 chairman of the Claire Roots Society and I think we convinced you after several years of discussions that it was worthwhile doing a DNA test and now we want to put them down. So Patti has become an evangelist like many of us for genetic genealogy and today Patti is going to talk to us about combining examples of the successful application of autosomal DNA matching from his own experiences and his thoughts on the statistical shortcomings of the current matching methodology. Examples will include how to use phasing and triangulation to either confirm or refute suspected relationships often revealing unexpected double relationships. He will also demonstrate some tips and tricks for managing lists of DNA matches and will show how DNA matching interrelates with adoption and inheritance searches, marriage dispensations, bad record keeping and other aspects of genealogical research. So ladies and gentlemen please give a warm welcome for Patti Walton. Thank you Morris. It didn't take Morris years to persuade me to do a test. I first heard Morris talk to the Irish Genealogical Research Society in early 2013 and I came along here as a skeptic to genetic genealogy Ireland 2013 but Catherine Borges persuaded me to swab and I did and I've been hooked ever since. Thank you all for coming, all my known relatives, all my DNA matches friends, everyone else in the audience. I have covered together some notes including lots of examples that I may not have time to get through today and I have put them on my own personal website which is pwalton.info. This is also hopefully being recorded with new technology on my own machine but if you go to pwalton.info forward slash GGI 2016 uppercase GGI you should be able to read these notes yourself afterwards. So a little bit about myself. I hope I don't look like I've been a genealogist 40 years ago but there are a few gray hairs appearing now and I have a rather large database which I have on the website just to show you my own family tree on my TNG website. It doesn't quite fit on the screen. I'll show you the offline version in a moment. I encourage everybody whether you're doing DNA or not put your genealogy in an offline database. It works much faster and it doesn't disappear vaporize when you put it in the cloud and the company that you choose to rely on suddenly goes out of business as has happened so many cloud computing businesses already. So I enter my data in program called ancestral quest which is the successor to personal ancestral file which was produced way back in the 80s by the Mormon church. I've been using computers to store my genealogy database for practically 30 years now. There's my ancestry. I'll be talking quite a bit about my west clear great grandparents McNamara and Clancy. I haven't had much success on my Walden line with DNA. My maternal line as you can see I have three darkened great grandparents out of four on my maternal side. They all lived in the same town and they were eight other darkened families in the town. So that's quite a challenge for DNA as well. While I have this up let me show you what else I have done in the notes for myself. I have put a tag up at the top. We get match kit numbers. I have done that for everybody in this database for whom I have found that they have done autosomal DNA. So I can search and I did this earlier. It takes a little while to find out. I can say in the field selections define anybody where there's a get match tag in the notes. I actually have 456 of them in the database. How many of them are related to me if I select my own direct ancestors and the number of descended generations from those ancestors and say okay I have 13,316 people in the database who are my blood relatives. Most of those are now dead. But the combined count I was astonished that I got to this size 52 people I have found. That includes myself. It includes a Lazarus kit which I tried to create for my late father but 50 other people. I think I should say 53 because I found another on Thursday night. So I'm astonished I have found those many known relatives who have done autosomal DNA testing. So that's my genealogy background. Sorry, here I am. That's the one I want to go back to. I'm also involved with Ireland reaching out as a volunteer administering the parish in West Clare that my grandmother was born in, my art of parish. This is the Ireland reaching out website. The idea of Ireland reaching out was we would reach out through this website to the diaspora around the world and they would ask questions and we'd answer them on the website. But if we scroll down to the message board, well there was one this year and there was one last year. It's not very heavily used but with the help of autosomal DNA, some of us Michael O'Connell is here in the front row and myself nearly every week meet somebody who comes back to West Clare having found their roots through autosomal DNA. In my professional life, I'm a mathematician, I have degrees in mathematical sciences, economics, finance, I've done a lot of statistics. I got rather annoyed at how poor the statistical rigor in analysing autosomal DNA really seems to be. I know very little about genetics, I'm an entirely self taught geneticist so I'm up here waiting to be shocked by those who know a lot more than me about it. But I'm on family tree DNA, I'm on get match, I'm on ancestry DNA. I've shown you my tips and tricks with ancestral quest, I've become a project administrator when Morris came down to Ennis in November of last year to give a talk to the Clare Roots Society of which I'm the chairperson. We decided we would set up a Clare Roots DNA project. So anybody who is here who has sent their DNA to family tree DNA and who has ancestors in County Clare, you're very welcome to join the Clare Roots project, just follow that link. And I'm logged in so you don't see a join button. But if you're not a member, you'll see a little button up there beside that, the ruin of the ancestral home in West Clare, inviting you to join the project and just click that and I'll do my best to help you with your Clare Roots. Just out of curiosity, how many people here are project administrators at the family tree DNA? And how many of you are residing in Ireland? Three on myself and Morris. So we really should get together a little more often and try and figure out what