation office then we have uh birth marriages and debts starting relatively late in 1865 civil registration the church records can take you back to about 1800 but there's very few before them because there was never any impetus put on the uh churches in Ireland to collect those records and then collaboration with other researchers on uh websites such as ancestry jeans reunited my Heritage uh Roots web that kind of thing um and more and more newspapers are coming online and they really add the flesh to the bones of your family tree and for anyone with ancestors who came from Dublin the glass Nevan Cemetery records are fantastic and you can access them online and there's also electoral roles coming online such as that from 1939 which helps bring you forward into the 20th century so having exhausted all of those records these are the kind of brick w that many people in Ireland are faced with and one of the reasons for it is is this one here as we stood near the gate there was a loud shattering explosion the Munitions block and a portion of headquarters block went up in flames and smoke the yard was littered with chunks of masonry and smoldering records pieces of white paper were gyrating in the upper air like seagulls the explosion seems to give an extra push to Roaring orange Flames which fanned patterns across the sky fire was fascinating to watch it had a spell like running water flame sang and conducted its own Orchestra simultaneously this was the destruction of the Public Records Office in 1922 when in a matter of seconds 800 years of Irish history disappeared into Ash and Ang complete tragedy from a genealogical point of view um how much of our identity as Irish people was lost in that moment we will never know but there was a this is a huge loss A lot of people have done a great deal of work trying to rebuild what was lost but again Ireland is not the only country that has been the subject of fires I think in Virginia a lot of the cour houses were burned during the Civil War so the destruction of all those records is as genealogists we cannot feel but grief and bement for the loss of of a large part of our identity that was lost in those flames and it wasn't the first time it happened in Ireland in 1711 there was a fire in the the custom house uh the 1758 fire in the Birmingham Tower in Dublin Castle was a probably greater historical significance than the public record office loss and we lost documents daating back to the 1300s and the 1200s in that particular fire then um there were a couple of clerical errors that resulted in the loss of the 1861 census and the 1871 census because uh and and also the uh 1881 and 1891 census because people in England thought that the Irish collected the census in the same way and that they had a second enumerator copy so when the Irish rang up sent a telegram or a pigeon to the English and said can we destroy the Census records now that we finished analyzing them they said yes in the mistaken belief that there was a second copy still available so we lost four Decades of Census records as a result of a clerical error the 1914 war effort as well resulted in the pulping of the 1981 and 1891 stanes then in 1921 there was a fire in the custom house which destroyed some tax returns which many people felt was quite a good thing um genealogically I think they would have been quite interesting but the 1922 fire in the public record office resulted in the loss of four additional Decades of censuses so in the space of a few decades we lost all the senses information from the 19 from the 1800s in Ireland as well as the Church of Ireland Parish records we lost testamentary Wills which would have been so useful for tracing families uh we lost land records court records military records and from a us and Australian perspective especially we lost Transportation records so there was a huge loss and this really has made me question who am I and where did I come from because would my concept of self be different if these records still survived and I think it would and I think that's another fascinating thing to explore because we are coming to a period of ceries in Ireland um starting with the great lockout of 2013 that was celebrated last year this was the start of the labor movement in Ireland and these centinary are causing us to have a kind of revisionist view of Irish history so the history that emerged from Ireland after Independence was gained in 1922 was a history that was written by the winners and I think now we're beginning to look back and we're maybe taking a a different kind of view of Irish history and the the centenaries that are happening over the course of the next couple of years will be very interesting in changing the way we think about ourselves in 1914 100 years ago this August it was the start of World War I and hundreds of thousands of Irish men fought and died in that War uh returning from the war certainly my own family one person was killed uh one person returned and had family one person deserted all his medals were confiscated and he became a hobo riding the box cars across the United States 1916 saw the Easter r Rising a group of men went into the general post office and declared independence for Ireland and then there was a large shootout and Dublin was bombarded bombarded by boats in the lify resulting in the destruction of buildings a decimation of people's livelihoods and this centinary is coming up in 2016 then in 1918 we had the Spanish Flu which killed 50 milon people around the world including my own great grandmother so that is another Centenary that is coming up we lost about I'd say 2% of the population in the space of a year and a half that really