 Good morning everybody. Welcome to day two of genetic genealogy Ireland 2014. Now can everybody hear us at the back? Yeah, okay. If you have any problems just raise your hand and tell us to speak louder or turn up the sound. But it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker of today, Debbie Kennett, who is an honorary research associate in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. She's a member of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, the Guild of One Name Studies, the Society of Genealogists, and the Association of Professional Genealogists, as well as the Society of Authors. Because Debbie has written two books, one is called the surname handbook, the other one is called DNA and social networking, as she has them available here today to sell. So if anybody's interested in buying those books, then please come up and see Debbie afterwards. We also have Emily Alasino at the back, and she is selling her book on genetic genealogy as well. So do have a look at that and check it out. These are excellent authors and the books are absolutely fantastic. They'll give you a real insight into surnames and genealogical research from a genetic point of view. So DNA for beginners is the title of Debbie's talk today, and she's going to tell us about three main types of DNA test. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Debbie Kennett. Thank you, Maurice. Can everyone hear me at the back? Yes, OK. Right. So I'm going to be looking this morning at the three main types of DNA test that you can take for your family history research to help you with your genealogy research. And we've got the first type of test is the Y chromosome DNA test. And this is the test that follows normally follows the surname line and it can be used for recent ancestry. But it also takes you deep back back in time and it can also trace your very, very deep ancestry. The second test is the mitochondrial DNA test, which follows the direct mother line. So that's your mother, her mother and her mother and so on back in time. And that again can be used for recent ancestry. But it also takes you way back in time about 200,000 years and tells you about your deep ancestry. And the third test is the autosomal DNA test, a family finder test. And this covers all your family lines, but it's most effective within about the last five or six generations. And I'll explain about all the different tests in detail a bit later. The first point I want to make about DNA testing is don't think of it as anything unusual. It's just another type of record that you use in your genealogy research. Most of the records that we use, we have to go to archives and we have to get the paper records to use. DNA, it's a different way of extracting the record because we have to actually take the sample and we have to take the sample from living people. It's not painful. It's just a little cheek swab. There's no blood or anything like that involved. And it just, well as with any record, it gives us different answers, but we use all the records in combination together. We don't use DNA testing on its own. And there are a number of uses for DNA testing. It's most effective if you've got a particular question that you want to answer about, say, the relationship. If two people with the same surname are related, if you want to try and establish whether two people share the same, say, great-grandfather. Depending on the question you want to ask, there's usually a test that will solve the problem for you. You can just use it to verify your family trees. And it can be very useful if you've got any brick walls in your research. If you've got, say, an illegitimate line or if you're adopted or if you've got someone who is adopted in your line. Sometimes DNA testing can provide answers that you cannot get from the paper trail alone. And the Y chromosome DNA test is very useful if you're interested in researching surnames. You can look at the evolution of surnames, the origin of surnames, and try and work out how many people with a particular surname are related. Sometimes if you're lucky, if you take a test, it can actually help your research. The people you match might have more information than you, and it might provide a geographical focus for your research. So if you've got a line and you only know it's from Ireland, if someone else has matched you and they've done more research, they may be able to pinpoint it to a particular county. So that's probably more relevant for Americans, but if you say you've got a line that goes to London and you were stuck in London, you may be able to actually get that line back to a particular county in, say, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales, or England. And it can just be fun just to take a test, just to see what you find. You go into a large matching database and you end up with matches with your genetic cousins. And that can just be interesting just to go on what we call a fishing expedition, just to see what turns up. One of the tests will give you ethnicity percentages. I'll explain more about that later. And the Y chromosome test and the mitochondrial DNA test will give you insight into your deep ancestry. One important point, the test does not replace your traditional documentary research. And unlike the paper records, it doesn't give you the names of your ancestors. And it doesn't identify, in most, apart from one test, it doesn't actually identify the precise relationships. You normally get a range of time within which the common ancestor might have lived