 My sport ona dupia. Pa pth을p, mpa. SEBRE Pa pa pa kiansa zжad pa kinsa cockar a tuntur Napria One is, it's highly addictive so I have tested all my family, all my sister and all her two children, my uncles, sniffies, first cousins, second cousins, anyone I can get hold of. I've also been testing all my friends as well because I ran out of family. And actually people realise now when they come and visit me as they come through the door they either have to give a spit sample or a tube or I scrape their cheek. There's another warning as well when you may find some surprises from doing a DNA test. And this might be quite interesting. You might find out something new about some of your cousins, something new in your tree. But you can also have some not so nice surprises where you've tested your sister or a sibling and they turn out to be a half sibling. You find out your biology or father isn't your biological father and who knows you might have a half sibling pop up in the database and someone was adopted out in your family. So those can cause a lot of emotional trauma in families. So if that's something that you think could be a problem in the family then really it's best not to test. And those are some of the surprises that are coming out. One quick disclaimer, I work in IT as Mara said. I'm not a scientist, I didn't even like biology at school. So my presentation is all in layman's terms based on things I've learnt over the last three to four years since I did my first DNA test. I have kind of lied to you because the very first slide has a big word on it, deoxyribonucleic acid and that's what DNA stands for. Now you can forget that straight away, you don't need to know what DNA stands for unless you're in a pub quiz team. And I can tell you from experience when all your friends know that you do a lot of DNA testing and one of the questions in the quiz is what does DNA stand for and they all look at you and you don't know, it's really embarrassing. So I now know, I've taught myself to spell it. But what DNA is, it's basically our genetic code that's in all our cells. It's stored on our chromosomes so we all have 23 pairs of chromosomes. We have 46 chromosomes in total. We get one set of our chromosomes, so 23 come from our biological father and 23 come from our biological mother. Apart from some very interesting medical conditions we cannot get DNA in any other way but from our biological parents, our mother and our father. Chromosomes 1 to 22 are called the autosomes and you may have heard people refer to some of the DNA tests that we're doing with Ancestry, FT DNA, MyHeritage, 23 Meas, autosomal DNA tests and that's because we're looking at the DNA on chromosomes 1 to 22 of which we have two of, one from mum, one from dad. Two other chromosomes we have, chromosome 23 and we call those the sex chromosomes or the gender defining chromosomes. So if we're a girl, as a female I have two ex chromosomes like an ex chromosome from my mum and an ex chromosome from my dad. If I was a boy I would have got an ex chromosome from my mum and a wide chromosome from my dad. So it's the father who dictates the sex of a baby by either it's a wide chromosome or an ex chromosome to make that baby if it's a wide chromosome it's a boy. So girls have an ex ex chromosome 23 and boys have an ex-y. The types of DNA tests, I was just talking about the autosomal DNA test. This is really the most useful test for genealogy. It tests both maternal and paternal side. You can be either sex to have it because we're looking at the DNA on that, those pairs of chromosomes 1 to 22 and it will look at the DNA from both your mother and your father's side. It's good for about five to six generations. So you've got to find matches that are going to help you with your genealogy for about five to six generations back. And these tests I'm going to show you where these tests come from but FTDNA, Ancestry 23 and me, my heritage in living DNA do autosomal DNA testing. There's a couple of other DNA tests that you can do as well and one is the Y chromosome test. I told you that boys have a Y chromosome, which they get from their father. So if you're a male, you can also do a Y chromosome test. If you're a girl, you can find a boy in your family to do the Y test for you. And I use my uncle's Y chromosome to do some Y testing on my Rutherford side. All the light's gone out. So the Y chromosome test is your father's father's father's line. So it's this chart down here and the Y chromosome is only inherited from your father and your man. So you're looking at the DNA that's been inherited over thousands of years on the Y chromosome line. It's what we call deep ancestry. So unlike the other test, it's not good for just five to six generations. This is something that can tell you something about your Y chromosome in your paternal line, that father's father's father's line back thousands of years. There's two types of tests, what we call STR tests and SNIP tests. And the one you might have heard about, or some of you may have done, is, for example, a Y-37 test. And the 37 means it's 37 markers. So it's quite awful where people start out by Y testing with a Y-37 test. And then you can go on and do more tests. Now FTDNA offer this test. If you've done family finder with them and you're interested in upgrading to a Y test, you don't even need to provide another sample. They can use the same sample if it's viable. They can use the same sample and then go on and do Y testing with you if you're a male. It also provides a haplogroup. A haplogroup is just like a family name. You may have seen it in some of the sites where people might put RM269. And that's a haplogroup. And all that does is it's like a family name and it places you somewhere on what's called a haplotree, which is the tree of mankind. And you can work out from your haplogroup where you fit in that tree. And if you keep testing, do more Y tests, like big Y tests, you can actually find you move further and further down the tree by finding deeper and deeper levels of your Y DNA. There's another test called the mitochondrial test. And this test, the mother's mother's mother's line, we've not talked about mitochondrial DNA so far, but mitochondrial DNA isn't on your chromosomes. It sits around the nucleus of the cells. It is only passed down by mothers. So passed down from women to all their children. So I have my mum's mitochondrial DNA and my son has my mitochondrial DNA. But if he ever goes on to have children, I hope he doesn't have any at the moment because he's only 21, just turned 