is a huge number of people then in 1920 the war of independence began in 1921 the Civil War began where more Irish people were killed than in the war of independence by their own Irishman and then we had the 19 19 22 treaty which saw peace and which saw the division of Ireland into the free states the 26 counties in the South and the six counties in Northern Ireland so all of this these centenaries are coming up over the course of the next couple of years and that's going to make us really examine who we are as Irish people and DNA is going to have a place to play in that as well because the Irish have taken to genealogy very very enthusiastically and they have a national genealogical uh conference or exhibition called back to our past and this has been running now for about uh five years and it's held in the ords the Royal Dublin Society in BS bridge in Dublin and last year a group of us uh suggested to Family Tree DNA would you like to sponsor some DNA testing at the Dublin event um would you like to sponsor a few lectures as well we have a few speak so uh there's myself and my dad with my granddad in the background in the portrait with darl o on the left Cynthia Wells and then of course Katherine boures on the right and side so we all went over to Dublin we um we set up a website called genetic genealogy Ireland um we also set up a Facebook page and we set up a YouTube uh Channel we recorded all the lectures and they're available for anybody to watch on the YouTube channel just search YouTube genetic genealogy Ireland and you'll actually find those lectures now the Facebook group has over 550 members the genetic geneal genealogy Ireland website has been viewed over 50,000 times and the YouTube videos have been viewed over 8,000 times for a total of 61 days 15 hours so that really was a success and the success of the conference lived long after it and this is an example of the schedule that we had we started off each day with the basics of DNA testing but then we had a variety of surname studies being presented like the Cruz y DNA study the career DNA study uh we had the McCarthy and Theo Mahan study there as well um we also had some academics talking so Professor Dan Brad from Trinity College gave a very interesting talk on DNA and the Irish past and his work on the uh genotype of Nile of the nine postive we also have Patrick Guinness who is related to one Arthur Guinness U that many of you will be familiar with uh the adventure of Guinness of course and um it was a great success great success uh the good news is that we're repeating it this year so if any of you want to come over to Dublin in October of this year you'll be more than welcome so please do come over and we're going to have another set of lectures again kindly sponsored by Family Tree DNA and it will be an even better success this time um the most popular tests that were taken at the Dublin event were the family finder okay which is the autosomal DNA test that family tree DNA do and we sold 99 kits alog together for a total of13 tests the second most common test was the the ydna 37 test then in the UK in London at who do you think you are uh we sold 485 kits uh for a total of 550 tests this was the most successful year that family tree DNA had in London they ran out of kits on the Sunday afternoon it was that successful so we ran out of kids so at 3:00 in the afternoon it was okay let's party so so um and again the family finder test the AAL DNA test was the most uh favored test the important thing to take away from all of these is that people in Britain and Ireland are doing DNA testing and it's largely family tree DNA that are actually responsible for this because ancestry DNA does not sell the product outside of the US and because 23 and me has um uh large shipping costs which are relatively prohibitive and they never turn up at these type of conferences uh either so it really is only family tree DNA that has put the work in to provide the support and infrastructure for its customers to help with Irish genealogy in particular now the the same kind of techniques that I mentioned previously can also be used to break down this second brick wall of how do I get beyond the 1800s in my Irish research um and just looking at autosomal DNA it has helped me solve the mystery of the wedding momentum and that's a little story that I I I tell in in in my other talk during the conference but this allowed us to connect with cousins in Australia that we never knew existed and they were related to my great-grandfather's sister who immigrated to Australia in 1886 those relatives would have been lost forever had it not been for DNA uh another brick wall that uh DNA has allowed me to break through is on my spean line um and that allowed me to break through that particular wall and take me back to the 1600s in limr uh so that was again another way of breaking through those brick walls and over time I'm sure that uh as I test more of my ancestral lines I will have other breakthroughs that will help me get over these brick walls but there are other ways that DNA is is going to change the face of Irish genealogy and one of them is related to the snip tsunami which I mentioned previously and this is a a diagram that Jared corkran has put together based on the z253 snip marker and uh we can do this with any of the snip markers but what we're going to find as we get new markers and we get the finer branches of the genetic tree we're going to be able to isolate particular parts of Ireland that the genetic marker is associated with but not only that that marker the people who tested will we be able to generate name clouds and those surnames are likely to be linked