 They should be on YouTube. What's his name at the moment? Turn me like, but also turn me recorders, and back to you then, if you're on YouTube. OK, I don't know. Great. OK, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our next speaker. And that's Martin McDowell. And Martin is a local man. He is education and development officer with the North of Ireland Family History Society, who have a DNA project for the North of Ireland that has over 1,600 people. And the North of Ireland Family History Society had done a wonderful job recruiting people from the North of Ireland. And of all of the people in the group were finding cousins within the group that they never knew existed. It's a wonderful way of bringing people together. And they've done a great job with that. And those numbers in the project are getting higher and higher all the time. And so it's great that we're here in Belfast, because we're going to get lots more recruits. And a lot of those recruits will be your third cousins, your second cousins, who will have that family Bible or the letters in the attic that give you the information about the brick wall ancestor that you're trying to find out about. So please give a warm round of applause for Martin McDowell, who will be talking to us about DNA and the North of Ireland Family History Society. All right, thanks very much indeed. Let me unmute you. OK. And it's just in your pocket. OK. That's grand, so everybody can hear. And just that button there. You are now live. Thanks very much for inviting me along and for giving me the opportunity to talk today. I'm going to be giving you a bit of information about the North of Ireland Family History Society, what we're doing to promote DNA about our courses. Then I'm going to take you through just very simply about our project and how it can help you. And then we're going to look at some research that we've been doing recently comparing population figures to testing data. So we're looking at people who have tested their DNA. And is that working? Is there a bit of an echo? No, it's just that we need to move this up a little bit. And that should be, in fact, I'm going to pinch your jumper and put it there. And that's, let me put it there. OK. Whoops. That should be OK. Is that better now? Is that better? Great. So that's the way we're going to do this talk. Sorry, it's full of it. It's full of it, yeah. OK. Let's pinch a little bit more, put it up there. And that should do the trick. Now. OK. Sorry about your t-shirt. No, sorry. Thanks very much. OK. So firstly, about the North of Ireland Family History Society, we have 10 branches in Northern Ireland. That is very useful in that it doesn't really matter what branch you join. It's the branch that is closest to where you live. And it's a really good way of joining in to the genealogical community and making contacts with people who are also doing research. We'll have 1,100 members worldwide. We have two types of memberships. We have a branch membership. That's people who go to branch meetings. And we have associate memberships as well. It is possible to be an associate membership and to buy that and purchase it, even if you live in Northern Ireland, if you don't want to go to branch meetings. One of the advantages of having a family history society is that we have a research library in Utnabai. Now, that is the headquarters for all 10 branches of the society. And it's very useful in that there's a lot of unique genealogical information in that library. We have some collections that are not available anywhere else. And that can be very useful to do traditional research on your family tree. If you haven't been there, try and get down. It's open to the public between two and eight on a Tuesday. But it can also be opened on request. And if any associate members or anyone wants to come to it at any stage from around the world, we will open it. One of the things that we have is people doing traditional research within the society. So over the last number of years, we are trying to raise awareness. And we're trying to get people who have got a good genealogical background, who have got good family trees already, to take DNA tests. Because the two work together. And DNA complements a family tree. It helps you to get through your brick walls. And when the traditional genealogy fails, DNA can get you that way further back and can help you to make connections that wouldn't have been possible with the existing genealogical data that's available. As you know, probably anyone who's been researching family from Ireland hits a roadblock of 1,800. And you can't really get much back beyond that. And that's where DNA comes into play. So the two things have to work together. You do have to do the work on your research because DNA doesn't replace that, but it does complement it. OK. So within this society, we have been trying to be very active to promote DNA. And what we're doing is we do a lot of talks at the branch meetings to try and encourage new people to talk and to demystify DNA and explain how it all works. We'll have a journal that comes out twice a year. We also produce newsletters. That's something we'll probably need to be doing more of. At the moment, that's traditional genealogy mostly. But we do promote DNA events and our DNA courses, whatever, through our journals and newsletters as well. We're doing outreach, an event like today, where we have a stand just outside the door. We also attend other furs and community events throughout Northern Ireland. And that is a really useful way of getting in contact with people and bringing genealogy to people who are not currently researching. And we've had a good experience of that over the last few years, even just at country furs that are just normal community events. We can bring in family history and try to get people researching. And what we can also do is bring DNA kits along. And then that encourages people to test and widens out the testing community. One of the success stories, I think, we've had within the society is training courses. We've got a leaflet here on, right, I've gone again. I shouldn't be moving about. What have we done? Oh, it's just dropped it up, though. Actually, maybe it