we can do as project administrators to help each other and to help our project members. I've also set up a Clancy surname project. As you saw my great grandmother was a Clancy. This is being organized in association with the 1916 commemoration. One of the leaders of the 1916 rising who later died in the War of Independence was Heather Clancy from County Clare. And I always grew up understanding he was somehow related to me. So my hope for the Clancy project is to find somebody with an own relationship to Heather Clancy who will give me their DNA so that I can confirm whether or not that's true. And I have a couple of suspects in there. But any male Clancies of the room were interested. Let me know. So basically, this goes on night and day, we have people with Clare roots in the Antipodes, New Zealand over in California, West Coast of the US. And we do this night and day. And it's like the financial markets. There's somebody working on a West Clare DNA problem all around the clock. So I said I would give a little bit of theory. And then I'll come back to some examples which could be a lot more entertaining probably than the theory. Hopefully, on day three of this conference, you all know that we all have 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes. And each chromosome we represent by a string of the letters A, C, G and D, which represent different chemical compounds. Just about drink with this microm. In practice, we would, or in theory, we can see these long lists of letters. In practice, we can't actually unravel the paternal and maternal chromosome in each pair. We can just look in and we see pairs of letters. We might be an A, C at one location, an A, G at another location and so on. Most of the locations of the chromosome, we're all identical. We're all A's. And most of the A's are probably A's as well. So for genealogy, we pick out the locations where it is known that within the human population, two or more different letters can be seen in that location. And they're called SNPs. The P stands for polymorphism. I'm not sure how many people here like me studied Greek in secondary school and know that poly means many and morph means shape. But in this case, poly doesn't really mean many. It means more than one. It's a location where within the human population, we observe two different letters. And usually it's only two. They're called biallelic. Two different values can be seen. And the problem with this is if you have somebody, you can only observe an A, C. If I have an A, C at location 123. And I want to compare myself with somebody else in the room. Everybody else will either be an A, C like me, an A, A like me, or like, not like me or a C, C, not like me. And I might have got the A from a common ancestor with either the A, A or the A, C. And I might have got my C from a common ancestor with the A, C or the C, C. So it doesn't, it's not really possible to tell anything about a common ancestor from a location where you have two different letters. So the interesting places are where I'm A, A, and the other person is also A, A. We both definitely have an A which could have come from a common ancestor. We didn't know that before we compared ourselves. The other problem with this is, is that A, an A that's shared by 99% of the population? Or an A that's only shared by 1% of the population? The Patrick here and I have an A, or a AA in a location where only 1% of the population has an A. That's pretty significant. That tells us that there's something going on there we might be related. But if we go to another location and we're both C, Cs, and that's a location where 99% of the population has a C, well it's not really a whole lot of valuable additional information. So I wish we had better measurements of the significance of these strings of half identical locations that we look at. Unfortunately we don't jump down, but all we really see is the number of locations that we have looked at, where we cannot rule out the fact that we might have a common ancestor from whom we inherited one of the two letters we have. And the other length we have is the Senty Morgan length, which is basically an estimate of how far back the common ancestor might be. We have to work with those numbers. Mike Mulligan earlier he said we're looking for ideas for what ancestry could do to improve things. They can give us a chromosome browser but a little more powerful chromosome browser than what we get from the other sides, which actually tell us within each half identical region how many places are we, what I call mutually homozygous and then within that how rare or how frequent is the letter that we have at that location. So a few rules of thumb for what to do with the technology that we have. Everybody who sends their DNA be it to 23andMe, AncestryDNA, Family TreeDNA, and the new LivingDNA, which launched recently and has us all downstairs. Please copy your results to the third party getmatch.com DNA comparison website. It has far more powerful tools and useful tools than any of the websites of the companies that actually run the labs that extract the DNA from your DNA sample. If you have other DNA matches please encourage and help them to copy their data to getmatch. I've uploaded seven kits this week for different people, some of who were down there in the audience who were struggling with it. It's become a lot an awful lot easier than it was. You do need a little bit of computer skill to save a file and upload a file and it happens very fast. It used to take half an hour and if you turned your back on it it would crash, but now it's done in a minute or so. A lot of people talk to me about their DNA matches and their relatives and they say third cousin and I think oh you have a paper trail to this person and you know you have common great-great grandparents. Please distinguish when you're talking about the estimated third and fourth cousins and fifth cousins that you get from the DNA companies. There are very crude estimates. There's a very weak correlation once you go beyond about third cousin between the amount of DNA you share with the person and your actual genealogical relationship with that person. I think it's commonly agreed that there are biases in the estimated relationships. In the ancestry DNA estimated relationships most people find that the true relationship