 Okay ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our next speaker. Michelle Leonard and Michelle is a professional genealogist. She's the owner of, and I have written down here, the owner of genes and genealogy. She is a researcher, writer, a speaker and a historian and I know Michelle primarily because of the wonderful work that she's done helping to identify the remains of soldiers from World War I that are found on the battlefield in France every year. So Michelle is going to talk to us about using autosomal DNA to maximum effect and I think that's something that is going to be of interest to any of you who have done an autosomal DNA test such as the family finder test from Chalmy Tree DNA, the kind sponsors of these DNA lectures. So please give a warm welcome from Michelle Leonard. Okay, hi everyone. So I'm going to talk about using autosomal DNA to maximum effect. Everybody can hear me okay? Yeah. Alright, so this is going to cover what autosomal DNA is, how autosomal DNA is inherited, how you can use autosomal DNA results to help with your family tree research, how to work with your DNA matchlists, a few case studies, success stories. I'll talk about the X chromosome and a little tiny bit about third party tools. So what can you use autosomal DNA testing for? Well, you can use it to confirm and support your family tree research, to identify and connect with new cousins, add new branches to your tree, break down brick walls, adoption illegitimacy and unknown ancestor mysteries, test theories about relationships and learn about your ethnic makeup. Disclaimer before we begin, be prepared and prepare others. DNA is the one record set that does not and cannot lie or be mistaken. Human beings can and on occasion they do. So just be aware that if you DNA test, you might find something you're not expecting or somebody you asked to DNA test might find something they're not expecting. So you have to be aware of that and make others aware of it. What is autosomal DNA? Alright, so in the nucleus of every human cell there are 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs overall and I'm going to emphasize this word pairs because it's a really important concept that you have to get your head around. There are 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes known as autosomes and one pair of sex or gender defining chromosomes and these are the X and the Y. So if you get two X's, you're female and X and a Y, you're male. And this is what they look like, the chromosomes. Chromosome one is the largest and they get increasingly smaller as we go down the numbers chromosome 21 and 22 are the smallest. You can see the X is quite large but the Y is quite small. The one most important thing you take from this, you see they're in pairs. There's two copies of each. There's a maternal chromosome one and a paternal chromosome one and so on and so forth. Autosomal DNA is a random blend of all of the DNA passed down to you by your direct ancestors. It covers all your ancestral lines and not just one, like Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA. Each new generation recombination takes place and some DNA from previous generations drops off. For instance you have less of your grandparents than you do of your parents and so on and so forth. This limits the reach of autosomal DNA to around 200 to 250 years. Autosomal DNA tests are non-gender specific, both men and women can test and I still get asked that question by people, oh isn't it better for a man to test? And that was the case a number of years ago when Y DNA was the only game in town but it's not the case any longer, it's completely equal, both genders can test. It's best for matching with cousins within the past five to six generations. People can match you in any of your lines, the larger the DNA segment, the closer the match. The more DNA segments, the closer the match. Test your older generations first due to the limited reach, test as many other close and confirmed relatives as you can to narrow matches down. The number of people testing autosomaly now has absolutely exploded in the last couple of years. There's now over 12 million people tested across the different company databases. That's enormous and it's just increasing all the time. There are now five major testing companies that sell direct to consumer autosomal DNA tests. There's Ancestry, Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, MyHeritage and LivingDNA which is the only British one of those. Get into the databases of all the major testing companies if you can as you don't know where your best matches may choose to test. FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage and LivingDNA accept transfers. LivingDNA doesn't yet have a matching database but there will be one coming pretty soon. Only FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage are here exhibiting today so if you want to test here you can go out and see them. How is autosomal DNA inherited? All righty, here's Mum and Dad and here's you. Apologies to the men in the room. Dad has 22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. He's got the X and the Y and Mum also has 22 pairs of autosomes and she's got two Xs and then recombination takes place and Dad passes down one set of 22 brand new autosomes, half of his 44 all jumbled up together and is unchanged. X chromosome remember he's only got the one to pass down so he passes it down. Mum does the same she passes down a set of 22 new autosomes, half of her 44 again all mixed up together and one of her X chromosomes. That's either going to be a mix of her two like her autosomal chromosomes or it's going to be one of them unchanged. So you now have 22 pairs of autosomes of your own and two X chromosomes if you're female and an X and Y if you're male. You encourage progressively less DNA from your ancestors with each passing generation. You get 50% from your parents, around 25 from your grandparents, around 12.5 from your great-grandparents and it halves each generation. It's important to familiarise yourself with the amounts of DNA different relationships should share with each other. DNA inheritance is random so these percentages numbers come in ranges and not absolutes. For instance, here's a range of sharing percentages and these are averages. So we've got 50% parent child, about 50% for a full sibling, about 25 for a half sibling, grandparent, aunt, uncle, double first cousin. There's lots of relationships at that level that could share the same amount of DNA with you and the same