would be better to put it like that. So there's less chance of it actually dropping off. I'll just put that there. And you're good to go. All right, sorry about that. For now. So we have actually got printouts today on our training courses. These are available at the North of Ireland Family History stand on the Family Tree DNA stand. There's also some of these. If anyone wants one at the end, they can come up and get it. But basically, it's just letting you see what courses we're doing over the next few months. We're going to be doing training courses. In relation to DNA, this is we're going to be doing a training course on Family Finder, which is a three-week two-hour session per night. And it's about how to use Family Finder, how to use the chromosome browser, and how to actually use the tools that you get when you get DNA results. We also do a course on a jet match. And we're doing an advanced autosomal course as well. And we're also having one on MyHeritage, which I think there's a lot of people in Ireland yet aren't using MyHeritage. And it's a very good site to get matches on. And the test is totally compatible. So you only really need to test with one company. But if you already have results from Family Tree DNA, you can upload them free of charge to MyHeritage. And then you can benefit from checking for DNA matches in their database. We also do courses on why DNA and on using Lazarus, which is a way of recreating the DNA of deceased ancestors. But we're not currently running them in the spring program. But we will be running them again. So you can always find details of our courses on our website. Another way that we support learning is through the monthly interest group. So when people come to a DNA course, or even if they haven't been at one, they're more than welcome to come to our monthly interest group meetings that are held on the fourth Saturday of each month between 2 and 4 at our research center. And it's a way of reinforcing the knowledge. And people just come sometimes to ask a question. They might not even stay for very long. They just want to ask something. They know we're going to be there at that time. They ask in the leaf. But most people do actually tend to stay for the entire time. And sometimes at the end of the day, it's hard getting people out because they're enjoying themselves that much. They want to stay on. So it is a good way of getting in contact and actually learning off each other. So it's not supposed to be a formal course. It's supposed to be about people helping each other. And that's what is happening. That's really good to see that. We do have a website. We have some information on our society website about DNA testing. And we'll have a link there to the DNA project, which I'm going to be talking about in a minute. But we probably need to put more information on DNA on our website. And that's really a work in progress at the moment. The other thing that we do is introductory talks. This is a growing thing where we're now being asked to do talks not within our own branch network, but actually to outside community organizations. So that's another way, as I said earlier, about broadening out the whole subject of DNA and getting people to test. So historical societies and community groups are now starting to ask for talks on DNA. And that is really useful because it's just raising the profile and making it a bit more normal of a thing to do. I know that a few years ago, people used to sort of go, why would you test your DNA? And there was a bit of suspicion about it. Now that's all gone, and it's becoming quite normal. And I think that's a good thing. All right, so now we're moving on to the DNA project. I'm just going to give you some information about how it could be useful to you. We're trying to promote DNA testing, as I said earlier. We're giving information and support. So once you're a part of the project, you can then feed into that. It's all about sharing results and about facilitating connections. So that's why we encourage everybody to upload their tree information and their surname information. If you don't share that information, it's very hard to find a connection. So that's really important. So it's those types of basics that we're trying to encourage people to do. And it's really working quite well. When I look through the project group and our members, it's very obvious that nearly everybody has a tree on nearly every account that they manage. So that's a really good thing, and we're continuing to do that. Another good advantage of the project, and particularly because we're part of the society, is that we can distribute DNA kits. So it means that people have easy access to them. They're not having to pay for postage and order one from America every time they want one. They can just come to the research center or to a branch meeting or speak to one of the administrators and we can get them a kit whenever they want one. It saves them the postage charges, which is excellent. But what we can also do is give them discounts. And that's really good too. So it helps to encourage DNA testing. And I will say at this point that there's no advantage to the society in promoting DNA. We don't actually benefit from this, but it is benefiting our members. And we can supply kits to non-members of the society as well. Okay, a little bit now about the project. And a lot of people do say, why do I join a project? Now, this would also apply to other projects as well as the North of Ireland one. But basically, if you look at the section of your results, now I've shown here family finder results, but it would also apply to YDNA or MTDNA. Down here is the bit that everybody misses. You can see the arrow pointing towards it, advanced matches. If you click on that, it helps to see who you match within a particular project. And a lot of people don't know that they can do this. So when you click on that advanced matches button, it brings you through to the screen. And three clicks will help you to see who you match within the project. So first you have to highlight what type of test you want to compare with. So in this case, because we are primarily an autosomal project, that's what I'm gonna be talking