 Great, we're back live on Facebook and we're going to have this panel discussion now about how along from the last presentation on these local DMX projects in Ireland we're going to be talking about four such projects and it gives me great pleasure to welcome our expert panel. Now one of the members was going to join us remotely from Portland, Maine but unfortunately cannot and it is something like five o'clock in the morning over there, I can't believe it. But we are joined by two members of the Northern Ireland Family History Society and Johnson and Martin McDowell. We're joined by Paddy Waldrum who runs the Clare Roots Society and of course we're joined by Martin Curley who runs the North East Galway DNA Project. Please can you give a warm welcome for Paddy. What the format is going to be, everybody's going to do a just a five minute overview of their particular project and then we're going to interrogate them furiously to try and get as much information out of them as possible so we can all go away and do exactly what they're doing and hopefully that way we'll have a local parish project in every county in Ireland and of course there's about five, well there's probably about 10 or 20 parishes in every county in Ireland at least so we need to get all of those parishes covered. So I'm going to start off with the work of the main gale top people, the main Irish at the main Irish Heritage Centre. They have a DNA and genealogy project that is run by a team headed by Deb Sullivan Gellerson and Margaret Feeney McComb. This is a quote from Thomas Jefferson, our ancestors possessed a right which nature has given to all men of departing from the country in which chance not choice has placed them and the main Irish Heritage Centre project is designed to reconnect our ancestors to their beloved Ireland and bring gratitude to them for their bravery as they were forced from their struggling homeland. Now the main Irish Heritage Centre is located in Portland, the main Irish Heritage Centre was actually born through the Catholic Church's decision to close St Dominic's Catholic Parish Church. Parish largely comprised of the Portland main Irish community which acquired the building in 2003 and soon after that the main Irish Heritage Centre Group began meeting. So the lovely location and here you see a picture of some of the team and they actually came over here to Genetic Genealogy Ireland about three years ago now and they have a their presentation on the Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube channel. So they have this wonderful location of Parish, an old parish church where the volunteer genealogists get together and they build up their own library, they also have a meeting room and people can come in and they will actually help them trace their ancestors back to Ireland and of course a lot of the Irish who went to Maine came from the West Galway area extending from Galway City all the way around over to Kifton in the West and they've been using DNA to connect people to their past. So they've had several trips over here where they go out to West Galway and they literally have swabbed farmers outstanding in their field. The farmer was standing out in his field and they walked out and said would you do the DNA test and said yes but be quick I have powers to milk and so they did and they've collected a lot of information from that particular part of Galway. So the focus is definitely on Galway because a lot of Galway people went en masse to Maine and the late 1900s more than 27,000 people in Great Portland claimed Irish ancestry mostly from the Connemara region of County Galway and they're specifically interested in the areas around Connemara and Joyce County and you can see them there in red and in green and they use family tree DNA as the DNA test in company and but they do accept DNA results from autosomal Y and mitochondrial DNA. So all three types of DNA are invited into the project but the majority of the 1200 people in the project are autosomal DNA tests so that'll be family finder and here is a picture of how the project has evolved over the course of time and you can see this huge increase in numbers from 2011 up until the present day and that's that's partly due to the sterling efforts they make in going out and publicizing the project but once the project gets going it develops a momentum of its own so you see people talking to other people and then other people join because of word of mouth we all know the word of mouth is so important especially in rural areas so they encourage dialogue on the main building of Irish DNA page within family tree DNA by activating the activity feed so it's like a family tree DNA's version of Facebook where you actually just it's just the Facebook it's like Facebook just for the project members so that's the activity feed on family tree DNA they also have meetings they have workshops in-house and off-site including what is the main guilt of DNA project all about how to get started with DNA testing how to use the family tree DNA tools how to transfer results from other testing companies how best to communicate with DNA matches the importance of adding known family trees to the database how to incorporate the use of jet match into your research how to start your DNA project and getting started with a genealogy database and I think that's probably true for most people as well most of these project will require people to meet and an education outreach type of approach they take so the project characteristics and goals participants have grandparents have great grandparents who immigrated from Ireland the geographical focus is Ireland and a Galway Ireland working vein and they're expanding their network to other locations where the Galway diaspora settled such as Massachusetts Pennsylvania and Chicago so you see it's beginning to evolve and as it evolves it stretches its reach further afield there are strong ties with centers in Galway the Karna Heritage Center the Spiddle Heritage Center the Letter Mullum Heritage Center these are local heritage centers in Ireland that have established close ties with the diaspora Irish