when they discover it is a little bit closer than the estimate. For the family tree DNA estimated relationships most people find that the true relationship is further out than the estimated relationship. So don't jump to the conclusion that those estimates are correct. So I like to concentrate on the bigger half identical regions as I call them. They're called blocks, segments, all sorts of other words which I find a little bit misleading. When I first got my results back three years ago I looked at my list of anything with about 400 matches at that stage and I saw two names that I recognize and I've no idea how I'm related to either of them and in one case I'm a slightly better idea because of people who submitted DNA subsequently. The other is Jared Corker and who spoke earlier in the week is down here in the front row so I said I just pick this as an example and I want to show you how much noise there is in the total amount of shared DNA as well. So I said get match to use the thresholds that family tree DNA uses when calculating total shared DNA, 500 snips and 1 centi morgan and we have all these tiny little ranges but if you eyeball down along you'll see down here there's two numbers that stick out and from a sum 10 there's a 13.3 with 3,773 snips that's not there by chance that's there because there's a common ancestor somewhere a way back we have no idea it could be seven or eight generations back even at that level. All the rest is just statistical noise you can ignore it. The other thing to look at in this one to one comparison it's based on 677,571 snips because we were both tested with the same chip that looks in all the same locations in our DNA. Ancestry is now using a different chip from family tree DNA 23 and me I think has always used a different chip you will see there might be only 300,000 or 400,000 used in the comparison so you won't have so much of these noisy half identical regions between 500 and 1,000 but you have a lot of noisy ones under 500 if you're looking at less. Also use the GetMatch Tier 1 facilities here's the GetMatch homepage. When you register and log in you see how many users are online there was only 55 when I logged in earlier on. Do it early in the morning Irish time the site gets busy and slow later in the day because most of the users are in the US and they're only getting up about now we've been at it for hours. These are the free tools the one to many matches and the one to one matches are the ones you use most often but down at the bottom you have these additional Tier 1 utilities and thereby far the most powerful and the ones I found the most helpful and I encourage people to sign up at $10 a month at least for one month for a trial subscription see what you get out of them and you sign up some for way down at the bottom join Tier 1 or you can sign up and do a monthly offer and you will if you think it's going to be worth it for the rest of your life and if you're sure that the GetMatch website is going to be up and running which has been very good recently in the early days it struggled but they've made huge improvements. So if I go back to the main page the matching segment search I have written some excel macros to actually tidy these up I encourage you if you've any experience with excel spreadsheets they take a long time to run save the output in the spreadsheet and you can add notes to the spreadsheet so I did one earlier I can select that I can copy it I can go to my text editor I can paste it that gets rid of all the formatting I can select it I can copy it and I can go back to excel and I can say on my personal menu there's a thing there for matching segment search paste that it runs a macro it pastes it in it filters the columns and I hope you can put over on the left hand side a notes column where you can add notes about each match so that helps you to be a lot more organized without using anything complicated I won't say that for now I'll come back to that later if you want to use those macros you can download them and you might have to build around with them a little bit or you can try and record a macro yourself so ultimately what we want to do with these things is phasing and triangulation we each have 22 paternal chromosomes 22 maternal chromosomes if you see you have a half identical region with somebody you don't know on a particular chromosome you don't know whether they match your paternal chromosome or your maternal chromosome so you have to look for a third party where there's a known relationship on your paternal or maternal side and they also match the stranger in the same region and then you can say that's a paternal match or that's a maternal match so let me go back to one that I opened earlier this is my matching segment search here we are in chromosome 10 I match Thomas Miller and Mary Piazza in overlapping regions at the start of chromosome 10 I don't know whether they match each other or not the next thing to do to see do all three of us have a common ancestor is take that kit number copy it onto your clipboard take that kit number copy it onto your clipboard go back to get match one to one comparison one to one compare this will probably say I've been logged out because I logged in an hour ago so we'll go back and we log in again that's the really annoying thing about get match is it's very unstable in terms of logging you out if you use the back buttons or if you go away for a while so we'll go back in and go to one to one compare and I have this lovely little tune that I recommend everybody use because you'll be doing these double copy and paste all the time it's called ditto it remembers everything that you had in your clipboard since you told it to start recording and hopefully that will paste in the first number sorry and then I tab down and I go back to ditto and I go down to the second thing and the clipboard and I paste that in and usually I say in case it's just under the thresholds we look at everything and I put in 501 and up comes where where we were I matched this person did match each other in chromosome one I matched them on chromosome 10 at the start they don't match each other at the start of chromosome 10 they both match me at the start of chromosome 10 that means one is related to my paternal chromosome the other is related to my maternal chromosome I don't