about, family finder autosomal DNA today. So you put a tick in against family finder or whatever type of DNA you want to test. Then you have to select what project you want to look at. So if you have joined multiple projects, you're able to do this in any of the projects. So in this case, you're selecting North of Ireland and just press the Run Report button. Once you do that, you will get a list of everyone who you match within the project. Something like that. So you're getting a list of names. You can see at the left-hand side the person's name. You can see what test they've actually done. The little blue symbol is showing you that they've uploaded a family tree. So you can see there, that's a sample of my matches within the project. And you can see that pretty much everybody has uploaded a tree, and that wasn't actually a fixed slide. That was just a screenshot I took and that just happened to be on it. It was pretty typical of all of the results. So that is actually the same information that you're getting on your matches page. So if you click on the name as you can find out more information, that tree will still take you through to the same tree that you're accessing through your matches page. And if you put a note onto your matches page, the note is also available there. There's a little green box at the bottom one you can see there and that's showing you that you have put a note there. So it's also accessible from that page and it's giving you the relationships over here. So it's a useful way to do it. I think it's particularly useful if you have joined a project group and you want to look at a particular group of people and find if you have any connections to them. So how I would find that being used is if you joined the North of Ireland DNA project, you can find out if you have ancestors who came from Ulster and we do find people doing that. We'll find people who would maybe don't know their genetic background, maybe because they're adopted and there's other jealousy or they maybe haven't done enough research yet and just by looking at the number of matches that are getting within the project, they can tend to find out how many ancestors they may have from Ulster. I've been having a look at this in a bit of detail. I'm coming on to this in a moment but I will say now that if you have all 16 of your two times great grandparents from Ulster, I find that most people within the project group will have between 50 and 75 matches. So that's pretty good and really I would say if you have a small number of matches within the project that is indicating that you don't have too many of your ancestors from Ulster because we do have a pretty tight group where we have a lot of Ulster DNA actually in the project. Now, when I mentioned Ulster, I'm talking about the nine counties. So we are the north of Ireland family history society. That is not the six counties of Northern Ireland. That's why we don't use that name. We also cover Kavan, Monaghan and Donegal. So it's the old traditional Ulster. So that's one thing you can do if you're using the project group. There's other things as well. That's where you click onto it on your homepage, just on the left hand side down towards the bottom you can see a list of all the projects that you have joined. In this case, I'm going to show you what's in the north of Ireland one and that's how you will actually view the project by clicking on that. You can view the results. So you can look to see if you match somebody on YDNA or MTDNA. You can have a look at the actual results there. If you want to do Family Finder, you do have to use the advanced matches screen that I've showed you already there. You can contact the administrators and hopefully we are quite responsive and that we're getting back to you very quickly and that we're helping you to do things and to improve your knowledge of DNA. So if you have any particular questions or your problems with a tree or something, you can definitely contact us and we'll try to help you as best we can. You can view your project statistics and I think that's very important because you can see the scope of the project and again this applies to any project that you join. So you can see how many people within the project have done all different types of tests. You just get a number but it gives you a feel for it. You can see the total numbers. You can also see how many people have done a particular type of test that you maybe have done. So that is giving you information and that is allowing you to say if you would expect maybe to find matches within that project. So sometimes it's useful just even to have a glance down those figures and say, well probably the best way to say it is the scope of the project. All right, there's also a message board and that's called an activity fade and it's very useful for asking questions by reading the questions that other people have asked and maybe that helps you to learn but the message board is only visible to members of the project. So once you join you will be able to access that but it's not available to anyone who would just go to the North of Ireland DNA project page. It also works a little bit like Facebook and that you can like messages and whatever and it shows that you've actually viewed them but that can be a useful thing and will encourage people to post more there and actually put on something say about ancestors and maybe try to find links and contacts within the group. That's what the message board looks like and you can see there that's the messages being posted. You just keep going down, you can go back to the very first message that was posted. Oh, at the left hand side you can see the names of the administrators and you click on them to get the email address and actually contact them then. And there is a blue button there if anyone wants to give us any money for banned DNA kits. Yeah, you can certainly do that too. Okay, moving on now to family founder project matches. It's all about cousins and actually trying to find connections to people within the project and also within family founder itself. So by testing your DNA, it's always a good thing to do. You can compare your results with others. That's how it all