 and it gives me great pleasure to introduce Peter Shulman too. Now Peter comes from, he is a professional genetic genealogist at the company DNA Academy providing training, presentations and conspiracy for genealogists. He's also the author, having written a handbook on genetic genealogy at a popular science book on the people of Sweden spanning the last 11,000 years. He's also a regular contributor to various Swedish genealogy magazines. And today Peter is going to focus on mitochondrial DNA which is not something that certainly we use a lot in our genealogy and Peter would contend that we're not using it enough. So to tell us all about the hidden power of mitochondrial DNA gives me great pleasure to welcome Peter Shulman. Peter, thank you for having me back this year. I was talking about viking DNA last year. It might be the viking ritual in this school. There's a quick update about genetic genealogy in Sweden because when I was here a year ago, about 20,000 people tested in Sweden. Now the latest figure is 40,000 in a year. It's really a skyrocketing in Scandinavia. I wonder if you all realize how much information you are carrying around all day. Do you know how much information you have in your DNA? If you were to put the information that you have in one gram of DNA that's so little you're cutting the seeds. But you take that information and put it on CD records. CD can carry an hour of music or half an hour of video. It's a lot of information. But how many CDs do you think you would need to record the data in one gram of DNA? Can you guess it? A lot, yeah, that's true. Very, very large lot. Because just to carry the information of one gram of DNA you need 1,000 billion CDs. That's amazing, isn't it? So you're carrying family history books all you, all the time without really thinking about it. And all this information is hard to know how much it's 1,000 billion CDs. It's larger than the record collection for the most of us. But to give you another example, in Sweden we have photographs of all church records of the whole country. And in Sweden we have records back to the 16th century. And all those books, every page, photographs in color, you can fit that into one gram of DNA. One million times. That gives you a perspective. But today I'm going to speak about a very tiny piece of DNA. The mitochondria DNA. It's a very, very tiny piece of your DNA. Consisting of only 16,500 letters DNA letters. But it's very useful if you know how to use it. Because you know where it comes from. It always comes from your mother. And her mother. Her mother. Or the sum of DNA can come from anywhere. But mitochondria DNA always comes from the mother line. That's great. Because I heard yesterday and we can see online people saying, ah, mitochondria DNA, that's useless. Not for genealogy. Academic interest. Maybe thousands of years ago. Is that right? But actually, of course, it goes that way. You can use it if you really know how to use it. And many of you have been priests in your computers, I suppose. Your databases. And when you have researched your family for a couple of years, you're getting a lot of people. And a lot of places in your tree that could be wrong. That's right? You're beginning to wonder, okay, are all those family connections correct? It's hard to know. Red gifts can be wrong. You can interpret them wrong. But I'm going to give you an example with my wife's grandmother. She was born in the beginning of the 1900s. I traced her maternal ancestry back to the church records, court records, tax records, etc. All the way back to the beginning of the 17th century. They have good records in Sweden. It's hard to trace women in the 17th century, even in Sweden, because they are not always mentioned in the records. But it's pretty far back, isn't it? And in this case, I also know that this is correct. I know that this whole line of mothers, that's the correct family. And how do I know that? Well, because when my wife tested, she got a result, and she was quite alone with that result in the Nordic countries. There was no one else who had the same mitochondrity at the group. That was quite disappointing. Okay, what should we use this for? But anyway, my wife carries the same mitochondria in her as all those mothers. After a year or two, I started to pop up matches all around Sweden with the same happy group. I contacted those people, and we started to trace their motherline further, and it turned out they all merged into one area in northern Sweden. They all had their motherlines from the same area. And when we traced them, a couple of generations more back, they actually merged into one woman, Charles Disney's daughter, who is the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of my wife. So all these family lines, we didn't know about each other before they tested, but they turned out we had the same, and we went through the records, and we could connect them all in this giant family tree of only women all the way back to 1610. And this is right now the largest tree at least in the northern countries that is verified with DNA and all with women all its way back to the beginning of the 17th century. And it gives me great pleasure to tell my kids for here that with 100% certainty I know who their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother is. Isn't that great? Great, yeah. So if you connect the people with research, try to go back as far as you can in their trees. You can find connections. Not always, but you can. In this case, some of those people had a brick wall late in the century over there. He had two wives with the same name, calling her under daughter. And it was impossible to see in the search records who was the mother of this child. In this case, the court rematches all those people. She was able to determine, okay, it's that car in under daughter because she matches the three. So you can go through brick walls even with my drunken DNA. The happy group is age 52 and if you look