first cousin, half aunt, great-grandparent, they could all share the same amount, 12.5%. By the time you get down to third cousin you're only sharing about 0.78% of your DNA. The only absolute here is that you share exactly 50% with each parent. All the rest are approximate. For instance, you could get 23% from one grandparent and 27% from the other. It's just down to how the cards fall. The other thing you really need to understand when you're trying to work out relationship predictions is the amount of centimorgans you share. A centimorgan is a unit for measuring genetic linkage and it's usually abbreviated to a small c and a big m. You don't need to be a geneticist to understand this. You just need to remember that the larger the number of centimorgans you share with someone, the closer the relationship is. Let's look at the amount of centimorgans. You've got 3400 for a parent child, about 2550 for a full sibling, 1700 for grandparent and uncle niece and if you have sibling, about 850 for a first cousin, 53 for a third cousin. But these are averages. You really want to be looking at the ranges. This is how you do it. This fantastic project called the shared CM project, which is run by an American genetic genealogist called Dr. Blaine Bettinger. He's gathered together lots of data on real confirmed relationships and has put it into this project and created ranges and averages. Let's look at one of them. This is for half sibling. Now the average is 1783 centimorgans, but look at how large the range is. 1300 to 2300. Now if you are a half sibling sharing 1300, you're a very low sharing half sibling and if you're a half sibling sharing 2300, you're a very high sharing half sibling. So what we call these are outliers. Okay. There's a really great tool that I recommend everyone use this now and it's the shared CM project 3.0 and it's been created by Johnny Pearl from DNA Painter. And it does the work for you. It's fantastic. So you get a new matching and the companies tell you that you share 250 centimorgans with this new match. You can go to this tool, you can plug in 250 and it'll give you all the relationship probabilities. For instance, here it tells us that's 3.35% of our DNA and it says there's a 62% chance that that's a half great grand aunt uncle niece nephew or a second cousin, a half first cousin once removed or a first cousin twice removed. Now, how many people are going to match a half great grand aunt uncle niece nephew? Not many of us. So we can almost eliminate that and think that it's much more likely this person is a second cousin or maybe a half first cousin once removed and that's a 62% chance. But what if it was an outlier? Well, if it's an outlier, you're probably down in that 12% probability bracket and maybe it's a half first cousin or a first cousin once removed a low sharing one. So you always have to keep these probabilities in mind. You also get this when you plug that in, you get a little chart and it grays out all of the relationships that just can't fit and gives you the relationships that could fit. If you're really want to get into the probabilities of it, there's now this probability test tool that you can use to put in multiple different probabilities and get a compound probability for a hypothesis. It's really fantastic, especially when you're working on unknown ancestor cases. So the randomness of DNA inheritance. I've got a second cousin once removed who shares 295 centimorgans over 12 segments with me. And I've also got a second cousin once removed who shares 23 centimorgans over one segment with me. The exact same relationship level. Now what are both of these? These are outliers and the reason I know they're outliers are not problems is because I've tested so many other relatives and those other relatives match these people in the expected ranges. It's me that doesn't so I'm the outlier. But you just keep this in mind. Always look at the most likely first, but this is always possible. Genetic generations versus age. Okay, so here we have Mr. Hamilton and his great grandparents were Joseph and Agnes. And this is my mum and Joseph and Agnes were her third great grandparents. So what's the relationship between these two? Well, Mr. Hamilton and my mum are second cousins twice removed. So you'd expect he must be pretty old, right? Two generations closer. He's three years younger. They're second cousins twice removed. He's two generations closer, but he's three years younger. Why and how could this possibly happen? Well, because of this guy here, James Hamilton, he happened to marry twice and was having children over the span of about half a century. Well into his sixties, he was still having children including Mr. Hamilton's father. So we can see where those two generations have been eaten up. It's useful to know the age of your match and try to work out what the relationship might be from that. So always start, as I say, from the most likely to the least. It's still more likely that two people of a similar age are of the same generation. But as seen in this example, you can't take that for granted. Always keep in mind that people of a similar age could be one generation removed from each other, and even, in some rare cases like this, a whole two generations removed. A genetic generation can throw up anomalies, as I say, due to older fathers in the line. So you need to examine your match's trees going back, as well as their own age, to get a better idea on what the relationship might be. Big word warning here endogamy. Endogamy is the practice of marrying within the same ethnic, cultural, social, religious or tribal group. In endogamous populations, everyone will descend from the same small gene poll, so cousins, marrying cousins, marrying cousins, et cetera. People will be related to each other in a recent genealogical time frame on multiple ancestral pathways, and the same ancestors are going to appear in many different places on their tree. So they might have the same second great-grandparents five different times. If you have a lot of this, if you have a lot of endogamy within your family tree, you have to disregard predicted relationships and ranges of symptom organs. Assistant cousins are going to share more DNA with you, and the closer relationship prediction is likely to be wrong. All right, so what to sum all DNA results consist of two main components. Ethnicity estimate or admixture and DNA match list. Now, I'm only going to talk briefly about the ethnicity estimate. This is an example of my cousin Marion's ethnicity