 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, it brings us to the last lecture of the day, and with this lecture we close Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2019 Belfast for another year. We will hopefully be back in Dublin later on this year in October, third weekend in October, so if you haven't had enough DNA this weekend, there's more for you waiting in Dublin in about seven months' time or so. So for this last presentation it gives me pleasure to present Cahill Macalgun. Now Cahill is a molecular biologist who works in industry in the Cambridge area. He has done a huge amount of his own personal research into the the intricacies of DNA, but he's not going to talk to us too much about that today because his other major interest is in the DNA of the monohon and from manaborder, which is the area from where a lot of his ancestors come from. So with a lot of very interesting and celebrity examples please give a welcome to Cahill Macalgun. Thank you very much Morris. I'm even going to adjust the microphone for you so that you're better poised. Well good afternoon everyone. I'm going to talk to you today about the lesser known aspects of the Fermanah monohon transborder DNA and history. So the contents of the talk are going to focus on the time course of our history in Fermanah monohon and maybe to a lesser extent cavern from the Ice Age through to the plantation. I'm not going to go past the plantation because we already know that quite well. I'm going to focus on two tribes which perhaps you haven't heard of at all and then talk about the ancient families of the Barney of Clan Kelly and then the genetic flux that was created by the plantation and then I'm going to talk about William Van Aranya's emigres and I wonder if any of you have any idea who he is and who they are. So this is at last year somewhere in Alaska. Can you imagine living there with difficulty? Well this is what Ireland was like before 11,000 BC and because everything was covered with glaciers it was extremely inhospitable and we had no little technology back then to survive that. It was too cold to support growth of vegetation so therefore there was no human settlement. At 11,000 BC some climate change occurred and the Ice Age ended and at that point humans moved out of a Caucasus pocket and moved into Europe and across the land bridge into Britain and Ireland before the ice completely melted. So here's the time course as I'm doing it today. We start off with the Ice Age where there's nobody. At 11,000 BC that ends and the hunter-gatherers move in from the continent. At 8,000 BC the Mesolithic farmers move in, followed by the Neolithic farmers at 4,000 BC and then we have two very ill-defined groups of people who we don't quite know who they are at least from my reading. There seems to be some debate. It's the fear of bogs and the tour de Danone. Now at this point one interesting thing is the word fear is man or man and bogs sounds rather like belge for Belgium. I'm just planting that there at this point. And they end at 600 BC when maybe Melisius the Gaels moved in from the continent somewhere potentially Iberia. So here we have the Gaels. Now at 6 BC we have a crowd called the Minapians in Wexford and you're probably wondering who they are. Then in 293 to 297 AD we have somebody called Carusius and you're probably wondering who he is. Then we had 300 AD we have another three group of three lads called the three Colas and some of you might have heard of them. And then we have Nile of the nine hostages and 400 and we have Christianity coming initially with Palladius and then with Patrick. However it's not impossible that there were people before Palladius as well because Palladius was sent by the church to the Christians who already were in Ireland according to the records. Then these crowd here that were in Wexford in 6 BC moved up to Firmana and Monaghan in 845 AD and then we have the golden age of monasticism of which part of that is the Dalriata move into Scotland and then at 795 AD we have these fellas coming down from Norway and Scandinavia to steal a few things and return back home. But in 852 AD they formed a place called Dublin which became the capital of the hibernol Norse world eventually and then Scotland in 900 AD Gaelic replaced Pictish as the language of Scotland and then in 1110-14 Brian Barou defeated the Vikings and the Lentster people at the Battle of Clontarf to end the Viking period in Ireland but that didn't last for too long since in 1169 AD the Anglo-Normans who were the descendants of the Vikings who'd settled at Normandy turned up and took over again. Now Anglo-Normans to my simple mind Anglo-Normans continued until 1610 AD and then in 1649 AD we had the English Republic this is Oliver Cromwell Parliament had beheaded King Charles I and England was actually a republic at this stage and in 1662 the hibernols arrived escaping France from persecution and I've put this in Dutch just to be pedantic this is uh Conning William the dirt durde Hendrik van Oranje and Gekomen met Netherlands Danes and Huukse Trouben now how many of you can understand that wow so King William of Oranje arrived in Ireland with Dutch Danish and Hugeno troops and then in 1709 this is particularly relevant in my family Napoleon was causing trouble in the Palatine Rhineland and a whole pile of German refugees came to Ireland via England and I actually have a line into my family of Palatine Germans so next slide right does anybody know where this is for a minute does anybody know specifically where this is Christina that'll be about right that's the the road heading towards Belfast from Enoskelen and this is Minapian Way you've heard me talk about these Belgian guys before so there's a road in Enoskelen named after them and there's a reason for that the Minapians so the basis of this is a number about in 2008 I had family connections with Belgium and I'm from Firmana and I thought oh this this whole Belgian thing in Firmana the name of Firmana has come from a Belgian tribe so I was interested to see whether one I was a Belgian and to understand whether understand how these people had impacted on on Firmana so a gentleman called Norman Mangan who died a couple of years ago wrote a book called The Minapia Quest 2000 years of the Minapi Seafaring Goals in Ireland Scotland Wales in the Isle of Man from to 16 BC to 1990 AD that's he wrote the book in 1995 it's now off print but so they were a Belgi tribe originating from the hinterland of the Rhine estuary and coastline in the modern territory of the Netherlands Belgium and France they were initially unconquerable by the Romans as the Roman legionaries were very heavily armed and the Minapians would just sneak into the marshes and then the religions couldn't go after them but eventually they were subdued and in modern Wexford on the Claudius Ptolemy map of 2 AD we find them there marked now in discussions with Gerard Ptolemy was just taking second hand accounts from seafarers but you know we still have a reasonable clue that these people were in Ireland in in 2 AD now they made the mistake of killing the son of the king of Lenster and on the basis of doing that they were banished to Firmana and Monahan in 485 AD note their names are Manapi or Menapi and you see the the men and the man coming through to Firmana and Monahan and Firmana means the men of the Manah so I mentioned Carausius before this is a picture of him from a coin probably from the Frome Horde and he was his full name was Marcus Aurelius Mausius Valerius Carusius and he began life as a Menapi in Seila and ended life well later on as the admiral of the Roman Empire's channel English Channel fleet and what he was doing was counteracting the Saxon pirates who were hindering Roman trade between Gaul and Britain so what he did was he held on to the treasure he took off the Saxons and with this declared himself emperor of Britain and a bit of France in 286 AD and he was responsible for the minting of the first coins in London and we find these in the Frome Horde and that's a picture of him and one of his coins he was ultimately