Next Steps For Using DNA to Find Unknown Ancestors or Parents of Adoptees

finding the biological parents of adoptees can be a really exciting event because it's like putting together a puzzle that you don't know the answer to and you have to piece together clues from all over the place howdy I'm Angela with family history fanatics where we help you understand your DNA climb your family tree and write your ancestors story along the way today we are talking about the next four steps from the DNA adoption website that can be used to search for adoptees now this is going to be a lot of the research in DNA with those results from your test one of the things that you want to do is go over to the DNA adoption org website they have a lot of resources and a lot more information on there which can help you learn more about how to search for ancestors now today I'm going to be using a lot of the graphics from that website with permission of DNA adoption so let's remember one other thing it's not just for adoptees this methodology can be used to help you find any unknown ancestors now the closer they are related to you the better but this step-by-step approach is what is used by many genetic genealogists all over the world in finding unknown ancestors so let's begin and learn and apply the methodology which is the next four steps that DNA adoption has well the first one is that we want to be able to learn about DNA and genealogy so you've taken the test and you've gathered your information you need to have some understanding of genealogy and how to build trees and record sets and where to look for them as well as DNA and how we can use DNA as a record for finding our ancestors now on this channel I teach you lots of different ways that you can use DNA I try to show you what this record can be used likewise my wife has lots of videos about genealogy about different record sets that she uses how she goes about researching that so this is a resource for you that you can use in your learning about DNA in jenny ology there's lots of other resources on the web that are free in order for you to gain the knowledge that you need so learning and gaining that knowledge is one of the first things and you may have already gotten to that point so then we have to have our DNA results remember we took a DNA test in the very first step well now we want to figure out who our closest match is now our closest match is going to be the person who shares the most centimorgans with us there may actually be several people that all fall within that little range ideally you're going to want to find somebody who shares you know a thousand maybe 1500 centimorgans because that is a close relative somebody who's maybe a first cousin or an aunt or an uncle that makes the next step even easier but if you only have close relatives that share 200 or 300 centimorgans you're still going to be able to use the next steps in finding your ancestor likewise if you only have relatives who share fifty Cent of organs it's going to be more difficult but you can still apply the same methodology to these matches in order to find out who your ancestors are now during this time of identifying some of these route these relatives these matches you may have to contact them one of the things that DNA adoption highly recommends is that you do not mention adoption or NPE in your initial email now this makes a little bit of sense because one the people you're contacting may not even know that there was an adoption or an NP e - they may know and that may be a family secret that they didn't want getting out and three they may not be the right people so what we don't want to do is we don't want to do more harm to these relationships that we have with people before we figure out what that relationship actually is so after you've figured out who your closest matches are next we're going to go through a process called pedigree triangulation now this is different from segment triangulation segment triangulation involves looking at these segments of matching DNA and finding at least three or more people that share that same segment and that is a definite indication that they share a common ancestor well similarly match triangulation or pedigree triangulation is a way to look at matches who share DNA and then compare their family trees with your family tree or their family trees with other family trees to identify where a common ancestor might be so let's go through a few of the steps of pedigree triangulation now the first thing is to create a chart like this if you've been watching videos you might be saying hey that looks an awful lot like a leaves method chart and in fact it is the leaves method was actually developed for finding adoptees biological family members so the first thing that we're doing here is we're taking our matches and we're grouping them based on who they also match so we can see that the yellows all match each other the blues match each other the greens match each other and the reds match each other now this one's nice because there's no overlap between any of these but what we do is as we reorganize this and put this group together is if we have three matches now remember you match all of these people and then you have your closest match and those are the ones you're focusing on and the shared match would be the other matches the three of you together make what they call a match triangle a match triangle is a good indication that you share a common ancestor now where that common ancestor is really depends on how much DNA you share in common let's assume that you are the adoptee so you don't know who your biological parents are but you have these matches the closest match and the shared match and perhaps they both happen to have a family tree now I love the DNA adoption has used the game of thrown names for this because there's really cool names but as we're looking at each one of these family trees we see that both of these two matches our closest match and then this other shared match they both have this two Guardian and Baratheon names in their