estimate. So she's 74% Jewish, 74% European, 23% Ashkenazi Jewish and a few trace results that we really don't want to look too heavily into. The interesting thing about this one is that Marion is an unknown grandfather, and the three-quarters of her tree that is known has no Jewish in it. So this is giving us a pretty decent clue to the origins of the unknown grandfather. But we can't take it too literally. It's just a good clue. Ethnicity estimates are going to vary between companies because they have different reference populations. They're only really accurate to the continental level, cannot be taken too literally, and you will find errors. Your ethnicity estimate can only cover the DNA you have personally inherited from your ancestors and you don't have all the same DNA they did. They can give you a broad idea of your origins and they might provide genealogical clues if you were adopted or have a recent unknown ancestor mystery like Marion. But this is an emerging science. I'm sure it will improve over time as more people test and reference populations increase. But just be careful about reading too much into it at the moment. The DNA match list. It really is all about the cousins and this is the most important thing you get with your autosomal DNA test. This is what you want to work with in order to make connections and to enhance your family tree. So this is my family founder match list from Family Tree DNA. It tells me an awful lot of detail on this one page. Giving me how many matches I have. It'll give me the name, the relationship range, number of shared centimorgans, the longest block of shared centimorgan and whether we're an X match or not and I'll come back to that and some of the other things on that page. Start with your largest matches first and work your way down your first page. Upload your family tree if you know anything at all. You'll be helping yourself and others. Use DNA in conjunction with traditional research to get the most out of it. Search your entire match list for matches with common surnames and locations. If a match has both, you have a better chance of identifying the places you get. The harder it is to find links between just the surnames alone because there's going to be lots of people with the same common surnames. Study shared matches as they might hold the vital clue, especially if you have no tree to work from. Be proactive, contact your matches. Many won't respond but keep trying and you will find new cousins to collaborate with. Build out your tree. Direct to ancestors of course but especially your collateral lines will be helpful with DNA matching. I get a new match with MLK and she's only got a very small tree. Goes back to her grandparents Alfred Albert Care and Jessie Emily Blackburn. So I have a very robust built out tree with lots of collateral lines. What is the first thing I should do when I get a new match and I can see their tree? I should check my own master tree. Might they be on there already? I have thousands of people on my master tree. I'm not going to remember every single name and date and when I did check my tree for this I found out that my third great-grandfather was there. Alfred Albert Care, Jessie Emily Blackburn Alfred's grandparents were my third great-grandparents. So that's that one solved straight away because of all the work I've done in the past on my own tree and MLK and I are third cousins once removed. So if you have a large robust tree it's always worth searching it in case you already have one of your matches ancestors on it. In this case I even had my matches father on my tree but this added a more recent branch and it got me in touch with them. Build out the trees of your matches. You just need a starting point to do this. So here's one on ancestry DH. It's a small amount of shared DNA, 20.8 cent of organs. Ordinarily I might not look at that but DH matches a number of my first and second cousins and I can narrow this match down to my paternal great-grandmother's cullin or nickel lines. And I find, so this is my great-grandmother's tree, Janet Kerstina's in cullin. Her parents were John Cullin and Janet Niccol. And when I look at DH's tree I find the common surname Niccol. Christina Niccol, born in Melbourne Australia. There's no other details for her though so what do I have to do? I have to build the tree out myself. It only goes back to her grandparents. Don't just accept the trees too small to find the link. Be proactive and build it out yourself. And I got Christina's birth record tells me her parents were William Niccol and Mary Leslie. So now I want their marriage, don't I? And that took place in 1856 in Victoria but that doesn't give me his parents' names. Now at this point I'm wondering about this William Niccol because I've got a collateral line brick wall involving a William Niccol. My third great-grandparents were William Niccol and Elizabeth Care. My second great-grandmother, their daughter Janet. But Janet had a brother, William born in 1829 in Glasgow and I can't get any further with him. He's on the 1841 census and then poof, nothing. This is the marriage of the parents, William Niccol, a warper in Glasgow and Elizabeth Care, married 19th July 1824. So I bought the Australian Marriage Certificate for William Niccol and Mary Leslie. And it tells me that that William Niccol was born in Glasgow, tick one, that he's 26 years old in 1856 so that's born in 1829, tick two. Parents' names, William Niccol and Janet Care and William was a warper. Now, everything matches up except the first name of William's mother. But I believe Elizabeth's mother died when our children were young and they were actually brought up by their grandmother, Janet Care. So it's not all that surprising William might have got the name wrong. It's almost certain I have finally found out what became of that collateral line brick wall by building out my Majesty. Use the search boxes. So this is a search on family 3DNA and I'm searching for an ancestral surname of Clelland. My Clellands lived in Ayrshire in Scotland so I'm looking for matches who have Clellands from Ayrshire on their list. And I get back this, there's lots of my Clellands from Ireland, I want to discard them but there's one that stands out, Clelland Ayrshire, Scotland. And this happens to be my mum's fourth cousin once removed from my Clelland Ayrshire line. So it's always worth looking for the common surnames and locations together. Make the system work for you. Upload your tree, it really will help you. When you upload your tree to family 