centers over on the other side of Atlanta they have a massive genealogy database and it is currently around about 135 thousand people in their genealogical database so it's a huge family tree they do DNA testing locally and in Galway so both important name and in Galway project welcomes the global Galway diaspora we offer in-person consultations giving individual assistance in-house workshops and training building confidence trust in our members they encourage participants to engage with their matches through in-person and online communication so just how do they work with the DNA results they encourage their DNA members who are local to come into the center for a review of their DNA matches and to bring with them their family trees they ask the members to admit what they wish of their research genealogy to the database and because of the size of the database and the DNA connections to our DNA project they've been able to identify people within the community or matches to one another they provide email addresses encouraged to make contact with DNA matches that they know have a keen interest in family history so it's all about sharing and collaboration of genealogical information um there are there are more in coin as one more in coin Norris is one of the members of the team and she's an ambassador to the carna emmergan center in carna which opened just about two years ago or so and they leave kits with the genealogy volunteer there and that volunteer in carna encourages local people to do the DNA testing they've also got contacts in Ireland who seek out and test people in their homes to solve particular mysteries so that they're doing targeted DNA testing as well and the database includes people from Boston, Norwood, Massachusetts with Galway routes many have bygone relatives who have Portland main connections and they've been able to solve quite a few non paternity events using the DNA project and the Galway genealogy database so there's the website of the carna emigration diaspora center it's all very new it was only built within the last five years and it is that particular part of Galway is now really quite remote and rural and in fact like many places in Ireland there has been a massive depopulation of that rural area over the course of the years since the great famine future goals of the genealogy and DNA project more DNA testing in Ireland and American cluster cities network and collaborate with other heritage centers including those in Galway helping them to start their own projects and continue to search for funding for more DNA testing publishing and outreach and increase the participants in our DNA project and continue to add to our genealogy database and in Ireland they test people who are suspected cousins or collect DNA samples from locations many of us of the people in the project would share to discover new insums tips they also look at at ship lists as well they test clusters in the area such as Calo Finnish and Joyce County in Connemara and they've tested lettermelons, spiddle, carna, lettermore, the aranilas and people in Ireland on our project on average have three to five pages of autism matches that are second to third or second to fourth cousin range sharing anywhere between 50 to 187 centimorgans and these are people from whom we already have family trees so you can see what's happening here is that they've concentrated on a rural Irish community that was relatively isolated and what happens in isolated rural communities cousin marriage custom and you get a degree of endogamy and you get suddenly all the neighbors are matching each other on the DNA and this is wonderful from the point of view of the DNA establishing well you know it shows that we are 100 centimorgans we must be related somehow let's look at the family trees so this is a wonderful crowd sourcing project and this is just the way that this particular group may have actually done it so they'd love to spread the word like I said they've been in many they've presented here they've been in many local papers they've been on TV shows they've been consultants on who do you think you are and they've used Facebook a lot as well and they have various Facebook groups of pages such as the Connemara genealogy page the main Irish Heritage Centre page and the Galway Irish of Maine and New England page this is the crew from answersfree.com interviewing a local news celebrity and discussing his DNA results so again they're getting on television they're publicizing what they do spreading the word and they have had many accomplishments that they can boast about including solving adoption mysteries they were involved in the Anthea Ring case as well and wrote countless numbers of local Maine Mainers and connected with cousins within their community but also back in Ireland and in Galway so those are the contact details of the Maine Irish Airtop project that probably was a little bit more than five minutes but it gives you an idea of what the wonderful work that they are doing in Maine now we're going to switch over to Paddy Waldron and Paddy you're going to present on the Clare Roots Society so that can be moved over here so that should recognize in a second and this mic yeah you can use that try and remember the computer with one hand and the mic with the other Morris sent each of us in this panel list and I counted up this morning there were 24 questions on the list we said you have five to eight minutes to answer them so I put up on my website in this page with the answers to the 24 questions and I'm going to fly through it and you can read the bits that I skate later on I have shared the link on the Genetic Genealogy Ireland Facebook group already and it's just bwaldron.info GGI 2018 so I am actually an administrator or a co-administrator of seven different autosomal related projects on family tree DNA Morris is to blame for a lot and all of our lives here I suppose but especially in mine I heard him talk five years ago in the IGRS and finally the light bulb went off and I started to understand DNA and he came down to NS in November 2015 to talk to the Clare Roots Society and said these people