or a predicted relationship range. And for the same reason you don't actually get precise dates for any of the matches that you get. And just one word of warning before we go any further. I would like to point this out. If you are afraid of skeletons, stay out of closet. This applies just as much to doing family history research as it does to DNA testing. Sometimes when people do start digging, they do find information they had not expected to find. And there are people who take a DNA test and they do sometimes find out that they are not quite who they thought they were. So be prepared. It does happen. We do have people who have tested and they found that they are not their father's son. So if that's something you don't want to find out about, don't test. And the other point that always comes up is whether or not you can exhum bodies and test your ancestors. I'm afraid that is something that's normally very, very difficult to do. It can sometimes be done at great expense, but you normally have to get permission from church authorities to do that. So if you want testing done, it's very important to get the testing done on the people while they are still alive. And one of the nice things about the family tree DNA company is that once you've done your test, the samples are stored for 25 years. You can actually nominate a beneficiary and then you can have a family member who then carries on and looks after the sample. And so you get passed on from one generation to the next. And the testing has been going on for about 14 years. There are a large number of people in the database who have now passed away. But there are relatives who are still managing those kits and going on to the further test as the science evolves. So the first test we're going to look at in more detail is the Y chromosome DNA test. And this is the test which follows the paternal line, the surname line. The main difference between males and females, if you're a female, you have two X chromosomes. If you're a male, you have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. And the feature about the Y chromosome is it's passed on from a father to his son. So it only males can take this test. And if you're a female, it's a question of finding the right male relative with a surname to take the test on your behalf. The Y chromosome tests are normally collated within surname projects. There are now over 8,000 surname projects at Family Tree DNA and a huge number of variants spelling. So all the common names are included in the database. If you've got a very unusual name, it may not necessarily be included. But what you get out of the test really depends on the size of the project and who else is in the database. And the more people with your surname in the database, the more likely you are to get something out of it. The test works because when the Y chromosome is passed on from a father to his son, it's normally passed on unchanged. But just every now and then you get little errors occurring. It's like photocopying a piece of paper and you get tiny little blemishes. And these errors, we call them mutations. And the test is looking at the particular parts of the Y chromosome where these mutations are most likely to occur. The technical name, they're called short tandem repeats. But you don't need to know all the technicalities. It's really for each marker that is tested, you get a number. And then it's really just like a number matching game. Your numbers all go into this big database and your numbers are matched with all the other men who've taken the test. And what you're hoping is that if you're lucky and that your numbers match other people with the same surname as you. When you get your result, it is just a string of numbers like this. And it doesn't actually mean very much having a knowing that you've got lots of markers and these are your values for each marker. So the whole value of the test is actually in the comparison process. And essentially the more of these numbers that match up, the more markers that you match on, the closer the relationship. And if you have too many mismatching markers, then you know that you do not share a common ancestor in what we call a genealogical time frame. So this is what a set of DNA results looks like. And these are actually some sample results from my own cruise projects. And if you look at the first two columns there, you can see every single number is identical. And so we know that those two men, they share the same surname, they share a recent common ancestor. The next two lines, you can see the results that they're all pretty much the same, but we've got two numbers here that are slightly different. But that's still within the accepted range. So those four men all match each other. And what we've actually got here is that we've identified two different branches. And it turned out that these two men with the number 27, they were all in Canada. And the two men with the number 28, they'd all stayed behind in England in Devon. So sometimes if you're lucky, you can actually have markers that identify particular branches within a family tree. And this is another one with the same surname. In this case, you can see virtually every single number is different. So although he's from the same part of Devon as the other men, we know that they do not share a common ancestor. There are various testing levels. When the tests first came, were first introduced back in the year 2000, you could only test 12 markers. We now go up to 37 markers. That's the standard entry level test now. And