assassinated by his finance minister in 293 AD I mean you can imagine the Roman Empire was not particularly happy that this guy had freelanced and took took over Britain so my humorous interpretation of this was was the first emperor of Britain for Manaman so the Menapians today here is a figure from Norman Mungan's book and we can see where they were where their homeland was and they ended up in Cornwall in Wexford in the Isle of Man in Fremannum Morhan and up in Scotland here so according to Norman the surname's Mooney Meanie am I going to read all of these out Monahan, Manian, Minogue, Minic, Manix all these names Norman Mungan speculated or maybe here's some evidence for it we have to read the book to figure it out are of Menapian origins now I have searched for the preparation of this talk whether there was any haplotype information of the white chromosome with regards to the Menapians and a gentleman in Belgium called Badoen de Crombrugge de Luringe contends that the Menapian white chromosome haplotype is this and some of you experts will understand what this is and some of you who are not don't worry about it it won't it won't kill you if you don't know it so we could in this room today have people of Menapian descent potentially and in the greater world these are Minogue's you may be familiar with them and that's the comment I made this morning about your neighbours so when I was communicating with Norman Mungan back in 2008 and buying his book he offered to take me on a tour of this promontory fort just north of Dublin which is called Dromanach this essentially was a Menapian trading station so their ships would come in from Gaul and they'd have a defensive position here I'm presuming that they had some kind of wooden pier out into the Irish sea that land their wine and then the the Irish would come in here trade buying the stuff from the continent that's what we think and this served as the Tralium Emporium and was the location that the earliest Roman artifacts in Ireland were found with Roman coins and the like so this is Norman Mungan and you see here you've seen already a street in Enes Gillen called after the Menapians but here is the street in Brussels called after them in French rude in Minapier and uh Minapier Strat and you can see the similarity between Dutch Strat and uh street in English so next on to the three collars now to focus back here where did they appear they appeared in 300 AD and I haven't gone into great detail in the time course with respect to the three collars needless just to say that they arrived at this point but who were they they were and I do forgive my Gaelic pronunciation because I don't know what that well and if anybody helps me out I'll be most appreciative there were three fourth century brothers and they were the sons of butchered dawn and and so I'm I'm this was what I got from a document I think this is probably a not so corrected somebody's writing but I didn't have the wherewithal this morning to confirm it so don't take take that with a pinch of salt it might be right it might not uh the son of Eilec the daughter of Udher the king of Alba of course all of this is subject to subsequent historical alteration to suit the current political agenda back in 500 AD or something but their names were carol color us miradak color focri and aid color men there were three of them now their descendants gave rise to the surnames Beggin Boylan Carol Connolly Higgins Hughes Kelly McDougal Macaulay McLean McDonald McGuire McKenna McMahen and some others and this is the Y chromosome on haplotype and again the experts will know what they're looking at here and I wouldn't worry about it if it was anybody else on Esther from that family and then you can start taking it very seriously all of this work is from Peter Biggins with Josiah McGuire Patrick McMahen and Tom Roderick and they have a PDF on a website that you can download and have a read-off quite simply so a gentleman called Donald Siegel made a hypothesis published in the Klocher Record a number of years ago about their origins and the key points here were that each of these collars commanded 300 men who were given to them by their grandfather who was King Ugari now they also had a Roman type name structure composed of a prenomen, a nomen and a kogunomen which was not typically Gaelic in origins and Siegel suggested that King Ugari could be cognate for Vicari or the vice tree broom rank of a Roman legion and there's also cognates between their name and the tree of Antes which was a tribe in the region of Colchester now Siegel concluded that the three collars were each Romano-British centurions hence the 100 men each and that they came from the present day area of Colchester whereas Biggins concluded they were from northwest Britain so we can use the DNA to try and figure this out basically and I want to stimulate some discussion and thoughts among people in in the area to see whether we can progress this a little further so then the Normans in Fermanagh and the answer to this question is essentially no there weren't any because they came here in 1169 and if you look at the castle distribution in Fermanagh there were no Norman castles built in the area Ulster was relatively free of of Norman occupation and the castle and in Eskilin in Keesher wandering was originally built by the Maguire's not Norman at all but the people who live down here you can easily imagine them being pushed out of down here by these Normans coming in and you can easily imagine them ending up in places like Fermanagh where the Normans were not present so that moves up moves us on to the plantation enhancing the complexity of our generation four hits and there is a method in this madness so the plantation started here in 1610 which is actually not such a long time ago and here from the Tloher record article by John Johnson we see the increase in British plantation people from 1610 to the late well 1660 and also from that article we can see the distribution of Irish in Fermanagh at the same time they also he also has a similar figure for the distribution of English at various time points in Fermanagh so this is me and what I'm trying to get at here is working back through the generations to see how many segments what percentage and how many centimorgans could be left of me in this time course so we know all of these guys we don't know the dates of this fellow but we know that this fellow was was farming flax in Belterbet and he died in 1846 and then we're extrapolating back using a 30-year generation to think when my seventh or eighth great-grandfather would have been and this is Bang's smack in the middle of the plantation so then we have my Jedmach hits but it's not only my Jedmach hits this I've used Excel this is a consolidation of me and two of my father's sisters so we're getting the maximum amount of hits and then I've done remove identical remove duplicates just to leave the maximum hit and so you can see the names here we got my close family members and my father's mother was Clifford this is on my entirely on my paternal line and the Clifford's grandmother's mother or father was a Collins and then we see there are mcconnells and mccurnans and if we hark back to the natives that I'm going I'm going to actually go forward rather than back and my Tommen was my great great grandmother and we see a lot of names we see Clifford's continuing we see hairs now this is a plantation name which is associated with this particular castle but we know we know this is a relatively recent one because we actually know that one of the Collins is married one of the hairs so that's where that came from and then we start to go into territory where we don't know where things are happening these cores here there was a maca gone married a core a while back but there are additional cores that we don't know where they come from and this is probably coming from the plantation time and here we have Caldwell which is a castle family down in Belique and they were in this castle which is now in complete ruins and then if we go further down we see a mixture of native Irish