DNA Monday: What Worked For Me

Bingo! Got a real live cousin match on 23andMe.com! And I feel good about this one because I can pin-point exactly where on the tree we connect. That's a first.

I've been working at GEDmatch and 23andMe.com looking for a cousin connection since, what, March? Yeah, it's been a while. A couple hundred emails later and we finally have a true cousin match. Listen, brothers and sisters, if you think that you'll swab a cheek or work up a lot of spit and send that sample off, then magically get a whole boat load of genealogy back, it just doesn't work that way, sad to say, or at least not for me. I kinda thought and hoped that it might, but no great big genealogy truck driven by a DNA cousin has pulled up and dumped a ton of stuff in my lap.

So here's what worked for me, and heavens knows if it was just a fluke or if it would work for others. I attended a Ce Ce Moore's seminar held at the Chula Vista Genealogical Society here in greater San Diego, and she spoke about triangulation and other sophisticated techniques, but I'm a simple person and just did it the best way I could think to do. Ce Ce Moore is wonderful and I do think that I've gotten this far because of her information:) Thanks, Ce Ce!

1.) On 23and Me.com as well as GEDmatch.com, I check back about once a week to see if new matches have popped up. At first I didn't have a feel for how long it took for new matches to show so I went from every five minutes to once in a blue moon. Once a week feels about right for me now, and since Monday is my day to work on DNA stuff, that's when I go check.

2.) The avalanche has started! As prices drop lots of new players are on the field! 23andMe.com has said that they are on target for reaching their goal of one million users by the end of the year. Impressive. And, I'm kinda shocked when I check into GEDmatch and find a couple hundred new people I match with.
You need a systematic way to cover this because a lot of them won't be matches that are close enough to bother with, at least not for me to bother with because I don't have that kind of time because of the laundry and all the rest getting in the way of me doing genealogy.

3.) There are two kinds of matches in my book: those with nice trees with a surname list and some locations and those who have a "mystery tree" or no tree at all. The really cool players are the ones - and you can spot them right away on 23andMe.com - who have a lot of surnames and locations. The other guys want you to supply a tree for them to pick over... and they never get back to you because they don't know what they are doing, bless their hearts. At least that's been my experience. Finally they say, I guess our match is just too far back. And it might be, but I'll never know because they have a mystery tree.

4) Go for the closest matches first, and for me that's less than fourth cousin on 23andMe.com, and the dozen closest matches on GEDmatch with the largest total number of autosomal segments. And while there, check out the green highlight on the kit number (in the left column) which indicates that the results are newer. I like GEDmatch's generations matrix because from that I have a clue as to how far back the match might be. I like it when it's four or less:) Whoop!

5.) Make contact and wait. You might hear back and you might now. I don't take it personally... anymore;)

Oh, yeah, about my match on 23andMe.com, Cousin Andrew. You know how I'd hoped that some DNA cousin match or other would show up and drive up the big genealogy truck with loads of info and drop it in my lap? Well not here and not with Andrew. He and his dad, still with us, don't know diddly about their ancestors. So ya know what? Mom, Aunt Betty, and I drove up the big genealogy truck and dumped it all right in his lap, charts, reports, photos and all! Genealogy good deed done for the week:) That felt great!!


From Aunt Betty's file:

Probably the wedding portrait of my great grandparents.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/06/dna-monday-what-worked-for-me.html

DNA Monday: Where Are the Cousins?

Generally, I'm having a blast with my DNA results from 23andMe because it's so fascinating. The thing that's been my obsession is trying to figure out what's the very best way to discover a cousin match from the test results. And now I can report that I have tested out a better way to proceed. Let me explain.

You need to know that I have only tested with 23andMe and I am stumbling my way through this uncharted wilderness without much of a map. The seminar a week ago with Ce Ce Moore has shed ample light on the scientific aspects of this work so that's to the good. She did mention, if I remember correctly, that AncestryDNA uses the Ancestry Member Trees and gives you a head start showing the section of your tree and the cousin match's tree that seem similar. That would be a big help! A clue, any clue, is a big deal!

