 Well, good morning everybody. Can you hear me okay at the back? Excellent. Well, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2014. This is the second year that we've had these genealogy lectures. And we have at the Tank Family Tree DNA, who are the very kind sponsors of this series of lectures, and also ISOC, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, who has helped put this lecture program together, and who are volunteering to man the stands downstairs to take your DNA for you should you decide to do a DNA test. Now, it's a great pleasure to be here again. DNA is emerging as a real tool to augment one's family tree research. And especially in Ireland where we have the problem that we've actually lost the records, a lot of the records prior to 1800s. So I would encourage you all to have your DNA tested. It can certainly help you get beyond those brick walls in your own family tree. So we've got a fantastic lineup of speakers for you over the course of the weekend. Whoops, sorry. This is the magazine. You should all have received a copy of this when you came in, and you'll find the lecture program in there. So there's three streams of lectures. The DNA lectures are over on your right-hand side. They're also put up outside the door just here, and they're also posted on the Family Tree DNA stand. So do have a look at those and come to whichever ones you feel would be of interest to you. Now, for me, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about which DNA test is best for you. Now, like I said, we in Ireland had some terrible fires during over the course of many centuries. In 1711, we had a fire in the council office, and the 1758 fire in the Birmingham Tower was probably the most damaging from a historical point of view. We lost a lot of historical documents there. From a genealogical point of view, we lost the 1861 and 1871 census. They were destroyed by order, a clerical error. And then the other censuses from 1881 and 1991 were poked to make paper for the war effort. We also then had the Custom House fire in 1921, which destroyed some of the tax returns. And in 1922, the disastrous fire in the public record office destroyed a lot of genealogical information, including all of the remaining censuses from 1821 to 1851. And there would have been our ancestors who went to live through the famine and who emigrated to America. And if we had those today, we would be able to connect a lot of our Irish-American cousins with their homelands today. We lost a lot of Church of Ireland records. We lost a lot of wills, land records, court records, military records, transportation records. It was a tragic loss. It has gradually been put back together in little bits and pieces. But DNA holds the answer to a lot of the questions that the restored records are not able to address. And that's what we'll talk about today. Here is your average Irish tree. It's my own tree. And here's me at the bottom. And I know my parents, my grandparents. But I've identified maybe half of my great-grandparents. And I've got question marks over some of them. It's typical that you know the first name of the wife, but you don't know the maiden name of the wife. And I've exhausted all the usual resources, such as family lore, the letters in the attic, the family Bible. Then we have the 1901 and 1911 censuses, the Griffiths valuation and the valuation records thereafter. The birth, marriage and death, in to say, starting from 1865 onwards for Catholics, 1845 for non-Catholics. We have church records, which usually go back to about 1800, but they vary an awful lot. And then we have collaboration with other researchers, such as on websites such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, Jeans Reunited and Roots Web. There's also newspapers, more and more of them coming online, very, very useful for the early 1800s. And Glass Neven, a wonderful resource for anybody who has Dublin ancestors. And then the electoral rolls are slowly coming online as well. But the brick wall happens around about 1800, 1830 for a lot of people. And I've used DNA to break through the brick wall with one particular line of my family. I'll tell you a little bit about that later on. Now, there are various companies that supply DNA. Family Tree DNA is downstairs. They're the only one that have actually offered DNA testing here in Ireland. Ancestry DNA, they're also downstairs. They have a DNA product, but it is not available outside of the US at the moment. They hope to launch it sometime in Ireland, probably sometime in 2015. 23andMe, they have a nice product that actually does medical health testing as well, but the FDA have told them they have to close that bit down until they meet some of the regulatory requirements that have been set by the FDA. And then we have Ireland's DNA, Britain's DNA, Scotland's DNA. Those tend to be more expensive and they don't provide the same kind of comparisons with matches that other companies do. So for Irish people, I recommend Family Tree DNA, largely also because 30% of their database is non-US, compared with only 10% in 23andMe and only about 1% in Ancestry. So if you want to find Irish cousins, Family Tree DNA would be my recommendation. So what can you get from a DNA test? Well, the first thing is a community of avid genetic genealogists. We are addicted to DNA. That's why we come here. That's why some of the volunteers down at the stand have flown over just for this conference from America. So we have about 10 people who've flown over from America. So that's the first thing is a community of avid genealogists that will help you understand and interpret the results of your own DNA test. It also gives you information about deep ancestry and human migration and the pathways that we all took out of Africa 60,000 years ago when the last exodus of humans left that particular continent. It tells you about your ethnic makeup, what percentage European, what percentage African, what percentage Asian. It also can connect you with long lost cousins, and that is the main reason why many people here will do that test, to try and break through brick walls in their family tree. It will also tell you what percentage Neanderthal you are. Now, you might just have to look at your husband to guess. You don't need DNA for that particular assessment. And then there's medical risk assessment as well. But like I say, that's been suspended for now, certainly by 23andMe, but it is possible to use your DNA to get a medical assessment of your medical risk for a variety of different conditions. To start off with the community of avid genealogists, this is the International Society of Genetic