works because everybody gets their DNA from the same ancestors. It's all passed down and it's those comparisons is what you're making. Most people's DNA is going back at least to their five times great grandparents and that is the start of what I'm trying to explain to you today. Because your DNA is going that far back in the north of Ireland, you're probably not gonna know who these people are but it's really good to know that you do have their DNA because that's what we're gonna be coming on to in a second. Each person has 128 five times great grandparents. Now, as I said, we don't know who these are but what we may know is who your two times great grandparents are. So what I would encourage people to do is put up their trace. The names of your two times great grandparents could indicate either the names of the places where these people were living and it can help you to make connections back beyond where you know. An example that I had recently was I found a third cousin in the last couple of weeks and the third cousin has verified for me a sister for my great grandfather and it's a sister that was born before birth. Should I forget, started in 1864. So I had suspected that this family was actually linked to my family but I couldn't prove it before but the DNA link has managed to do that for me. So it's very, very useful but what I was able to do was I was then able because this person who had tested was living in England they had not been able to access the family history records that are held within Northern Ireland. So what I was able to do was I was able to give them their three times, their four times and their five times great grandparents because I had been able to access information and prove them and I was able to prove them through DNA as well. So that is something that could happen to you if you find a match that's maybe not that far back you might find that the person that you have the match with has more information than you because maybe they've been able to access a different set of records. So, you know, it's very useful to get that type of information so I got something out of it but the other person got probably considerably more. I just want to mention that I find that one of the most important facts about doing a DNA test is verification and it's something that I think we need to stress more. A lot of people say to me, why do a DNA test? I have a good family tree and my response to that is normally you have done research, you have... There's a chance that maybe you've made a mistake and your research isn't correct. There's also a chance that the paper trail was not actually the same as your DNA trail and what you can do is by doing your DNA test and finding links through the ancestors on your family tree, you can prove that these people were actually your ancestors. Now, I think anyone who's done a traditional family tree should be very, very pleased to do that because it's helping you to look at your tree and know these people were your ancestors and it's giving you that solid proof that you don't get from purely following a paper trail. Right, so now I'm going to get into what I'm talking today about the project matches and what I'm trying to do is look at population statistics and compare them to the people in the project and the amount of DNA that you have whenever you take a test. So what I've been doing is looking at people's five times great grandparents and I did a series of sums and found out that because we'll have an 1800 block, I'm trying to look a bit further back. I don't want to look at 1800 because we'll have a lot of information about our ancestors who maybe lived in 1800. I want to try and stretch this a bit here and go back to 1750 and look at something that may be a generation or two further back than what you can currently get when you're doing your traditional family history research in Northern Ireland or in Ulster. So we've been looking at population figures and I've been helping this by my friend Daniel Brown who's sitting down at the back here. He's an Australian from, well, he has a doctorate in modern history from Queen's University and he's been looking at population figures for me and helping me to make sure that what I'm using here is the best guess because we don't have exact figures before the census. The first census in Ireland was in 1821 and from then there was population statistics available but as I said, I'm trying to concentrate here in 1750 to produce something that's going to help people so it's before that. So we're dealing with estimates and we're looking at historical records to see what we can find and we're trying to estimate what the population of the North of Ireland and again by that I mean the nine counties in 1750. The other point I want to make at this stage and I'm going to be coming onto this in a minute is that any population group is made up of different generations. It may seem a very simple thing to say but basically if these people were living in family groups some people here would be testing and their five times great grandparents may have been children in 1750, other people it might have been the older community but basically because DNA is inherited what I'm trying to do is look at a generation in 1750 because there's going to be people that are related to each other living in 1750 and there are going to be different generations that have inherited DNA from each other so I'm trying to split that out and I'll be explaining that more in a minute. So this is just a couple of estimates that we've got. The first one is the population of Ireland. It's been estimated in Sean Connolly's book Divided a Kingdom. It came out in 2008 and he has estimated that the population of Ireland in 1753 was between 2.2 million and 2.57 million. So just so it can't be accused of falsifying these figures I'm going for the higher figure here I'm going for the 2.57 million and I'm looking at that and then we were looking at what the population of the north of Ireland might have been at that time. We'll come up with an estimate of 750,000. Now that's based on a work by Kennedy Miller and Gurran people in population change which have indexed at the top there and the information