21. But his children will have the mitochondrial DNA of their mother. So my mitochondrial DNA will stop with my son. And so with my sister, my mum's mitochondrial DNA, she's got two boys when they have children, the children's mitochondrial DNA will come from their mother and not from our side. Anyone can do a mitochondrial DNA test because we all have mitochondrial DNA, but it will only look at the mitochondrial DNA that's been passed down the mother's line. So a bit like the Y side, here you're looking right up the maternal line. So mothers, mothers, mothers, mother. And again, it's deep ancestry testing. It will go back thousands of years. And again, it has a haplo group, which is like the family name for the mitochondrial side. And you will know where you fit in the mitochondrial haplo tree. You might know about mitochondrial DNA, if you know about Richard III, the king under the car park. Some of the evidence that was gathered in the DNA testing that helped confirm he was Richard III was mitochondrial DNA. So that's where it has had a practical use that we all have heard about in the last few years. Now X DNA, I talked about the fact that we had an X chromosome, so girls have an XX and boys have an XY. There's no specific X DNA test, but when you do your autosomal DNA test, the companies will also look at some of your X DNA as well. Not all of them show it. FT DNA, 23andMe and Jed match will show you your X matches. Ancestry and MyHeritage will test your X DNA, but you can't see it on their site. They don't show you anyone that matches on your X chromosome. They're only looking at the autosomal DNA. If you download your file and upload to another site, you will be able to get X matches, for example with Jed match and FT DNA. But the interesting thing about this is if you're a male and you have a DNA match on the X chromosome, as a male you could have only got DNA from your mother because from your father you got a Y chromosome. So there's a couple of inheritance charts you can use here to help you. If you've got an X match and you're a boy, you can have only got DNA down this fruit through your mother. As a girl, you would have got an X chromosome from your father, but of course he could have only got it from his mother. So these charts are really useful if you're working with X DNA. And for anyone who has done test and has looked at X DNA, it is quite tricky, and I would suggest you need to be looking at significant amounts of X DNA to read too much into it. So which companies offer DNA testing? Or FT DNA, which is downstairs, and they offer not just autosomal DNA testing, but also the Y DNA testing that I was talking about in the mitochondrial DNA testing. And all those three tests can all be done with one sample. So you can start with a test now and upgrade your sample later if that was something you were interested in. The other company is 23andMe. And a lot of people test at 23andMe because they also do health testing. My heritage, who hasn't been around that long, they were a bit wobbly with their matching when they first came in, but certainly that's all been sorted and my heritage is doing quite well. And if that, I find a lot of New Zealanders have tested with my heritage. Don't know why, but it's something they've done. And Ancestry, who are the market leader, they say they've sold something like 12 million kits. So one of the biggest databases is Ancestry. There's one more company as well based in the UK and they've been specialising in British DNA and they can provide a regional breakdown of your British DNA basically by county. They've been looking at other projects as well and some of you might be aware of the Irish project. We've been gathering their reference sample for their Irish project as well. They are also, interestingly, starting to roll out cousin matching. So if you have done a test with living DNA sometime in the last couple of years they've been around, there will be cousin matching coming soon. It's probably going to be towards the end of the year, maybe early next year, but it is coming. And living DNA, that she's gone into a partnership with Find My Pass now as well. So if you've seen the Find My Pass page and you're looking for DNA tests, they will be testing with using living DNA. So what actually happens when you do a DNA test? Well, first of all, you get your kit. So if you've tested today or if you've tested this is an FT DNA kit. So you get your swab and your swab be inside of the cheeks. You put it in a little tube and send it off to the lab. And in the lab they do all the processing. So they extract the DNA that we're looking at on those chromosomes and they do all the background processing. But this is the important part of the test because it feels like you wait forever. It takes about six to eight weeks. It does feel like it takes forever. But online you'll get all your results and all the sites will have a place you can go online to see your results where you'll see your ethnicity and you'll see all your cousin matching. This is the FT DNA dashboard and you'll see just in the last couple of days they've all had a new chromosome browser here which is available on their dashboard. As an optional extra, some sites let you actually download your file where your genetic code is and you can download your file and have a look at your actual DNA, the bits of it that have been tested and your genetic code. And if you download your file, you can upload that at other sites, some of them for free. So how does it work? Once you've sent your sample off to the lab, the lab looks at these specific areas in our DNA. So they're not looking at every part of our DNA. They're just looking at parts of our DNA that we know change at every generation. And I'm going to show you how it changes at every generation in a couple of slides. And if you have what they do in the background then, it's once they extract that small amount of DNA and I've had it explained to me that it's kind of like if you think of a small cupboard at the top of a very huge skyscraper, they're just taking enough DNA that they're looking at that changes every generation so it's useful for genealogy. And if you have long segments of your DNA in common with someone else, then you're related to them. You're a DNA match to them. There's some rules around that in terms of having enough DNA in common and this is the only big word you need to learn with DNA testing and it's centimorgans. And centimorgans you may have heard about and that's the measure we use to work out how much DNA we have in