and planter names and all of this stuff is stemming from the plantation in my view and it's also stemming from the fact that it's a relatively small local community and people are marrying each other and I'm finding people blinking to me on multiple multiple levels from this just as Michelle was just talking about so by this timeline you see the generation four matches could be mostly from the plantation period and I'm sure this is going to affect a lot of us I mean those of us that are a bit younger or have very very tight generational gaps it might be completely gone but those of us that are a bit older and have longer generational gaps this will certainly be present so now on to my Y67 Y chromosome STR matches and first thing I'll point out is you have here three guns and gill guns these are the same name there is a cave nest gun and these don't figure on this at all because the mackle guns and the guns and for manna and calvin are distinct native Irish population compared to the cave nest guns in scotland although there are people in one side that think they're in the other and vice versa the other thing you see is boiling mcconan cairns kelly and more mcconan and you see their locations and Morris there are actually some I was thinking more in terms of there are fowls in here as well all right which you might want to take a look at later but this this is the smp3 that all these guys are on I've assigned it relatively loosely and I haven't pinned it down but you experts will know what this means and you'll be able to figure out what this is so then what's clan kelly clan kelly originated from kelly who died in 732 ad who was the king of the oocrymephan and believed to be descended from color duckish now kelly's grandson donal give rise to the name mcdonald mcdonald in the area and laterally the mcgonals and the mcconals and this was this name changed to mcgonal and mcconal was essentially done to distinguish them from the Scottish mcdonalds so two people with the same name we want to make a distinction between the two of them and this is what happened here so if we come on to the the slide again we'll actually see these guys are there and kelly also led to the olorcan summer flan against which is where the boiling comes in the oocrymephan the oocrymephan cairns and the o'hearts and the maroonies so there we see we got the gun we got the boiling we got the mcconal we got the cairns the o'kelly the mcconal i mean there's a few people that haven't tested and are therefore not there but this is pretty much representative of these names from the kankeri barony which was described in the 2005 article by shigel again so a couple of weeks ago i was coming across links to the or sorry Fitzpatrick's and i uploaded my data to the or to the Fitzpatrick group on family treaty and they were extremely interested in it because they were thinking that this earlier dataset is helping them understand where they got the name McGillip Patrick from because they weren't always son of pat the follower of patrick because the smp group that's characterizing myself and the kellies and the mcconals and the cairns is is that related to the Fitzpatrick's of or sorry and if we go down to a very low resolution of 12 markers there actually Fitzpatrick's that start to appear although i don't place a whole lot of trust in that but the last of the orsorian kings was donal McGillip Patrick and the fourth i think and he was driven out of his fortress from the site of the kenny castle by the normans in 1170 so potentially they've moved up north to get away from the normans potentially so could these be clan kelly foreman orsorians who moved to all star to get away from the normans rather than clan collar descendants so next on to the the emigres van william van aranya and this is not so much a genetic but rather a genealogical thing just to illustrate that people from the williamite wars did end up in for van ar and it's a little bit humorous as well so this is one particular family three that i did relatively recently at the end of last year uh it was the family of juist who was a dutch soldier in arland he arrived in 18 sorry 1689 but we don't see any record of him until or as ancestors was descendants until 1772 in wicklow where he was a coast guard then appeared in west port and county mayo another coast guard and then cork and carry and then eventually in 1934 one of them married a girl from my hometown who was the daughter of the acting r.i.c sergeant so it's a very small world so i have a quiz for you we are talking about here a literary williamite descendant who was coming from a dutch colonel who arrived at the forces of william van aranya he was educated at pertura royal school and wrote prayers who is it anybody know sheriff thank you again thank you no no no no no exactly oscar wild now in dutch his name would be wilde but over here we call him wild for some reason right so that's more or less it um thanks very much for your attention uh the acknowledgments of morris and jared for running the show today and having me speak michael for helping me with the slides uh bado and de crumb burger de loringa with a little bit of his information on the menapians and these guys here did the assignments of the smps this is peter bigans at all who worked on the three collars mike fits patrick for the information on the fits patrick link rick o kelly for information on the kelly link shonkor and veronica reilly and others informana for uploading their data and for useful discussions and uh thank you very much for your attention and any question thank you very much call um where do you think the research is going to go next so where are we going to be in 10 years time do you think because you've painted a lot of very tantalizing uh connections but where do you think how do you think the state of play will be in 10 years time i would imagine in 10 years time we'd have pinned all of this down if more people would have tested and we would know exactly what the smp lineages are and where everybody's from and we may even integrate it in with ancient dna or more recent buried samples so we can see where this was in belgium and this was where and so on and are there many of them around for manan monahan not sure not sure get digging in the garden see if you can find them uh questions for kaho jared there's a few points to say uh local historian and for manna john conningham who's very helpful to me in my research and he's written 20 local history books including a lot of the ancient settlements and things like that there is a legend that the city and warrior stepped the shore on lock urn at uh boa island and the the janis figures there are three christians so very very interesting stories right there on the three colors they were df 21 which is also the same branch as the bell beaker who was found up in rattle an island so i'm just wondering if there's a connection there and and they moved south eventually and they gave rise to the elio carols uh who are neighbors of the mcgillipatres i mean the other thing i forgot to mention was that the neolithic people brought our m269 with them and 80 of the population in this island are our m269 descendants and even that some of the invaders from england and the continent would also have been that as well so we still have a lot of people on the same branch same trunk but actually having different branches any questions we're going to um have a well we were going to have a panel discussion afterwards but i think we might as well have it now and just kind of continue into the panel discussions so that you can ask any question that you like about dna because i know a lot of people are still fairly new to dna and probably have learned a lot today but there's still a lot of other questions that still remain so if you have any questions about any aspect of dna we'll answer them now in the next 10 to 20 minutes or so so um does anybody have any particular questions about dna that they they want to to ask anything anything at all there's stun stun science there's a lot of digestion that will be required after this weekend