that's on sale at the show at a special price of 102 euros. It would normally cost you, it would be about 133 euros normally. You can order extra markers. You can always upgrade at a later date. If you are looking for, if you're trying to find a match for an illegitimate line, I would always recommend testing at least 67 markers because it's much more complicated interpreting matches with different surnames when you don't have the surname as a clue and you don't have the genealogical records. And sometimes it is necessary to go up to 111 markers. There are, it is a problem with some Irish surnames in particular, where there seems to be a very prolific genetic signature. And it's one of these signatures is where they thought originally it was related to Nile of the nine hostages. And some of these people have extraordinarily large numbers of matches. And if you are one of these, if you do have to happen to have a match with what they call the Nile signature, sometimes it is necessary to order lots of extra markers. The Foundry Tree DNA give you a list of matches. These are the thresholds that they use. You get, you see your matches at the various different testing levels. And as you can see, the more markers you get, the more relaxed the criteria become. And the number of matches that people get, it can vary considerably. Some people can take a test and they have a very rare DNA type and they don't have any matches at all in the database. And other people can take a test and they can have huge numbers of matches. And it's one of these things you just don't know until you've tested whereabouts you're going to fall on the spectrum. Most people will have a few matches at least at 12 markers. But it's really only the matches at 37 markers and higher that are significant when you're looking for surname matches. I should say by the way that I have, these, the PDFs of my presentation will be available on the Genetic Genealogy Island website and I've got all the links on there will be clickable links so you don't have to worry too much about taking notes. Now when you interpret the matches, it's done on probabilities. You can look at the number of mismatching markers but you also get a tool that you can use called the tip tool and this will allow you to generate these little reports and I just put up two sample reports here showing the probability that two people share a common ancestor within a given number of generations. So it's then a question of going back to the paper records and interpreting these results in the light of the paper records. When you get your test results you get a page on the family tree DNA website where you can actually look at your results and you can see all your matches. This is actually my dad's page on the website and you can see that he's done the Y DNA test the mitochondria DNA test and you can just click on your matches and all the other buttons there and you can see all the results. These are my dad's matches. His surname is Cruz, C-R-U-W-Y-S and I run the Cruz project and we now tested quite a few men with the surname Cruz and he now matches three other people with the surname and also a couple of people with a different surname. It is actually quite common to have matches with different surnames because obviously surnames do not always correlate with the Y chromosome there's always been illegitimises and some of the matches with other surnames will actually predate the formation of surnames. And if you're lucky the people you match will have also provided the information about their most distant ancestor as we've got on there. This is what a DNA project website looks like this is my Cruz project and when we organise the results we place them in what we call genetic families. So I've got quite a large number of groups now and each group and the people in that group they match each other genetically and it's regardless of the surname and if you look at my first group there you can see I've actually got a variety of different spellings we've got some people have got CRUSC CRUISC, CRWS and we also have an interloper here with the surname Rainy and it is actually quite common that this sort of thing happens in this case we call it a non paternity event a very strange word or sometimes Emily coined the word not the parent expected and in this particular case we went up to 67 markers and it was two men in America and there was a Mr Rainy and there was a Mr Cruz and they were both living in the same county in America so we think there have been some sort of event in the past that hadn't been revealed to the family and the Mr Rainy was actually quite happy because he'd been in his Rainy project and there were lots of Rainys tested and he hadn't had any matches at all and then suddenly my Mr Cruz came along and tested and he had a match after waiting all that time. Now this is just an example of how you can use the testing and the sort of answers that it can reveal sometimes in the absence of any paper trail. I had a researcher come to me back in I think it was about 2006 and the story that he told me was that his ancestor had been shipwrecked off the coast of South Africa and apparently he'd swum to shore and he was the sole survivor of this shipwreck and there is a place just off Hawxton in South Africa that's actually called Harris Bay in honour of this ancestor Harry Cruz. When he started to research his family tree the South African records were pretty poor. The only clue that he had was from a death notice and on this death notice it gave Henry's name he died at