Genealogy. And the mission statement is to advocate for and educate about the use of genetics as a tool for genealogical research and promote supportive networks for genetic genealogists. And there's a website, there's various mailing lists, and I would encourage you all to join those. Now, I should mention that these lectures are all being recorded. It'll all be available on YouTube. And the only thing that you need to remember is to Google Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube, and you'll get all of these lectures, or most of them, on that particular channel. So if there's anything here that you see that you'd like to go over again, do go to the YouTube channel. It's been up for a year since the last set of lectures, and we have had 10,000 views for a total of 81 days and 2 hours. So this is a very interesting topic for a lot of people. ISUG also have a Facebook group. They have over, I think it's over 1,000 members in there. And there's other various DNA Facebook groups as well. It's a very, very good way of asking questions and socializing with other members of the international community. There's also a Wiki page, an ISUG Wiki page, and that has a lot of information, just like an encyclopedia, about everything you wanted to know about autosomal DNA, about any kind of DNA, autosomal, wide DNA, mitochondrial DNA. We'll look at those different types in due course. But I would recommend you check out the ISUG Wiki. Lots of great information there. Also, the volunteers from ISUG are so enthusiastic that they are actually prepared to pay for you to have DNA tests. So a variety of the administrators of projects on the Family Tree DNA website have volunteered to pay for free DNA tests for anybody with these names up here. Does anybody see their name on this list? No? Oh, there's one person? Okay, we'll ask down at the Family Tree. Oh great, okay, very good, very good. So those are the free DNA tests. Taking a DNA test is actually very, very simple. You just swab your cheek or give a little sample of saliva. That goes into a test tube, which goes into an envelope, and you post it off to the lab. Now, six to eight weeks later, well, they look at the test in the lab, and they put it through their machine, analyze the whole thing, and it comes out with your DNA results. And those are posted on your own personalized web page with your personal username, your password. Not only that, not only do they give you your own results, they compare your results with everybody else's results in their database. And the database of Family Tree DNA is 600,000 people. So it's quite substantial. And that is going up all the time. And they will give you a list of the people in their database that match you and put that on your web page. So then you can contact those matches and find out if you are related to them, what is the connection. It can actually help you break through brick walls in that way. And the other great thing that Family Tree DNA do is they allow you to start your own project. So if there isn't a project for your particular surname, you can actually start one yourself. So that is what Family Tree DNA, no other company offers the infrastructure to start and perform your own projects. Now let's take a closer look at the DNA that you sent off in that little test tube. Inside that test tube, when you swabbed your cheek, you dislodged some cheek cells. And here's an average cheek cell. And you can see it consists of a cell membrane, and then there's a nucleus there in the middle. And there's also those little blue things. Now these little blue things are mitochondria, and they're like the batteries of the cell that provide the energy. And within the mitochondria is the first type of DNA, and that's called mitochondrial DNA. This is only inherited from your mother. Mothers pass it on to their daughters and their sons, but only the daughters pass it on. So it can only be passed along by females, which means that it can only have come from females. So my mitochondrial DNA came from my mother, she got it from her mother, she got it from her mother, mother, mother, mother. Passes all the way back along that maternal line. In the nucleus of the cell, we have the chromosomes. Now we all have 46 chromosomes arranged into 23 chromosome pairs. We get one copy of chromosome one from our father, one copy of chromosome one from our mother, one copy of chromosome two from our father, one copy of chromosome two from our mother. And so on down all 23 pairs. Now the last pair, this one up here, is known as the sex chromosomes. And one of them is an X chromosome and one of them is a Y. And the X is quite a large chromosome, the Y is quite a small chromosome. So what this means is that your average man is less of a person than your average woman, genetically anyway. And if you get two X chromosomes, you become a woman. If you get an X and a Y chromosome, you become a disappointment. So that's XX and XY. And those are going to be very important when we look at the three main types of DNA tests. Now the Y chromosome is only passed on from father to son. So that allows you to go back on your father's father's father's line. I got my Y DNA from my father, he got it from his father, he got it from his father, father, father, father, all the way back. And that will take you back 338,000 years to Africa. On the other side we have the mitochondrial DNA and that will take you along your mother's mother's mother's line 200,000 years ago to Africa. And in the middle you have your autosomal DNA. And that will take you back about five to seven generations, say to the level of your great, great, great grandparents. And you have 64 of those. So the Y DNA is one ancestral line, the mitochondrial DNA is one ancestral line, but the autosomal DNA is about 64 ancestral lines. And that's probably why it is the most popular test among people who are doing family tree research. Both the Y and the mitochondrial DNA are useful for deep as well as recent ancestry, but the autosomal DNA is just useful for recent ancestry. So that's a quick overview of the three main types of DNA. Let's look at each of them and turn and go a little bit deeper into what each one is able to achieve. So the Y DNA, now here's your typical Y chromosome, it's got a short arm up here, it's got a long arm down here. There's a variety of genes along the way. Here you can see a gene for the ability to remember and tell jokes. This one is the refusal to ask for directions, the anti-stop gene. My favorite one is the DC-10, the ability to identify aircraft, very, very useful. And the Y chromosome, it gives all these particular attributes to men. And so that's