3DNA for example it searches all the other trees of your matches and it will bold any surnames that you have in common. Now this is for one of my first cousins, so we have a lot of surnames in common but it just gives a really good clue that you've got surnames in common that you can investigate. The other great thing if you upload your tree are these linked relationships. If you upload your tree and then link a relationship it gives you narrowing buckets as they're called. So I've linked my mother as my mother and that brings me this maternal bucket with all the matches that also match my mother so I can just click on that and just see my maternal matches. I've also linked all of my paternal first cousins and I've tested a number of them and they go in my paternal bucket so anyone that matches them in the paternal bucket and identified as a paternal match for me so I can click on these two buckets and switch between maternal and paternal if I want to see the different matches. Not all of your cousins are going to match you. Close relationships in cousins up to second cousins will match or should match you pretty much 100% of the time. If your first cousin isn't matching you there's a problem. If your third cousin isn't matching you though is there a problem? Well maybe but strictly not. 10% of third cousins won't match each other. It's 50-50 at the fourth cousin level and only 10% of fifth cousins are going to match each other at all. So you're lucky if you match a fifth cousin. Not all of your matches will be real cousins. Many small segments are false known as identical by chance and I'm not going to get into the science of that but research suggests 100% of segments of 15 centimorgans or larger are what we call identical by descent or real. But only 14% of 5 centimorgan segments are real. So be really really careful if you want to work with really small segments many of them won't be real. It doesn't mean totally discount smaller segments but just don't make them a main focus. You've got plenty of higher matches usually to work on anyway. Test your older generations if possible. They have more of your ancestors DNA than you do. Here's a match. PM on my list down as fifth cousin remote largest block of 8 centimorgans is that something I would ordinarily look at? Probably not. But I've tested my dad's first cousin who's that magic generation closer to our common ancestors than I am. And PM shoots up on her list a second cousin third cousin sharing 155 centimorgans with the longest block of 55. That's a really good match and I want to investigate it now and PM turns out to be my third cousin my dad's first cousin's second cousin once removed. Should I test my siblings? This is a really common question that I get and many people think there's no point testing their siblings if they've tested themselves. The answer I always give is it depends the question can only be answered with another question. Do you have parents to test? If the answer to that is yes I've got both of them. Then test both your parents. Your siblings DNA can't give you any more than your parents can. If your answer is no or I've only got one of them as is the case for many of us then the answer is a big fact yes, yes test your siblings. Why? Let's go back to how autosomal DNA is inherited to see why. Mum and dad again, you and this time we're going to say dad's autosomal DNA is a pack of 100 DNA cards and he shuffles his 100 cards up and passes a random 50 down to you so there we've got them. And mum she's got the same and she shuffles her 100 cards up and passes a random 50 down to you. So you've now got 100 DNA cards of your own it's a unique mix of 50% mum 50% dad. Fast forward a few years and along comes brother and dad re-shuffles this pack of 100 DNA cards up and passes a random 50 down to brother Mum does the same. Brothers now got 100 cards from mum and dad just like you but did he get the same 100 cards? How likely is that? Well it's as likely as you're being identical twins because those are the only people that get the same 100 cards. So siblings share approximately 50% of their DNA using my playing card analogy this means the average siblings share around 50 DNA cards with each other but that means there's around 50 that they both have that they don't share with each other two siblings therefore should expect to have around 150 of their parents combined 200 DNA cards between them so if you don't have parents to test then testing just one sibling might get you an extra 25% of your parents DNA into the system that's worth doing and the results will give you an additional matches across all lines since they're going to match people you don't on segments of DNA from your parents that weren't passed down to you personally. Let's see an example of why it's so helpful here's BC on my 23 and me list is a third to fifth cousin sharing 0.42% he's down near the bottom of my second page of matches it's not a match I'd get around to looking at but it's not top of my investigation list but I've tested brother and look at brother's match list well there's my mum and me as his top two matches that's understandable but number three in his list is BC second to third sharing 2.12% of their DNA that's a whole lot more than he shares with me shares 159 with my brother and 32 with me now I really want to investigate this and BC actually turns out to be my second cousin once removed another outlier on my side but average sharing for my brother how to narrow down your test results alright so test your older generations they can narrow your matches the furthest if you don't have older generations to test test your peers, half siblings, first cousins, second cousins first cousin can narrow to grandparents second cousin to great grandparents this is how narrowing works here's a match, SJ and if I didn't have any confirmed relatives test it to match SJ as well I wouldn't be able to narrow her down to even maternal or paternal but I can do a lot more than that because I have got lots of people tested now the first important thing to notice on the in common with list is she doesn't match my mum so this is a paternal match she matches four of my paternal first cousins that just gives us more evidence on that front she also matches my dad's first cousin another one that's the magic generation closer and she is my dad's maternal first cousin so this narrows things down to my paternal grandmother's quarter of my tree to throw out three quarters of my tree already but even better than that she matches my second