common with someone. The more DNA we have in common with someone, the more closely we are related to them. So we're always looking to see how many centimorgans we have in common to try and work out how this person might be related to us. So I'd like to introduce you to my family. These are my grandparents. So this is Jack Rubberford. Jack's family from Scotland and from Cornwall. And this is my grandmother Dorothy. Her family EastEnders. She was actually left London as a small girl. She was cockney and came out to New Zealand and they met in New Zealand. Stan Hancock my grandfather was from Warwickshire and my grandmother here, Annie Drinn and interestingly Annie's parents were first cousins. So on Annie's line when I have DNA matches I come up with a bit of a problem sometimes because we share a lot of DNA on this line because her parents, my great-grandparents were first cousins. But how did we inherit DNA from these four grandparents? How did I get my DNA? This is me down here. So first of all Jack and Dorothy mission had my dad. Now the way we inherit DNA is we get 50% from our father and 50% from our mother and it's a random 50%. So when Jack and Dorothy had a baby they got, my dad got a random 50% of his parents. So if you think of it as kind of a colour or some people talk about as like a pack of cards Jack dealt out 50% of his cards to my dad. He's got 50% of Jack's dark blue and 50% of Dorothy's light blue and similarly my mum over here with a salmon colour and a green colour. Now my mum and dad met and had me. I'm the first born. Again dad I get a random 50% of dad's DNA. So I don't get 50% of what he got from Dorothy and 50% of what he got from Jack. It gets recombined is the term. It gets recombined and randomised. So I could get a little bit of light blue and a big chunk of dark blue but I still get 50% of my dad and I get 50% of my mum so I could have got a little bit more of her light blue. My sister came in on 17 months later my little sister she loves that I put her photo on here she's quite famous around the world now. She lives in New Zealand sadly my dad passed away several years ago but my mum still lives in New Zealand so they made my sister and she also got random 50% of dad's DNA so some of his light blue and some of his dark blue and some of mum's salmon and green and you can see there that we're slightly different. So siblings will get a different DNA from their parents in different amounts but you can see here we're exactly 50% so we're still exactly 50% of the mum and still exactly 50% of dad but we have slightly different DNA. So how does that help us with our genealogy and help us find answers that we've got on our family tree. So you've just met my grandparents this is my family tree I was born here in the 60s and as I said here Annie had first cousins on my dad's side if I go up through the Rutherford side we kind of stopped here around about Northern Ireland these Rutherfords were in Asia and then we managed to track them back to Northern Ireland but we couldn't go any further and then on my grandfather's side this family here they were all settlers into New Zealand and they are a nightmare so his grandmother was a legitimate no idea who her father was there's nothing on any of the paperwork and then on his mother's side we've got this man here called Thomas Robertson that used a completely different age on every single document he filled out never used a middle name and professional genealogists have never ever over the last 40 years have never ever been able to find out who he is so those are some of the questions that I wanted answered in my DNA by doing a DNA test and the DNA test goes back about five to six generations as I said on the Ultrasomal so I'm looking here at trying to answer questions I might have to get the stick out try to answer questions back to about here my four times great-grandparents of course I don't have 64 of them because these are the same people because they were first cousins so of course these four times great-grandparents have all had family and those family there's lots of siblings got married and had more children and all those children had more children and all those had children had more children and all those children had more children and today a descendent of all these families has done a DNA test and is going to be my DNA match and that's what I'm looking for my DNA matches that are descended from my same ancestors now that's me I can go back about five to six generations and I've also tested my mum so she can go back five to six generations which gives me another layer back to go to start solving some of my brick walls and confirming some of my tree now interesting you may have seen this question mark turn up that wasn't there originally and that's because DNA can bring in some surprises and mysteries and we're pretty sure that the person we thought belonged in this pink box here isn't the person we thought she was and that's because we're getting some of our very unusual DNA matches back on this branch that are pointing to a different family and possibly a family that they married into and of course you can't get DNA by marrying into a family you can only get it by book from biological parents so we're starting to second guess who she might be and interestingly we could never find a birth certificate for her so I'm starting to have a look at that line now and then simply with my dad and as I told you my dad sadly passed away several years ago but he's got five brothers so because I can't test dad I have tested four of his five brothers the other one hasn't been very well but he actually has a DNA test sitting in his kitchen at the moment somewhere in New Zealand on his farm and I'm hoping that he's spitting today and I'm really and that will give me all five of dad's brothers in the database dad didn't have any sisters he only had five brothers so I have dad's siblings and as I told you siblings will get DNA right so as it recombines slightly different colours so having all dad's brothers has given me a great pool of matches to work back on dad's side now because we got back to Northern Ireland here what I've done is one of my uncles did a big y test we started off with y 37 and I upgraded over time to big y and we've been able to work out family law always told us that we were Scottish from the Scottish borders so we were border reavers probably from around Jedbar area south of Edinburgh and but I couldn't find anything in the paperwork we could only get back to Belfast so my working high but I've done