know which is which as I know proven relationship to each of them another thing you'd find yes they do match each other then you have what we call a triangulation group um so we don't need that anymore we'll come to that one later a triangulation group is uh there's my definition of triangulation group here we are sorry I went down too far it's a group of three or more people all of whom match the others on the same region of the same chromosome therefore that region of that chromosome came down to everybody in the group from a single common ancestor so let me look at another spreadsheet with a lovely group I put together group of people from county claire um some of whom I encouraged to swap myself some of whom had done it already some of whom were encouraged by various surname projects and plan gatherings there's five people in this group Bill, Carl, Oliver, Kevin and Ed Bill and Carl live in America I'm going to try and anonymize these things by referring to everyone by first cousin by first names for privacy reasons Bill and Carl are in America they're known first cousins Ed is in North America somewhere he's their own second cousin once removed so that's one group of known relatives Kevin and Oliver are in claire we know their third cousins we don't know how they're related to the other three we know they have ancestral surnames in common so here on chromosome 10 again we have half identical regions anything from three centimorgans up to 21 centimorgans between Bill and Ed from the American branch and Oliver and Kevin from the county claire branch they all overlap some of us overlapping regions begin at 127 million something others end at 128 million in the case of Ed and Kevin you would throw that out as noise normally it's only three centimorgans it's only 500 snips but because it overlaps with known relatives it's highly significant so this tells us these four people two from an american group two from a claire group must have a common ancestor from whom some of them inherited 21 centimorgans one of them only inherited three centimorgans or two only inherited three centimorgans in common the problem is the ancestral surnames the group in america have two lines of maranan ancestry and one line of clancy ancestry Oliver and Claire has one line of maranan ancestry one line of clancy ancestry Kevin and Claire has no maranan ancestry he has two lines of clancy ancestry but by looking at the occupations and the locations and the dates it quickly became obvious there's a clancy ancestor common to all five of these people they lived in roughly the same townland between Kilrush and Kilki the two clancies that the two brick wall clancy ancestors were both born in the first decade of the 1800s they both appear in the early parish records for Kilki which unfortunately were never microfilmed having children in the 1830s and into the 1840s with the same townland address so we're pretty certain there were brother and sister one married a carpenter the other had several sons who were carpenters the female had sons who were carpenters the male had son-in-law who was carpenter they all lived in the same towns so i'm happy to say we have found a common ancestor for two groups of people who did not know they were related and they're only fourth cousins all done through dna that was my first example the second example is the one that i put in the title of the talk the ups and downs i put downs with an e because that's how the surname is spelled in clear i told maris this story year ago tomorrow and he said i'm booking you for next year for ggi 2016 you can tell that story so i better tell it it's a story that involves a couple of births out of wedlock as a lot of stories in the world of dna do dna has really left the genie out of the bottle as regards adoptions or any any family secrets if you want to resolve those cases if you want to meet the part of the family that was separated by adoption dna is the way to go if you want to keep them secret then don't put your dna out in the public domain so this was an amazing string of coincidences i do an occasional professional genealogy job i did an inheritance search for a man called marnan who had died in 2014 and i got to know his cousin who was one of the heirs and he said i have a pedigree of uh my mother's side of the family would you like to copy and he gave me this six a three pages of the downs family of west clare and some of them were distant cousins of mine through other lines so i was very happy to have it uh last year within a short number of weeks the 10th of june i i checked the post on facebook uh the clear root society was approached by a man we've got a 50th birthday present from his wife of his first ever trip to Ireland to visit where his grandfather was born um um forget was it his his grandfather i think actually died on a visit home to Ireland um that was the famous story of the man who was laid for his own funeral but in the very early cases where a man was flown from clare to america to be buried in america and the funeral was all set and the plane was delayed and that i think the funeral had to go ahead and he arrived halfway through or something um but anyway nine days after that i went to get matched to check my one to many match list to see had i any new matches and this lady called dana downs showed up with the biggest half identical region i had seen so far without a with a stranger 44.6 centimorgans and chromosome 12 and i said she has to be closely related with something that big i found a few bigger ones that i haven't managed to explain since then so i sent her an email straight away and it took about two days before i got an invitation to her family tree and ancestry uh which was three quarters very complete with with a big blank um the 8th of july about three weeks later i get an email from somebody else who found me on get match bill brown he matched my first cousin on the mayo side nothing to do with the clare side of the family but a small match 10.3 centimorgans and i surprise even bothering me about a small match like that that's so far back we'll never find the common ancestor but i looked at his one to many match list and here he was with dana who had contacted me a few weeks before two very big half identical regions 30 centimorgans and 19 centimorgans and i said this guy's even