i'm sure how many people have actually done a dna test so a lot of people and all of you are in the north vireland family history society and the dna project there that's no okay well anyone who buys a test downstairs gets automatic inclusion in the north vireland dna project so that's very very useful because they have 3 000 people in the database from the north vireland so if you're particularly interested in connecting with cousins within the north vireland then being part of that dna project is going to be very very helpful for you and the other thing to note is that they do do courses as well so every four weeks or so they do a new three week course they meet every Tuesday for two or three hours in the evening and they take you through the actual dna test itself what your matches mean and then finish on the third week by uploading your matches to jet match so that you get access to the two databases rather than just the one so do go down to the north of island family history stand downstairs if that's um if you haven't actually joined the society as yet you don't have to join the society to join the project the dna project but i think you get a lot of additional benefits from joining the north vireland family history society so um question here from michael michael kowt online for genesis i know i know that the website itself gives you some information that's a good question no we don't think there is there used to be a really good video by kitty i think you did a blog and a video that shows you exactly how to use jet match i don't think anyone's done anyone for the genesis but if you go to the iso wiki page there's a specific wiki page with all the links about jet match and there's some links there to the videos and blogs and things people are written but i i haven't seen anything specifically on genesis yeah yeah go to the iso wiki page and there's lots of really good links on there to blogs one of my one of my blogs is on there about genesis as well quite old now but okay uh any other questions dana you might as well come up here and and sit at the front so that we can have have a uh have something that looks like a panel anyway um so just to introduce people that we have jared quarkran here who's been doing the uh the facebook streaming all day thank you very much for that jared we then have kahl machal gun of course whom you know uh from the previous presentation and donna rutherford who gave the first presentation here this morning so um i think i'm going to start with uh your yourself donna and i'm going to ask you a question and that will help generate some interesting discussion and stimulate some questions from the audience as well but um we've obviously come a long way with genetic genealogy and especially in ireland as well where between the dublin and belfast shows there's a lot of people who are actually doing the dna testing now and a lot of people are finding connections where would you like to see this in five years time where do you think we will be in five years time and debbie kennet is joining us as well because people are learning people want to go to the next day what i'd like to see is when we do shows like this we actually do workshop style shows where you can come along with your problems or maybe even mail in your problem a few weeks early and maybe a couple of months in and say we're coming to the show we want to book some time on the workshop but we pick up three or four of those problems and actually workshop them with you over the over the course of the show so that's that's what i'll tell you would you find that helpful do you think having workshops here where you can actually sit down with an expert show them your your ipad or a little bit of a printout and try and work on your own uh particular conundrum so that's something that we would like to see what what other things would people like to see at these type of events because i'm just aware that sitting in the audience and hearing an hour lecture followed by an hour lecture for six hours can be a little bit overwhelming and what other things would you like to see at these type of events because that would actually help us in in the planning for these type of events yes gentlemen here i sort of wonder about the whole business is about connecting to other people uh other people who are relatives now this is a room of other people and then i come along to these things and i think to myself you know i perhaps i resonate a bit more you know when i'm close to them you know that person or the other person whatever i don't know is is the is it the the krimson eight or is it is it 21 or what which what's doing it and i'm sort of wondering about the connectedness that could happen at these meetings you know i mean even just uh having a name tag because we do get to know names very well because we spend half our life sort of seeing there is really strange people who don't exist but but you know they're with so many setting omens but but all i just wonder about that possible connectedness that might happen at these events has anyone seen that happen at any events or conferences that they've been at an app an app oh i i'm sorry there is an app jayu's all the time you can nearly go to a conference every single day if you want to there's a platform called event right okay they have interesting conferences nearly every day most of them free right which you can sign up for and and in pretty much all of them they give you a mark code so you can be scanned in you know and connects a little network between people so that you can discuss things and so on so on we talked about yesterday and i think maybe in one of the future conferences who implement that um somebody jokingly said tinder at the back of the room but um could we actually have a dna app a tinder app that included dna matches would anybody like to talk about decode me and the situation in iceland because that app actually exists uh in in iceland they've practically tested the entire population and the icelandic genealogies are very very good and they have documentation that goes back sometimes to the 900s which is absolutely incredible but because everybody is relatively closely related in iceland what some entrepreneur has done is taken this genealogical data and um the uh i'm not sure if they've used dna data they must have used dna data as well but taken the genealogical data and built an app so that if you're chatting up a blonde at the bar you can knock phones together and an alarm goes off if you're too closely related so so the so the idea of a tinder app is actually not a bad idea at all yes at the back that would be really really good if you actually had a t-shirt with all of your ancestral names written on your back or your front as the case may be it was it was decode me that actually was the company that did the uh the work in iceland sorenson was a different database the sorenson molecular genetic foundation set that up um and they had they eventually sold that database to ancestry and then um ancestry closed that down because they found out that it was just had too much public um exposure and uh so they wanted to close it down for privacy reasons and they still have that database at ancestry and they still use it internally but the um data in that database is not publicly available anymore and of course that's one of the big uh risks in this industry is that you don't know how long the databases are going to be active for um we can think of scotland's people uh which closed down or britain's dna britain's dna rather and scott scotland's dna scott people is not closed down that's the website scotland's dna britain's dna yorkshire dna uh they were all under the same company they've all and ireland's dna that all closed down we've also lost a public database why search we've also lost the public database mito search although new ones have come in to replace that so we do have to be strike while the iron is hot and while those databases are there we should be doing getting the most out of them that we possibly can um moving along then kohl uh where do you where would you