in Northern Ireland have a project you should do something like this for Clare but the next thing the project was up and running of the Clare Roots Society actually wanted nothing to do with it so I'm administering it on my own I was also roped into the Clare project where I just left in the background it's a good idea with a project like this to have two administrators and I dropped out in the morning there'd be a co-administrator left to continue reaching my projects I'm also involved in five surname projects Clancy because I have a Clancy great grandmother Durkin because I have three Durkin great grandparents or three Durkin great grandparents and I think maybe five Durkin great great grandparents some not proven yet I'm involved in the Marinand project with my dear cousin Cindy Wood over here this is the Marinand project when it's printed out on the wall you can come and have a look later I think it's 105 get match kits I had to take over the McNamara project because I have a McNamara grandmother and it was going to die when worldfamilies.net was closed down because of GDQ or last May I think it was and I gave a talk here two years ago and that gentleman down there James O'Dee was the first one up afterwards and he stuffed his card into my hand and said I need to talk to you and the next thing I was co-administrator with James at the O'Dee's surname project and sitting beside James we have Shane O'Dee who thought he was an O'Dee up to DNA proof he's one of the Royal O'Brien's directly descended from Brian Baruch so somewhere about 500 to 700 years ago we have discovered an O'Brien became an O'Dee I quote the descendant of royalty in the audience of course we're all descendants of royalty if we go back to thousand years but we don't all have the DNA proof or the genealogical proof and that I send out a standard email when I find somebody on one of the DNA websites that I think should be in the Care Roots project telling them to join I illustrate in the email and on the home page of the project that there are benefits of membership and responsibilities of membership if you want to gain something from a project you should be prepared to share as I say do unto others as you wouldn't then do unto yourself show them your family trees show them your match lists and then they will hopefully learn to reciprocate. Martin talked about his very local parish projects there is probably not as big a county as Goldway but it's still a very long way from Mount Shannon in the north west northeast to Lupe in the southwest and I do think that a smaller area like the poor low union or the parish might be a better basis for a geographical project. There were over a thousand members in the project at the moment that is more than the family sheet DNA interface is really designed to handle so I think it's got too big I like to search the member list with control f on my keyboard but if there's 1,100 members then you can only see a thousand at a time you have two pages to search instead of one and dispose everything down. But we can try and run projects with the other DNA websites Ancestry DNA the Marinans in particular have used Ancestry DNA through one account there's access to 143 kits most of Marinan ancestry but the tools are not nearly as good as the Family Tree DNA tools as I said the Marinans are also used in Getmatch and you can use Getmatch to run your own project it doesn't have the nice interface of Family Tree DNA but it has twos the Family Tree DNA does not have. The genealogy database it's in Ancestry Quest there is my pedigree chart there are over 130,000 people now in this database I started it back in 1987 and it grew slowly for many years and there's more and more records have come online and I found more and more relatives in the DNA databases it has exploded in size there's about 1750 people in this database and I have found in the online DNA databases so I can quickly say tell me all the people in this database are related to this individual and are in one or other DNA databases and then start looking at shared matches and things like that. I will also keep an Excel spreadsheet to try and keep track of the kits that I have investigated kits that people write to me about kits in my projects and I record for each individual whether it's one of my own relatives all relationship the name the Getmatch kit number the record number from my own database which DNA company the email address if I have the Facebook profile if it's somebody I find in one of the genealogy groups on Facebook the Ancestry DNA details so that I can click straight through to a pedigree chart on Ancestry which you can't really do quite so easily on any of the other DNA websites. I said to give you one example Donna had a great example this morning of a line through one of her great DNA achievements so we had a discussion on the county Claire Facebook group recently about hackers we started out in the town of Lendham Clover Hill near Six Mile Bridge as I said the county is too big people chipped in who had her ancestors from all over the country one lady came in and said my ancestor had a Michael Brooks who married in New York in 1901 was the son of a woman called I found the marriage record in New York in 1901 I found the birth records he was referring to back in Ireland although tunky-dory so I said oh there were cousins welcoming each other in this Facebook discussion hello cousin you're right in this one is your cousin and so on and it turned out there were six people all related to each other all in my Claire Ruth's project so I was able to do this all the summer matrix to avoid embarrassing them I've taken the names off it's the same as the get-match matrix on the wall but it's six people are older than 105 so this is the lady who was claiming the heritage uh ancestor zero six shared zero shared zero shared zero shared with a second cousin once removed and four third cousins once removed one match each other so then I went looking for the Michael Brooks his mother was a her and I found he married at home in Ireland in February 1901 so it couldn't be the Michael Brooks and married in New