this big y test and I've matched with a whole lot of other rudderfords that are all from the borders and we're all quite close matching so I'm pretty sure we really were from the borders our stories were right there is no paperwork here so my working hypothesis is that for some reason my branch of the rudderfords were in the Ulster plantation and that's why they're in Belfast and they've gone back to Ayrshire and from Ayrshire they've come out to New Zealand so after you've done your DNA test the first thing you usually want to see when you get your results back is your ethnicity and you've seen the ads do a DNA test and find out if you're a viking because everyone wants to know if they're a viking right and it makes quite entertaining conversation when you're having a beer with your friends at the pub guess what I'm a viking so this is my ethnicity I first tested I've now tested all the other companies and I've uploaded my file lots of different places and my ethnicity is all over the place so pretty much FTDNA and Ancestry show me as a British and British, Scottish but then as I come down and have done some other tests this is a Chinese site actually so they think I'm Chinese Living DNA did a great job of working out the counties that I came from with all their British work that they've been doing but they snuck in 10% in Tuscany so they say I'm 10% Italian that hasn't come up anywhere else somewhere over here they think I'm from Finland so it's pretty I'm pretty much all over the place so how do they find your ethnicity from a DNA test and why is it different every time you upload it somewhere and why is it different when you do a different test and can you really trust anything from the DNA companies when ethnicity looks so different well the way they do it is they estimate it by comparing you to a living group of people which they call their population their reference group or their reference set Ancestry at the moment for example been comparing you to 3,000 other people in their reference database and those 3,000 people were people that met some sort of criteria Living DNA for example when they're trying to find reference people for their projects they ask you to have a grandparents more than about 50km of each other so all the companies will have specific reasons of how they get you to be a reference person for them as I said Ancestry has been working with about 3,000 people and actually if those 3,000 people don't represent an area of the world where you've got some ancestry that's never going to turn up in your ethnicity results every company uses a different set of people and that's why you get different results Ancestry, I'll come to that so a lot of people say to me well if that's the case now how do I know which one's accurate where do I test to get my most accurate accurate ethnicity results and this is my standard answer it's the one you like the best and I can't think of any better answer to that question if you're happy with one of the ethnicity estimates and it reflects your family tree then run with that one if one of the tests has some Scandinavian you'd like to say that's Viking DNA bear in mind no one's dug up any Vikings to match you would there's no Vikings in the reference set but yeah sure enough tell everyone that you're a Viking but really there is no better science than that at the moment however the companies are continuing to try and tweak the ethnicity because they realise that's a great marketing to do a DNA test and find out where you come from and ancestry, anyone who's got an ancestry test you would have seen your ethnicity updated in the last few weeks and what they've done is they've changed their, tweaked their algorithms some of the mathematics and clever stuff behind all the behind all the calculations but they've also increased their reference panel from 3,000 people to 16,000 people so they now keep hearing your DNA to 16,000 people and they believe that's becoming more accurate and being able to give you a better answer on your ethnicity and after that I was 5% Irish and Scottish and 3 were probably 4 weeks ago and now I'm 36% Irish and Irish and Scottish so so that could mean I have to start drinking a little bit more Guinness which is fine by me by the way I have one other region you can see over here I had 7 other regions I had tiny bits of Finland I buried a peninsula Scandinavia and all sorts of things and they've removed a lot of that I have one other region and it's actually Swedish and so that's a whole new country for me I don't have Swedish anywhere else so I'm going to start shopping at Ikea a little more often and so as I say some of the companies are trying to roll out tools where you can use your ethnicity this is the family tree DNA FTDNA is my origins this is their ethnicity and they've got tools like you can plot where the most the furthest way ancestor is the oldest ancestor that your matches say they have so you can see interestingly at FTDNA matches so that their oldest ancestors come from this region as well UK, Ireland now can ethnicity help you with genealogy so I've basically said to you take it a little bit with a grain of salt it just depends which company you've tested what sort of result you've got but this is an example I actually had probably just a few months ago now Jennifer is my fourth cousin and Jennifer came to me see if I could help her find who her unknown father was she was adopted by her stepfather and I knew because she matched my dad's first cousin I knew she came from my Rutherford and Robert's side of the family and I pretty much knew because of where she lived and what she'd been able to tell me she wasn't from the Rutherford side and I was pretty sure she was from the Robert side so she actually had her birth certificate and she sent me over her birth certificate which did have the name of her father on it so I did some sleuthing I was looking at the father who was said to have come from New Zealand so I was looking at electoral roles in New Zealand of course I know my way around the New Zealand record so it was relatively easy tracked down who I thought was the tree that Jennifer came from and I thought these were her great-grandparents so George Roberts who is from my side of the family married a lady called Francis Nishofsky in my hometown in New Zealand now I thought to myself well that's kind of interesting because Francis comes from a very well known Polish family in my hometown in New Zealand and there's a lot of documentation about those early Polish settlers now I know that we don't have