like to see us in five years time hmm it's a it's a tricky question we could potentially be next generation sequencing next generation sequencing however there are privacy concerns with that that makes me cautious about it but it would be certainly infinitely more effective in analysis if especially the tools came along with it to find similarities we certainly would be able to get rid of a lot of the false positive segments that we probably have in our results when you do um whole genome sequencing which is not just looking at the 700 000 snips that we're currently looking at with the commercial tests that we've all done but you're looking at three billion uh letters in your genome and comparing it to the three billion letters in everybody else's so there's a lot less chance that you'll get false positives with this new type of of testing but in order to do that you're looking at tests that were a thousand more than a thousand dollars then they came down below a thousand dollars now you can get them really cheap for how much debbie what was the 199 so 199 dollars for for Dante when you think about the first human genome cost 3.7 billion dollars and it took 10 years and now it's down to 199 dollars um a few hours but that was a one-off that was a one-off and it's not it's inferior technology I understand compared to Illumina and how long Gerard I'll direct this to you how long if we do do whole genome sequencing how long before we build comparative databases that reach critical mass and are as good as the 30 million we have in the current commercial databases you know the reason you can buy for 199 dollars today in terms of data it's much more valuable than the cost of sequencing right and the people who sequence it whether it be healthcare companies or for example the business model of helix is to sell you the initial sequencing for a very low cost maybe 50 dollars and give you part of your analysis and then as you need other parts throughout the lifetime of your genome which lasts your your entire life you can buy additional parts of the analysis okay but the data is so valuable that I would expect for in a few years it'll be free of charge that the you know human the national genome projects in Ireland we have GMI which is Genomics Medicine Ireland in England it's Genomics England and so on so forth I would imagine they would have programs to sequence the genome free of charge so that kind of brings us to to your view of where are we going to be in five years time because the the promise of personalized medicine has been held out to us like a carrot at the end of the stick for a long time are we actually realizing that presently are we not there yet well the the problem is the evening as you look at all the very interesting presentations we have these two days it's still very complex we need to make the technology disappear right it needs to fade into the background and as long as anyone can pick them up and analyze your DNA do useful stuff find matches find their ancient ancestors and things like that yeah it will take a while to do that probably about 10 years I think that's where I would like to see it happen as regards the role of you know the national genome projects are way ahead of their targets in Ireland we had a target of of 40 000 right and that's just been increased to 500 000 that's 10 of the population in the UK Debbie can comment they've probably expanded beyond the initial targets because we've got um well genomics medicine or the 100 000 genomes in England they they're now rolling out a program on the NHS where you can pay to have your genome sequence through the NHS but contribute your results to science so they're trying to get five million people in population sequence and I I presume that's extended to Northern Ireland as well I would hope it is and then we've also got UK Biobank which I'm a part of which is half million people in the UK who have had their they're currently doing whole genome sequencing on that but they're also combining that with national health service records I had to go for like two hour visits to have all sorts of metrics taken I had to do all sorts of things on a computer I had to have my urine tested my blood sample tested and they did lung function and heart rate and then I even had a like a week I had to wear a Fitbit on my arm and that got sent off and that's produced a massive amount of data because the it's the first big data set that's ever been made available to scientists and it's now given that chance to to mine that huge data set so try and work out if there is a genetic component of all sorts of things whether it's just height or you know whether it's a particular condition of these but it's much more complicated than anyone ever thought and there's many more factors involved and there's still so much of it is environmental rather than genetic so your DNA is never going to determine your destiny so much is your environment as well the speed of change in this whole frontier over the last five years let alone ten years is just phenomenal and in many ways it's kind of outstripping our ability to imagine what can happen in the future and we've seen obviously applications by law enforcement in the US for for identifying murder victims catching serial killers we've seen how personalized medicine is just getting bigger and bigger and they're creating these massive big databases we've also seen how it helps adoptees get reconnected with their birth families and there's a lot of very very positive stories that come out of these new applications that had not been initially envisaged so i'm just wondering what what what you think maybe starting with you debbie where are we going to be in five years time that we can't even imagine today well i think one of the things to say is that there's been a lot of talk about DNA being behind all these things but in fact it's not DNA itself and when you think about adoption searches law enforcement DNA only plays a very small part of it and there's not really any DNA information that's being revealed that what is really happening is we've got all these big data sets coming together all at once so when i first started doing my family history i had to look through all the indexes for birth marriages and deaths i used to go to my local record office get one microfiche out at a time now i just put all the names in to free bmd i can search names on nansist you'll find my past and i can find information about any living person today when they were born when they were married when they died i can go on facebook i can find out all sorts of things about families and their relationships and none of these things will be possible without that expansion of online genealogical data so i think we're going to have a sort of sea change where people have to think about what data they're sharing and making available online and how that impacts other family members and i think DNA is just one small component of that very much bigger picture i mean donna you are an expert in cloud technology um do you think we'd be able to do what we've done with dna without that kind of cloud technology behind it no it's not just the the cloud technology is just a way of storing data but it's the is the big data and the ability to store big data now and to have a way to access that data and pull information and what's happening with things like dna and some people worry that they've got dna and perhaps a big database but when people are accessing this big data they're not necessarily they're not looking for names they're not doing genealogy like we are they're looking for patterns in the data and how they can use data to maybe you know look for healthcare want it to look for how we can help with diseases and so on and people are looking for that information and it's the same in the in the rest of the world where you know if you're using bus cards or you know like an oyster card in in London um obviously your credit cards even people are mining all this big all this data is available and people are mining it to sell you things um or to um to try and and gain some