why men are the way they are. And so that's the sort of thing that you see when you stretch out a Y chromosome. The other chromosomes are similar. They have a short arm, a long arm, and a bit in the middle called a centromere. And they have a variety of genes along their length, but they also have a variety of markers. And we will talk about those markers in due course. First thing that they're able to do is by looking at these markers, they can actually trace the journey of men out of Africa. Because as men evolved and left Africa and evolved, every time the DNA was copied, sometimes a mutation would occur in the DNA that instead of passing on a particular type of base, they're called, it would have passed on a different one instead. And then that mistake gets copied and passed on to the next generation. And these serve as markers. And by looking at the markers, you can actually trace the path that human beings took out of Africa, roughly about 45 to 65,000 years ago. And that ties in very much with the archaeological evidence and the linguistic evidence as well. So this is one very exciting application of DNA, and that's a whole lecture in itself. A lecture, in fact, that Dr. Spencer Wells from National Geographic will be giving here tomorrow as the keynote address for the conference. So if you're interested in the human migration out of Africa, come and listen to Dr. Spencer Wells from the National Geographic Project at 3.30 tomorrow afternoon. Now in Ireland, the most common haplogroup that we have is this one up here. It's called Or 1B. And you can see that as you move from east over to west, the concentration of this particular haplogroup gets larger and larger. Now a haplogroup is just a group of people with a similar genetic signature. And what you can see here is that in Ireland, in Western Europe, most people have the same kind of genetic signature. Very, very different from what you see over in China. And that's just because humans turned in different directions and the group that went over to China developed different mutations and different markers than the group that turned left into Europe and developed their own mutations and markers. So your DNA will be able to distinguish between European, Irish, Chinese, that type of thing. Again, a useful application. And here you can see the various haplogroups in Africa. We've got E, we've got B2, we've got A2 and A3. Very different from the ones in Ireland where 80% are haplogroup Or 1B and 15% are I1. You can see the highest concentration of I1 is up in Scandinavia. So it could very well be that this is a Viking gene or something similar to a Viking gene, maybe even pre-Viking. So this is a very exciting time for the study of human migration because as we discover more markers on these chromosomes and test more people, we get a much more granular view of human migration through Europe and finally into Africa, into Ireland rather. The hope is that as more and more people test, we'll be able to get down to smaller and smaller branches on the haplotree, as it's called, the human evolutionary tree, and eventually we will find out that these markers, these markers of the subgroups are associated with specific surnames and those surnames will connect us to the ancient Irish annals. And there's going to be a great talk about that after this from Brad Larkham who will be talking about DNA versus the Irish annals. What is it actually telling us? Are the annals correct? Are they politically motivated and you can't trust them? Or is there actually a lot of truth in the annals? So Brad will be talking to us about that after this lecture. The most important application of why DNA is in surname projects and if you go to the web page of Family Tree DNA, you can just Google, well you can actually see if you put in the search bar here, you can see if your surname is part of a group already, if somebody has actually set up a group to study your particular surname. The other thing that you can do is you can just simply Google FTDNA and your surname and see if it comes up with a project on the Family Tree DNA website. Then you can take your DNA test and join that surname project and see who else within that project you're related to. To give you an example of one of these projects, I'll talk about one that I set up myself. This is the Speeran surname project and it started off, well we have our own website and we have our own DNA results page on Family Tree DNA, so you can compare all the DNA results, but it started a couple of years ago when I decided to research my Speeran name because it was rather unusual spelling, S-P-I-E or I-N, so I thought well that's easy, let me do that one first because there can't be that many people with that name. So I was online and I came across this guy called Bob Speeran and I saw that he was interested in researching this, so I sent him an email and he wrote this email back, four pages of the email and he said, oh I think I know where you're from, I think I know who your family are, and he told me this incredible story of how he had found two wills in the early 1700s, 1719, 1726, they had Luke Speeran and Matthew Speeran and these were brothers and they married into the Hartwell family and the Hartwells were mayors of Limerick and the reason why they got land in Limerick was because they were granted land for their services to Charles II in his fight against Oliver Cromwell. So the combination of Hartwell and Speeran appeared in their family tree and it was passed on and out of the 236 living branches of Speerans around the world, 24 of them have this Hartwell-Speeran-Cernan combination within their trees and they're probably related to these early Limerick Speerans. So that was the first thing. Then there's a sliver of evidence from Sir Charles Beetham in his notes on the wills that he was reviewing and that says that the Speerans were related to a group of Speerans in London where they were Speerans or Speereans and they were goldsmiths and one of them was the the executor of the will of John Stowe who wrote the biography of London before the Great Fire and they lived in Leddenhall Street and I have tons of information about these London Speerans. I have the floor plans of the houses where they lived and they're buried under the gherkin. I want to go there with a shovel someday and see if I can get down to the basement, get their DNA and then there's a link to Cambridge where Henry VIII gave the first license to print to a Nicholas Speeran whose family came from Flanders and this Nicholas Speeran was the best friend of Erasmus the most intelligent humanitarian philosopher that Europe has ever produced so my