any East European ethnicity in the rest of our family so I thought I wonder if there's a clue by looking at Jennifer's ethnicity would at least give me some clues that I was on the right track so I went back and I had a look at Jennifer's ethnicity ensuring enough she had some East European ethnicity so whilst that didn't confirm for me I was on the right track it was another clue that I was heading in the right direction with the Roberts family and after a bit more sleuthing and finding details and putting all the family tree together from about three hours since she'd sent me the birth certificate I was actually able to send her back a photo of her great-grandfather next I hear Samson and my second great-grandfather John George is the son of Samson and I'm descended from John and I was able to send her back a photo of her two times great-grandparents grandfather standing next to my two times great-grandfather great-looking guys by the way I love his feet look at these shoes so tall and interestingly I've got some photos to send her as well and George is also very tall so how can DNA help with our genealogy so that was just an example of where I used ethnicity as a little bit of a clue but the other thing it does it's comparing you the DNA is comparing you to everyone else in the database and that's where you get your DNA matches and this is the real power of doing a DNA test for genealogy so you compare to everyone else in the database and the databases are growing all the time when I tested at Ancestry early 2015 I had 32 fourth cousins and closer this morning I got 273 so in three and a bit years three and a half years that's how fast the databases have been growing and what it does is not only gives you all your cousin matches it tells you how much DNA you have in common with them and this is the word I was telling you about before centimorgans it will tell you how many centimorgans you share with someone which helps you work out how they can be related to you but will you match all your cousins? well there's never been a case so far where a second cousin hasn't been a DNA match so if you test your second cousin and they don't appear in your match list then you have a mystery to solve so second cousins you should match once you get to third cousins there's probably 10% of them are going to drop off they're not going to match you and that's because the dilution of DNA at every step remember my grandparents and the light blue dark blue at every generation we're getting 50% of each of our parents and so it can get diluted where your third cousins aren't going to have enough of that DNA come down their branches and fourth cousins probably round about 50% of them aren't going to match you and then it really drops off with we say ultrasomal DNA testing is good for about 5 to 6 generations because you're really not going to share enough enough DNA to make any sort of ideas about whether they fit in your family or not after that and there are charts that explain how many centimorgans you share with someone so a parent is about 3,500 centimorgans a sibling is round about 2,500 centimorgans and then interestingly if you match someone at 1,700 centimorgans that actually could be your aunt or your uncle but it also could be your half sibling so once you start getting further down the number of centimorgans you share with someone a lot more relationships come into play now brilliantly you don't have to remember this chart because there's a fantastic website that Johnny Peale runs called DNApainter.com and on the tools section of his site there is a fantastic tool called the shared CM project it's interactive so it means you can go and put in an amount of DNA so however many centimorgans you match with someone and it will give you an idea of what the relationship should be if you bookmark anything bookmark the site because you need to use that tool all the time do not take the cousin category at the test site for granted so just because they tell you it's a third cousin they don't know there's so many other relationships we have double cousins we have three quarter siblings we have half siblings we have half two cousins three times removed we have so many different relationships and all those categories are not available at the site so the first thing you need to do is have a look and see how many centimorgans you match with someone on their list all the different companies and how to find the centimorgan amount and the shared CM tool and it will give you an idea of all the different relationships you might be looking for but just because the site tells you you've matched with a third cousin don't take for granted it's a third cousin so what can I do with my matches well I can find biological family and you'll hear about adoptees testing don't only conceive people testing people looking for biological family I found who Jennifer's father was for example because she was a DNA match to me her shared matches and how she fitted in with my tree you can also contact your newly found cousins I mean you don't know this lady over here in Plank she may be sitting somewhere in another country and have your family Bible sitting in a bottom drawer because it got passed down her side of the family and not down your side of the family and this is really interesting for me because my family are immigrated to New Zealand and of course they didn't take a lot of family Bibles and things with them so by finding some of my biological cousins that are back here in the UK and Ireland in Scotland I'm finding that they've got documentation and information and things that have been handed down the family that of course never made it to New Zealand one thing to remember is DNA testing doesn't replace traditional genealogy in fact I have spent more time doing traditional genealogy since I did a DNA test because I'm forever building family trees to find out where my matches fit with me so I actually do a lot more genealogy now than I've probably done the rest of my life put together and how does that work well how do we go about confirming a paper trial with a DNA match so this is one of my ancestors this is my third great-grandmother now her name is Elizabeth Smith and I don't know if any of the genealogists want to take a stab at how many Elizabeth Smiths lived in Lincolnshire in the 1800s so Elizabeth Smith was on my list of things that I've done so Elizabeth Smith was on my list of things to do on a very rainy day and I never really did much research into her family I knew all about her family she came across to