that they give was they estimated that the population in 1732 was 600,000 and in 1766 it was 824,000. So basically we went for a figure that was in between that but there's always a chance that figures that were given for estimating in that century were underestimates. So they could be underestimates but we're hoping because it took the higher figure for Ireland compared to the two of them that's actually 29% of the total of the population of Ireland. Now why that is significant because when we look at Ulster after 1821 when the census came in we find that the range of population compared to the total population of Ireland was around 30%. So 29% seemed pretty good and that's what we come up with. So that's 750,000 people living in Ulster. So if you have got Ulster heritage those people are your ancestors. We just don't know the names at the moment. So I was then thinking that people live obviously there's gonna be different generations living in 1750 as I mentioned earlier. So that means we were looking at 250,000 people that were living in different generations at that time. So now we're gonna look a bit more at DNA because that's the population statistics. So as I mentioned earlier everyone has your 128 ancestors and you're gonna be looking for partial DNA samples like a little match down here you're seeing at the bottom in chromosome 10. You're gonna try and find people that have the same segment of DNA because that means that they inherited that from the same ancestor. Okay, so we're looking for a partial DNA sample. Obviously we're not gonna have the entire DNA of everyone who lived in 1750 but we're gonna try and see how many potential people in 1750 we may have a partial DNA sample of. And when you're looking back you don't have a sample from all of your 128 five times great grandparents but you can't keep absorbing DNA. Every generation it's been halved. It's going down because everyone is getting half from their father and half from their mother. So around 100 or maybe more it varies per person and it's to do with the randomness of inheritance that if 100 people, sorry if 100 of your ancestors at the five times great grandparent level are giving you DNA that means that you have a segment from those people that is potentially traceable when you have matches within the database. So if you could just highlight all of these people it follows that because we have 250,000 individuals that were trying to find their DNA in 1750 if we compare that and we're saying that they're all representing 100 of their ancestors we could potentially test 2,500 people with purely Ulster heritage and that would give us a partial DNA sample of everybody but obviously that's not possible because you're not going to be able to identify those people but everybody who has Ulster heritage is going to be able to contribute to the overall figures that we're achieving. And I'm just going to come to that now. So it's just to look how many we have. There's over 900 people in the North of Ireland project that have auto-summel DNA results. Now not everyone has all of their ancestors from Ulster because people have ancestors from Scotland, from England, from all different countries. So that has to be taken into account and when I was looking at this area and trying to come up with some statistics I took all that into account. So I was trying to look at people's information and to see if I knew that people had ancestors from other parts of the country I was making an alliance for that. And obviously some people are very good at testing large numbers of family members and I'm giving that myself and I know that some members of our project group have done exactly the same. So if you test all your siblings that's really good and it's great for DNA but in terms of what I'm trying to do here and look at estimates it's actually not a very helpful thing because you're representing the same ancestors. It is very useful and it is giving you more DNA from these particular ancestors and that's what it's a good thing to do but I have to discount those figures. So if I know that there's five siblings within a group I'm only counting their DNA once because otherwise it would be falsifying the figures that I'm trying to come up with. Okay, so every day this is going up as new people are joining our project but what I have found is that I've estimated that around 39,000 ancestors are currently represented within our database and if you compare that to the generational figure for 1750 that is working out at 15.8% of the population in 1750. Now how that can be used is if you're testing your DNA and again we need more people to test their DNA but if you're testing the reason I'm producing these figures is to try to illustrate that Ulster has a lot of people tested. They're not all living here but people with Ulster heritage are testing. I've only based my statistics on people within our project group. There's a lot more people who have not joined the project that are in family tree DNA and another testing databases as well but the more people that we can get together on the one database the more useful it is for everybody. So having a partial DNA sample of approximately 15% of the population of 1750 is really useful to know because if anyone is thinking what's the point in me doing a DNA test my ancestors aren't going to have tested well that shows there's really valuable information here and there's a real good potential for matching and that's what it's all about and we're trying to increase that all the time. So the next thing is what we're gonna do to make this better. The first thing we're gonna try and encourage more people to join our project that means people who currently have results because our project as I think I mentioned earlier is hosted on family tree DNA. We also need new people to test and hopefully an event such as this is helping towards that. So we're getting people to test and therefore if they join the project group then that is going to increase the number of ancestors that are represented and help us to find matches. Just to give you an example of how useful the matches is. I had a look at a member of our project group who I've been helping with our DNA and I