back to the ancient genealogies I was chatting with Brad yesterday and he has found that in his own Lin study he has been able to use DNA to connect the lens back to the ancient Irish geneal iies and the Ireland has the oldest genealogies in Europe and they are thousands of pages in in length and Jared corpin from Ireland ISO is lobbying the Irish government to have them digitized so once we get the ancient genealogies digitized it'll be possible to take a ydna test and to jump back not just to Ireland but back a thousand years to the ancient Irish Irish galic Clans and that is really going to change the face of Irish genealogy so that's a very exciting development that we will see probably happening over the course of the next 2 or three years and of course tied in with that the fact that because with the advances we're making with ancient DNA now involv why DNA and oral DNA there's no reason why we can't collect the DNA from the ancient Kings there were four of them buried in Iona on that Scottish Island in Cashel we have what we believe is the skeleton of McCarthy Moore uh so there's no reason why we couldn't test these ancient remains and Link them with the ancient genealogies and Link them with people doing y DNA testing in Ireland today um the Battle of Cl clarf actually was reenacted earlier this year in April and I was there and I saw 600 Vikings many of them from Texas New Zealand Canada Denmark okay uh fighting each other uh and it was a really really great reenactment and this year in Ireland there is um it's not the stiner it must be the moliner the moliner of um uh the Battle of tonar which took place on Good Friday 104 but those uh celebrations and commemorations are going all through the year so if you do come over in October to the genetic genealogy Ireland conference you will be able to take part in in some of these uh activities as well um that was the battle where Brian baru as High King of Ireland kicked the Vikings out of Dublin well he didn't really because the Vikings were fighting on both sides but um uh I took my nephew and niece and they became Vikings for the day so uh do get involved in those activities if you happen to find yourself in Ireland in October um the other big way that uh DNA is going to help is when we look at those Irish people that left prior to the famine uh so that would be from the early 1600s on there was a huge Exodus of Irish indentured servants over to the West Indies and the West Indies at that stage included Maryland Virginia and Carolinas so there was some very very early Irish immigration into the US and to the Caribbean uh but then uh following Oliver cromwell's conquest of Ireland in the 1650s he rounded up all of the men who had been fighting and he exiled them to Europe and said you know we're not going to send you to the colonies because you're just going to cause problems there you can be exiled to Europe you can go to any European country that is not at war with England and there you will remain never to return to IR so the men went off leaving the women the wives and the children abandon romed and destitute in a a very very War ravaged Ireland because Cromwell followed a scorched Earth policy and he burnt the crops as he went to Ireland with the result that the population of Ireland fell from 1.5 million in 1640 to B 900,000 in 1660 that's a drop of 40% compare that with the famine which was a drop of 25% So proportionately speaking the population of land really fell significantly during the 20 years of 1640 to 1660 but not only that with the abandoned uh wives and the children a lot of them he rounded up herded them down to Cork uh carried them across to Bristol uh where they were sold and sent as slaves to the West Indies so a lot of the mened up in Barbados a lot of them ended up in the new American colonies and depending who you read it was either a couple of thousand people or it was 50,000 people or it was 130,000 people and then it was an impossible 600,000 people so there's still a lot of controversy about how many people actually were sent over to the West Indies and were they slaves for life or do they have a kind of time limit on their servitude and that again is is on clear and it probably varied from place to place but depending on who you believe you're looking at maybe some between 4 to 15% of the Irish population were transported in a very short period of time just those seven years between 1652 and 1659 so again that's a kind of um part of the Irish history that has been lost in the midsts of time but I think DNA is going to reawaken that and again it'll make us question who we are and where we come from and some of them would have been indentured servants initially but they're non- indentured servants and possibly slaves for life in the 1650s again a an area of research that is crying out for further further research really uh to give you an example Professor Henry Lewis Gates last year keynote speaker um The Fabulous creator of Finding Your Roots a wonderful television series that mixes genealogy with genetics and also the author of The Root which is very very fascinating website so anybody with African ancestry uh definitely have a look at these but when um Professor Gates did his uh DNA testing he found that his y DNA went back to Nile of the nine hostages so he is descended from an Irish man more than likely could be Scottish as well who um passed on his y DNA to Professor Gates so he turned to his maternal side his mother's mother's mother and his mitochondrial DNA ends up with a European apyp a European genetic signature indicating that his mother mother's mother's time came from a European woman um he's had discussions with