New Zealand in 1875 with her husband and some of her children and then this is very early days one of my first DNA matches was someone called KP who lived in the US now KP had someone called Diana Smith in her tree and she had a very good tree she was American all her branches were were fully fleshed out lots of documents fall very well except for one part of her tree where Diana Smith apparently just came from England and I found this with some of my American matches it's very easy to spot where you might fit into their tree because when it gets to England they're not as confident with the records and know their way around the records of some of us do in the UK and Ireland we know where to go and get the records from so I easily spotted that this could be something interesting was Diana Smith related to Elizabeth Smith and she had the same birth date for her and I typically thought she must be wrong she's got the wrong person so what I thought I'd do is start to have a look at the records where there was an Elizabeth and a Diana and it was spelt quite unusually with the age and in the records I did find an Elizabeth Smith and a Diana Smith living together with their parents they were the same age and they had more sources for them so I found their baptism I also found a poor law removal their father died and they got moved from the parish back to their original parish which was common in the time and again the girls were both down with the same birth date the same ages and we've come to the conclusion that Elizabeth and Diana were twins now that was something that none of us knew and you know Elizabeth Smith we don't know research on her and in fact this story was what made my mum DNA test I don't want to have anything to do with that and I started to tell them guess what I found out you know Elizabeth Smith Betsy Longstaff she was called she married Tom Longstaff Betsy Longstaff was a twin now Betsy actually had twins as well she had some more children out in New Zealand her last two boys were twins Isaac and Charles so my mother found it really interesting she's like well why hasn't my DNA kit arrived why haven't you sent me one so that story actually encouraged mum to test and also my sister to test as well and it was one of the first things I confirmed in my tree from a DNA match that was actually in the US that I had no clue that that family had gone to the US at all oh good I really want to lease in time for questions for you so I've talked about you know how to you know using your matches to try and confirm your tree and this slide is really just consolidating some of the things that we need to know about when we're using our DNA matches for genealogy so first thing is what we want to try and do is find a tree see if any of our matches have a tree attached to their DNA have a look at their profile at FT DNA and Family Finder all your matches will have their email address in there and even if they're not answering their email you can go and google search their email address and you might find out they have a website or somewhere else they store their tree so next thing I had a match turned up the other day no link tree, no information couldn't find anything else was looking in the DNA page I thought I'll just have a quick look at his profile but that probably won't help me opened up his profile and he'd written a little bio and he'd listed his parents his grandparents the address of the website where his family tree was so by going that extra step and looking at his profile I found out what everything I needed to know about him also look at the shared matches for those of you who have tested you know your match list isn't just a list of DNA matches every single one of those DNA matches probably matches one or two or more of the other people in your list as well and actually if you deal with your matches as a group of matches rather than just one match at a time you might find out a lot more one person, one match might not have a family tree but they're matching five other people and three of those all have a tree that go back to the same common ancestor the Sheds are centimorgans centimorgans is always written as a little C in a capital M don't take the cousin category for granted on the websites always go and look on the DNA painter tools in the shared CN project and get a better idea of what the relationships might be contact the match, I like to keep it really simple when I contact a match I typically don't send them an email and say hi on your cousin how do we match because I realise that I have lots of messages like that from some of my matches and I have access to I don't know 200 kits I have no clue who they're matching with this one of my kids or one of my friends kits got no idea so if you contact a match make sure you give them some information about you and all I really ask them is if they know their grandparents and a lot of people now are testing because they got a DNA kit for Christmas it was under the Christmas tree they unwrapped it, they spat in the tube they found out they were a Viking so I'm going to look at it again so those people aren't going to write back to you those people you need to do some sleuthing to find out who they are so that's my last step on this page is sleuthing and I mean sleuthing not stalking so this for me is actually quite important it's something we've been talking about I'm not during this conference it's the ethics and things we and privacy rights of some of people who do DNA tests now ultimately every single test taker has the right to privacy and when I say privacy what privacy means to me might be different what privacy means to you guys and it might be different amongst all of us there is no right or wrong in terms of how you feel about privacy the way you feel about privacy for you is correct for you and don't let anyone tell you that you should do things in a different way because that's the way they feel about privacy privacy is really important that you follow your own feelings about privacy ultimately you shouldn't take a test if you don't want people to identify people can be identified by DNA tests and actually to be aware can also be identified from your family doing DNA tests as well so when you're doing some sleuthing to try and work out who one of your matches are and you happen to find out where they live all their phone number don't go around there and stop outside their gate and take photos of them to see if they who they look like in your tree so I haven't fun one said I'm busy stalking a DNA match and someone