York in March 1901 so she's attached her New York ancestors to their own pedigree just like that DNA just proved it I'm a little bit of background research proved that the Michael Brooks and the Ellen Clancy the she had picked from Irish records both stayed at home the book they found at home in Ireland long after the two namesake that married in New York we communicate by email Facebook all the standard methods try and talk to people on the telephone if necessary meet them in person what are the challenges GDP or is a big challenge family tree DNA have decided project administrators email addresses have to go on all the public family tree DNA page it's not just visible to project members of DNA matches I have long said I do not want my email address with a made to link on any page so we're still in discussion with the authorities and family tree DNA trying to persuade them that is not what GDP or is about um other challenges are getting people to upload family trees getting them to even answer messages getting them to fill in their most distant known ancestors on the websites and so on we've had successes I was also involved that at the ring case that the main people mentioned her father turned out to be from Connemara her mother from Mayo where my mother was from I still don't know how I'm related to her she was found abandoned as a baby 80 years ago but she now knows who her father and mother were and is in contact with half siblings on one side and the first cousins on the other side um I mentioned finding the O'Brien's and the ODs with the same um and we do a little closer things somebody wrote to me through the Clare Roots project about six months ago with details of McMahons who emigrated from West Clare to Australia did a little bit of research and I said well there's a McMahon family in the same townland I think they might be your relatives so she got her second cousin to do a Y test and he came back to 0 out of 67 match with the McMahon from the same townland so not sure whether the fourth cousins or fifth cousins or sixth cousins but it's nice to have come up with a wild guess like that and six months later see the DNA confirming it then Morris said what's my wish list a long wish list part of it would be to try and get better and faster integration between the genealogy databases and the DNA databases if I could upload my get-come file and each individual had a field in the get-come file saying this is my DNA kit number and then automatically run the paternal maternal phasing or created noticeable comparison metrics like the one on the wall or whatever there's a lot of work to be done by a lot of programmers to get that done I'm sure way over my eight minutes am I one minute away one minute away so basically that's me flying through everything and thanks a million to Cindy who came up with some of those ideas as well and we discussed them next with my project next up to speak is going to be Martin and I will perfect that was there hi everybody thanks very much I'm on myself from the north of Ireland family history society and we are registered charity and we have our own DNA project and we also have other roads within the society as well and the education and development officer and our data protection officer so we are also trying to work on our DNA and try to encourage people the advantage that we have is that all of our DNA kits are automatically enrolled in the project and what that means is that we have it made with the family tree DNA whereby we get kits sent to us in bulk and then we're able to keep them in our research centre and distribute them to people who want to test and then those people pay the company directly so it works very well and it means that there's always the ease of access to kits and that encourages people to test we do try to get people to do more with their DNA so I have just opened up an activity feed last year we also encourage people to use the advanced matches field on family tree DNA that a lot of people don't know is actually there it means that if you're in a project group you can go into your advanced matches and you can see who you match within any project that you're apart of that's been particularly useful for us and we've been able to find a lot of people are connected within our society and within the project group anyone can join our project group from anywhere in the world so anyone can join it but we do have dominance of people who have tested within the north of Ireland and that is really it's really useful because then anyone who wants to join our project can test against the people that we are testing locally we also then harass and control people to put locations into their tree and so as we can find out if it's the same families and if people live in a certain area as you know whenever you go into somebody else's tree there's a search for locations at the top of the screen and when you use that that would bring up any locations that match within that tree so if people use abbreviations like IRA for Ireland it won't come up if you do a search for Ireland so we're trying to educate people and make sure that they put in things that can be searched so if you want to put in a smaller place you then have to put in a county like Ireland or Northern Ireland in order to make that clear so as the search page will work we also encourage people to put in their ancestral assertions because there's a lot of people just don't do that and there's a lot of work just done following that up and encouraging people to have to do those things nope well they're done okay so okay yeah oh don't have again Mars I did press the mate bottom last time it actually went to that one first so yeah we need to go back that's what it is it's starting to come off slack is that the one you want? no I want to go back to let's jump on the right sorry first shall we just reorganize your slides? that's fine that's fine yeah we've done that okay that's it thank you so we do try to support DNA because we understand it's a complex issue and it's something that people need support on so we supply training courses on a variety of different subjects