dad said well there's no way you're related to them. So this is a fascinating story but it's all based on scrappy evidence and there's big gaps in the data. What we were able to do and what we've done in the project is we've created a best fit family tree based on the documentary evidence so you won't be able to see the detail but basically here's one family here and there's the brick wall there around about 1770 here's another family here there's my family there's my great great grandfather Patrick Speeran in 1800 there's me down there and there's me and there's my dad here's another family here with their brick wall another family here with their brick wall all of these are different Speerans and we know that there's probably three generations where we just don't have any information and then we have the early Limerick Speerans up here Luke, Matthew and their brother Nicholas so what has DNA allowed us to do? Well before that the reason why there's a suggested relationship between these families is because first of all the different surnames could be variants of each other the similar forenames in the different families like Nicholas, Luke, William there are many brick walls go back to the same general area of Limerick Adair, Palace Canary, that type of thing and the early Limerick Speerans are present in the same area in 1719 and 1726 so a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to the fact that these families are probably all related but what we did with DNA was we did some testing first of all four members of this group of about 11 of us decided to do the DNA test and they came back as matching each other and they thought this was incredible because I never expected a spear in to match a spear ring but they did so that indicated that these were surname variants and certainly these people had a common genetic ancestor somewhere in the last 300 to 400 years which would fit in with what we know from the documentary evidence I got my own third cousin to test and he came back positive as well so my family is also related to these people and we tested more people and there were a couple of mutations but usually in fast mutating markers because here are the markers up here at the top and then the values for each of those markers for each of these people down here in each of these rows so it's like you've got a stack of Y chromosomes on top of each other and you're comparing the value of the markers at each particular point and there were a couple of mutations but these mutations were not so far apart that they meant that we weren't closely related they're minor mutations and everything points to the fact that we are a related family the other thing, the way we tested other people and they didn't match us so that means either that they are from a completely different origin or they're what's called non-NPEs, non-paternity events now it doesn't mean that there wasn't a father involved it's just not the father you expected that's why they're called not the parent expected as well, NPEs so it could be a different origin or it could be an NPE the other thing is that most of the, well all of the spirans were belonged to haplo group I2B1 and the highest concentration one of the highest concentrations of I2B1 is in and around the area of Flanders so again further circumstantial evidence so because I'm at Leeson and not a spiran I had to go back up to my great-great-grandfather Patrick's spiran and then I had to find a direct male line down to a spiran third cousin and that's what I found there and he volunteered to do the test and like I say he matched all the other spirans in the group so what can we say about how DNA has helped us? well it's helped confirm the theory we're all definitely related certainly in the members of this particular family those people who have tested or illustrated in red here so we're all related we definitely share a common ancestor about 300 or 400 years ago which ties in with these early limerick spirans, Luke, Matthew and Nicholas so that points us in the same direction as the documentary evidence some of the families like I said have this unusual heart well-spiran combination and therefore they can jump back to the early 1700s but because we are all genetically related to them we can piggyback on them and jump back with them to the early 1700s, late 1600s we're probably related to the early limerick experience for that reason we just now have to find those three missing generations we need to look for documentary evidence that tells us yes we actually have documentary proof that the spirans can go back to the early 1700s and that means looking at the 22,000 documents in the Earl of Dunraven's estate papers in the University of Limerick Library so I have my retirement plan all sorted and it's just a question of finding the time to actually go down and do it but if we hadn't done the DNA we wouldn't even attempt to do that so William Beetham says we're probably related to London's spirans we need to test some and possibly the Cambridge spirans as well we need to test European and English spirans to see if that is the case and yes, eventually I will activate my retirement plan so that is an ongoing project you can see that we've already got a lot of information out of it that is pointing us in the direction of further research and that gives you an indication of how you can marry the genetic and traditional research to help break down a couple of brick walls in your family tree so it's the why DNA test, the best test for you it shows you deep ancestry, human migration path if you're interested in that and it tells you what haplo group you belong to it may eventually link up to the ancient annals which will be a very exciting development it's useful for confirming a relationship between two men on their direct male lines father, father, father, up, father, son, son, son, down so direct male line up, direct male line down there's more than 8,000 surname projects on family tree DNA I would encourage you to join one if there isn't one start your own there are geographic projects which help elucidate the relationship of your surname to the others in the same area so there are geographic projects you can consider to join haplo group projects tell you what SNP to test next and SNP testing helps define what branch of the human evolutionary tree what sub-branch you are on that's a completely different lecture in itself and Brad will be touching on that tomorrow when he talks about the future of genetic genealogy and then lastly there are heritage projects what happened to a particular group of people and John Cleary will be talking about the Scottish prisoners