Solve Family History Mysteries with DNA Strategies the Pros Use

Hey everybody welcome back to another episode on Genealogy TV. if we've not met before my name is Connie Knox. I am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research. Today we are talking about the DNA strategies that the pros use. So just as a reminder before we get started please subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time we upload a video. So let's jump into this. As a reminder there are two YouTube channels there's Genealogy TV where you are watching this episode, but there is also NC Ancestry for North Carolina researchers and that also has a website. As a reminder Genealogy TV is also on Facebook so you can follow us there. Now we've all seen that commercial with the guy who dressed up with his laderhosen and thinks he's German so I'm gonna play that commercial for you now. Growing up we would German we danced in a German dance group I were later hosen when I first got on ancestry I was really surprised that I wasn't finding all of these Germans in my tree I decided to have my DNA tested through ancestry DNA the big surprise was we're not German at all 52% of my DNA comes from Scotland and Ireland so I traded in my lederhosen for a kilt ancestry hasn't many paths to discovering your story it's long story short the DNA strategies that the pros use does not have really have anything to do with the ethnicity estimates what he was talking about were the ethnicity estimates that ancestry puts out there and they've got some really good tools out there now but basically how this works is they've gone out and sampled a whole lot of people thousands of people in the various regions that are deeply rooted in that area people that have deeply documented history in various regions and so when we take a DNA test we're comparing against that sample set of those who are rooted in those areas so when we get our ethnicity estimates back it gives us a little bit more finer detail - what is there the reality is it really doesn't it kind of gives us clues as to where to look but that's a pretty big region and so how is it that we narrow this down and really nail down our family history so how do we make those connections using DNA we really use the cousin connections now it's in the in the cousin matches where you're really going to find the answer to a lot of your questions now keep in mind these are not estimates they're not like the ethnicity estimates which the ethnicity estimates are just estimates and they will change over time but these cousin matches are scientific fact they they are your cousin's in this is a bogus example that I'm showing you right now this actually came from ancestry training area and so we're gonna we're kind of gonna study this example a little bit deeper using our strategy but the reality is when we are looking to make connections and figure out our family tree and we'll want to use DNA we're looking at the cousin matches and so what we want to do is and it doesn't really matter if we're resolving of missing persons we're trying to figure out an adoption case missing parents solving crimes whatever it is we're looking at those cousin matches and it's usually the fourth cousins are closer that we're looking at in my personal opinion I prefer to look at the second cousins or closer first of all it's a whole lot less work let's just be frank so how do we connect our cousins in that match list with us so let's take a look at a quick background as a reminder we have 23 pairs of chromosomes a man has a Y and an X and women have two x's so we're not going to get into a whole lot of science but just hold that thought for a moment so the ancestor tree if we look at it this way we've got your father and your mother your grandparents and your great-grandparents and your great-great grandparents and if you'll notice you've got four pairs or eight great-grandparents and 16 great-great grandparents of course it doubles with every generation so if we look at the way the DNA works you get 50% from your mother and 50% from your father father and mother and your grandparents therefore you have 25% of your DNA in you from your grandparents and that's a rough estimate it's not an exact you have to about 12 and a half percent from your great-grandparents and about 6% from your great-great grandparents and if we look at this if we figure that each generation is 25 to 30 years we're looking at in this view about a hundred to one hundred and twenty five years back so you can go out there and get tested at the various companies the only one that's actually not pictured here is Family Tree DNA and they are a fine company but there's a variety of choices so when you get your test results back you're looking at your cousin matches okay so using your second cousin matches as an example means that you have great grandparents in common with you all of these four people so if we pretending that this is you for a moment this is your cousin matches with these four people you share guaranteed great-grandparents with them unless there is some other little factor in there like there's half siblings or something but we're not going to get into that it gets a little more complicated but we're gonna pretend for a moment that these are full second cousins and therefore you would share great-grandparents in common with those people so we take a look at that tree again here's what that looks like so that means those second cousins are sharing great-grandparents with you but which set we got four sets of great-grandparents so we've got to figure that out so if we erase the tree