to do with DNA would you a family find your training course that is lead to your sessions where people could go and practice during the week and come back with questions then we'll follow that up with a monthly interest group where people who have been in the course are welcome to come back and actually ask questions or work with each other in order to find more links would we we also do one-to-one sessions on request and everyone is invited to a monthly interest group that is takes place on the fourth Saturday of every month between two and four sometimes we're still pushing people out the door about six o'clock at night but anyhow it's a very popular session and we then send out an email to remind everyone of that group as well and in that email we will then tell people anything that's changed in the month maybe if there's something new or there's a sale on or I think this month is going to be about the new proposal browser on family to DNA so eloquent that's new and it keeps people up to date even if they don't come to the interest group and we also give personal advice we have a research center which is really good we have headquarters and people can come in there and choose between two and eight and there's always someone available to help them with information on their DNA as well so we can sit with people individually and help them to increase their knowledge okay so it's all about raising awareness as I said we do talks at our monthly meetings so that's slightly different than our training courses that's where we have 12 branches around novel Ireland and we go out and deliver talks to those branches we have a newsletter and a journal that go out regularly from our society and we're always encouraging people to test and to give more information about DNA out through them as well we'll have our DNA information on our website and of course as was mentioned earlier what about is a really good thing because that is working very well for us people are testing within our society getting good results telling their friends and family and then we're getting new people coming in that also join our society and also then DNA test but it's not just about our society we also go out to other events in the community we go to church first we go to local community first we go to events and we take stand to publicize the society and we bring along a selection of our DNA tests and then we allow people to test down there but if people do test with us they don't pay us they pay family to a DNA directly but it's just about accessibility and allowing people the opportunity to test and the support to give them what they need to follow that up and it doesn't hurt that there's discounts available as well that's always something that encourages people to test and one of the advantages is because we have test kits within our research center it means that no one has to pay a postage charge or a delivery charge to get a kit sent to their house so they have ease of access to get a screen away plus it means that they're they're saving that money so that's also a good thing and that's basically all I want to say at this stage okay thanks very much Marius. I feel awkward because I've just spoken so it's kind of like you probably know all of this I'm going to do quite quickly so as Marius said just social media is is that and to do it on the Galway DNA group which I joined a number of years ago so I've put up this document and it's a list of the available regional and local groups I passed that on to Marius so what are the groups there I can see PLU stands for poor law union so I've broken down the county as I said before the civil registration 1864 act meant that you got registered in the poor law unions so for a lot of people in the diaspora that might be their first word that they see and to do that so these groups as you join them they're closed groups so there are questions to be asked like you know what is your connection to Canberra and what's your connection to Menlo and then to join in and to post the information there um there's numbers on it here I can't make them up I have 262 I think over 370 280 270 on those and then particular groups the Balegar group is quite big with 379 members and the Mayan group as I said is over 500 and we've got about 400 of those who have jetmatch numbers and on the files there we've got a list of at least 300 of them on the files so it's a matter of asking people and what Martin has said there just gently coaching people to add their names and to do that a lot of people when they answer the questions get into the group they think everyone can see that it's just the admin so it's just asking them again politely can you do that or some people don't answer the questions those are the two problems with Facebook goes and then you send a message and that doesn't go into them unless the three or four friends with them and they might answer that message like four months time and then they've forgotten why they asked you to join so there's all sorts of complications can do that smaller groups then my mother's maiden name is Melody it's quite small there's only like 40 plus members in that but it's just a way of teasing out who's related to who as Paddy mentioned there with like you know some of the Claire groups you know they might have the same name in a certain area I mean rather just sticking them all into one group to do that my primary tools are Facebook and jetmatch obviously to just have like narrowed down because I use ancestry use family treaty name my heritage and I ask people there I send emails to them or messages to them and say please join the group make sure you get on jetmatch and they most around jetmatch just encourage them encourage others most of the database that I put on my heritage dot com at the moment I'm just getting close to a hundred thousand so I'm not quite up to how these standards but we're getting there but the database rents I started in 2010 and my heritage gives a free one for 250 which is grown because I use it in schools as well so now with transition years I get them the first thing to do is to start up a tree in my heritage