was just looking at the amount of matches which she's been getting recently and it's what we weren't achieving a few years ago. It's really increasing. She's getting a lot higher matches and she's getting them a lot more frequently and this is because we have got a higher representation of our ancestors DNA within there. There's more people to match with and there's larger segments coming along that you can then find matches with. So I find that that is what's happening. So just to give you a precise example here on the 8th of December she got a match which was 90 centimorgans or 90 units of DNA in size. Anyone who's done family find her will know that's probably quite a good match to get. On the 21st of December she got one of 92. Now this was on a totally different family line so it's not as if this was one person who was testing different members of their family that she was matching to. This was all through her family try. She was also finding matching names as well which is really useful and places. On the 10th of July she got another one which was 210 and just a couple of days ago on the 13th of February she got another one of 151. How I know this is that as an administrator when there's a close match found within a project group the administrators are notified of this and if I know people personally or if they come to my group I'm able then to help them with this match and maybe help them to focus on where they should be looking on their tray. So all of these four matches were in different family lines and the last two there were probably second cousins once removed. Now this lady had hit a brick wall, hadn't got an awful lot of information but she did have areas and each one of these matches was hitting these specific areas. So that was useful. If you've tested with another company we want you to transfer your results over and join our project. So it's about people on Family Treaty and joining the project. It's about new people testing and it's also about people transferring their results over from other companies and you can do that free of charge. It's called an autosomal transfer and if you've tested with Ancestry or 23andMe or MyHeritage you can do that and you can come over and transfer your results over. If you do have problems with the transfer process because some kits don't work because of a change made by Ancestry to the heading of the raw data if you do have problems with that contact one of the administrators and we will help you rectify those problems and get your results transferred okay. It's better for everyone to have their ancestors on the one database. At the moment within Ulster we've been very lucky in that Family Treaty DNA seems to be the preferred company that people have been using. Also because of the society we have the easy access to Family Treaty DNA kits and we've been able to sell them at a reduced price and because of that then the majority of people in Ulster I would say have tested with Family Treaty DNA that helps because if you split them over the different databases you're only comparing your results with people who have tested in the same database. And I would say that Family Treaty DNA definitely have the biggest database of people with North of Ireland heritage and that's really good. So if you have North of Ireland Ancestry you want to see your matches on Family Finder because that could potentially get you back beyond a brick wall and that's what we're all trying to achieve to work on our family trees. So that's basically what I want to say. I'll just give you another couple of statistics. I based the figures that I had there on 833 people who have got Family Finder results within our project group but there's also people who have transferred their results from other companies. There's another 104 of them so I've also included those in the figures and the figure I said was over 39,000 precisely it was 39,562 and I have more results I've noticed come through last night and I've had more requests to join the project than I didn't do yet because I was too busy looking at this presentation but I'll be doing them tonight and that figure will continue to grow. We're getting about 20 people a week at the moment wanting to join the project which is really encouraging. So I think it's growing and I think it's going to benefit everybody but don't forget what I said earlier about looking at the advanced matches because if we're getting people joining all the time you're going to be able to see who you match and it's going to be particularly useful if you maybe only have one family line from Ulster because then that means that you can look and you can look and see who you match within the project and you're a pretty good idea if you only have one family line from Ulster that those people are related to you on that line and that's giving you a basis to start on. It may not turn out to be correct but it's an assumption and that's what you have to do with DNA. You have to have a method or a way of looking or trying to navigate through and find your matches and confirm them. So that's really what I want to say to you today. Anyone questions or let you hand over to you. Thanks very much Martin. Well that was a really, that was an excellent presentation so thank you very much for that. I think it's particularly encouraging to see that you have access to almost 39,000 ancestors from that 1750 generation, generation born in 1750 which of course would take me back to my four or five times, five times, right? Yes, just like, just exactly like you said and I'm mainly Dublin Irish on my mother's side and then all over the country on my father's side and that 16% figure is really interesting and I think as more people join that will, it's not going to be a linear increase, it's actually going to be exponential so the more people that join the figure will actually increase faster and faster and faster. So questions for Martin. And congratulations by the way to the North Valiant Family History Society and our team working on the North Valiant DNA project because they've done a wonderful job and I think it is the way forward actually that we actually get these type of projects which have a large DNA database and