benefit by knowing this information about the population as the whole and so dna is just going to get is just by extension part of all this big data um that's available but it's not necessarily available by person and i think that's why some people get really worried about big data it's it's almost it's people aren't looking for one person they're looking for patterns and and all those and all that data well they are one of the most invasive things is actually like supermarket loyalty cards where they are looking for data for an individual and trying to market things specifically to you based on your your shopping habits for example so if i go to boots they know exactly what i'm buying there or to waitrose or Tesco's or wherever and they they can build up a picture of you and your lifestyle they probably know more about your health than your doctor does just by your you know the diet and by the what you buy every week in in the supermarket and they you know they can work out your age how many people you've got in your family whether you're buying nappies or sanitary products or you know all sorts of things like that and what medication you're picking up when you go to boots and so all these big stores have far more big data on individuals than any say genealogy company or DNA company does but they're also managing that by the technology so it's not someone sitting behind the behind the curtain going divi kinnitz coming in let's get all those things she needs eggs and beans um but actually it's the technology that's working in the back end to to put that information out to you there is it it's not done by by people people are certainly making those those programs but all that information is coming to you because the technology can work out who you are it's not a group of people who are working out who you are well that is interesting implications for ancestry and genealogy because obviously ancestry being the biggest company ancestry.com being the biggest company it has it uses big data in a very very important way i'm just wondering what do you think is going to happen in the next five years with ancestry when they go from 30 million to 60 million people DNA tested when people are starting to to to more and more put up their trees on ancestry will we actually be in a situation where somebody does a DNA test and ancestry gives them a report that says here's 56 percent of your ancestors now just go away and find out the other 44 percent absolutely is going to happen and there's no doubt about it and because i would be my pioneer family my my mum's pioneer family so many of them have DNA tested now and i've built out all their trees because i've had to do that to figure out who some of these matches were literally if i get a match to mum and it's one of the pioneer families i can put them in my tree straight away i know exactly who they are and where they fit because all that's been built and you're right that's going to happen with ancestry and you're going to do a DNA test they're going to give you a family tree you will then need to go verify it but they're going to say here's a hint for you it's your entire tree but you verify how much that is right. Question here. Can i ask if that's the future? Can we first have an algorithm that will correct the wrong trees that are out there? Especially in ancestry. Well one thing that ancestry are doing i don't think many people are aware of it they're building this big tree from all their user data and in fact when you have big computers aggregating information it can actually be really powerful and can spot mistakes so a computer can easily spot if a birth and death data out by 100 years and can correct for that and i think what we need to do is to crowdsource the family trees and make sure all the trees have good sources so without everyone working on their own individual tree we should all be working like wikipedia to produce good one good big tree so for every person that ever lived the family searcher trying to do the same we have a really good record for that person and all backed up by sources but not on everyone's computers but on one big central resource which may be two big central resources. How many people use wiki tree? A few. How many people use genie? And how many people use the family search tree? This is a few. Okay so how do you think how effective do you think those trees are? Has anybody got an idea? If you're researching a match I mean those trees are incredibly helpful because you know I actually find that a lot of them are actually more correct than what you think they are. Maybe I've just been lucky but actually when I've been quickly building up trees for my matches pretty much if I take the hints and just build up whatever's there online I find my ancestor and you start to then work backwards to make sure everything's properly sourced and they're not as bad as people think. But of course it's in the company's best interest to start getting these trees right because if they want to sell us the ability to do a DNA test we'll produce your family tree that that's good that's not good marketing if they do that anyone goes well that's a load of crap so you know crap and crap out there's something we say in technology excuse me I'm going to have to publish it um yeah so it's in anyone's best interest to get these things right and comment here. Yeah I think that's kind of a thing and certainly we're going to have people collaborating on the family trees and stuff and you have to be very careful of who you give permission because there are some people and they will just cut in and they kind of just go off and there's crazy stuff and take take so much work and undo the kind of misinformation they put in I don't have time to be able to control it when it comes to the trees and I get people sending the information at this stage because it's just But if you have a situation like genie.com where it's a collaborative tree you have administrators who have responsibility for individual people on those trees and you can't add extra data if it's wrong and if it's not backed up by sources it's much more difficult to control that if it's a private tree but if it's a public tree where you've got a lot of people collaborating together you've got much more chance of coming up with some good results I mean like like a wikipedia is now a really brilliant resource okay so it's 100% accurate but it's a really good starting point for any subject that you want and that's a purely collaborative process that's been going on for the last 10 years or more. Gentleman over here. I just wanted to know how is a DNA test done? Does it involve needles? How is a DNA test done? Does it involve needles? It can do if you want it but I would recommend the swab just swabbing your cheek like that or you can do a spit test and spit into a test tube so that's the the two main ways that DNA is actually done but you can do it from blood tests as well but that's more on the medical side of things. Most of the precision medicine ones are blood tests. Most of the precision medicine ones are blood tests. If you are have an elderly grandmother for example sometimes old people find it very difficult to get enough saliva to spit into the tube in that situation the swab test is probably a better one to go for and Michelle you had a comment on that as well? No not on that actually I wanted to go back to the trees. Oh the trees okay my presentation when I was talking about master trees on ancestry and the like. Can we stand up and just turn around so we can let the audience hear? Thanks. Basically with the trees obviously there's you know there's thousands and thousands of trees on ancestry and there's lots of errors in trees prior to DNA but we're finding more now that people are building very quick and dirty speculative trees to help with DNA matching and a lot of these trees are being left public and thrown out there and then they get copied and the mistakes is like Chinese whispers and of course that's what happens you know before DNA as well but it's just escalated with the trees that people are creating