Andrew McKnight's Ancestories: Coaxing Family Stories Out of the Past

The last week of February has become an exciting time for genealogists each year, coinciding with the big RootsTech annual conference in Salt Lake City. It seems to have become customary for the big players in the business to roll out new products and features to maximize the splash with their target audience. This year it was two of the DNA companies that made big announcements, which might loosely be termed as "advances in big data analysis". Ancestry.com unveiled two new advances in their DNA matching service that clearly are taking the next steps in trying to connect dots between DNA evidence and records searching. While their new ThruLines feature is far from highly accurate in its connection suggestions, it generated some new clues for me that led to some exciting new discoveries. ThruLines were generated for most of my ancestors back to my 5-x great grandparents - literally nearly 60 sets of new specific clues to examine. The numbers were much smaller for MyHeritage&

Yeah, we've all got them. Those tales that grandma used to tell about being descendants of Robin Hood, and my grandfather's steadfast insistence that we were of Clan MacNaughton, are the ones that stick out for me. Most every family has its narratives, and many of them include myths and legends that are nearly impossible to verify. And as with most myths and legends, there is probably some kernel of truth somewhere within it, but what that truth is and how much its been obscured in the countless tellings and retellings... What those tales really are might be best described as identity totems. They are part of what we hold in the fabric of our family memory and story, and help us in how we describe ourselves. And as we dive into the deeper research of genealogy, we run the risk of unraveling that tapestry. It is important to realize that we are still who we are, whether or not those stories are 100% factually accurate. Learning that an ancestor was not all they were cracked

Great question, and the answer is "a lot!" But there are limits, and we've discussed many of them in detail in the past few posts. Here are the highlights - some general conclusions and cautions. There has never been a better time for those interested in their family history to do an autosomal DNA test - the standard offered by all of the popular companies like Ancestry, 23andMe, My Heritage, Family Tree DNA etc. At present more than 20 million people have done so - and that almost certainly includes a lot of people who share some ancestry with you. Add to that the enormous ongoing efforts at digitizing historic records from many countries, and bringing them online along with tools like optical character recognition (OCR) and powerful searching features. It has never before been possible to go so far back into your family's past without leaving your desk! Autosomal DNA (measured in centimorgans , or cM) can provide conclusive evidence about people to whom we are c

Perhaps by now you have been exploring Ancestry's "shaky leaves", the little icon that serves notice of a Shared Ancestor Hint in the tree of one of your Matches. And how exciting - they too have a John Smith as a 5x great grandfather (5G), and Ancestry says that you are 6th cousins (6C)! Genealogy and genetics are in agreement - huzzah! Well, maybe! The amount of the match is pretty small; clicking on the little i in a dark circle on the match page shows that you match at an amount 8 centiMorgans (cM). Since this is above Ancestry's 6 cM threshold for significant match possibilities, they have showed it to you. But…. Each generation doubles in number, and in theory we'd get equal amounts of DNA from each member of that generation: • 2 parents (50% each) • 4 grandparents (25%) • 8 great grandparents (12.5%) • 16 great-great grandparents 2Gs (6.25%) • 32 3Gs (3.125%) ....and so on. If we go back in time 10 generations, our theoretical tree includes 1,0

In my last post we covered what we can learn from our DNA matches . This post is just as important, for there are many limitations. We don't inherit the same amounts of DNA from each of our 16 great-great grandparents (2Gs) . As we go farther back through successive generations, we find that we don't have any identifiable DNA from many different lines in our family, while DNA from a few branches of our family may still show up 10 to 12 generations distant. Autosomal DNA has been found to be reliable over 5 to 7 generations. A 3rd cousin (3C) is five generations removed from the Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCA) , a shared set of those 2G grandparents. One in every ten 3Cs don't share ANY common segments with each other. And because siblings get 50% of their DNA from each parent, but not the SAME DNA (other than identical twins), it is quite possible to match some siblings in a family of 3Cs but not every sibling. Similarly, a 2nd cousin once removed (2C1R) is als

When your test results arrive - YIPPEE! - you will have a lot of information to sort through. And it can be overwhelming! Relax, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that this will be waiting for you later. Understanding the power of this wealth of family history at your fingertips takes time, as does learning to use it to build your "ancestories." There are typically three categories on your results page - your settings for your account, an estimate of your ethnic makeup (more about that below), and a long list of DNA Matches . DNA Matches are our genealogy gold mine - these are other users in the company's database who match you, sorted from highest match to low confidence matches. Usually they are grouped into some category of possible relationships, but these are mostly generalized predictive ranges (e.g. 2nd-3rd cousins, 4th-6th cousins, etc.) for all but immediate family. A quick recap from my last post; these tests look at specific sections of the autosoma

If you're reading this, you have probably seen those commercials on TV about the home DNA tests - "learn your ethnic origins". As evidenced by AncestryDNA sales recently eclipsing 10 million kits, interest in learning "where do I come from?" has exploded, while technology offers powerful new tools to help answer that question. So what is DNA testing, how does it work, and why should I do it? Great questions! You have 23 pairs of chromosomes - 22 pairs of autosomes , and the 23rd is a pair of gender (XY) chromosomes. Chromosomes are made up of genes , which in turn are made up of DNA, which is the molecular basis of heredity - the traits we inherit from our parents, and they from theirs, etc.. All of your genes collectively make up your genome . For humans about 99.9% of our DNA is identical, yet this still leaves some 3 million differences between your genome and any other human. (For comparison sake, we appear to share about 96% of DNA with our closest cousin