more closely related to dana than i am and eventually we put our heads together we worked out the family tree these three people who'd made contact with me within less than a month were descended from immigrants called downs who'd all immigrated from the same house and there uh two of them had gone to dna because they had brick walls because there was a birth house out of wedlock um but we quickly worked out bill and dana or double third cousins once removed and my clancy ancestors and their downs ancestors were near neighbors so to look back at dana's story her grandfather was her brick wall she knew his parents' names he had come from new york city to texas on what they called an orphan train from a foundling asylum in new york city at the age of about four or five in 1904 and 1905 to foster parents with him he lived very happily and they did well they were german immigrants and in the 1920s they wanted to go back to germany and they wanted to bring their son their foster son there was no legal adoption at the time and they had to get him a passport so there's a big file in the ancestry passport applications uh why should we give a passport to this guy who doesn't know who he is he came with the names of his parents but he certainly wasn't the child of the people who were trying to bring him to germany as their son the parents were henry clancy and kathryn downs i have a henry clancy my great grandmother's first cousin in my family tree he married a kathryn downs so i said i didn't know they had a son so we went and we did a little bit of research and we found that kathryn downs emigrated on the teutonic the end of 1899 she's here on line 22 kath downs aged 18 a servant from quaren funny little q quaren is usually spelled for the double or but only one or bound for new york her fare was paid by her cousin don't know yet who the cousin was but the address is given there by 1-8 lexington avenue new york uh then the next question is rendered henry emigrate henry sailed on the last day of the 1800s on the lucania by coincidence he's also line 22 handwriting isn't great ancestry transcribed it as h-e-w or y so we had to be a little clever with wild cards to find him he's 22 male single i'm sure but that says birthplace is given as kill rush which is the major town about eight or ten miles away from where he was born wasn't born in the town he changed his destination i think that scroll says terhote indiana because that's where they ended up paid his own passage he was going to his cousin somebody healy in terhote indiana i still haven't figured out how he was related to the healy's or the hayleys as they're spelled on the census so what next raymond is born in january 1900 we found him in the new york roundling asylum there he actually looked at the line number line 72 i want to zoom in which is there there he is raymond downs white male january 1900 i think that says age 412 or something those columns are all dittos unknown place of birth unknown place of birth of father unknown place of birth of mother unknown but i have no doubt that raymond downs born in january 1900 was conceived in county clare by the time he was born both of his parents had gone to new york and the new york roundling asylum was essentially serving the role of the mother and baby home for county clare at that stage where was kate downs in 1900 she's in the census the same week in the same institution as her baby but enumerated on a different page line 91 down at the bottom here downs kate white female born may 1880 age 20 single i got this bit wrong born in new york to new york parents she was a nurse and i think it's too much of a coincidence that that was a baby whose mother was kate downs in this asylum and there was an adult called kate downs in the same asylum on the same date and she was probably working for her keep where was harry what had the father done but he deserted her and he'd gone to indiana and again i forgot to check my line number line 68 off the top of the page this is almost impossible to read i don't know how we found it can't see harry he'd now changed from henry to curie to harry a border in whose house the hallies the same people he was going to on the passenger list april 1874 age 26 born in ireland parents born in ireland immigrated only six months ago an alien a car blacksmith so that was the family split up in 1900 but i had always known that henry had come back from indiana to new york city to marry the next door neighbor from home in 1904 so they obviously kept in contact it wasn't a complete breakdown and they seemed to have had a happy life together into her home where they had one more daughter born in 1905 she never married the family has died out i don't know whether she ever knew that she had a full brother who'd gone to texas but now through dna i'm in contact with my fourth cousin our most recent common ancestors are hugh cansey and marcella blackwood we lived in calard the same townland that henry and gathrin were born in time is getting short so i'm going to skip through some of the more technical examples just show you some of the basis this is another one i said you often find a double relationship this is a case where we found a triangulation involving somebody who did dna somebody who knew was a cousin on his father's side somebody who knew is a cousin on his mother's side michael and martin have 32 centi morgan's martin is the cousin on the mother's side ann is the cousin on the father's side they share 11 centi morgan's on the same part of chromosome four and michael and his paternal cousin ann share eight centi morgan's so why do we match up with a paternal and a maternal cousin in the same part of the same chromosome there must be a double relationship so we ran another of the tools on getmatch there's a gun here are your parents related and we came up with on chromosome one michael's maternal chromosome one and his paternal chromosome one matched each other for 23 centi morgan's his parents probably didn't know they were related they may only before the fifth or sixth cousins with the dna revealed it so you'll often get these little puzzles next example i love this one this is one of my californian members of the claire roots project said can you get me dna from some of my fourth cousins at home in claire he might have third cousins we