and we look at just the great-grandparents and we start tracing back down to present day then we start looking at all the children of our great-grandparents and then we look at their spouses and of course then they have children and by the way the boys are represented in the blue dots and the triangles are the girls and they have kids and so forth now the blue lines represent blue arrows by the way representing generation I could not put all little triangles and dots here just because the example was getting too large for you to see but they're there ok so along the way when we start doing all this research and we start discovering all of these people eventually what will happen is the second cousin match will reveal itself and then you can discover ok now we know which set of great-grandparents that we have in common and how they trace back okay so but wait a minute what about if we have missing parents for example adoptees foundlings unknown father's whatever the situation may be maybe you don't know who your parents are ok let's take this work example here because this is where the meat and potatoes of how the strategy works so in this example this is a new example ok here you are not knowing who your parents are and but you take a DNA test and you have a third cousin match and another third cousin match you have a female third cousin and a male third cousin alright that much we know so what we do is we start looking at their family trees and that third cousin let's stop just right here for a second this female third cousin we look at her tree she's got some documentation the reality is her tree is going to have four sets of these great-great-grandparents excuse me eight sets of these great-great-grandparents up there because there's sixteen great-great-grandparents so the reality is this tree is much bigger than what it looks but for the simplicity sake I am only showing these great-great-grandparents because it'll eventually lead to us so I'm just for the sake of being able to actually see it all on the screen normally we would be researching their entire tree up and down that is basically the strategy so as we continue to research doing regular traditional genealogical research good quality research we start making the connections across this family cluster along the way we've discovered that this male third cousin and this female third cousin are in fact in the same clan and so we continue on with our research now it could have been that these two third cousins were actually on opposite sides of the family and do not show up together in the same tree in this example they are so we continue to do this research until we kind of figure out where we think we might fit in now we're not sure at this point but we suspect that this third child of this couple this woman might be the mother that we're seeking maybe this one but right now for what all the research that we've done right place right time all of the details that we've collected perhaps this is the person that we think might be the parent could be several people so it might be we have to do the research of several people in order to figure it out but this fits with the third cousin clan because if the third cousin is going to have and I use I use the a the number of G's is how I remember how this works so a third cousin is going to have one two three geez in common okay so that's how I remember it second cousins are going to have a great grandparent or grandparents in common so that's how I remember it okay so now we have the suspected mother and we move on and we take a little bit closer look because now we're kind of narrowing our focus all right so if we think that this woman could be the mother we seek then we do some more research and we discover who her husband is so now we might have suspected parents and we continue on with our research and then we identify all of the cousins now at this point what we need to do is we need to prove our case we've because we've come to a hypothesis we think that these folks in green here are the parents of the person we are are looking at okay so that means we need to look at all of the people around that area to prove our case so that would be our first cousins and our second cousins in that in that territory okay so what we do is we go out and we identify first and second cousins that a are that we can find maybe some of these folks we can't find or they have passed away or they are unable to present information to us we can't find them for whatever reason so let's pretend that we've identified these six people and we ask them to take a DNA test so if we take a look if we take a break from that thought for a moment and we come over here to blame Bettinger x' the genetic genealogist has done some awesome work at figuring out how many centimorgans that we have in common with our various relationships in the family clusters so for example siblings share about 2600 sinem organs with so so my sister's for example are listed here and I have one sister that is 27:38 centimorgans from me and that falls within the range so the range is 23 42 to 29 17 and then my other sister is 2505 so she squarely falls within that range as well and so on ancestry this is kind of what it looks like and it falls into the immediate family bucket so if we look at first cousins first cousins average 884 or actually within this range okay and if we look at second cousins they average 232 with it with a range of 99 to 397 all right so if we go back to our example for a moment and we managed to get some of our potential cousins to take a DNA test for us and we've offered