a young age he was only 36 years old and the only clue about his origins was that he was born somewhere in Great Britain so that gave us a choice of three different countries numerous different counties and we were trying to look for a Henry Cruz born around about 1826 somewhere in Great Britain that predates all the civil registration records he employed a researcher at great expense trying to track down his ancestry trying to look at all the Henry Cruises the baptisms for Henry Cruises that he could find and he was getting absolutely nowhere so he was one of the first people who joined my DNA project and he sat in the project for about a year he didn't get any matches and he didn't match anyone else in the database at all and then I started to get some other cruises tested and then finally we got some matches and it turned out that he matched four other men with a surname Cruz, C-R-U-S-E and in all these cases we'd got very very detailed family trees and we'd managed to trace the tree right back to a small village called Ogburn St. George in Wiltshire so from these very close matches we knew that this Henry Cruz was somehow related to this Wiltshire tree and we're still trying to actually find the connection it's a question of going again back to the paper trail we think it went somewhere through London but now we know precisely where to look rather than having the whole of Great Britain to search for the answers the other part of the Y chromosome test is the deep ancestry aspect and with your test result you are told your haplogroup and your haplogroup is your branch on the human Y DNA tree and each of the branches they all have their own geographical origins so you will find haplogroup A and haplogroup B are mostly found in Africa haplogroup C is the one that's found in Aboriginals in Australia there's a particular branch of haplogroup Q that's only found in Native Americans and the haplogroups we can actually put them all together in a massive tree and if you want this when you know which haplogroup you are most Irish men will be this R1B haplogroup but the tree actually you can trace your tree all the way back up here all the way back up here and we get to this point right at the top which is the most recent common ancestor of all males on the planet every single person who's taken a Y DNA test will fit somewhere on this tree and everyone goes back to that recent common ancestor who we call Y chromosomal Adam and he is thought to have lived something like 338,000 years ago so with DNA you can actually trace your tree back 338,000 years in Ireland these are the main haplogroups that you'll find R1B is the predominant one but you will also see some of these other haplogroups as well if you are interested in the deep ancestry aspect you can actually go on and order further testing and you can refine the haplogroup there are numerous different subclades within R1B if you come to some of the later talks today about the subclades of R1B just a word of warning when you get the haplogroup results a lot of the newspapers get carried away with stories about haplogroup origins and there's one British company unfortunately which is at the root of a lot of this misleading press coverage where they've issued stories claiming that one billion men descend from Vikings and someone else was descended from Spartacus treat any of these stories that you read in the press about haplogroups with a very large pinch of salt we cannot draw these conclusions from DNA testing and they're just publicity stunts to try and drum up sales for this particular testing company and similarly if people try and tell you that you can determine your genetic homeland a thousand years ago from a DNA test it is not that simple there's a lot more to it so just be very careful when you see any of these claims that are being made one of the reasons why we can't determine origins going back a thousand years or more ago is because the haplogroup the distribution of haplogroups is actually very very different when you go back in time and we are getting much more insight now through ancient DNA testing and at the moment haplogroup R1B in Europe is the predominant haplogroup when in the ancient DNA samples they're now finding that we've got two different haplogroups that predominate haplogroup G and haplogroup I but there are very very few ancient DNA samples available and there are not even any samples that have been taken from the British Isles at the moment Richard III is probably going to be the first ancient DNA sample published from the British Isles and there's another study in Cambridge that should be publishing soon where they've got some Anglo-Saxon DNA but this is a very nice map that you can look at, it's actually an interactive map and you can actually see all the samples that have been collected at UCL we have got a website set up where some of these misleading stories where we're trying to dispel them so if you want to take a look at that and we've also got a nice page on there which explains how the tests work. One very nice project I just wanted to mention quickly is the impact of diasporas project which is run at the University of Leicester and they're testing, they're doing Y chromosome DNA testing and mitochondrial DNA testing on men in Britain and they are trying to look at these deep, I lost my sound here. Let me give you this one instead I'll change the batteries. Oh is the battery gone? I think so. Okay. So the impact of diasporas project is a five year project and there's still some way through but I