My problem over here is that the cousin match folks, while mostly enthusiastic about working together to discover a connection, really do lose energy when looking at Mom's Big Tree on Ancestry with over 60,000 people! Where to start?

Alternately, of the folks who replied and are in contact with me and willing to discover where we match, few have trees on line. The one experience I had with a cousin match who did have a large tree on Ancestry gave me an insight into how difficult it is looking at someone else's tree and try to find that elusive ancestor with whom we share a bit of DNA. It's a pain!

So as mentioned here previously, my job is to provide them with a list of surnames going back maybe a half-dozen generations with the locations associated with each surname. This idea came from Ce Ce Moore at the seminar and it was a super good one! This last week I reached out to those cousin matches again and mentioned the list I was working on to get a reaction from them. All of them responded warmly! They would be happy to have a list of surnames and where each lived. One even replied with the longest message I'd received from him yet with even more of his surnames and locations. Cool! Am starting to see that you need enthusiastic cousins to work this problem because it is work.

I have to say that checking in with the prospective cousin match folks first before I went off to work on that surname and location list was a better idea... granted, any other person would have thought of a while back;)

Photos of the Ladies Aide Society (above)

and Children's Choir (below)

of the Congregational Church, Frostburg, Maryland.

Circa 1930s.

 

 

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/dna-monday-where-are-cousins.html

DNA Monday: Listening to the Expert

On Saturday I went to a seminar by Ce Ce Moore sponsored by the Chula Vista Genealogical Society here in southern California, and a big "Thanks" to them for doing this. It was fabulous. If you ever have the chance to see this delightful and ever so friendly and generous speaker, please do! She persevered through the end of the flu and a bothersome cough as well as technical difficulties, and did it with grace and aplomb. And I learned a lot. So here are some of my take-aways, in no particular order. Just know that if I wrote for a week about the information she shared, it would only be scratching the surface.

I liked the big picture that Ce Ce gave us along with the many detailed explanations of the how and why of DNA testing. The one really big picture statement that struck a deep chord was that my mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, has been handed down from mother to daughter over tens of thousands of years. I basically knew this, but given the occasion of the seminar, thought about it and could imagine that unbroken line of women handing me pieces of the puzzle of me. As Ce Ce said, this DNA is the tangible evidence of these ancestors living inside me. I like that!

I was particularly struck by how purposefully the Y-DNA of males and the mtDNA of females is handed down in a highly orderly manner and how that contrasts with the disorderly way the autosomal DNA - or atDNA - is just, at least to my eyes, gathered up like random laundry, thrown in a basket, and handed off to the younger generation. Nature has a sense of humor it seems, and each of us is a crazy quilt of autosomal DNA.

So nature must be having a hearty laugh at me trying to figure out which ancestor the various chunks of autosomal chromosomes came from, which is a mighty hard task, and I did not know that until this seminar. I just thought it was me not "getting it". The bulk of what we are is due to autosomal DNA so there's a lot to sort out. Sounds like a wildly random plan to me but then I'm over here trying to understand it and not over there trying to design an organic system with hybrid vigor where random changes in chromosomal segments work best.

The most illuminating aspect of Ce Ce's presentation for me and where I am in the learning curve is her advice on how to proceed once you get some DNA matches. I had wondered about a "best practices" way of going forward once you get matches and want to contact the other person. Ce Ce suggested sharing two items: surnames and locations. I did try to share the surnames but including the locations for each surname would add important depth to the process of finding the commonality. Because our American families are usually travelers, I'm willing to try a list that includes each surname followed by the locations where they moved and the order in which they did so.

Most importantly, Ce Ce encouraged us to be patient. She said that we might want to think of this as a very long-range project just now beginning. This whole area is young and just getting started. More matches are down the road a short ways, and many more after that. Think of this as the frontier. It's exciting and fun and perhaps some fine excellent day I'll actually find a cousin match out there and we'll look at our chromosomal segments and see that little chunk of orange on number two and know that we got it from the same ancestor oh so many years ago. Now that would be worth the effort!

Dad, Francis Patrick "Pat" Kelly (1916 - 2007)

Easter, 1941.

The URL for this post is: http://nutsfromthefamilytree.blogspot.com/2013/04/dna-monday-listening-to-expert.html