haven't traced any we've traced fourth cousins and the oral tradition that i took down years ago from one of my county claire informants who sadly is long depart who did a brilliant memory for family history was that there was a farm that belonged to a no d man and he had two daughters and one married a conal and one married a lynch and he divided the farm up between them and i actually confirmed that in the tithe of plotman book where i find michael lynch and pat conal living right beside each other so we got dna from claire who's descended from her mother was a lynch and on the dna databases we found a man called edd his mother was a no conal descendants of this same house the same farm that was divided up in 1820 and their fourth cousins according to the family tree but they had this huge 50 centi morgan match so we know that 50 centi morgan match shared by the two fourth cousins descended from the two od sisters must have come down from those two od sisters born well married around 1820 born around 1800 so we're going back into the 1700s practically here so we looked to see did anybody else match claire and edd on this region where they match each other and anybody who did must be related either to the original mr od or his wife whose surname we don't know and we found this gentleman called michael and he matched both of them between 17 million and 38 million and chromosome 8 so bang in the middle for 26 or 27 centi morgan's and his name is lynch so we can be pretty sure from the dna that he's descended from the od couple and because his surname is lynch we can be pretty sure that he's descended from the daughter who married the lynch not any of the other children all he knew was that his grandfather was eugen lynch born somewhere in ireland somewhere around 1869 we can now tell him thanks to dna this is the townland and this is the farm that your lynch ancestor came from but michael and his three siblings are coming over next month to mavin to meet the cousins that they found through dna a few more adoption cases my top match three years ago when i first got my results was a lady called anthia in england she was up adopted as far back as 1938 in pretty horrendous circumstances which i probably shouldn't go into uh i've been working as hard as i can with her to find out she was abandoned as a baby basically to find out who abandoned her and who were her parents and three years hard work later we've got as far as we think we have found some second cousins for her three people her all descended from the same great grandparents her almost certainly two of anthia's eight great grandparents there's a long way to go to find the other six there's a long way to go to find out which child or grandchild of the identified couple where her grandparents and her parents sometimes it's very easy the next boom is just ridiculously easy another of the active members of the Claire roots project lives and the antipodes will say and again he said to me can you find me a fourth cousin in terror that will provide a dna sample so i showed up he said i'm paying i said this gentleman is a bit tight with money we really should try and make him pay and he said no no no um so i got his dna we sent it back results came back uploaded to get match his top match will turned out to be an adopt d looking for her birth parents it took me less than an hour to tell her who her birth parents were um but haven't gone public in that story yet so i don't want to say anything more about it um other story a more complicated adoption story here in Ireland my fifth cousin was adopted i found him and his son through the dna websites and we'd compared notes and things just weren't adding up the information the adoption agency was going through the adoption agency to try and unite the adoptee with the birth family uh there were half siblings out there and at the same time he was working with the dna information to see what he could find out if he didn't have the information from the adoption agency and things just weren't adding up and eventually through dna he met somebody who's here in this room who was able to tell him i know all the gossip from that area this is what happened this girl got in trouble with this guy and that's where your father came from and it fitted perfectly with the dna evidence so eventually the adoption agency came back and said oops we got our files confused we gave you the wrong information and produced a file which exactly tallyed what had come up through the dna and through the local gossip network and of course everybody knew the story and the locality except the half siblings which is usually the case this is another one that i've given several talks about before but again dna came to the rescue uh there was an inheritance case back in the 1920s for a man called tj talty died in florida leaving what became known as the talty millions it was never millions it was right before the 1929 crash so it was a lot less than millions by the time it was distributed and a lot less again the apologies to the lawyers in the room by the time the lawyers had taken their cut out of the store the estate but ultimately various hearings were heard and all the old people were interviewed and the family trees were put together and it was decided that the nearest next of kin of tj talty who died in florida were his first cousins scattered around the world my great-grandfather was one of them and they got some few pounds quite a few pounds by the standards of the time several hundred pounds each and back i've always been interested in this story and back in 2007 i found a girl in australia christian asking questions about her ancestor mary talty tj talty was the son of timothy talty and a margaret macnamara he emigrated with his parents to lowl massachusetts when he was a teenager um what's going on here uh this is the marriage certificate that christian found for her talty ancestor bottom one on the page marriage in 1868 in santerston victoria donald macaskill married mary talty bachelor spinster he was from scotland she was from miltown mulbay county claire uh 25 and 22 living in kerrang in victoria her parents were timothy talty and margaret macnamara and he was a storekeeper so i scratched my head and said could there really be two families with such an unusual combination of names and my