think we will get some very interesting insights from this project because they're trying to go back to the Ice Age and look at the people who actually settled in the British Isles and they are also doing some work with Irish surnames as well. So I now want to move on to mitochondrial DNA which is the test that follows the maternal line and mitochondrial DNA is passed on by a mother to both her male and her female children so it doesn't matter whether you're a male or female anyone can take this test and this is the test that traces the direct maternal line so that's your mother, your mother's mother, your mother's mother and so on back in time. This one is not so useful as a genealogical tool and one of the problems of course is that surnames are passed on in the male line so of course the surname changes every generation so you haven't got the surname as a clue if you want to find people to test for comparison purposes but also it's got quite a low mutation rate so what that means is when you have a match with someone it will confirm that you're related but the time within which you're related could actually be very very distant. But this test is useful for deep ancestry purposes and whenever you read stories in the papers where people manage to get DNA from ancient samples it's nearly always mitochondrial DNA. The reason being that within every cell in our body there are thousands of mitochondria whereas there's only one of all the different chromosomes so there's a much greater chance that mitochondrial DNA will survive. This is just a chart just to remind you of the inheritance part so it is just this one specific line on your family tree people think of the maternal line as all the ancestors on your mother's line but it's not, it's just this one very very specific line. There are two different types of mitochondrial DNA test. When the test was first introduced you could only get a very very basic test. It's now possible to have your whole mitochondrial genome sequenced so there are actually this is the genome here there are actually 16,000 or more base pairs you can have the whole thing sequenced now and that would cost you 50 euros. When the tests were first introduced you could only actually have this little bit tested here. You can have that test done and that's just 54 euros but if you're going to have this done I think it's now worth doing the full sequence. The results when you get them they are just a jumble of letters and numbers like this but again what the actual letters and numbers mean doesn't matter because these just go into a database and it's a matchmaking process and what you're hoping is that you will match someone who's got exactly the same markers as you. This is a page showing your mitochondrial DNA matches these are actually my husband's matches and again you get the names and the email addresses of the people that you match and if you're lucky they will have provided information about your most distant known ancestor and then it's a question of contacting the matches and trying to work out how you're related. In my husband's case his tree goes back to Cambridgeshire and he had exact matches with two people in America and their ancestry went back to Germany so this is obviously a very very distant relationship but it could be that it could be a sort of Anglo-Saxon thing where they came over from Germany and settled in England but it's obviously a very very distant relationship and you do find this with mitochondrial DNA matches and the ancestors will sometimes live in different countries. This is just a chart from the family tree DNA website which shows you the closeness of matches so if you just do the basic test which is now called the MTDNA plus test the common ancestor there's a 50% chance the common ancestor could have lived within about the last 700 years but what that also means is that 50% of those matches will be without outside 700 years so for family history purposes that's not particularly helpful apart from eliminating someone from your inquiries. When you do the full sequence test 95% of matches are supposedly within about the last 550 years so that's still when you've got the surname changing every generation it's still quite difficult to do the tree there and that also means that 5% are outside that range and sometimes those very distant matches can actually go back a long way. With mitochondrial DNA you also get haplogroups as you do with YDNA and just to confuse us the haplogroups don't have any correspondence with the YDNA haplogroups they all have again have this letter and number system and it's the same thing where you can actually trace the entire tree back through the different haplogroups to what we call mitochondrial Eve who's the common ancestor of all living people on the planet and she's thought to have lived something like 2000 years ago. If you do a mitochondrial DNA test it's always a good idea to join one of the haplogroup projects. There are projects with all the different mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and you will get extra help from the project administrators who run those projects. The mitochondrial DNA haplogroups like the YDNA ones they all have their own distribution patterns you've got particular ones like the L haplogroups are all found in Africa you've got the Native Americans they are A, B, C, D and some of them are haplogroup X haplogroup M is one that's found in India that does sometimes turn up in British people and when that happens it's usually someone who's had an ancestor who was out