Professor Dan Bradley at Trinity College and they've come to the conclusion that it probably was an indentured Irish servant sometime back in the 1800s so DNA is helping people find out their Irish ancestry and in terms of African-American um DNA about 35% of African-American men their y DNA will go back to an Irish man or a European man and about 10% of African-Americans in general their mitochondrial DNA will go back to a European woman and I'm currently working with a Jamaican group in Birmingham and uh we're doing DNA testing and a lot of the results are quite fascinating and certainly changing the way that we think about africaribbean uh ancestry um and looking at the Irish and Scottish influences there as well the last way in which I think DNA is going to make a major change is in the face of Irish genealogy is by looking at the question of adoption and adoption mysteries in your family tree now has anybody here seen the movie filamina okay if if you haven't seen it it really is a fantastic movie um uh is based on the story of filamina Lee who was a 17-year-old girl who got pregnant uh her father didn't want to know anything about it he um banished her from the family home home he told all the neighbors that she was dead she went to a mother and baby home that was run by the nuns at Shan Ross ABY in MRA uh she gave birth to the child uh the child was with her for about four years and then it was sold to a rich American Catholic couple and it was taken away from her and she signed a release documents but for every day of the intervening period She Never did not think of her child and at the age of 80 s in her late 70s early 80s she went looking for that child with Martin ssmith who was a reporter from uh The Daily Mail and uh it's a great movie to see but watching that movie it made me think if her child had done a DNA test and then she had done the DNA test it would have been an instant match and I I think that is uh the way forward because with filamina her son was had been looking for her and she had been looking for him and they had both visited the Abbey over many years but they passed each other and the information that they were looking for each other was lost so they were never connected so the great thing about DNA is that it is potentially possible that a birth mother can take the DNA test and find a child or a grandchild who are already in the database and I'm working with the adoption community in Ireland to see how best we can introduce this to the Irish public so that birth mothers but also adoptees can can use the uh the the resources that we have within the genetic genealogy Community to reconnect with their birth families and in essence to answer the two questions that we all want to have answers to and that is who am I and where do I come from and that is one major way which will change the face of Irish genealogy thank you very much for your attention that one there you put your first slide back up oh first slide okay great there there's a couple of questions I'm not sure if we're going to have ring microphones but um Let me let me see there's a lady down here shout out your question Irish Quakers I don't know a huge amount about that particular um uh Exodus from Ireland but there would be Quaker Societies in Ireland that would probably uh be able to answer you know answer that particular question question um so I'm afraid I don't have any specific information about that there's a gentleman over here you mentioned that UK in Ireland expand great grand that's right now is that related to the more social Mobility because of famine that occurred earlier or is it just they want to get a better the reason why the uh bio geographical analysis and the differences between people of the British is project and the Irish dapol project is purely there was different scientists that came up with the design for the study so in Britain they decided to go with four grandparents in Ireland they decided to go with eight great grandparents there was no particular reason behind that um there has been a suggestion that perhaps the Irish being a projects should loen the elig criteria and bring it down to four grandparents rather than eight great grandparents but I haven't heard any further developments on that to this point um the in the people of the British project it is oral DNA the question was um the people of the British is Project is a y DNA but the answer is no his own um is there similar project um well any of the hler group projects are kind of doing the same and also there are geographical projects with ydna which look at the same kind of issue where you know what is the genetic signature of a particular region and one of the uh there are several ones of Irish relevance one of them is the olster Heritage DNA project and the other one is the monster Irish DNA project and they are Irish one was the topic for one of the talks at genetic genealogy Ireland last year went down extremely well and it's a very very wellat scientific project so do take a look at that and is we do have an English mapping DNA project which is doing that what you're saying as well as Irish Ma so there's an English mapping project as well as an Irish Mapp for English ma DNA project look for English mapping DNA project on question here yes I have a question may come up later how ACC these test in words they're testing 700,000 percent of probably do you know anybody know it's a very very good question um the question is how accurate are the tests uh because we're testing 700,000 alals on the oral DNA we're looking at 50,000 Snips on the Y DNA we're looking at 37 St markers on the ydna and 67 um with the seven marker test uh there