for DNA matches so what I always tell people to do when they're creating these quick and dirty and speculative trees is to make the trees private and unsearchable and then they can't be seen by anyone else in the ancestry database apart from you or someone you give access to and that just would help clean all of that up a bit all of my trees master trees etc are all private and unsearchable nobody's going to see any of that because I might be doing very speculative things on these trees I'm not looking for sources as much as I would if I'm doing traditional genealogy I'm just quickly trying to see if I can find common ancestors and so there will potentially be errors that I don't want other people seeing so it's always best to keep it private and unsearchable and often people make them private but they don't realize how you can go and make them unsearchable and you just need to go into the settings there's an extra click and then you need to look down and tick the box to make them unsearchable with a comment there from Patty on that point a little more cynical about the ancestry procedure I do recall the first time I signed up for an ancestry account I was invited to start my tree and if you don't know please just guess that is not the way to introduce the beginner into making a tree but it's going to be sold on to all our other customers and I'm not sure about Michelle's point about making it unsearchable and unseable because Ancestry internally is doing the data mining to find here is an individual probably even in a private unsearchable tree to which the researcher has linked these 10 records so when somebody else comes to one of those 10 records Ancestry is going to provide the other nine as a hint the big the second big problem after the beginner's please guess is the hint system which is the worst computer virus I have ever seen because when somebody puts in wrong information like my granny was born 20 years after I was that information goes viral by generating hints for other users there's no quality control on the hints the hints are not checked for viability relative to dates or they're not checked against primary sources so if there was actually a human in Ancestry checking all these things before generating the hints it would work more like Wikipedia but it's working exactly the opposite way at the moment it probably will improve in time I would imagine and I think you know thinking forward to maybe five years time when there's maybe 60 million people in the database maybe even more than that and we have people doing more accurate trees and creating more accurate trees and Ancestry has improved its own internal algorithms and statistical processes for generating hints that are accurate we're going to end up in a situation where just like you were saying Debbie we have one big tree with more and more branches being added to it all the time now that presents opportunities but it also presents challenges so I'm just wondering from you Paddy what do you think Ancestry is going to do with that information in five years time when there's 60 million people with DNA in their database and they know how they're all connected in a big one-world tree somebody with probably not Ancestry will try and automate what we've been talking about for the last two days everything that has been talked about for the last two days is presumably capable of ultimately being automated it's probably Johnny Perle behind you actually but unless Ancestry is convinced that there's money in it they're not going to go down that road and nobody has convinced them that there's money in making the user trees accurate well you know the Ancestry industry I've created various numbers it's probably about a two billion dollar industry two billion dollar industry project the healthcare industry is a 10 trillion dollar industry right now Ancestry I understand some of the markers are medical informative markers they're not reported right but they could be used and you know it doesn't take any leap of the imagination think that Ancestry would be tempted to collaborate with the healthcare industry and what would that look like do you think and what kind of effects would that have on medical medicine in general pharmaceutical developments in particular when you get up to 60 million datasets then these become extremely useful for machine learning artificial intelligence and we already have the convergence of cloud and big data and so on and so forth when you bring in genomics into that it becomes very very powerful if you look at you know reading x-ray scans or MRI scans two years ago it had to be human today it's more accurate to do it with a machine using machine learning artificial intelligence the same thing will happen with genealogy just how things are I'm wondering if Johnny could create a chatbot you know which goes through and interviews people so we get avoid all the problems that Paddy mentioned you know and I think very useful and in terms of medical developments I mean are we going to live longer because of the DNA we're giving to these companies today for sure for sure yeah how why first of all who wants to live longer than me so what what do you think well that's the do you want to live longer very true very true um there's a term called longevity escape velocity right longevity escape velocity what does that mean if you reach a certain age where the medical progress can prolong life by one year longer than the time it takes that means for next year they'll prolong it two years then you have reached longevity escape velocity but how long within 30 years we'll be able to live forever no at least 150 at least 150 and that's how long away 30 years so in 30 years time we'll all be living till 150 so there'll be plenty of time to do your family tree except a little more automated so you won't have to that's the other thing right it will all be automated and I know the fun I used to have with spreadsheet a lot of that stuff is now automated you lose some of that real fun because it's too quick almost and too easy so we need something new to to do well I miss going to a library and just getting the smell of the parchment and the leather of the old books that's what happens on microfiche yeah and all those days sitting in front of the microfiche getting seasick they used to make me seasick but yeah things have moved on in fact DNA testing is almost like they it's like when we link from traveling around the world to go to records offices and everything came online and people were like we don't believe it if it's online it's impossible if you found it on the internet it can't be right you know they still wanted to go to a records office and now people there's so many genealogists now that don't even believe you have to go to an archive office or a record office don't realize what they're missing out on because they just think you find it on ancestry and you build you know I've had someone say well you know I've been doing my genealogy for five weeks and I've finished my family tree what do I do next you know something that actually think that that can happen and so we're losing that fun of well I read I think it's the National Archives in the UK they've only digitized like 2% of their entire collection and they've got a huge amount that's online but they're focusing only on the most commonly used records so there's a huge amount of treasure there that's still waiting to be uncovered and similarly with family search family search as well I think they've only digitized 10% of the records that they have in that big underground chamber in a mountain in Utah but people can't you know put it in the search box and have it pop up then they don't they don't notice that that's even there so do you think that standard genealogy documentary genealogy is going to die out relatively in the next five or ten years or how long would you give it yeah it's not going to be the same as it is now for sure but we have to do everything we can to preserve the archives that we have and at least make sure everything does get digitized in case you know we lose them at