to pay for those tests and get those back and we see that one came in at 880 and one came in at 915 and we look well sure enough that chart showed us that the range was 619 to 11:59 so sure enough they are confirmed to be first cousins based on this relationship the parents are up here we've got child number one child number two and child number three who then married and had a child so these the fact that we've got a child from this person and a child from this person confirms both our first cousins then the only logical solution is that that you are a child of this third couple now in this case we've got second cousins and they also squarely fall within the range here so that helps kind of seal the deal that there are no other possibilities so we can cross out all of the other so parents along the way sometimes when we do these experiments and we do all this research we discover that there is a sibling and that falls in the 2600 range remember there's actually a range there so just kind of to recap we take those cousin DNA matches and we research using traditional genealogical techniques and there's a lot of research there so don't underestimate I knew I kind of flew through this quickly for demonstration purposes but then through that research and through our cousin matches as part of our evidence we can narrow our focus we try and test closer relatives if needed sometimes you'll get really close DNA matches to begin with and you won't have to test any further and then we try to prove and disprove and that's where I went back briefly and xed out the people that it could not be so you're trying to work just as hard to prove that you're wrong as you are that your hypothesis is right so be careful not to have bias and trying to make that the evidence fit you want to be sure that you've made a proper connection with DNA my question for you is what is the one burning question that you've always wanted to know about your family history in order to answer that question we kind of need to determine what the question is in order to decide what tests is appropriate to take so it kind of depends on what your question is really that one burning question what is it well maybe it's you don't know what your grandfather is and so you take and you identify what your problem is who is it that you're trying to find not trying to shotgun blast the entire family tree but who is it that you're trying to discover so as a reminder autosomal DNA we get 50% from each parent to child and thus 25% from each grandparent so when you're doing an autosomal DNA you're kind of taking a shotgun blast that the entire family tree it it kind of gives us DNA from all of our grandparents and as a reminder as we go back it gets smaller and smaller and smaller so it eventually gets to the point where the DNA is so tiny that it's not usable and that's usually somewhere around the 200 year mark if you're trying to figure out the father's line then a why DNA test might be appropriate because we get a hundred percent of all men do a hundred percent of their Y DNA from father to son the mitochondrial DNA test might be appropriate if you're tracing the mother's line and that is a little bit different strategy for mitochondrial DNA so I would suggest you study up on that before doing it so the testing companies that do these various tests all of them do the autosomal DNA that's ancestry DNA my heritage 23andme and Family Tree DNA Family Tree DNA is the only one that does all the tests and there are actually more companies out there but these are kind of the big four so the curiosity is what's kind of driving the answer to which test you're going to take as a reminder you can always upload to Jed match and capture more cousin matches for example if you test it on ancestry and you're not finding what you need you can upload your raw data basically you go on to ancestry and you download your raw data it becomes a zip file if you don't want to unzip it you just upload it to Jett match as it is and you can find cousin matches from other testing companies so if one of your cousins happen to test at let's say 23andme or Family Tree DNA and they uploaded the JED match but they didn't do a test at ancestry you might be able to capture some new cousin matches they're also now that we use DNA evidence only as lead finders and that it is used in conjunction with traditional evidence such as birth certificates newspapers and census records etc we've got a huge amount of data now that we can use to help us fill in our family trees and it's not just DNA so I hope that was helpful as a reminder we have genealogy TV and NC ancestry please subscribe if you like that please make sure you give us give us a big thumbs up and make sure you leave a comment below I'd love to hear where you're watching from so that's the question of the day leave a comment in the comment sections below and tell me where you're watching from thanks so much for watching genealogy TV

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 27,622

Rating: 4.9276018 out of 5

Keywords: DNA Strategies the Pros Use, using dna to find relatives, genealogy tv, #GenealogyTV, #familyhistory, #genealogy, genealogy, family history, genealogy research, family tree, what dna test, genetic genealogy, how to, ancestry dna, family tree dna, 23andme, what is dna and how does it work, myheritage dna, using dna to find birth father, how to research family history, how to research family tree, dna test, dna ancestry test, dna test results, family search, ancestry.com dna

Id: 792WHKBIOy4

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 23 2019