who were forced marched from Durham to Dunbar was it and then they were transported off to the new American colonies the West Indies and that will be very interesting because it's similar to what happened to the Irish with Cromwell sending a lot of Irish out to the Caribbean Cynthia Wells will be talking about the challenges of reconstructing Irish-Caribbean ancestry tomorrow, Saturday afternoon the second type of DNA test is the mitochondrial DNA test and this traces your mother's mother's mother's line it goes back about 200,000 years to Africa so it's very good for deep deep deep ancestry as well as recent ancestry although from the point of view of recent ancestry it probably is the least useful of all the three main tests but here's an example of the type of human migration map that you get with mitochondrial DNA it's a nice coffee table talk but to illustrate how useful it can be and where it really comes into its own is in ancient DNA so if you hear these stories about people digging up ancient bones they will be looking for ancient DNA and mitochondrial DNA will be that particular DNA that they look for when they are doing these archaeological digs and one such dig was the story of King Richard III the king in the car park and he was buried or he died at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 and here you can see a commemorative slab to him in Leicester Cathedral I believe and he is the one that Shakespeare maligned in his wonderful play which starts now as the Winterfell discontent and he's got the clubfoot and he's got the hunched back and that probably wasn't that correct it was probably a propaganda spawned by the Tudors who of course killed Richard III and took over from him so they wanted to make out that he wasn't a good man and therefore they justified their position now Philippa Langley is the head of the Richard III society and she thought we can't have Richard III being maligned in this way and they did some research and they found that people had been looking for his body on previous archaeological digs in the wrong place they'd been looking in Blackfriars Cathedral Blackfriars Abbey when in fact he was born buried in Greyfriars Abbey so Greyfriars Abbey currently lies underneath the car park of Leicester Social Services Department so they raised some money and they said to the Social Services Department can we dig up your car park? here's £10,000 and the society said yes sure no problem at all come on in so they dug up the car park and on the first day they found bones and the heavens opened and there was a torrential downpour and they had to run for cover as the spirit of Richard III was liberated in Leicester Social Services Car Park and they did further excavations they found the remains of Greyfriars Abbey the actual skeleton had battle marks on its skull and on its pelvis they analysed the diet of the remains and they also did DNA testing on Michael Ibsen who was in the direct female line down from Richard III's mother so Richard III's mother passed mitochondrial DNA to Richard but also down this particular line here and you won't be able to read it but I'll just read out the names we have Richard III here his mother was Cecily now her mitochondrial DNA went down to Richard but also down to his sister Anne of York and then she passed it down to her daughter Anne and then she passed it down to her daughter Catherine and then she passed it down to Barbara Margaret, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara not a very lazy family Barbara Anne she was a very welcome child Charlotte, Charlotte, Muriel and Joy and then down to Michael Ibsen now of course mothers passed it on to their sons as well as their daughters but only the daughters can pass it on so Michael was actually the end of the line he wouldn't have been able to pass that mitochondrial DNA onto his offspring it would have been his wife that would have passed on the DNA to the offspring so this was an unbroken female line from Richard III's mother to Michael Ibsen and a match on the DNA test was only one piece of the evidence and they were a very, very close match Michael and Richard III and they also had a secondary person testing who chose to remain anonymous but she was also directly descended from Richard III and her mitochondrial DNA was either an exact match or a very close one as well we're hoping to get the paper published in the next couple of months and we should see a Tory King unless their university is working on that so the totality of the evidence suggests that this is Richard III and this was a very, very useful application of mitochondrial DNA so is it the best test for you? good for deep ancestry and defining your haplogroup useful for confirming a relationship between two people on their direct female lines just like you saw with Richard the line up, direct female line down project admins are a great source for advice and support so do join projects and ask project admins what should I do next? now it's important to remember that you have many, many ancestral lines and the Y DNA and the mitochondrial DNA just test the ones on the outside just one ancestral line each you have got 64 of them and the Y and the mitochondrial DNA might not tell the whole story this is Professor Henry Lewis Gates African American man his second episode of finding a roots is on the television now you can find it on YouTube so if you want to see it and I recommend it wholeheartedly because he combines traditional genealogy as well as genetic genealogy with various celebrities in America a fabulous series he did his DNA test and his Y DNA came back as one B M222 Nile of the Nine Hostages so he's Irish and about 35% of African American men will actually have their father's father's father's line will go back to a European man and this is a vestige of the slave trade and the sexual exploitation of women during that period of time so about 35% of African Americans will go back to a European man African African man so he did his mitochondrial DNA test European so he reckons that and he's talked about this with Professor Dan Bradley he came over to Ireland and talked to Dan about it and they reckon that his mother's mother's mother's line goes back to an Irish indentured servant but what happened to all the African stuff in the middle that's where you need to look at the autosomal DNA and his autosomal DNA I don't know the percentages but it'll be something around about 70% African 30% European and autosomal DNA is good for looking at your ethnic makeup recent ancestry what percent Neanderthal you have now you don't get that with family tree DNA's test you can get it with the national