is an element of convergence and convergence is just the name that's given to uh the fact that you have your results here and somebody on 37 markers somebody else has their results on 37 markers what is the likelihood that they just match by chance and the answer is approximately 10% when you're looking at a ydna 37 and you're you're matching somebody who doesn't have the same surname so for people who have different surnames and they have EX exactly the same match on a ydna 37 uh test um the the chance that that is just a chance finding is about 10% uh and that is that is our current estimate okay and it's based really on only one source and that is um I believe Ralph Taylor and the Taylor DNA study he's looked at it and he's tested people who have exact or similar matches on a ydna a37 test and he's found that about 10% of them them have different snip markers different terminal Snips indicating they're not in the same group even though the S oril results look like they are in the same gr so uh that's the best estimate that we can get for the moment of course that chance finding is going to be even less at 67 markers and even less at 111 markers so the more markers you test the less likelihood you have of a chance finding the other element where there are chance findings is with autal DNA and if you are testing 700,000 Al and you find that you have a match of less than 8 cenor and this is work that's been done by John Warden he estimated and again it's an estimate that needs to be repeated by other studies uh you only have a 50/50 chance of that match at eight centor being a true positive and you have a 50% chance of it being a false positive so when I'm looking at my autal DNA result anything less than 8 C organs I don't discour them I put them to one side because I want to maximize the chances of having a true positive uh that is not going to take me that's going to take me down a path that is likely to be correct rather than for positive that will take me down a kodac and I'll end up chasing a red paring so I would say anything over 10 C organs I will consider that as a match anything less than 10 C organs I would say okay the chances of the big full positive are even higher the smaller the this DNA segment gets so now supp one individual you have three cases three chromosomes of less than I would still Arrow the side of caution and I would put them aside for further consideration down the line um and I will stick with my 10cent Mor than uh matches for as long one of the seven segments is greater than 10 then I would consider that but if all of them were less than 10 then I'd say okay I'm going to put that to one side and let me focus on something a little bit more powerful well of course it depends on what are the surnames associated with that match and where did they come from and is there any other evidence that might suggest that it is worth pursuing a match that has smaller segments than I would usually feel comfortable another question here okay the question was uh suram still fairly rare surname tested to 67 markers but no one person one person tested at to 111 no real matches yet just within the family so is there any point in doing the big why and testing lots of snips um the answer is you will probably get some information but it's probably not going to break through the brick walls um by doing the Big Y you will be testing a whole load of different uh Snips which will help identify your terminal snip for your particular suring but I think before doing the Big Y Big Y what I would preferably do would be to join um the hlo group project which which have you have done and the hler group project will look at your St markers and advise you what snip marker you probably have the terminal snip and it'll probably say test this one first that one test this one and that one's positive test this one and you've done that already no more to be tested um those projects the the haa group projects will be informed by the Big Y results so they will have probably Incorporated those results into the advice that they give so I would write to the administrator of the H project you're in and ask that specific question and see what they say I don't immediately see how it be would be of of benefit in breaking down your particular genealogical Scottish or Irish yeah all those oler Scots yeah yeah so um the next couple of years you'll hopefully see some demarcation and delineation no rush no Russ take it slowly okay we have one more question here uh you mean the the people of the British is project and the Irish DNA um will the results of these projects the Irish DNA apst project and the people of the British is Project will they be available for people in the US um how it's going to be done we don't actually know but ultimate what what Bruce M has said that within that first of all he said the data will be publicly available so we will have access to it how we actually go about comparing our autosomal DNA with their database has yet to be decided so we don't know how that process will work but he did say within the next 12 to 18 months it should be possible for us to compare our DNA with the people of the British Isles uh project DNA the Irish DNA acts project will take another 5 years out another 5 years before we can do the same thing in Ireland but certainly by 2017 you should be able to compare your DNA with the academic DNA and that will tell you what percentage of your DNA came from each of those 29 uh Subs that they've identified for Great Britain I think we better leave it there because the next speaker is going to come on but thank you once again very very much even yes no and I they have documented down in