cousin found a file in the attic with all the papers from the inheritance case and one document said the talties had a farm in the townland of knock and oldman and they also had a shop in the town in miltown mulbay and they moved back and forth between the two and some children were baptized in one parish and some were baptized in the other parish and i said i think the wrong eras got the money because if there was a sister in australia with a dynasty of descendants they were closer related than the first cousins so christian eventually sent in her dna and we compared it with myself and my first cousin anthon who's down there somewhere and in her top four matches when we sort them by longest block for anthon and myself so no doubt now the wrong eras got the money and the christian is our fourth cousin twice removed we all match on chromosome nine between 85 million and 103 million and this is what shattered my faith in the ethnicity estimates that we get she has her two two of her four top matches are 100 per cent british isles according to family tree dna christian is an amalgam of many different nationalities 47 percent eastern europe 43 percent western and central europe seven percent finland and northern cyberia three percent asian minor no mention of british isles so your relative matches can have completely different ethnicity estimates from your own ethnicity estimates and again there's a double relationship there which i don't have time to go into but the dna doesn't always tell the truth or at least you can twist the dna to tell stories that come out not to be the truth and my paternal grandfather had a cat ancestor from east clare from six mile bridge and there's a cat family that i know in west clare around kilki so this man called joe showed up as a match to me i knew his mother who was a cat and we matched for 10 and a half centi morgan's and chromosome 18 and i knew his cats were in west clare for 15 generations back mine were in east clare so there was any relationship it was going to be quite distant and this was all we might expect and cat was our only common surname so i said great and there's actually another little bit of evidence from traditional genealogy there was a famous lady called georgina frost who took a case for her right as a woman to be a clark of petty sessions all the way to the house of lords in the 1910s up to 1920 and got the law changed and she was elected by the local magistrates to the position of clark of petty sessions three times and the nomination was sent to double in castle who sent it back and said this isn't good enough you can't elect a woman have another election and they elected her again and again and eventually she got her job but one of the magistrates who elected her was the chairman of the county council who ex officio was a magistrate and he was none other than joseph kelly kett the grandfather after whom my dna match joe was named so i always wondered was this the local politician making a stand for women's rights or was this the cousin from west clare supporting the cousin from east clare and i said well it must be the latter because we have this little dna match and then i went to jj who happens to be joe's fourth cousin also descended by the from the kets and he wanted help with his family tree and i said i'll help you if you give me your dna and we sent it home and back it came and here we have a little overlap from us on 18 again um only 6.4 centi morgan's for all three of us match so that definitely says these two have common ancestors um john kett and mary o'connell they match each other they match me in the same region surely i'm related to john kev or mary o'connell case proved then i got another cousin um this was another one for the man in california wanted dna from the cousin in clare and i facilitated it and i looked at her results and here we are in chromosome 18 again uh between 10 million and 12 million she matches joe the man with the cat mother me the man with the cat great great great grandfather jj the other man with the cat ancestor but she's related to me not through my grandfather through whom my cat dna should come but through my grandmother so there's some other common ancestor back there through whom we all inherited this segment and chromosome 18 uh at another similar case kevin is my fourth cousin our common great great great grandmother is mary o'connor i found kevin had a match with a man called tom comer not a very common name and i had been in correspondence with a man called tom comer who had relations in west lair the west back near luped peninsula anywhere further west than where you are in west lair is known as the west so i said this is great looked at tom's tree oh he has an o'connor ancestor as well the o'connor ancestor married a man from the west um they went to sandy hoek and kinetica for half west lair emigrated back in the 19th century so i wrote to tom i wrote to the person who was managing tom's dna kit and said i think we have a connection through the o'connor's reply came back no this is a different tom comer turned out he was related to kevin on the other side of kevin's family uh you're going to shut me up yeah um which of the that's one's line okay just just for cindy uh a surname that came into some of those double matches that i skipped earlier was the maranan family my cousin cindy down there has been adopted as a genealogist of the maranan family it's like talty it's a name that there's about 300 of them in the census returns every single one is from county claire if you're not from county claire you've probably never heard of these surnames there's other names like concidine and conheady where you immediately know they're from county claire um the homeland is supposed to be a townland called caracody me hall maranan is a great traditional musician he's written a song called between miltown and sweet and his diamond because he was so caught up with explaining for a caracody once and there were other branches further south down towards kill rush area townlands of schra and kill mcduan and i talked to another great musician who's a maranan descendant there's an obviously musical gene in the family and he said well we always heard nine brothers left after the famine and came south two or three parishes south towards schra and kill mcduan i'm not