cousin once removed again a magic generation closer so I've now narrowed it to my great grandmother's eighth of my tree that's really getting down to the nitty gritty now and here's my great grandmother's eighth of my tree again it's Janet Cullen her parents John Cullen and Janet Niccol so I'm going to see if I can break down a brick wall and Janet's grandfather is my brick wall Robert Cullen died in the 1820s in Glasgow no documentation to tell me who his parents were I found this birth Robert Cullen born in 1802 in Glasgow to John Niccol, John Cullen and Elizabeth Morton but I can't prove that he might not have been born in Glasgow he might not have been registered I can't make that link enter DNA and I get a new match Jan and Jan has Cullen's and whiteheads on her tree just like I do in fact she has Robert Cullen and Margaret Whitehead and they're her third great-grandparents as well so Jan and I are fourth cousins exactly that's a great match but can it help me with my brick wall well she's added John Cullen and Elizabeth Morton to her tree does she know something I don't well she knows her great grandmother had a middle name of Morton and indeed when I looked at Australian records she was calling herself Elizabeth Morton Johnston that's a really really good clue that those two people are the correct parents for my Robert I still want more, I want more so SJ we know she matches on this particular part of my tree now she doesn't have a tree at Family Tree DNA but she's one of these people who have tested at different companies she's also an ancestry and she has a small tree there and it tells us her grandfather was a Thomas Cullen married to an Agnes Ray that perps up my interest I know she's on my Cullen line and she's even got a Cullen in her tree so what does it tell us all she's got for him is that he died in Glasgow that's another tech we know my Cullens were in Glasgow but it's not enough I need to get digging I've got a common surname and a common location so I'm going to investigate Research and Matches Tree so I went and got the 1905 marriage for Thomas and Agnes and his parents were Robert Cullen, a carpet weaver and Margaret Cullen 1881 marriage of Robert and Margaret I got Thomas as the parents and Martha McLean now they got married in 1853 which is prior to statutory registration in Scotland so it wouldn't give me Thomas' parents I needed to go for his death instead and I found that in 1893 and his parents were given as William Cullen and Sarah Morrison so I'm getting closer now and I look for William's death, 1879 and guess who his parents were none other than John Cullen and Elizabeth Morton I now have proper DNA evidence that they belong on my tree and SJ is my confirmed fifth cousin and in fact I've had more DNA matches on this line since then another descendant of John and Elizabeth sent me these absolutely amazing photographs this is of their daughter Christian who was born in 1793 and it was taken in 1855 and next to her is her daughter Elizabeth I wouldn't have these photographs but for DNA matches and I wouldn't even have any of these people on my tree but for DNA matches so confirming lines on your tree and this to me is one of the best things that DNA testing can give you it's a gold dust to those of us who've been researching our tree for years and years and years to be able to verify it with DNA it's so so important so let's focus on a match in my mom's family tree DNA list and we're going to talk about Christy here she's down as a second to fourth cousin 24 centimorgans 39 longest block this is a decent match we want to look at first at the in common with list and who do we find on that? well we find a woman named Isabelle who is my mom's maternal first cousin and has tested for me so that is probably narrowing Christy down to my mom's maternal side but we want to look at this in the chromosome browser and this is what a chromosome browser looks like the first thing you want to notice is you've got all 23 chromosomes including the X but there's just one line for each just one line for each even though as I've been banging on about you've got two copies of each of them now why is that? it's because the companies can't differentiate between what's on your maternal copy and what's on your paternal copy so they just give the one line and the matches could be on either and you have to work it out yourself unfortunately by testing other people or by getting confirmed matches now they give you the solid color at the back is me no my mom sorry and the blue color is her first cousin now they share a lot of DNA segments so you'll see a lot of the blue and the orange color is Christy and they just share two segments but look at this one on chromosome 7 that's the one we want to hone in on because Christy and Isabelle look like they share the same segment there don't they? so we want to view this data in a table that's the best way to look at it and here is what I do now is I add up all of the segments over 6, 7 centimorgans I discount the little tiny ones the ones, the 2s, the 3s because as we've said before they're most likely to be false so now I've got a total of 71 over 3 cent segments and you can go and check that with the shared CM tool that I told you about earlier to see the probabilities if you want but it'll come out at about a third to fourth cousin being most likely triangulation what is triangulation? well I'm going to show you an example of it what we want to know is are Christy and Isabelle matching on the same copy of my mom's chromosome 7? well let's look at how mom matches Christy 31 million to 76 million you're looking at the start and end locations now how mom matches Isabelle 31 million to 130 million so it's a much bigger segment but the one she matches Christy on is within it, isn't it? so the million dollar question do they match each other on chromosome 7? and this is what triangulation is doing you have to know that everybody matches each other and the only way to do this unfortunately is to have access to see if Isabelle matches Christy on one of their accounts or to ask them to do it or to get them to upload to Jedmatch but as I say Isabelle tested for me I have access and from 28 million to 76 million so they do all match each other on the same segment of DNA and what you want to do when you're deciding on the segment that they match on is you start with the highest start location and you end with the lowest end location that's the segment that they all three of them share completely so we've triangulated it mom, Isabelle