genographic test if you're interested or with the 23andMe test and then medical risk is only available through the 23andMe test but for ethnic makeup and recent ancestry family tree DNA supplies that and if you no matter which company you test with you should upload your data to GetMatch which is completely free and it allows you to compare your autosomal DNA data with people who've tested in other companies and have uploaded their data to the website so it's a good way of fishing in three pools if you like at the same time and this is an example of the ethnic makeup and it breaks it down by region here for example this particular individual is 69% European and the European is in red and you can see that it's spread between Scandinavia Britain Ireland and maybe central Europe and 26% African and that's spread down there but you can also divide it out onto a sub regional level so for example the European is now broken down into 37% western and central Europe say France and Germany 22% Scandinavian and 10% British Isles so this person most of her European ancestry will be from Central Europe France, Germany similarly on the African side 25% of the 26% is West Africa so you're looking at this area here there's also a smattering of Middle Eastern from North Africa and there's a smattering of Central and South Asian 3% from Central Asia around Afghanistan so this gives you clues to where some of your ancestors may have come from and can be very, very useful I always take it with a pinch of salt because these type of analyses are only as good as the reference databases to which they're being compared so you're going to get a slightly different result if you go to 23 and me slightly different result if you go to ancestry but the take home message here is that this person is largely European with a substantial bit of African but the main reason for using autosomal DNA is to find long lost cousins now we're back to my family tree here I've done the DNA test it gives me a reach of about 5, 6, 7 generations now we're taking back to round about my 4 times great grandparents so I've got 64 of those and they were born about 1765 so if I match somebody on my autosomal DNA it could mean that we have a common ancestor somewhere this 1765 but I've also tested my dad and I've also tested my mother's sister so that gives us an extra generation back so now I can get back to maybe a cousin with whom we share a common ancestor born about 1730 so this is the the main advantage of autosomal DNA mystery the wedding memento we have used it to good effect on our family a couple of years ago this wedding memento fell out of my dad's grandfather's papers and it says Ruby Kathleen Gleason David Patterson David Patterson Ruby K. Gleason K stands for Kathleen married a Targa Minda 23rd of March 1893 so my dad said go and find out who she is set you a challenge so the first thing I did was I googled Targa Minda and here it is here in the middle of the Australian desert surrounded by man-eating koalas snakes murderers and teetering on the brink of nothing so this was the first surprise what were they doing getting married in the middle of the desert and how did their wedding memento end up halfway around the world in Ireland so I sent off to Australia for Ruby Kathleen's marriage certificate and I found it and it listed her parents as John and Ann Gleason fantastic I thought my great-great-grandparents were John and Ann Gleason but are they the same people well how many John Gleason's can there be surely not that many so it was no proof there's some interesting circumstantial evidence her certificate said she was born in Longstone well that's exactly where my father's grandfather and his siblings were born in Longstone and the neighbouring townlands of Shalee and Kiliskully and she said that her father was a hotel keeper or a farmer or a labourer so maybe she was telling porky pies it's still not gelling she was born about 1872 or 1869 depending on her death certificate her marriage certificate had different dates and that kind of tied in with the births of my father's grandfather's siblings 1868 to 1877 so maybe it was one of them maybe Catherine became Kathleen maybe that was it so it generated some ideas but we still had no firm proof that there was a definite connection her death certificate said she came to Australia around about 1886 and that tied in with our family lore because John Gleason died in 1885 family's destitute children have to emigrate it makes sense but also we had this family lore that Timothy and Winifred went off to Australia sometime around the late 1800s early 1900s and Winifred was supposed to have had a daughter who was a concert pianist or a concert singer of some sort well it took two years because I put the tree up on Jeans Reunited I checked it every six months or so and finally I found somebody that put me in touch with Ruby Kathleen Gleason's grandson who was in his 80s and we struck up an email conversation and he agreed to do the test and Ruby Kathleen had an uncle and an aunt who lived in Sydney and she had a brother who went to the US and became a baseball star and he sent them a watch with an inscription on the back of it and they've lost it so again still the additional information we got from the family wasn't enough to tie the two families definitely together so we did the DNA test the other piece of information was that Ruby had a daughter who excelled at the violin and was a very accomplished musician musician concert pianist again there's parallels between the two stories but there's nothing definite you can say that they're definitely the same family so here's Ruby here here's my great-grandfather here Martin M. Gleason, founder of the GAA the Balanahinchen Killa Scully GAA club back in 1884 1885 and if they were siblings as the documentary evidence is suggesting then they would share about 50% of their DNA in common then that would mean that my dad and Alan would share about they'd be second cousins and they'd share about 3% of their DNA in common and me being a second cousin once removed I'd share about 1.5% of my DNA in common and my dad had done the test already Alan sent off the test we waited, we waited we pulled our hair out, we bit our nails we frayed our nerves we came back 2.6% which is well within the range that you would expect for second cousins so and mine came back as 1.5% which was right in the middle of the range that you'd expect for second cousins once removed so what does it tell us? Dad and Alan are definitely genetically related to each other and the best fit genetically is second cousins which is exactly what the documentary evidence is suggesting