got quite upset with me by saying that but actually this is really serious for me we're talking about sleuthing we're talking about using public records I use Facebook, Google, newspapers science, electoral roles but that's not stalking that's using information that's freely available I haven't happened to anyone's account and I don't go around to their house and I don't ring them up at work but sadly some people do that now the other thing with DNA testing and nothing I love this so if you're walking along a country road and you hear hoof beats behind you so you're going out next weekend and you're walking along a country road and you hear clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop what do you think you're going to see when you turn around behind you what are you expecting to see someone knows this right so you're expecting to probably see some horses behind you you're not really expecting to turn around and you've never seen a load of zebras following you down the country road perhaps an island, I don't know is it common to see zebras but this is one of my favourite quotes where you hear hoof beats think of horses not zebras and it's really important when you're doing DNA testing you're looking at your matches that you're actually making the right you're looking at the right information and you're interpreting it correctly and I have seen people who have uploaded their DNA file to GEDmatch and you've been ringing their parents saying why the hell didn't you tell me I had an identical twin and did you separate it at birth and what a bad parent you are they just forgot that they uploaded their file the previous week so they're actually just in GEDmatch twice and they're not really identical twin I've also seen people if you know GEDmatch there's a little owl as you go across the page and you can click on that and people don't know what it is and click it and what it does is list out the matches that you've clicked it on now if that match happens to have a parent in the database you've just clicked this button you don't really know what it was and some of you have seen a parent along the top line and you're suddenly getting concerned because that's not the parent that you know and I have had people absolutely worried that their parent, their biological parent was someone different than who they thought it was because they've clicked the owl button at GEDmatch so it's really important that lots of people say DNA doesn't lie but correctly interpreting DNA can be quite problematic so for example that the person who thought she had an identical twin she just interpreted that wrong so as she said well I must have a identical twin because DNA doesn't lie she just forgotten that she'd uploaded her file a few weeks back the other thing when you're working with your DNA matches beware of confirmation bias and I've definitely fallen into this trap I thought I had found my Thomas Robertson who is the man who uses a different age on every single document never uses a middle name came from Perthshire well we thought came from St Andrews in Scotland out to New Zealand but yeah couldn't ever work out who he was professional genealogist couldn't work out who he was now I thought I had found him because I've got a whole lot of DNA matches that all go to back to a Robertson family in Perthshire and finally I've nabbed him he must be of this family and I did a bit of research and I found that they definitely did have a Thomas Robertson the oldest son and he'd completely seem to have disappeared off the records so I thought oh I've got him he didn't disappear off the records he went to New Zealand this is Thomas Robertson and I took it down and I showed my uncle my uncle lives down in Dorset and I went through it and I said what do you think he goes well have you tried to find Thomas Robertson's death certificate and I've always had this little sort of nagging doubt that did I really try hard enough to find Thomas Robertson's death certificate to rule out that he really was the right one and it was only about two weeks later some man emailed me and said I just want to know why do you have my Thomas Robertson in your tree he died quite young he didn't go to New Zealand and he actually sent me the death certificate so I fell into my own track of confirmation bias I really wanted this Thomas Robertson to be the one he went to New Zealand so Thomas is now a big mystery for me again so you've got your DNA test we've looked at ethnicity see how that might be useful if we're aware of what ethnicity is all about we've looked at using DNA matches to confirm our family tree find biological family but these are just some of the things to remember along the way so spend time researching you're not going to do a DNA test but suddenly find a whole family tree sitting behind it so spend time researching and some of that time can be a long time and sometimes it's going to take days months even years to confirm parts of your tree use creative ways to identify your matches but remember it's about sleuthing not stalking and as you go on you might start wanting to learn about some more advanced matching tools and some of our other talks during this conference have been about using advanced tools like ChromaZone browsers using triangulation using DNA painter lots of different things there that can help you with your research surnames can be less important than locations because women they change their surnames every generation by marrying people so you don't always know when you're finding a DNA match lots of people say well I've got my DNA match list I can't see my surname in it I can tell you that the only person who has Rutherford in their surname matches my mum and my mum's not a Rutherford I'm the Rutherford and it should be on my dad's side Rutherfords are very small family and there's no male Rutherfords in my autism match list and the Rutherford that happens to be in my mum's match list we list on a different side and we're not related to his Rutherford at all but actually if I go searching for Rutherfords I might pick up this man but he matches me on my maternal side and isn't matching me on my Rutherford side at all Collaboration is really useful to work with your matches so for example Jennifer when she wanted to know who her biological father was exchanged a few emails and I helped her out by sending her some photos and information about her tree and some of the people I've met some of my biological family or third, fourth cousins in the UK have helped me out by telling me a little bit more about