and Christy all match each other on the same segment on one of their two copies of chromosome 7 and they have the same common ancestor from whom they inherited this piece of DNA and we know mom and Isabelle are maternal first cousins so we know it's on that side I'm not going to talk anymore about triangulation because Morris here is going to give a full talk on this subject tomorrow so tune in for that let's check the common surnames now for Christy and there's a number of them all bolded that could be given as a link so I need to see her tree and thankfully she has uploaded a tree and I see a name on it that's really interesting to me, William Berry and he's married to a Mary Bullock and he's Christy's fourth great-grandfather so let's look at my maternal grandmother's tree because we know that's where this match comes from and I've got a William Berry who was also married to a Mary but he was married to Mary Somerville could they be the same person, cousins what's going on here? well here's William Mary and Mary Somerville in 1860 says he's a Carter and a bachelor he also says he's 39 years old and you can add a decade to that and here's the marriage of William and Mary Bullock in 1841 so nearly 20 years earlier in the same area of Lanarkshire and where do I find Mary Bullock on the 1841 census well I found her with my Berry family my William's father John and his sister Jean so he is my William Berry he has married both Mary's Christy and I are half fourth cousins once removed what's going on, did Mary die? well no she's alive and well in the 1861 census in fact she outlived him and she's living with her dad and her daughter who is Christy's ancestor on the 1861 census the year after he's married Mary number two as I started calling her then and it turns out Mary number one found out about his antics with Mary number two and shot him to the police and he went to prison for three years for bigamy and I have these magnificent transcripts from the trial interviews with Mary number one interviews with Mary number two and Mary number two knew nothing about Mary number one I'm completely innocent but she did take him back after he got out from his three years in prison and thankfully for me because my second great grandmother was born after that point in time a little tip here use the notes field to keep track of what you're up to and so this is found between DNA but no matter which company you're working on there's notes fields on all of them use them so I've done all this work now on this match 71 centimorgans by three I counted it all up so I put it in the notes it's maternal I know the exact relationship third cousin twice removed to my mum most recent common ancestor is William Berry I put down if I send a message if we're in contact it keeps you straight on what you're doing with all your matches not in common with this is another great tool to use so we're going to look at my mum's again and Isabel again her first cousin and this is their not in common with list this is people that don't match now we have to be careful here we can't assume that all the people on this list are paternal because my mum and Isabel only share about 12 and a half percent of their DNA so there's lots of maternal DNA that they both have that they don't share so these matches could still be maternal but there's a way to work out some of them so let's look at this one KDO and the chromosome browser now like with Christie and Isabel we see a segment on chromosome 9 that these two people seem to match on the same part of DNA don't they but we know they're not in common so when we view the data on the table we see Isabel matches 93 million no KDO matches 93 million to 124 million and Isabel from 108 to 127 so they are matching on the same bit of DNA so what's this telling us well it's telling us because they're not in common with each other that Isabel matches my mum on this part of DNA on her maternal copy of chromosome 9 and KDO then must be on her paternal copy of chromosome 9 so we've narrowed it down without even testing paternal relatives just because we have a really close maternal relative to use and a not in common with list and KDO in fact turns out to be my mum's fourth cousin twice removed proving and hypothesis alright so I've got this hypothesis my grandfather's grandmother was an Elizabeth Leonard and her father was John and his father was Jeremiah a farmer in Ireland in the 1700s that's all I know about him and John and his wife Margaret they came to Scotland in the 1840s and we find them in the 1851 census at 84 Waterside in Ayrshire and on the very next entry on the same census is another Leonard family right underneath them also at 84 Waterside so that's really interesting to me and they're headed by a Darby Leonard great name so my hypothesis has always been that this Darby is my Elizabeth's brother is the eldest son probably of John and Margaret but poor Darby died between 1851 and 1855 so I couldn't add it to my tree I did find a little bit more circumstantial evidence though that Darby is none other than the Irish nickname for Jeremiah, named after his grandfather perhaps anyway I did do his tree and kept it separate because I've been so convinced of my hypothesis and he had a son named Patrick who married a woman named Jane Doyle and I get an interesting new match on Ancestry who has the surname of Leonard and on their tree I see their father was an Ignatius Leonard another great name and his father was Patrick so I want to again trace this match's tree I traced Ignatius's birth and his parents' marriage and you could have seen me doing the happy dance around the archives in Glasgow when I've got this marriage up his grandfather Patrick married Magic Fadgin and Patrick's parents were Patrick Leonard so he was the great grandson of Jeremiah Darby from the 1851 census and therefore I think the second great grandson of my John and Margaret I've not proven conclusively that my Elizabeth and Jeremiah Darby were siblings yet but it's a great piece of evidence to add to the other traditional evidence I have and I think it makes it almost certain my hypothesis is correct a little bit about ex-DNA matches now ex-crumble matching is included with autosomal DNA tests which are visible on ancestry so be aware of that a match on the ex-chromosome is different to a match on an autosomal chromosome why? well you can only inherit ex-chromosome DNA from certain ancestors and your gender is a big factor women have to remember so they have way more matches than men ex-DNA often