so it's confirmed a suspected relationship with 99% probability there's always a 1% that you can never be sure of but 99% probability it answers many questions but a lot of questions remain but it has helped us focus our further research which of the sisters became Ruby Kathleen or was there another sister that we just haven't found and isn't in the documentary evidence was Ruby because she had red hair that's our current theory it's subject to change so Ruby Kathleen has been saved from the shoebox of obscurity because dad's first cousin said oh never heard of her put her in the shoebox, leave her under the bed and I wasn't prepared to let Ruby fester under the bed there in that shoebox so she's been saved from the shoebox of obscurity she is one of ours we are one of hers and we have new cousins in Australia I met them a couple of weeks ago they were visiting London where I live so it's about reconnecting family and that really is what autosomal DNA can do for you it can answer specific questions confirm two people are related help focus research and be a useful extra tool the other way that you can use autosomal DNA is to go on a fishing trip now that last example it answered a specific question so you and another person have to do the test but if you just want to do the test yourself throw it into the gene pool and see what kind of genetic fish you catch then the fishing trip is what you can do and like I say there's three companies that do this but Family Tree DNA are my recommendation here is a list of my matches and you'll see that there's one here that's my second cousin once removed here's another one who's a second to fourth cousin we haven't figured out what that relationship is here's a spiran, I know who this person is because I got her tested myself she's my second cousin twice removed you can see the small amount of DNA we share 66 centimorgans in total here's another one that I haven't figured out second to fourth cousins somewhere and here's another one here who's a distant cousin and shares 56 so that's what your matches page will look like the sequence to success with autosomal DNA are to have a tree online have your tree developed as well as you can and also to collaborate so contact your matches exchange information with them and maybe even work in small groups DNA is a pointer DNA will point you in the direction of further documentary research so it very very much works hand in hand with traditional research it's not a replacement for it then along comes DNA adoption and they've developed a whole range of tools that you can use to analyse your autosomal DNA even deeper and we're going to have Rob Warden talking on Sunday about how he used it to help find the birth family of his wife who was adopted so that's going to be a fascinating talk on Sunday do come and hear it is autosomal DNA the best test for you well it'll tell you your ethnic makeup mine is 99.8% Irish it says 99.8% British slash Irish and it says I'm 0.1% Sub-Saharan African I would like to find out which one of my ancestors was Sub-Saharan African so it's presented me with a tantalising little a tantalising mystery there but I think most people in the room if you're Irish Irish Irish your ethnic makeup will be 95.99% British and Irish if anyone, it's great in America because there's such a mixing of people in America that it's great for maybe finding out which if you have a match you can tell on the basis of the ethnic mix which of the ancestral lines might be the most likely it's useful for confirming a suspected relationship between two people on any ancestral line it works best with close matches up to about third cousin or so fourth cousin fifth cousin it gets a little bit iffy it's not as good as at detecting them most matches are from the US because it's largely a US database but like I say of all the big companies it has the largest non-US component and a lot of them are Irish in fact there was a last year 100 people did DNA testing last year back to our past it can be complicated you can get bogged down that's why it's important to join the ISOG Facebook groups and the appropriate mailing lists to get the support that you need in interpreting your results DNA has several limitations it's not a substitute for documentary research just an extra tool cost has come down considerably so why DNA in mitochondrial DNA well why DNA the cheapest test it's 59 mitochondrial DNA the cheapest test that's around about 46 euros and 54 euros respectively the autosomal DNA used to be 999 now it's 99 dollars that's about 70 euros so that's a really really great value the price has been driven down by competition from the other companies understanding the results can be too technical and this is one of the major complaints and concerns that we hear back from customers that is why we as a genetic genealogy community need to have these conferences need to have these lectures need to get the message out there that there is help available do join ISOG and do become members because that's where you will get a lot of support there are privacy and data protection issues and people will have concerns about that there may be some legal implications as well if you're a multimillionaire it might be better if you didn't get your DNA tested just to be on the safe side and there are complications like emergency events what happens if you take the DNA test and you find out that your father isn't your father or that you have a half sibling that you never knew about so you kind of have to go into it with your eyes open it does come with a public health warning the matches where do they come from like I said mainly the US which company do you test with the different companies don't talk to each other they each have their own databases get match helps overcome that to a certain extent but it's not used as much as it should be now I'm going to skip through these and just go on to this one most popular tests last year back to our past were the family finder which is the autosomal DNA test followed by the YDNA 37 test and compare that with who do you think you are in London last year 41% went for the autosomal DNA family finder test and then about a third of people went for the YDNA test half of them between the YDNA 12 and the YDNA 37 so that gives you an idea of what DNA is all about and I'd be very happy to answer any questions you might have thank you for your attention whoops sorry does anybody have any questions yeah we have a question here what number of markers should you test for do you recommend if you're doing a YDNA test you should go for a 37 marker test if you want to do research or surname if you are mixed race for