some of the family that stayed behind when my family went to New Zealand Upload your files to other sites so if you've done an ancestry test you can upload to FTDNA my heritage GED match Living DNA at the moment as well a little tip if you want to upload to my heritage if you've got a test from FTDNA a 23mm taking now an ancestry upload before the 1st of December from the 1st of December my heritage you're going to charge for using some of the tools on their site but if you've already uploaded it will stay free for you so if you've got a file to upload for my heritage get it done before the 1st of December Always remember to look at shared matches working with a cluster of matches can be a lot easier than working with just one match in isolation and look at who else they match for example Jennifer when I looked at Jennifer's match I could see she matched my dad's paternal cousin so immediately she was on my Rutherford Roberts line Target test people if you're looking for an answer in your family tree work out who you need to test to get the answer that you want and go hunting down a cousin that can help you with that also think about what other tests that might help you for example my Rutherford's year we've been able to confirm we come from Scotland only because we did the big Y test and did Y DNA testing we couldn't have found that from autismal DNA and test more relatives and especially older generations you saw in my chart with my family the light blue, dark blue salmon colour, lime green colour that DNA gets diluted at every generation so always test an older generation where you can one because they may not be around much longer and will lose that opportunity but also their DNA is less diluted and if it's your parent you only have 50% of their DNA so by testing then you've got 100% of their DNA so test that older generation as soon as you can some of my success stories and we talked about a couple of things along the way I'm actually working on confirming my great-grandmother's illegitimate you saw that in my tree I had my grandfather's mother we're pretty much narrowed down who that is but he comes from a settler family and everyone's interrelated so every time I get a DNA match I have to go through the tree to see if they're not related to me about five other different ways so that's proven a bit of a nightmare found at my three times great-grandmother Betsy Longstaff you met her earlier found out she was a twin and I actually have in here that I confirmed to you Thomas Robertson was and I've crossed that out and that's to remind people that you could think you've found somebody and a piece of evidence will come along that completely rules it out you should always be trying to disprove any of your theories so if you think you've got something right try and disprove it I went to Newfoundland mine went to New Zealand and the siblings went to Newfoundland and I actually wonder if they went down the docks to get in the ship so we're going somewhere starting with new and why not go on a ship from New Zealand to have a ship for a newfoundland and I have a lot of family fourth cousins that are in Newfoundland so that's on my bucket list of places to go and visit and I've been told it's really nice so really looking forward to that and I saw Jennifer's unknown father I've told you about and she was one of my Roberts family and I've found fourth cousins all over the world one of them is in Alaska I've got an amazing place I've got people in Texas I've got DNA matches all around the world family like travelling my family have all arrived in New Zealand and here in my back living in the UK I think I just come from a group of people travelling around the world I've also worked on a family case and some adoptee cases we've found biological family for family and adoptees which is incredibly rewarding but very emotional and traumatic and if you're doing that with some of your matches just be aware that it is a very emotional and traumatic time not just for the DNA match but also for the biological parent that you find so always be kind to people if you're working in that area and think about some of the ethics involved and obviously I still have many many more mysteries to uncover I'm sure every time you get a DNA match they're a mystery anyway trying to figure out who they are and I'm sure there's lots more stories I'm going to find this is some places you can get some help we're all from ISOG anyone can join ISOG it's fantastic the wiki is absolutely amazing anything you need to know about DNA you'll find on the wiki with lots of links out to blogs sites, tools and so on and my Facebook group I think I've got some people here today who belong to my Facebook group there's about 5-6 thousand of us we concentrate mainly on UK we do have some Irish people in there as well we have some US people around UK and Ireland for helping people because it is quite different people in the US have been testing for a lot longer and have some different ways of finding their matches and lots of YouTube videos so this small guy from genetic genealogy island thanks to Morris some amazing videos up there and in fact that's how I learnt how to deal with my DNA was watching Morris speak on a DNA for beginners talk so everything I know I learnt from Morris testing company that's just to get me a disclaimer in case I said something wrong and the testing companies themselves this is from family tree DNA they actually have a support site about DNA basics and beginners guide to genetic genealogy so don't forget to check the test site for help and support as well and that's it thank you Gama thank you full of information how many people are in the DNA help for genealogy Facebook group there's a few people it's actually really really good place to go and find an answer so if you have any kind of questions certainly recommend joining that group because you'll probably get an answer within about 5 or 10 minutes of actually posting not today not necessarily from you but it could be from anybody else in the group there's lots of really good people in there now that have got some really good helpful advice and for the rest of the day so if anybody has any questions then please do not hesitate to approach Donna or anybody else downstairs on the family tree DNA stand and we'll be having the next talk from Cahill, Matt and Gun in about a 5 minutes time 3 to 5 minutes time so thank you very much again to Donna Rutherford thank you you're welcome thank you you need a coffee or something yeah I do thank you thank you thank you