under happy groups, how many have taken the mitochondria DNA test? Oh, great. Many of you. Many of you have something called extra mutations. Extra mutations that branches not yet specified under this happy group. And people with the same extra mutations are found in the same area up in northern Sweden. The big daughter is Chastin Nilsdotter, the one we know of. The other ones we can't connect in the records. They connect before written sources. And we know that they are related somehow. And based on the extra mutations we can see how the family tree looks beyond the written sources. When we hear people say that, okay, mitochondria DNA might be fun, but of no use when it comes to genealogy because you have no real matches. Many of you say, oh, I have matches maybe two, three, four, five, six thousand years ago. That's not that interesting. I was lucky when I got all those matches of my life. Happy group, of course. But the key to use mitochondria DNA, that is target testing. Find the right people to test. Not just take your test, wait for matches. You don't get so much out of that. But if you test yourself and then you find other people to target test, then you can really use mitochondria DNA. Like this. If you test your mother's line or your father's one's line and you trace that as far back as you can in the records, then the key is not to sit around and wait for matches. Don't get them from your great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother as far as making use. Find a daughter and trace a line after leaving people. And that leaving person could be a man or a woman because even we inherit this from our mothers if we can't pass it on to our children. You do this, trace your own lines and then you trace another line after leaving people and you contact them and test them. Then you can verify that these lines are correct in your family tree. Imagine if you test a couple of genealogists do the same, then several lines in your family tree will be tested by someone else. You can tap into their verified lines and imagine if you also count all the Y chromosome lines or the male paternal lines that people test. In a couple of years you'll have a huge network of DNA verified family lines all over Europe, all over the world. That will really benefit all genealogists. We know that these family lines are true. So keep testing your lines and target testing possible of relatives. Another thing that's really interesting with mitochondria DNA and one Y DNA is that you can take a historical person. In this case we have started with Margarita Homs doctor Cedro Sundsja. This was a famous woman in the late 1500s in Sweden. She was called the great mother of Dallakarlia. Dallakarlia is her maiden in Sweden. There are much things written about her. She was well known in this region 500 years ago. And why was she called the great mother? Well, she had children of two more that died with her husband. Her husband actually had seven or four children from his former marriage so she had to raise 18 children. That's quite a lot. And hence she got the name the great mother of Dallakarlia. She was the biggest wife in that region that really stood out and had to take care of so many children. This is the interesting woman and she had five daughters of her own. And that made us think it would be very interesting to see if we can trace living descendants through only female lines up onto today to see if we can get her DNA. So we actually we started researching two of these daughters. It's tough work going 500 years. Only women, no men it stops with men but you have to start a work. We managed actually to find two lines up onto living people. It turned out it was two men because they had no sisters but it doesn't matter in this case. Those two men they ordered the records they should be female descendants of Magareta the great mother of Dallakarlia. So it was very interesting to wait for the results because if all this was correct they should have the same mitochondria DNA and they had. That's great. All these long lines back to the late 1500s are correct. We also know that their mitochondria DNA is the same as her mitochondria DNA. So now we have her mitochondria DNA and we are starting to trace her roots back because she has matches so we can hopefully try to find out where she came from. So this is really genius isn't it? It's mitochondria this would be impossible they say on the internet. Is that true? But if you use it like this it's up in your own family and you trace it to living people and test them if you verify your own family tree or if you take historical persons trace it to living people as a lot of genealogy is to find all these lines then you can also use mitochondria DNA to verify lines and get the DNA of historical people. That is the way I think the best you use mitochondria DNA when it comes to genealogy. But the fascinating thing about mitochondria DNA and mitochondria DNA is you cannot go just 5 generations into 50 generations you can go 100 generations back through time with the help of mitochondria DNA. And I'm going to give you an example I have a friend in the world in Sweden that when she tested she got the mitochondria DNA half a group that is totally in Europe she is the one person in Europe who has this one C4A one C and of course she wondered how can I be so unique I'm only from Sweden so we have to trace to trace her maternal line as far back as we could and we ended up in 1650 ish where a margaretta biologi the earliest woman in her maternal line but you can find in northern Sweden but still how could this woman in the mid 1600s carry this unique hat with her had no idea until a year ago when it turned out we got hold of a Russian our search report an article that it had tested a lot of native people in northern Russia that has found one area where there is a lot of this C4A one C here in eastern Siberia there we have a lot of people with this exact half a group among the events