sure which family was talking about it maybe the 1740 famine rather than the 1845 famine because by grippett's valuation in 1855 there's already about seven maranan families in schra but we can find remarkably large segments of dna which persist through many many generations megan and therese are both maranan descendants one is from the townland of schra well they're both in america but one's ancestor can be traced back to schra to a peter maranan the other can be traced back to a completely different peter maranan and kill mcduan they're not the same man they're both called peter they're obviously not brothers they may be first cousins or uncle and nephew or something these two ladies are no closer than sixth cousins but they have a 69.5 centi morgan segment which shared dna at that distance we're pretty sure but it's not from any more recent common ancestor that it has come down through the maranans maybe all the way back to caracody before the 1740 famine for all we know i'll show you this matrix this is the reedy dynasty this is a comparison matrix from dead match everybody except the person in the first row and the first column is a proven descendant of a michael reedy and a margaret meloni who lived in tolly crime between emison calrash and panticlaren i was going to ask you who's the other one out there and i told you who's the other one out the one in the first row and the first column is in new zealand she has a death certificate for her emigrant ancestor daniel reedy which says his father was another daniel reedy and his mother was a margaret meloni presumably another margaret meloni um i don't think looking at those numbers that we're looking at somebody who's more distantly related to everybody in the inner columns than they are to each other i think the death certificate is wrong and that the father was michael and that she's from the same family but that just shows you how many people we now have for couples who lived in the mid 1800s on the dna database some of those i recruited some of them recruited each other some of them we just found as dna matches and we're able to give them a couple of extra generations back to the common ancestor and skip the marriage dispensation stories dna is a bit like the marriage dispensation uh anybody who's gone through irish catholic marriage registers will see obtente dispensazione in corto at corto grado consiguin natate etc so you know you have two ancestors who were third cousins who married each other but where's the piece of paper that sets out the family tree telling us who would become an ancestor of the two third cousins who wanted to marry it's a bit like dna you're just scratching your head and wondering is there a document somewhere in a diocesan archive that will tell me these details and just to show my faith in ethnicity has been completely restored since i started recruiting people in west clare i can now tell you by looking at a list of dna matches that person's a hundred percent west clear i got a result for a man during the week um we don't know much of a family tree for he's in his eighties and his great-grandparents were all married before civil registration i looked through the top 30 matches the first page of family tree dna matches that were seven people that morning that i knew when i did appointment to meet another of them visiting from america that evening so that made eight six of them were people i swabbed myself got their dna myself but only one of them is a man that's a known relative of the person whose dna results have come in we still have to figure out exactly who the common ancestor is with the other seven but the roo west clare dna and i did these calculations some time ago um worked out from the population of ireland 12 generations back and a little bit of statistics i think any two irish people have a 95 percent chance of being 12 cousins or closer i think if you narrow it down to a county like county clare it's a 95 percent chance for nine cousins or closer you narrow it down to a little narrow area like an island or like the luped peninsula everybody married somebody from within 10 miles and most of that 10 mile radius is either the shannon estuary or the atlantic ocean that was a very small pool to choose from i think we're probably all if they're six cousins are closer there's even one lady in the clare roots project um who when i looked at her matches with other people within the project when that worked the advanced matching has been broken and family tree dna for weeks she matched more than 10 percent of the people within the clare roots project and theory we're only supposed to match about 10 percent of our fifth cousins so i think the inference is she's closer on average than fifth cousin to everyone else in clare and there's a great story um the mark Humphreys of dublin city university came and talked about in kililou for the millennium of the battle of clontark a couple of years ago we're all descended from brian buru we had the mail line representative here for the first two days conor o brian the present lord in chicquinn but if you think back 30 generations 10 generations back you have a thousand ancestors in your family tree another 10 generations back each of those as a thousand that's a million slots to fill 30 generations back to brian buru another thousand each that's a billion slots to fill in your family tree there's going to be a lot of repetition anybody who was around 30 generations back and has descendants today is an ancestor of everyone today so dna may just be telling us a little bit more than what we know anyway we're all related we all have common ancestors great and if you want any further reading there's a link there at the bottom to my general document on everything i've learned about dna in the last three years this will be on your website this document is on my website pwolder.info forward slash uppercase ggi 2016 now um paddy you'll be around for the rest of the day so a few questions for paddy that please do come up and ask them unfortunately a little bit over time so uh we're going to go on to the next presentation in the next two minutes but uh thanks paddy for a wonderful presentation and it's great to see west clear being connected genetically in ways that we probably never imagined about three or four years ago so thanks very much