coupling that with a large genealogical database because having the two in combination makes it a very, very powerful tool for connecting new members with genetic cousins and therefore breaking through brick walls in their own ancestry. So questions for Martin? Are any questions about DNA at all? Any questions from the North Valiant Family History Society on their own project? Okay. Good. Thank you for that. Thank you for joining. Yes, I will approve it later. Thank you. Another point to make of course is that anyone who tests a family tree DNA today gets to the North Valiant Family History Society so that 16% figure is probably going to go up to 20% by the end of the day. Hopefully, yes, that would be good. And I would say probably, what would you estimate that figure's going to be, say, six months time and 12 months time? I mean, it's risen very, very fast. I did the statistics at Christmas time. I spent a lot of my Christmas holidays trying to pour through this and work it all out. My figure at the time was 37,000 from Christmas, it's went up to 39 and a half. So that shows that it's quite a meteoric rise we're having and that is just because new people are joining the group and because we have so many people awaiting results. So at the moment I think we have about 30 or 40 people who have our waiting results that are currently being processed. We also have nearly 200 kits which have been purchased and which have been bought on FamilyFinder that have not yet been returned to FamilyTreeDNA for testing. So all of those are going to be bringing in a lot of unique ancestral segments that are going to help us all with our family tree. And then there's hopefully, hundreds of kits going to be sold today and that's going to help as well. And we have a question over here. We're going to bring the mic over in the cross. Here we go. Thank you. I just wanted to ask, Martin, how do you deal whenever you're teaching your new recruits? How do you answer the question that they very well will ask? Who are only strange people that I've never heard of? And where's my third cousin gone? Yes, we do get a lot of that. We find a lot of people are finding connections within the society. Sometimes that goes down very well because people within the society are finding they've got connections that they didn't know about. They've known people in maybe 20, 30 years and sometimes that brings great delight. Sometimes maybe not so much. But it's always good to know that you have those connections. Sometimes in our classes, we are finding that people who are sitting in the same room, and maybe we haven't even got many people in the room and we could be under 10. And we're finding that maybe two of those people have quite a close, autosomal link. And it gives people an opportunity to talk about it, to exchange information. And I feel that the society network enables that to take place. So is that answering what you, yeah? We have another question here. If you transfer in from Ancestry.co to familyDNA, does that automatically then come to yourselves? No, you have to then join the project. So what you have to do is you have to log into your kit and then if you go to your website and go to your DNA page, there's a link there. As long as you're logged in to your kit at the time, when you press that button, it will bring you through to the join page. Or the other way to do it is you can go to projects, join a project at the top of your home page on Family2DNA and you can go and look at all the different projects available and you'll find us in the dual geographic project section. It's all divided up into different sections, but because we're primarily an autosomal project, that's where you'll find us. So sometimes it comes up as a suggestion for people and it will say you may want to join this, so you may find it there as well, but you can do it straight through your website. It might be easier to access the information that way. Thank you. That's great, I'm glad to hear that, thank you. Completely agree. I think there are a lot of these family finder or autosomal DNA projects around, but I think very few of them have the kind of templates that they need to actually move the project forward. And I think those figures that you have presented on the coverage of the ancestors that were born around 1750 is something that now a lot of other autosomal projects, like the one that you have in the north of Ireland, they're going to copy that and I think that definitely is the way forward. We have a question here from Jared. Martin, thank you very much, so it's a great presentation. Two questions. First, I was at the launch of a very interesting project last week, which was Beyond 2022 and it's the anniversary of the burning of all the records. Yes. The hazel, which used the records, they tried to fetch them in the records office in Dublin. So probably the records office of Northern Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland, the National Archives of UK have come together with some principal researchers and they're going to recreate virtually all the records of London. Yes. And as much as the records as possible. And that's really good because it'll provide access for people who'll be able to access information that they can't otherwise find and that would be really useful and that will complement DNA and that will help people then once maybe they get a lead through DNA or they find something that they could potentially follow, then they can then go back to the paper records and access that site as you're saying and get a bit further back and actually put a name to these people. Sir, can you break down which of those would be referenced? A theory that means that the majority of all of their four ancestors came from the county? Yes, yes, I can do that. Yeah, what I've actually been doing is trying to estimate per person. So I've been looking at two times great-grandparent data and extrapolating back to five times great-grandparent data because people don't always know the names of their five times great-grandparents. But what I can do is check the number of matches and that is helping and that is supporting and showing that we must be working it out right because basically