the events of people living up there reindeer herring and hunting for thousands of years beautiful dress here DNA shows that somehow one woman must have come in eastern Siberia 850 kilometers to northern Sweden before the year 1600 we don't know how but it's quite intriguing it could be of course that they had migrated of course but we should see some traces along the way of course everyone is interested but still so we have two theories those people that Vikings the first Viking Vikings were up here in Mormonsk in northern Russia and of course it's quite easy to imagine they went a little bit further very warm in the Viking age there was no ice up there they could have gotten a bit more to the east and taken a woman home with them that's one explanation there is another possibility because nowadays we DNA test everything they DNA test wheat to see where the first wheat took room they DNA test snails trace people's movement from the Atlantic coast they DNA test everything and also reindeers in northern Scandinavia we have reindeers and some people have been heard on reindeers for a long time but reindeers, they don't come from northern Scandinavia DNA test has shown that's a family tree for reindeers also so the DNA test has shown that they come from northern Siberia and they came to Scandinavia 1500 years ago that long ago it could be that this woman came along when we imported reindeer herding maybe she was a reindeer herding consultant all that time we don't know, one of those two could be right we have to wait for more results but this is also the the exciting things about reindeers DNA you don't get all the results directly you have to wait for new results to untangle these riddles and normally when you're doing genealogy you're looking at the close of family and second, third, fourth, fifth cousins but all those people that came before us I think that as interesting as the reindeers family actually in my decodity I give us the possibility through all those tests that remains the gold star bunch yesterday we could see how they drilled into bones of DNA from all the remains and the best thing about my conda DNA is that it's quite easy to get from all the remains it's easier than the other DNA so all the findings they have done they have almost every skeleton has their mitochondria DNA analyzed this is how it looks now all these markings that's prehistoric individuals that has had their DNA analyzed when you take your own mitochondria DNA test it can compare and find who of these people are your distant prehistoric relatives you can also not only just find who are your relatives you can also find how did my relatives live because when the archaeologists find these people they find them in a context so they can see what culture did they belong to how did they live and all this information is available I'm going to show you an example of a customer I helped who has his earliest maternal ancestor in southern Sweden he said to me ok, I don't know everything how did they get there how did my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother get there we started to look back in time with all the data available and could trace that his maternal line from West Asia to the Middle East and this way through the millennia up to southern Scandinavia and how do we do that well it could actually find quite a lot of these prehistoric relatives all these people, all these skeletons turned out to have dismayed the community but they are related to his maternal line maybe not the straight line but they are have a common maternal ancestor with him and you see, they started out between 10,000 and 30,000 years in the Middle East, West Asia and they moved out through Europe and eventually landed in Scandinavia and if we look at this from the present time you can see that he is related to a couple of people skeletons from the Viking Age in Denmark that is also very surprising we have a routine in southern Sweden of course they are related to Vikings in Denmark but going further back we are 4,500 years back in what is now near Germany there we had a couple of relatives that belong to the cold and the wear culture they are called that because their pottery was the patterns was made with the quartz and these people they were the first as we heard yesterday also the first to ride the horse and the first to actually travel with shaggots and move around a lot and they also were the first people in the world to speak in the European languages I mean you speak a Celtic language or an Anglo-Saxon language and we speak a Germanic language there are Roman languages there are Slavic languages but how many of you know how in the European language sounded before it became Germanic Celtic you want to hear it? as actually researchers in Sweden at the Uppsala University has traced the roots of all the European languages back to the the first in the European language and we will hear the researcher General Arsson from Uppsala read out a bit with how it must have sounded before the languages divided into our different families yes do you want more to translate? the reason is you can actually reconstruct a language through language genealogy so to speak they are building family trees language trees so they probably sounded like something like that here if you go further back in time on this maternal line you find that we have pre-historic here you watch now Ukraine so 6,000 years ago and 6,000 years when I started out with this a couple of years ago 6,000 years that's a lot they were living in caves, right? start thinking of stone age caves long time ago maybe small huts and small settlements but these people they belong to something called the Trapilia culture and they have excavated a couple of settlements here in Ukraine that are huge more than 2,000 houses in those settlements it's almost finished 6,000 years ago I think that's quite impressive, I didn't know that before I started with this people are advanced more than them