some point I yeah I don't think there's going to be any major decrease in in the need for documentary research in it will still be there in five or ten years time because we still have so much to digitize and index and put online and then of course gravestones as well we need to go out and photograph all those gravestones and get that digitized and indexed and put online as well so there's still a lot still to be done and that's where big data is really going to help us well the other thing about that is people don't understand the cost of trying to put records online it's multi millions of pounds to digitize and get records online and and people are constantly wanting it well we can I go get that for free I don't want to buy a certificate anyhow I just want to find this for free and if we stop wanting to buy things um and online genealogy documentation there's going to be no money to fund this continuing digitization. It's one of those things I get I get asked very often and I see very often people complaining about the fact that the English and Welsh marriages you can't buy them as PDFs and the reason for that is because they ran out of money when they were doing that the digitization of the births and the deaths they got to leave the deaths and they didn't they ran out of money and they stopped the project before they they digitized the marriages so they simply don't have them to offer as PDFs but every week you will see someone complain why can't I get a marriage as a PDF and that's the reason they didn't they and there's no money being found to go back and do it. I did actually literally work on that project in NIT and that was millions and millions and millions of pounds with that project and it's just a mess of documentation out there and needs to be done and you have to automate the process I think someone did work out how long it would take for someone to stand there and actually scanning through thinking it was an army of people over hundreds of years so it will take a very long time to get everything digitized basically. There's a similar thing happening in academia we've seen it with ancient DNA coming in and overwriting overwriting the archaeologists and linguists and the history and sometimes trying to rewrite history and there's been a backlash against that and there's been a good debate opened up about what it all means and I think we have something similar happening in genetic genealogy and traditional genealogy and they will find a happy meeting and you have to have more cooperation happening Well if we are all going to live for 150 years thanks to the tests we've done at Ancestry and Family Tree DNA and it is going to deliver 56% of our ancestors to us as soon as we do the test what other potential applications are there for this far greater connectivity so for example with the North of Ireland family DNA project you know with 3000 people in there Martin McDowell is currently calculating that that means that they probably have DNA from about 30% of the population of Ulster in the 1750s so that's 30% that's just going to keep on getting higher and higher and higher so that eventually maybe it could take two or three years but it'll be close to 100% of the population of the 1750s here in Ulster will have some DNA represented in that DNA project and that's going to increase the connectivity between the people in the project so I'm wondering if that is going to have or translate into some kind of social change that when we realize that we're all that much greater connectivity between us what's going to happen socially is it going to change the way that we think about each other is it going to make Christops's a much bigger affair what's going to happen any any thoughts any ideas about the social implications of ancestry one would you interest me a lot of course is connecting the diaspora and here in Ireland we have five million people and abroad we have 80 million people who are part of the diaspora and connecting that I think is very powerful second one you know you have different ways from Northern Ireland you have the Scots Irish which went early you know the Daniel Boone type settlers and pioneers in in the American and then you had the famine immigrants and are from different communities and I think connecting those back together will be very powerful I think it'll be good for tourism as well Paddy again I think we're looking at it in a very different way to the way ancestry is looking at it a tiny proportion of ancestry is 12 million people have researched their family tree or attached to family tree to their DNA ancestry is telling them this is about our ethnicity percentage estimates it's not telling them it's all about changing society and making bigger families and bigger Christmas parties but if ancestry went out there and marketed it in that way perhaps it would happen but that's not why they're doing it where do you think ancestry will be in five years time and what will their interests be given the fact that they are a company owned by venture capitalists well their interest is in making money and we have to convince them that doing the things we would like to see will make the money and then they do them I think they were quite surprised at how successful the DNA was because initially from my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong if you've heard otherwise they introduced the DNA in order to attract more people into the company in order to do get subscriptions for doing genealogy but in actual fact it's taken off so much that in fact they're probably getting more money from the DNA than they are from the subscriptions if somebody say only something like three million of their 12 million people have paid subscriptions and the other nine million have no access to their matches trees or any of that stuff Cecilia I think they're I think they're advertising is hurting that completely because they so focus on the ethnicity through all of their advertising the people just go on they do that and they say well I just wanted to know where I just want to know what nationality I was I don't really care about the rest of it and that hurts all the rest of what we're off time to do but why do you think there is this fascination in ethnicity or where you actually come from it's an American thing it is because because for those of us who come from lots of different places I mean those of you who are here and whose families have been here for hundreds and thousands of years you already know that but for those of us who haven't we want to make sure that we're part of our history we want to make sure which part of Germany did you know my great-great-grandfather come from that's why they wanted but they there are people who just want to know well am I German or am I Irish well some of us want to get more specific than that well my my three second cousins there are brothers and sisters over in Los Angeles all three of them the the ancestry test I thought that's very very strange why why did all three of you do the test your old brothers and sisters she said we wanted to find out who was more Irish than the other a quarter one brother is nearly 50 percent and one brother is only 70 percent Irish and I mean I'm not sure how they work without why wouldn't you want if you are just siblings why wouldn't you all want to do your DNA because since you only got 50 percent of your mother's DNA and 5 percent of your father's you want to get the rest of it so by doing siblings you get more of it that's true that's true I don't think they're that involved in this particular family they just wanted to get the number well it's funny you say that because I come from a family of there were four children three of us were redheads and my sister was not so I had them all do the DNA test I was a little bit worried about what her results might be but she is a full sibling yes oh really oh yes we would be uh it's almost five o'clock doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself so unfortunately we have to call it a day there but please give a warm a round of applause for our expert panel thank you