Genealogy

Are you familiar with the Virtual Institute of Genealogical Research? The Virtual Institute is online platform offering a wide variety of courses by well-known instructors. Each 6-hour course is presented over the course of two consecutive Saturdays. The course is recorded and all participants receive a copy of the recording! Live attendees have the benefit of Q&A periods in each session.

Earlier this year I presented “(Finally!) Understanding Autosomal DNA” through the Virtual Institute, and the course was very well received (see some example reviews here and here).

Genetic Genealogy for Professional Genealogists

This November 7th and 14th (or at your convenience if you’re listening to the recordings), I will be teaching my second course through the Virtual Institute, entitled “Genetic Genealogy for Professional Genealogists.” The course is designed for anyone interested in genetic genealogy, but especially for genealogists that help others understand DNA test results whether as a paid professional or simply as a knowledgeable friend. ... Click to read more!

In the last post (“The Search for Helen’s Roots“) we learned that my adopted great-grandmother, Helen Johnson, has a cluster of shared close autosomal DNA matches in the 3rd and 4th cousin range. These matches are all genealogically members of a Snell family which lived in the same small county in Upstate New York where my great-grandmother was born.

We also learned that my grandmother married Walter A. Snell, who also appears to be a member of the same Snell family.

Did Helen knowingly marry someone who was her cousin or possibly her half-brother? Did she always know who she was biologically?

Is My Surname Actually SNELL?

On February 17, 1932, Helen’s first husband Frank Bettinger passed away unexpectedly at the age of 59: ... Click to read more!

With genetic genealogy the name of the game is collaboration, whether it is collaboration with other people or collaboration among the trees and records of our genealogical and genetic matches. Only when we collaborate can we generate the clues and information necessary to break through walls and recover the names of those missing ancestors.

We have multiple tools for collaboration of genetic matches. At GEDmatch and DNAGedcom, for example, we have many third-party tools that assist our efforts. The companies also offer tools that allow us to sift through our matches to find the clues we need. Family Tree DNA, for example, has an In Common With (“ICW”) tool and a Matrix tool that allow users to see what matches they share in common with another person. ... Click to read more!

Today, I saw an interesting table posted to Facebook, summarizing a genealogist’s family tree. It listed a handful of generations along with the number of possible ancestors in each generation, and the individual’s known ancestors for that generation.

Out of curiosity, I generated a similar table with my own data:

There are many interesting data points in the table. For instance, between the 7th and 8th generations, I drop from knowing 71% of all of my ancestors to knowing just 51% of my ancestors. At 10 generations, with 2046 total ancestors in all generations, I only know a quarter of them. And while I feel very confident for the first 6 or 7 generations; after that I’m much less confident with my family tree. ... Click to read more!

TribeCode (www.TribeCode.com) is a relatively new direct-to-consumer genetic genealogy testing company, officially launching in the fall of 2014. The company is owned by Centrillion Biosciences, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The TribeCode test, currently offered for $99, offers Y-DNA, mtDNA, and atDNA analysis.

The ISOGG wiki page about TribeCode offers some information about the test, gleaned mostly from Facebook postings by the company. For example, the test apparently uses an Illumina low-coverage sequencing technology and tests at least 12 million markers throughout the genome. More exact details of the sequencing aren’t yet found on the TribeCode website.

Around Thanksgiving of 2014 I ordered the test on sale from approximately $79, and received my results a couple of months later. ... Click to read more!

I recently forced the creation of a DNA Circle at AncestryDNA by target testing a descendant of a common ancestor. This blog post offers some information about how I did it, and some of my reasoning for doing so.

AncestryDNA’s DNA Circles

AncestryDNA offers a tool called DNA Circles, which is a group of at least three individuals that share a common ancestor in their public family tree at Ancestry, and each member shares DNA identical-by-descent with at least one other person in the circle.

According to AncestryDNA, a DNA Circle “open[s] the possibility for AncestryDNA members to identify distant relatives with whom they do not share DNA IBD directly, but with whom they still have genetic evidence supporting their relationship.” Instead of relying on just triangulation, DNA Circles rely on the concept of a Genetic Network. ... Click to read more!

This data is shared under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC license. You are free to share and use the information for non-commercial purposes, as long as you give proper attribution and release anything you create under the same license.

For a summary of all Shared cM Project posts, see “The Shared cM Project.”

For reference, here are all posts for the Shared cM Project:

• Most up-to-date post: “Version 4.0! March 2020 Update to the Shared cM Project!” (March 27, 2020)

Older Posts:

[EDIT – June 26, 2016: An updated chart and detailed histograms are now available and should be utilized. See: “Update to the Shared cM Project.”]

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