example if you're africarabian or irish carabian then a YDNA 12 will tell you whether your father's father's father's line goes back to a european man or an african man and then you can cite at that stage whether you want to upgrade from a 12 marker test to a 37 marker test to do further exploration and can they do that upgrade without a second test absolutely your sample will be stored I think for about 25 years or so and you can use that sample again and again so anytime you want a new test you just go online to the FamilyTreeDNA website and just order either an upgrade or an existing test or order a completely different test let me give this microphone to you so that you actually can be heard thank you very much for your presentation I am so pleased I am going to do all the sessions on this stream just to ask you the connection between Brian Brew whose father was Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy interesting well the person to answer that question is Kathy Swift Dr. Kathy Swift from Limerick who has just stepped out of the room you're a Limerick man as well so I would say you'd need to ask Kathy that question and she will be talking about the genetic legacy of Brian Brew and that is going to be on this afternoon I believe I can't remember exactly the time but yes do cut this actually I'll see it in here any other questions then yes question here the paper trails were on kind of in around the early part of the 19th century so how good is the some that when it comes to fifth cousins will have reached that yes it will it will reach that far the thing is that it will identify 99% of your first and second cousins about 90% of your third cousins about 50% of your fourth cousins and about 10% of your fifth cousins you have so many more fifth cousins than you do first cousins and second cousins you will find that most of your matches are in that distant level now the trouble is you're going to have some false positives in there sometimes the DNA will match just by chance because at that level you're looking at around about about 0.78 or even half of that 0.4% so 0.4% of your DNA is shared between two people it's a very very small amount it's still big enough to be detected because you've got 6 billion base pairs in your DNA so 0.4% of 6 billion is still a considerable number of markers but when you get down to the level of fifth cousin you have to be very careful that you're not actually looking at a false positive match and there's various ways that you can decide whether or not it's a false positive match one way is to have parents tested have two generations tested if it's passed on or is present in both generations then you can say it's probably a true positive result because that has been passed on and there's not just a chance match there's various other ways that you can do it you can upload your data to get match for the parent and the child and you can have what it's called phasing done and it'll be done automatically for you and that phased results will actually be a much more accurate indication of whether or not the match is a false positive or a true positive so when you get down to fifth cousins you have to be careful and as well as that of course, fifth cousins from an Irish perspective certainly for my generation would mean a common four times great-grandparent which is going back to 1765 and our brick wall happens at 1800 so we're looking at a common ancestor that lies probably two generations beyond my brick wall and the chances of finding the documentary evidence to actually hook up could be quite low documentary evidence isn't there well that's the thing what you're hoping the comment was the documentary evidence isn't there and Kathy Swift is back we were talking about you Kathy but we'll tell you about that afterwards the documentary evidence isn't there except in a rare family tree where somebody has the family Bible and it goes all the way back I mean we are talking rare but what we're hoping with autosomal DNA matching is that you actually match with somebody that has the paper trail that goes beyond your brick walls and that does happen from time to time in the spirit example we don't have a paper trail but what we have is this unusual surname combination that actually takes us back to these early limb experience in 1719 and 1726 so it is possible that you get pointed in the right direction but we do know actually that with that particular, those early experience we do have a paper trail that actually comes down one particular family line because Kathy Walton showed it to me and it comes down one particular family line to virtually the present day so you know there are family lines out there that go beyond the 1800s how many people have traced their family at least one member of their family back to the 1600s one ancestral line so we've got seven hands going up 1500s one, two, three, four 1400s maybe genealogically, yes in Ireland as well okay anybody got Irish ancestors back in the 1600s so what we're hoping is we all match Roz and that we'll be able to jump thinking back on her family tree and go all the way back in time there are limitations Ray, well what are the last questions you were talking about you were talking about false positives how do we deal with this when we get a match on our thing as a third cousin or second cousin and there's no common surnames and they have the genealogy done and all how do we deal with that one? I don't know with a second or third cousin there isn't the chance of a false positive at very very low okay because you're going to have very long segments of DNA shared but and I've got a second or third cousin where my paper trail ends their paper trail ends so we can't actually see there is a technique and Rob will talk about it tomorrow to an extent which the DNA adoption group has developed where you actually move beyond working one to one with your match and you actually start moving into groups triangulated groups I'll mention it briefly I think in my presentation tomorrow on how to solve adoption mysteries in your family tree but you start working in small triangulated groups and this takes weeks of work so it's not for the faint hearted this is another public health warning that comes with DNA but there is a way of working with groups in the hope that you can triangulate and get certain members of the group to connect and finally all the groups point in a similar direction and then that helps you with further documentary research great well listen I'm going to leave it there thanks very much for your kind attention and we're going to move over to Brad now so thanks everyone I'm going to mute it actually