I can look at people's tree data and then I can look at the number of matches and I can do it either way. So if I look at the tree data first, I nearly know how many matches they're gonna have in the project before I even look or I can do it vice versa. So as I said, it's very useful for people who don't know their heritage because if you look at your number of matches, that is giving you an indication towards how many ancestors you may have from Ulster. Now, what I should have mentioned earlier was the RHD and Atlas project. There's gonna be a talk on that tomorrow by Ed Gilbert at half past two, but he found a unique genetic cluster that was faithful to the borders of the old province of Ulster, probably due to the Ulster plantation and movements and that has been supported by what I have found. I did read his information and it wasn't until I started to analyze some of this data that I realized that it was actually being supported. A lot of people do have ancestors from a myriad of different places, but I did find the vast majority of people from Ulster were maybe if they did have ancestors outside of Northern Ireland, they were more likely to be in Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal than at any of the other counties within Ireland and that was interesting because I felt that what I was finding was supporting what Ed had found and he's gonna be doing a talk tomorrow and be explaining that in a lot more detail and probably a lot of detail that I wouldn't understand, but he'll be giving a full presentation on that tomorrow. There's a great question because I think what Ed did in the Irish DNA Atlas was he looked at people who had eight great grandparents from the same 50 kilometer radius. So he was getting a very localized snapshot of the genetic makeup of Ireland from 1850, which was two years after the great famine. People of the British Isles Project had something similar. They looked at four grandparents from the same localized area and they looked at 2,000 people and they got this wonderful map of Britain and Northern Ireland and the various genetic groups were geographically located. So it's gonna be very similar to the people you have in the Northern Ireland Family History Society. A lot of them will actually have four grandparents from that same localized area and of course grandparents roughly born about 1880. You get a genetic snapshot of Northern Ireland in 1880. So a lot of this information now will be added in to a lot of the academic projects in due course and we're gonna get finer and finer detail of the genetic makeup of Northern Ireland from the late 1800s. And that's gonna be very, very helpful for people, especially from the diaspora, who have no idea where in Ireland or Britain their ancestors came from. They do an autosomal DNA test like the family finder. They tie into your data, the data from all of these academic projects which will eventually be collated in one place and they'll be able to be told 10% of your ancestor of your DNA comes from Kevin, 10% of your DNA comes from Manna, 20% from Armagh, 30% from Tipperary and the rest are from the Orkney Islands. So it really will help focus your research and that's going to be very, very useful. Another question for Martin? Yep, we have a question over here. Very, very informative talk this morning. Thank you so very much. I met you some time ago and with your help I was able to get a lot further back than I ever thought I would. So my sincere thanks to you, Martin. Thank you very much. Thank you. Pardon me. I'm just wondering, have any of the M222 been identified on family DNA? We do have members of that group within our project but that is related to why DNA? Oh, I know. Yeah, so as I said, we are predominantly an autosomal DNA project but yes, yes, we would have some information, yes. That's good. Any good match? On names, you see, because I'm potentially on that to Nile of the Nile hostages. Yes. And I've asked as a result of going to your artist lecture, three or four male relatives are encouraged to take your test. Great. So thank you. With the wide DNA, I was going to say that I've lost between the thoughts. Sorry, I was going to say that. I still don't know what I was going to say to you there. M222? No, it's gone. No, it's gone. It was a good point. It was a great point. I got it but nobody else did, sorry. The wine with Lachlan, the Lachlan of the wide DNA line. It's not going back to me, sorry about that, I forgot most of it. I got that up at nine not earlier. I don't feel like that. But it's a very interesting point because of course, even though this is an autosomal DNA project, which deals primarily with all of the problems apart from the wide DNA, it will be overlapping. So there is a lot of overlap. I remember that, yeah. Yes, I remember what I was going to say. It was really a very simple point. What I was going to say was if you're using advanced matches, if you join the project group and use advanced matches, you saw that I clicked on the family founder button. You will get a wide DNA button coming up if you've done a wide DNA test. So you will be able to click that button and then look within whatever project you have joined and see who you match on wide DNA within that project. And hopefully that will bring you up some of the matching hub look group. Sorry, that's what we're going to say. One last question for me. When do you think we're going to hit the magic number of 100% coverage of the ancestors from 75th? I've had that done to do with it. It would be the end of the year. Well, listen, thanks very much. Thank you very much. That's very much, congratulations. Very well, very well. That was a joy, that was got a gold button. No, you did extremely well. Extremely well. And it's all still recording, so I better turn it off. Yes. My name's Peter Mike William. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I'll be here the next two days. I'll be in the family tree, then I stop. Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm a minister, you know, I've got all the funds for people. But I've got everything here. We can't force us to turn off the recording. We can't force us to turn off the recording. No, thanks.