I tell them the year that they're born which is 2000 for everyone because I don't want to give too much data away even to a group that's based in Israel and my side might come up to you but at the same time just don't have it out there but what that advantage does is it's again social sharing so by my tree I have it and access to it so the people if they have the same thing you obviously have to make sure that when you copy that it's valid it's not somebody else was pointed the wrong tree the wrong people and stuff so that database helps out immensely because now if somebody comes up with a query I'm able to say oh that name is from there so have a look to see who you're related to on that I work as a part of the heritage in school scheme which is quite handy I've worked in a pricelessly 45 primary schools in Goli, Roscommon, Mayo and in approximately 10 secondary schools delivering workshops and I also do workshops for family history so I've worked with ICA groups I've worked with local groups and I started to work now just by setting them up myself where there was I felt a need for it but I didn't see that demand so I kind of created the need and the demand at the same time and then obviously to bring people together then for conferences so set up a few we've had a great Dublin gathering back in June Jared was very very good and helpful with that and the man in gathering I just give it a quick talk at because it's done by a great committee so I'm not a part of that but other groups just trying to bring people together so basically in terms of like how I go about it is that I amend the groups I kind of like make sure that the people who are in the groups have a reason to be in there and it's not like in one of the groups it was the Chum group Chum poor lot union group and obviously big story in Chum with the mother at baby home there's quite a few people that were interested in Chum because of that and my thing was well this is for a genealogy this is for people who have known roots to the area so we do have people who are residents in the mother and baby home in there and they're freely sharing information but if you're a reporter for some company it's close group you can't see what's going on so keep it private that way it's a good market great well those are four projects I think you'll agree that they're really quite inspiring when you see the amount of work that people are doing it really is quite mind boggling now what I've tried to do here is to summarize the uh and compare and contrast the different aspects of the four projects so we have the men gelt up to northeast Galway clear roots of the north of Ireland family history society the coverage of each of these projects is west Galway northeast Galway clear and Ulster so there's a huge difference there in in the actual coverage of these different projects the location of the dna database is family tree dna jet match family tree dna family tree dna the database size is over a thousand over two thousand over a thousand and over two thousand the genealogy part of the database uh for the main gelt of people it's a personal database which is on roots magic on somebody's computer so obviously uh you know how do you access that well you have to go to personal houses on the computer um personal areas for northeast Galway um that's the genealogy database well it's going to be on if it's on jet match it's use the um microphone sorry it's um half of it is on ancestry as in like this 38 thousand on ancestry and then there's over 70 thousand on my heritage so if you have a my heritage account and you start getting matches with mine chances are that you know you have a dna in your but the database resides on your computer it's on my heritage on the website as well okay so on the on the on the commercial websites clear roots it's it's a personal database pad isn't it it is but it's also on my personal website pworld.info and anyone has reason to see if it can register and if you explain in the notes field when you register i give you access to it very good and then for the north of byland family history society you have individual family family trees by the project members you don't actually have you haven't collected as a genealogy database per se not particularly for a dna project but we do have a collection of family trees and a collection of um okay they're available yeah they're all indexed we indexed um the the individual family trees so we do have a database um we're also looking at a project maybe to put um information on to what you try to write um uh that's that's something that we're looking at at the moment make it part of the one launch tree yeah and you probably have more than 300 000 people in those family trees yeah easy yeah um the member interactions i have the members of the groups interact some of them are physical so physical meetings for the main goal for everybody do you have physical meetings paddy not public meetings no i've talked about the need for training courses but hasn't happened yet yeah but in fact the others you do have uh the meetings so so for example mark and you do your educational outreach so there's the kind of meeting as well mark and you do your training courses and then filter people from the training courses into the special interest groups so there's a continuity of care there if you like um three of you use family tree dna's activity feed um but of course there's minimal useful in your project mark because it's mainly based on jetmatch and facebook and and then in terms of facebook uh there's a facebook page for the northeast go away projects um the main gail talks don't have facebook page per se and neither does the care roots society per se paddy well it has an overlap with the county clear island genealogy group on facebook and there's also the care dna group on facebook so a lot of the people are going to be in the facebook group and in the ft dna project but there's no form of link between two and in terms of um other activities now um mark and northeast go away projects you do have other activities apart from the physical meetings the activity feed and facebook