if you go even further then we are about 7,000 years back in what is now a former Yugoslavian it's a Balkan there we have people in the Stadacievo culture they have found those small amniots with writing signs and the numbers on them this is 7,000 years ago that's before the Samaritan people and in our school books in Sweden they said that the Samaritan people that's the first people that used but apparently no these were before that so you learn a lot about history when you're tracing the deep roots you might have come to the United but the most fascinating part was the earliest found prehistoric relics that are found for him this man lived in a small village in northern Turkey 8,300 years ago this village they have been excavating it for more than 10 years layer after layer layer after layer really huge excavation project now they are down on the level that was the village in 8,300 years ago the same time as he lived there on that level they have found a floor a clay floor from the house and it's hard, it's burnt so probably this is the house burnt down in that floor they have found two footprints imagine a small village same time his maternal ancestor lived there they found two footprints on the floor it's not sure that it's his relative to walk there but probably a close neighbor or something I think that really brings the family together over the millennia I mean 8,000 years ago not that much so he and his wife is going to go down to Turkey they are preserved on the museum there so they are going to go down and maybe step in them to see if they are fit really brings history to life all thanks to DNA I hope you have seen this probably there is a family tree for all men in the world and there is also a family tree for all the mothers in the world through mitochondria DNA and all those branches that are mapped by those main branches these are the branches that are most common in Ireland they long got something else nope, but you'll get them this tree as long as there were academics that did the finding and developed the tree didn't happen much but since genealogy is all over the world and other people have tested the DNA and they are starting to look like this it's exploding it's just like a SNP tsunami we heard of this is the mitochondria DNA tsunami they are discovering new branches all the time and academics haven't got a chance to do this now it's the genealogy of the world that are developing this tree and if you have done the mitochondria DNA test you can help develop this tree by submitting your DNA or so to GenBank how many have done that two three okay you have a lot to do when you come home because this database is a large research database of the US, Japan and Europe together and here they collect data not only for humans they have made the mitochondria DNA or chimpanzees or fungi or whatever for bacteria it's a bit complicated to submit your result because it's a research database but if you go to this link then there's a fairly easy form to fill in the description on how you do it it's a bank called Ian Logan that has made his easier submissions world what you do is you go to your family the family tree DNA page you go to your mitochondria DNA results there's a possibility to download your PASTA file PASTA file and then you submit that to GenBank so please do that to help build the tree it looks like this if you look in the database there's nothing to use in your ordinary work it's more for project administrators and researchers but you're helping to find new branches so hopefully people submitting to GenBank we can get the tree growing even faster I started with these quotes and I'd say come out and use this instead great technology too but you have to learn to use it right? so go home and trace your lines to various higher trees with mitochondria DNA and then a lot of research about vikings and settlements in the forest etc but we are discovering new things all the time these are the latest news just a couple of weeks ago from the city of Birka one of the largest Viking cities in Sweden huge city close to Stockholm actually and in this city they have found 3,000 burial mounds a lot of graves and one of the largest graves is this one a really rich Viking warrior grave with a lot of things in it and even two animals they reconstructed it and there were two horses in the grave a lot of weapons big pieces a very rich grave for obviously a very famous at that time warrior viking when the time they got around to test his DNA it turned out he was a woman he was a female warrior that was a surprise because this was a really rich warrior grave to teach him being a Viking is another part so this also shows that mitochondria DNA is showing us new things not history this is just going to continue the more people that test the more people to learn about our history and the more skeletons they test there are exciting times if I come back next year I suppose there are 80,000 tested in Sweden maybe 15 million in the world and by that I say thank you now any questions for Peter? ok we have one down here I hope this microphone survives DNA it's a man he showed two men who were subplated by my torch exact matches on their eternal DNA or did they have any extra mutations that had appeared I've seen a lot of DNA and I never understand how often the extra mutations appear exact matches and it's quite tricky to understand what is an exact match anyway if we use Kerr in mitochondria DNA those two are exact matches but mitochondria DNA mutates very slowly so in one average mutation occurs every 2,000 years but we have families that two sisters have a distance of 2 so it can happen very fast also so it's all up to random but closest matches 0 distance matches would be as far away as 1,000 years when it comes to mitochondria DNA you have the exact same as your sister but it's no better or no worse than your sister thank you I was going to say I had exactly the same experience finding a an ancient DNA