doesn't recombine when passed down and can pass through several generations untouched so quite often a match on the ex is further back than a match on an autosomal chromosome this is a male ex-DNA chart very helpful all of the ancestors in white couldn't contribute ex-DNA the ones in blue and pink did but even on the side where you do have an ex there are still white lines that you can eliminate the female ex-chart has way more options but there's still lots of lines you can eliminate there too I always suggest that people should create their own ex-DNA table with their own ancestors and I've done this here the pink and blue are all of my ancestors that could have given me ex-DNA so I consult this every time I get a good ex-match here's an example here's Ruth and family-DNA tell us we're an ex-match but again be careful with that it might just be one or two or three centimorgans and you'd want to disregard it at that point but we have to go to the chromosome browser and check and actually it's a good sized ex-match it's 35 centimorgans so we want to investigate that look at her in common with my mum's not there it's a match of my paternal ex-chromosome now my paternal ex-chromosome came entirely from my paternal grandmother 100% of it and this is my paternal ex-table now when we look at this we can see 100% came from Margaret McPherson Campbell my grandmother but 50 or more could have come from my second great-grandmother Margaret McPherson simply because there's two men intervening in this X-line for a second great-grandparent on an autosomal chromosome you might share about 3% with them so to share 50 or more is pretty high so whenever I get a match on my paternal ex I'm looking at Margaret McPherson as a likely source of that match and now I want to see if Ruth has any ancestral surnames or a tree I can look at but she has neither the dreaded no tree DNA testing has become the new gateway to genealogy many of your DNA matches don't have a tree because the DNA test came first getting anointed lack of trees isn't going to help we have to reach out and encourage these new people to build trees many will never respond but many others clearly have an underlying interest in genealogy and will want to learn taking the test can turn these people into genealogy addicts I've seen it in action also never forget some people won't have a tree because they're adopted or have unknown parentage so what do you do? try to make contact keep it short and simple but include all important information always tell your match which test you're talking about for example my kit at Family Tree DNA under the name Michelle Leonard matches your kit at FD DNA under the name XY it would be great to try and work out who our common ancestors are do you have a tree or some family history information you can share with me don't worry if you're just starting out and don't have a tree yet anything you can tell me about your ancestors could help us work it out if a tree is either Scottish or Irish do you have any other Scottish or Irish always ask a question but simple ones here's my tree or you can see my tree here you can contact me here always include an email address especially if you're using the messaging systems I look forward to hearing back from you simple and Ruth replied and we can look and see who we can cut out who didn't give her X none of these people gave her X so we can put a line through them there's one person on her tree that stands out to me majorly Anne McPherson on her direct maternal line no, her father's maternal line and she did or could have given Ruth X chromosome DNA so here's my Margaret who very likely gave me quite a bit of X chromosome DNA could Margaret and Anne be related? well yes they're sisters and this DNA match gave me evidence for Anne's line my Irish brick wall this is my last success story this is my paternal grandfather's tree again and his father Patrick Lennon was an only child so that means I'm only going to be able to get second cousins or fourth cousins or maybe third cousins once removed a generation closer I'm not going to get a lot on this line because he was an only child his wife conversely Bridget she was one of 14 and there is a massive number of descendants out there from my second great grandparents Thomas and Anne Jane over 50 of whom and I call them the Kelly clan over 50 of my Kelly clan descendants have now tested okay so whenever I get a match on my paternal grandfather's side I instantly think Kelly clack, I don't think Lennon and I've not got any really good matches on the Lennon side this is the only thing I know about my second great grandfather's parents from his marriage certificate they were named as Patrick Lennon and Lennon Weaver and Helen Graham's and that's it, that's all I know about them so my paternal first cousins match list she gets a new match and her name's Mary and it's a good match let's add up all the segments 66 centimorgans across three segments solid third fourth cousin match but I've also tested my dad's first cousin once removed on my paternal grandfather's side now Mary is my first cousin's top match outside of family members I've tested myself and she doesn't match me so I wouldn't even know about her if I hadn't tested my first cousin but yeah let's look at my dad's first cousin and she matches her as well but because she's a generation closer she matches her even better she's got lots of segments with her and 116 centimorgans this is a really good match so I really want to look at Mary's tree because the big kicker here is she matches not a single one of the Kelley Klan descendants yet she's on my paternal grandfather's side so it's almost certain she's from the Lennon line and she sends me this tree and it's small, she doesn't even know her grandmother's maiden names so time to get digging and I find an intriguing marriage possibility Stephen Carey marries Maggie Lennon in 1906 in Bambridge the name Lennon of course is what gets me excited and here's their marriage and it says that her father was John Lennon a farmer and that she was residing in Drummiller and Scarva and Countedown okay? but I couldn't be 100% sure this was the correct marriage the only way to be certain was to see Mary's father Brendan's birth but he was born in 1918 just outside the 100 years for online searches meant it had to be looked up in Prone down the road in person so I asked Martin McDowell of the Northern Island Family History Society if he could help me and he kindly looked it up for me and this confirmed that Brendan's