yeah that was the education part of it and the conferences and similar to the others just reaching out especially in schools when i'm doing family trees like you know some of the schools they're quite small so you might have probably about 15 or 16 in class other schools then because of transition you've had 90 so the chance is there that you get maybe about 60 family trees done out of the 90 because other kids are after doing something else and in terms of uh websites uh three of the projects have family tree dna websites but but not the northeast go away dna project because it's based on ancestry um any any of jetmatch so any company ten people people test with any company can actually join that project um other websites i think only the north of island family history society have a dedicated website to the project well it's another dedicated project it's for our own society and then we do have dna and we do have dna information on that and the dna section yeah on the website okay um and then in terms of facebook um mark when you make a great use of facebook for northeast go away the north and island family history society has a an array of facebook so yes there's a lot of different facebook sites for each of our individual branches so it's up to them what they want to open up their own facebook group as such and we also have them facebook pages as well yeah and they all link to each other and again they're available to the anyone who's not a member of the society to join and um talking to so the paddy is where you have you talked about doing a facebook group or you thought that you don't actually see the need for it at this point in time i think the activity feed satisfies the need for a forum for communication on family tree dna and i have more than enough things to monitor without trying to monitor a parallel facebook and activity feed the problem is persuading people to leave facebook and move to the activity feed and i think that's what's almost killed island reaching out to because the sort of questions that were being posted and island reaching out and have been posted in the corresponding facebook groups right right right yes facebook is the most popular platform um but if ft dna gives us a built-in platform that links specifically to the dna project i think it's better to stick to that yeah and i think that really does illustrate how there's many different ways to skip the cat you know there's no right way or wrong way to run these type of local geographic projects um and um the various ways that you've chosen in your own ways are the ways that suit you best for the circumstances that you are in now i'm going to throw it open to the floor for a few questions who has well i'll actually think i'll ask you as a panel first of all how do you have the microphone but we'll pass it along what strikes you listening to your fellow colleagues um what strikes you is the main big differences between um the various projects and your project for example the scale of the area being covered right very good point and i think two or three hundred people is probably enough and the parish or a townland is our poor low union is probably enough and if you're covering a whole county you get people with a common surname chipping in and the discussion saying oh you must be related to me i have the macanerni surname in my family tree so i don't know how many times i've replied to a conversation saying well there's a thousand townlands in county clare and there were macanerni's in nine hundred and fifty of the census of 1911 and really just because you share a common surname with somebody else in the second county does not mean you're going to immediately find that you're the second or third person mark what strikes you from listening to the others um i like the fact of the um the northern islands it's it's a community there's a lot of people involved in it and stuff and lots of meetings i'm kind of meeting it versus myself sometimes no committees and no all of that so it's nice and just what i like about paddies as well as the dynamism you know that it's it's revolting around that's great enthusiasm that kind of brings around to the different areas and stuff like that mark what strikes you about uh listening to everybody's projects i think what is different with ours is that we're covering a wider area we're covering nine counties so we don't have that specific local knowledge so we're trying to enable people to do their own research and to make connections within the group and we do find that happens quite often quite often at our interest group we will have people come along saying that we look at who they match within the project and they will see that they match someone within the room there was one occasion i think it was actually our last meeting where we had one lady uh we're going through her match list and we find that three of the people were actually in the room that matched her and they were able to come up and speak to her and then actually discuss personally how they could potentially be related so that's really good that you can get that type of connection and then one word because another lot can be done through conversation yes i think i think the the area is important and i suppose we try to strike the balance because we are a society of branches across the north of Ireland and we use that structure then to get a more focused area so we have coordinators in each of the branches we're working on that to develop a little bit further at the moment they have kits that they can distribute in their local areas or can bring to branch meetings so it is trying to get to leverage the structure that we have with the society but we always stress that the DNA or DNA project is beyond the society it's not just something for branch members we make it available to everyone great any questions from the audience anybody have any questions panel okay Debbie i'm going to ask you this microphone i'll call it for you the question may be directed at martin curley i'm just wondering about how you all what your experience has been with jetmatch especially in the lines of the golden