sequence there's a new paper that was coming out that Dan Brown used to talk about this massive migration that continues from the step into Western Europe in that paper there are mitochondria DNA sequences one of those sequences in evidence it's one step especially my dad who is in the exactest trees of London it's just so exciting to actually see that in the ancient DNA record and that is a direct female minor relative it's a close prehistoric relative it's fascinating my oldest relative I had mitochondria DNA she was several thousand years ago my colleague Christina here she was worse you have four in Syria for eight thousand years so she has the record I'll bring it down to Jim and then we can bring it back to Peter what is the best way to access these ancient DNA samples where do you get them to be able to compare you don't want to stick all through the research papers you can go to the website Ancestral Journeys it's a British historian I think she is she connects all those results from all those papers and puts them on Ancestraljourneys.com they also have an interactive map that's this one so you can sort it by period etc any other questions for Peter question back here let's go back here and then I get this question family tree DNA must have the largest collection of empty DNA are they actively working to build the tree because the one that I see everybody will refer to is the followtree.org which is not from family tree so who's actually active in building the tree here we go well that's really the huge bottleneck in this it's one man in Netherlands who has taken on the task of building this huge tree and therefore there's a new word from about every second year and that's the final tree it's Peter that's family tree DNA isn't more actually obviously in Sweden you've got wonderful records that go back to the 1500s here in Ireland we're stuck at around about 1800 so what would your advice for the use of mitochondrial DNA for those people researching their Irish family trees what would your advice be my advice would be go back as far as you can to the 1800s and find that woman and then you hopefully find two daughters and then you go up onto recent times and test people so you get all those maternal lines tested and verified when you have that accessible for everyone then you can also find close branches and you start to map it before the time of records so be active, search line and test people and one of the fascinating things that you've done of course is trace the mother of is that how you pronounce I'm just wondering which famous Irish woman would we want to trace all the descendants of anybody have any particular ideas Green Maeve so Grace O'Malley and who else what other Irish women would we like to trace the descendants of Grace O'Malley Grace O'Malley got married to a Flaherty and she also got married to somebody else do you know the actual story of it she actually had two husbands and I'm sure she had children but I'm not sure if she actually had any daughters and whether they would actually have been documented and I think that's one of the big problems is we don't have that line of documentation all the way down from Grace O'Malley to at least one living descendant and you do need to have that paper trail all the way back the animals of course they're very very male biased so you don't actually get the women being recorded so if we do want to trace a famous Irish person it'll have to be somebody probably since 1800 so and we probably have records for those people as well but yeah we've got two comments down here at the time Brian Baroo one of the old girls from Kilkenny married his daughter to one of the Viking chiefs and she I believe is mentioned in the Icelandic sagas so I've been trying to get some readable English and short history of that so that I can trace it but Austria or Eli Austria that would be certainly a feasible example that we could potentially get down John can you come out here I'm just scared of that speaker behind you I don't know a lot about Monacondra but it seems to me as we go down this journey of having more branches like you were saying and we do discover through science and forensic archeology these ancient mitochondrial lines will that fill in the gap to some of these things and we don't have paper records for as far as seeing that this person historically was in a grave site related to somebody historically on the male side that may help us advertise whereas am I just wishing very good question Peter what do you think today they're mostly testing analyzing neolithic and bronze age people and iron age people that's not that relevant in the audience but when they are starting to advance into medieval people medieval graves it would start to get interesting and we can fill in the gaps and in terms of the tests that we should be doing is it just the basic mitochondrial test or should we do the full mitochondrial sequence good question there are actually three tests you can take you can test that 23 and me how many are tested at what do you mean a couple of years then you get your mitochondria in a happy group but on a very basic level because they have a data from 2009 or 10 maybe 7 years old and you know how the tree is evolving so that's not all much use at family tree DNA they have two micro tests micro quantity DNA plus I think they call it but that's really a minus don't use it it's of no use at all you can maybe find relatives 20,000 years ago it's the mitochondria in a full sequence that's the only test on the market that gives you the whole mitochondria and makes it possible to upload gem bank also and that is on sale actually at the family tree DNA stand for $169 I'm not sure what the euro equivalent of that is but normally it's $199 so you're saving $30 that you buy here today great well listen thank you Peter for a fabulous talk and for really kind of spurring our imagination so let's go out there and be creative ladies and gentlemen Peter Chauvin