family tree and so that's a good hint that the common ancestor for both of these people is two Guardian and Baratheon so we can now start making our pedigree triangle now notice this pedigree triangles a little bit different than the match triangle on the pedigree triangle we have our closest match in our shared match at two points and we have the common ancestor between those two at the other third point now we ourselves are not on this pedigree triangle just yet because our work is not done if we continue and we go on and we start looking at the other matches we may have to go back another generation to find that this Baratheon and a knight were together and that's where this other match fits in and another generation back we see that the knight and the Duke were together and another match fits in and we can go back even another generation and see that there's Duke and this footman who were together and there is a fifth match so what we have done here is we have taken five matches including our closest matches and we've figured out how they're different trees fit together now for some websites that do have this tree people may already have the trees on there which makes your job a little bit easier on the other hand sometimes people don't put a tree on there and you may have to use your skills as a Jenny ologist to actually build a family tree based on the information that you have for these people but ultimately what you want is you want to have how each of these matches or as many of these matches in a group fit together so this was the yellow group and there was five matches and we've actually got or I'm sorry there was six matches we have five of those matches represented in this chart well because of this now what we can start to find is where all these ancestors converge and start to put ourselves into this pedigree triangle now we don't know where exactly we fit on the pedigree triangle but we know where the most recent common ancestor of all the matches leads back to and we also must be a part of that most recent common ancestor so in this case what we have here is we have three different positions depending on how far removed we are in generations from the other matches because this king and queen had three children and because of those three children we are related through one of them our closest match is related through another and our shared match is related through yet another of those so we're taking the information that might already be available on the different web sites the trees that have been built or if we're building our own trees to put together this pedigree triangle to see where we might fit in with these most recent common ancestors so we did that for just one of the and now what we want to do is we want to actually go and do that for the other groups as well so the blue group we can go and we can find and build trees out and in this case we have four different matches that are all part of this group and we've built back several generations because of that once we've got that with all the different groups well then we're ready to go on to the next step because what we have created is we've created several trees for all of our matches and we want to connect all of these trees because where these trees connect is where we fit in to the overall picture so for instance if we take the one tree and the other tree and we actually find that there was a stark that married a two Garion or a stark that was in the same place as this two garyun well that may be the clue that we need to show that hey we fit in under this now we may fit in in several different locations under this we may be a child of the stark into the two Guardian or we may be a grandchild or a great grandchild of this stark and two Guardian but at some point these different trees have to have interconnected because we share DNA with people from each one of these clusters of people and so we have to be the combination of all these trees together that may have seemed like a really rapid explanation of this process and it really is there's a lot more information on the DNA adoption website but more importantly you can go through and you can take training on these steps they actually have classes at DNA adoption there's also different training that you can find on the Internet with videos that we teach about how to do some of these steps although we may not even call them by the same names but the important thing is is that this phase of the search is the actual research phase using DNA we are comparing matches we're comparing trees or to mesh all these together we're using the tools that we have to see how these can fit and solve our puzzle now if you remember in the very first set we created a profile and that profile is going to help us in narrowing down the trees and at this point what we may have found is we may have narrowed it down from just a serie and really everybody in that area now to just a couple of families or maybe even just a few individuals of who these adopted parents could be if you have questions about adoption and how to use DNA in order to find it then put it in the comments below and if you have had success with using this methodology then tell us about it also because it's great to hear different success stories but be sure to subscribe to our Channel and join as a member if you'd like to have access to extra training that's only available for members it's just $2.99 a month

Channel: Family History Fanatics

Views: 8,953

Rating: 4.9723182 out of 5

Keywords: Using DNA to Find Unknown Ancestors, Using DNA to find biological family, DNA testing for adoptees, how to find birth parents through DNA, adoptees guide to DNA testing, adoption research genealogy, search for biological family, using dna to find birth parents, dna for adoptees, genetic genealogy, genetic genealogy for adoptees, Family History Fanatics, dna research, find my family, genealogy, Pedigree Triangulation, DNA match triangle, DNAAdoption.org, dNA Adoption

Id: AvBqxENyYUc

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020