state kinocase and the dna dome project does that have any impact positive or negative on your projects one of my cousins has refused to upload to jetmatch because he spoke about how his dna would it didn't want to be stolen and they didn't want to make it public the only problem is if you've done a dna test in some way it is public i haven't come across anything other than that he did work for the us state department and there were difficulties because of his job in the previous situations that was a very personal thing quite understand where he's coming from but in terms of golden state and cc more and again there was a program on cbs this weekend about hard work and stuff it is scaring some people off because they're now hearing jetmatch in a slightly different way than we introduce it but at the same time as i tell people you are committing a crime don't leave your dna around saying that if you don't have committed a crime you don't have anything to worry about that's great um chair do you have a question yes i'm very interested in fermana both from population genetics and family history point of view going from the bronze r and h early christian right down i wonder is there a um a group in fermana there is a group in fermana one of the project winners is sitting two of those behind you she's movies have a work with shawn later he's got more today very good so he should be able to help you but that we probably have less people within our project in fermana than any of the other nine counties that we cover and that's probably because it's a less populated county but also i think we we have more work to do in fermana and we're hoping to be going to give more talks in fermana in the coming year so hopefully that's your case testing there as well you pass the microphone to annan then we'll ask one last question of the panel and never call it a day and the question is for people who are thinking of doing something similar to you and having a local civil parish or poor law unit project or a geographic local project what advice would you give them in terms of what's what to do next and how to set it up well i think it's it probably for a lot for a lot of people that are more focused it often starts with um their own situation you know often i think it probably starts using their own surnames and their own areas so i think it's really about you know um taking up and expanding on that um and through that developing a network even with your own setting up a project on your own with with your own kind of family is dipping a toe in the water in terms of um running a project that involves many people and i think that's that would be a good starting point i think that's an excellent idea because there's many people there who are surname project managers who could very easily become local geographic project managers because their surname may be very very um isolated particular geographic area so it wouldn't be a big step to go from that surname to the locality where that surname occurs very smart i think it's a bit encouraging people to test who wouldn't otherwise do so so it's a bit trying to support that in different ways i mean we've had people who don't have email addresses that don't use the undernet that don't go high the build tree and if and we try to support this locally we are also something to do it for them because we'll try to put more barriers in the way of DNA testing and so that will affect them with our enthusiasm and when people come to branch meetings and they see everyone else getting great results they don't want to be that behind so that's about them as well so if you can get out a positive message to people and see that they're going to make progress through this another thing that i emphasize is that you can verify your family tree i have a lot of people saying to me i don't need to do DNA testing because i've done my family tree well that's not the case because you can verify your family tree and find new family lights which you have to have a light you have to have something to say back to them to actually make them realize why they're doing what they're doing i think that's my answer great thank you i just want to add one thing there to the person who says i know my own family my response there is there's somebody out there in the diaspora that wants to find their family and your the connection and that has helped convince a few people for me as well to do that especially with jetmatch because yet they know who they're related to first second third cousins one person thankfully did a DNA test he had no said this doesn't mean now that there's going to be cousins coming to visit because i have enough and i was like no but it helped out very much in making connections for them in diaspora to come out there great paddy i suppose my usual advice to be three sources for family history there is the traditional paper sources like the censuses and the births marriages and deaths there's the oral history that's handed down by word of mouth or committed to letters or family bibles and there's the dna evidence and none of those three can work in isolation from the others so if you're setting up a dna project you have to remember that you have to tie the other two to it as well and something that a lot of beginners i think should get in their first genealogy less than don't is from day one you start putting what you learn into a database and it grows and grows and grows and 30 years later great well i am totally in awe of the work that you guys are doing i think it's abundantly clear to everybody how these type of local geographical projects are able to tie in local knowledge local place names local locations to the surnames that you're going to be interested in in your own particular family trees and i think it's a great way of marrying those three things together so uh i i think you're doing sterling work i think you're a wonderful uh wonderful examples to the rest of the genetic genealogy community i'd like to say thank you and i'd like you to say thank you as well the next presentation here in five minutes would be you developments at the o'neill genealogy