mother was indeed Margaret Lennon and I'd guessed correctly huge thanks to Martin for this and I was very excited at this point so I went and got her birth in 1880 Margaret Lennon, born 11th November 1880 at Drummiller to John Lennon a weaver at this point he was born in Convry so let's get their marriage and they got married in 1870 and his father was put down Goosebumps time for me Patrick Lennon weaver now remember that my Michael's father was Patrick Lennon a Lennon weaver John died in 1915 aged 78 so he was born around 1835 to 37 my Michael was born around 1825 to 27 according to census returns was John my Michael's younger brother I think it's very very likely due to the amounts of DNA shared between Mary and my paternal relatives and I found a potential birth for John in 1836 in County Down to Patrick Lennon and Ellen is that my Helen Grahams it's not proven yet but it's very possible considering the large amount of DNA shared I just don't think this could be any further back than Patrick and Helen this link it's a work in progress I need to do more I've not yet proven the DNA came from them I need to trace Mary's maternal side make sure there couldn't be a match there I'd like to test some of her first cousins try the why perhaps more baptisms etc etc there's lots to do advanced tools Martin McDowell talked about this advanced matching tool earlier in the day and I like to use it to see if somebody matches me on both the family finder and the mitochondrial or the family finder and the why so have a look at it there's also the matrix tool which you can use to see how 10 people all match each other and if they all match each other these are all my family so yes they pretty much all match each other but it's a good tool to use third party tools make the use of them the most important is GEDmatch, GEDmatch is a fantastic and free third party tool that can help you match against those who have tested all the major companies and it provides better tools for analyzing matches DNAJed.com, Genome Pro and DNA Painter this is GEDmatch these are the tools I suggest you use one to many, one to one X one to one and people who match both kits this is what the the matching one to many match list looks like it can be a bit daunting lots of numbers and everything but it's really only giving you the same information that the family true DNA match list gives you about the number of the number of centimorgans and X DNA and it gives you email addresses there's also tier one utilities which you can spend $10 a month for and I recommend this once you've got a little bit more used to the regular GEDmatch tools DNAJed.com has some great tools especially the autosomal DNA segment analyzer which helps you visualize how your matches match you on the different chromosomes Genome Pro is a fantastic tool for organizing your data and I use it on a daily basis it is not easy to set up it's time consuming so be careful with that and some people prefer spreadsheets but I like it and I can do chromosome mapping on it so this is my segment mapping what I'm doing here is I am mapping bits of my DNA back to my ancestors or my ancestral couples so they all get different colors and I know that these bits of DNA came from those ancestors via confirmed cousin matching DNA Painter has a similar thing that you can do and they just have a few different and exciting tools that you can use to do it a few resources for you ISOG, International Society of Genetic Genealogy join it's free explore the ISOG wiki, read blogs join Facebook groups, watch webinars, YouTube videos there's lots of help out there traditional literature I would recommend Blaine Bettinger's Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy and Emily Olashino's Genetic Genealogy the Basic Sand Beyond which is on sale at the Family Tree DNA stand for £17 today sum it up, use your DNA results in conjunction with traditional research for best results test close relatives, especially older generations to narrow your matches down and gain more of your ancestors DNA upload your Family Tree no matter how small make cousin connections and work together organize your data and take advantage of all the help out there practice, practice, practice and have fun with it I don't have a printed handout today due to a printer malfunction but I've put it on Blaine so there's the digital copy if you'd like to take that down and thank you Michelle Leonard what an amazing run-through of everything you possibly could have needed to know about on his own DNA the good news of course is that it's being recorded for YouTube it's also available as of now on the Genetic Genealogy on the Facebook page all of these lectures will be but if you want to see Michelle's lecture again on YouTube of course you'll be able to pause it and then start it and then pause it and then start it sorry I know I talked so fast to get it all in but it is it is fast again and again at your leisure it is very fast you did a fantastic job getting as much information into that lecture as absolutely possible questions from Michelle do you have any questions from Michelle or as you explained absolutely everything you've done nothing now I've just destroyed their brains I think Hi John do you know if they have excluded the endogamous cases well yes there is a question whenever you put any data into the shared CM project there's a question that asks does the endogamy within this relationship so I don't know exactly what he's doing with the endogamous ones but he does ask so I presume he's excluding them and keeping them separate but that's something I would need to ask him but he does ask that question so I presume that's why I don't think it is I think it is you think it is okay I prefer to take the small ones out it just makes it easier to take them out because they're problematic a lot of the small segments 3 centimorgans, 2 centimorgans as I was doing throughout that I just count up the larger segments anything over 7 centimorgans usually you can get quite different totals sometimes between what you count up on the chromosome browser and what it tells you on the general match page so it's just something to be aware of that they're including those small segments any other questions? great well we'll call it a day there thanks again Michelle for a wonderful presentation you've taught us everything we all need to know about all the DNA thank you the next presentation here will be James Irvine talking about the DNA of a spot-syrish diaspora and that will be in 5 minutes time come on Michelle