in British India and sometimes people can take a DNA test and they will actually get the clue of a DNA test that they've had an ancestor who was out in British India and that may even be the only record that they have of that relationship but within Europe you've got the main ones in the pink section there the H, U, X and so on These are the haplogroups you're most likely to find in Ireland a haplogroup H is the one that predominates that's surrounded but it's getting on for 40% it's about that same frequency throughout Europe and there are some other haplogroups that are not quite so common haplogroup T tends to be fairly common in Ireland Brian Sykes who wrote a book about the seven daughters of Eve he gave all the haplogroups names and you may sometimes see those names used Richard III is probably the best known example of a practical application for mitochondrial DNA testing and I'm sure everyone saw all the press releases when his body was dug up and it was announced that they had a match it was actually a phenomenal feat of genealogical research a historian by the name of John Ashton Hill had actually spent many many years researching Richard III's family tree actually for another project Richard III is obviously being a male he cannot pass on mitochondrial DNA to the next generation although there weren't any children anyway to leave the descendants so he had to look at his siblings John Ashton Hill was able to trace the family tree from Anne of York right down through the generations to the present day and a lady called Joy Ibsen had her DNA tested even before Richard III was discovered for another project and when Richard III went ahead with the Richard III testing Joy had actually passed away to provide the sample for comparison purposes and if you saw the press conference it was announced at the conference that there was a match but the scientific paper has not yet been published for that I understand that it's actually in press at the moment and it should be out very very shortly so you'll be able to see the methodology and they have, I understand, also been able to extract Y DNA we know from the testing on Joy Ibsen that she was happily group J1C2C so we assume that is going to be Richard III's happily group so if you end up taking a DNA test and you find out you're a J1C2C then you might be related to Richard III I should say with the happily groups if you do the full sequence test you will get this detailed happily group assignment like J1C2C if you only do the basic test the $59 test you will just be told you're happily group J so having all those extra letters and numbers gives you better geographical resolution the last test I want to look at is the autosomal DNA test and this is the test that covers all your ancestors just one quick biology lesson autosomal DNA we talk about autosomal DNA this covers the 22 pairs of autosomes males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome these are the sex chromosomes two X's the feature about the Y chromosome is it's passed on unchanged whereas the autosomes when they're passed on to the next generation they get shuffled up so the DNA that you inherit is actually a patchwork of the DNA from all your different ancestors and you can see that on the picture there so this test can be taken either by males or by females and it's called the family finder test and it puts you into a matching database and gives you matches with genetic cousins and who share a common ancestor within about the last 5 or 6 generations it works best within that time frame you do get more distant matches but it's much more difficult trying to make the connection this test has come down in price considerably when I bought my test I paid about 3 times the price that you're paying now and it's on sale at the show for just 70 euros and the test works on the principle that the larger the portion of DNA that you share in common with your matches then the closer the relationship I've just put up a few statistics here just to show you how the DNA is diluted with each generation so you get normally you share 50% of your DNA with your siblings you get 50% of your DNA from your father 50% from your mother about 25% from each of your grandparents but the important point here is that these are averages and there are actually considerable variations within those averages so you may get 27% from one grandparent and 23% from another grandparent and that effect is magnified as you go down through the generations and then once you get out to the 5th and 6th cousin level you only have a very very tiny percentage of DNA that is shared in common so with this test if you've got a particular scenario that you want to investigate it works best within the very very close generations if you were to test 2 second cousins they 99% of the time they would show up as a match I don't think we've ever heard of any second cousins who do not show up as a match so if you test 2 people who should be second cousins and they don't match then there's obviously something funny going on when you get out to the 3rd cousin level 90% of third cousins will show up as a match but that still leaves 10% or 1 in 10 who will not show up as a match so in this case even if you test a third cousin you don't match each other it does not rule out that you are still connected and in that case you'd have to test other cousins once you get out to the 4th cousin level only about 50% of 4th cousins will show up as matches and with 5th cousins it's even fewer but when you take the test because we have so many of these 4th and 5th and distant cousins most of your matches will actually be at that 5th to distant cousin level although it only covers quite recent generations I'm sure everyone else is struggling with their family tree as I am this is my family tree going back for 6th generations and I've been doing my research now for about 12 years and I've tried to research all my different family lines and some lines I can take back a long long way my surname line I can take way back into the 1200s and my mum's tree I've got a lot of ancestors all settled in the same part of Barks and I can actually take those trees way back into the 1600s but then I've also got big gaps in my tree and the autosomal DNA will give me matches that will help me to break through those brick walls and I've also got a great grandfather born in London who seems to have landed from the moon because there's just no records of his birth whatsoever and I'm desperately hoping that one day DNA is going to give me the answer to that now the complication with autosomal DNA is that the inheritance process is it's random and you do not get DNA from all your ancestors when you go back at this level so this is that's my grandparents my great grandparents my great grandparents you will inherit DNA from all of your great great grandparents so supposedly only about 0.4% of people will not actually get DNA from all those great grandparents but once you go to this level your genetic ancestors actually start dropping off your tree so you may this is just a simulation you may not necessarily have so it could be that you've got some of these ancestors and you just will not have their DNA it just will not have survived in you and then that effect is magnified the further back in time you go so with this test it's always very important to test the oldest generation so I've tested myself but I've also tested my parents and that takes me back to this generation here so I by testing them I can actually fill in those blanks here and I will be able to fill in some of those blanks further back in my tree if you haven't got parents available for testing if you test say a sibling your sibling will have they will pick up matches that you don't have so you can actually fill in some of the gaps that way so with this test it really helps to test as many of your relatives as possible and that also helps to work out which line the matches occur on this is what the match what you get when you get your matches this is actually my dad's family finder match page and it shows me there that off the pages is daughter fortunately and this is one of the matches that he got quite recently which I was very pleased about when you get the matches you get a list of if people have provided a list of ancestral surnames if you've got a list in common they will be highlighted in bold like this and this one leaped out of the page at me my dad's surname is Cruz and we saw this name here Cruz PEI that's Prince Edward Island in Canada and I'd already done YDNA testing on a cruise in Canada who had matched my my dad's Y chromosome signature but the YDNA we can't get the precise dates from the YDNA we know they share a common ancestor but it could go and it could be way way back in time I've managed to highlight a particular point in the family tree where I thought this person had gone from Devon to Prince Edward Island we'd in the family tree records we'd found a William George Cruz who disappeared from the English records back in 1841 the records in Canada were not very helpful I found a marriage certificate in Canada where William Cruz had married of Sarah Burroughs but unlike the certificates the English certificates there was no parents' name on the certificate so I've got no paper records that will actually prove that the William Cruz that we've got in Canada is related to the cruises from Devon but the DNA test results came in and my dad was shown to be a I think it was second to fourth cousin and when we looked at the paper trail the presumed paper trail it was a third cousin once removed which was just the relationship you would have expected if the presumed tree was correct you can see on here how the DNA how you lose DNA with each generation because that's my dad's results these segments here are the DNA that's the segments of DNA he shares with Mr Kitson this is me and I've only got one of those segments left out of those three segments so with each generation you lose segments of DNA but the nice thing about this is that now I can actually identify I've got this particular segment that came from a particular pair of ancestors and you can actually go on and do that in much greater detail the more matches you get this is a lovely story if you just take a DNA test on spec just to see what you might find sometimes we are seeing more and more success stories in the family of the three DNA database this lady Michelle Rooney when she was a baby she was thrown out, literally thrown out with a rubbish she was put in a sack outside a block of flats in London and it was about 36 hours later someone went to put their own rubbish out and heard the sound of a baby crying and they rescued the baby and then she was eventually adopted so for 45 years she did not know anything about her birth parents she took a test with family tree DNA and she had a match with a first cousin oh sorry she had a match with a first cousin and the first cousin was able to look at her family tree and she identified someone she thought might have been Michelle's father and so this person took a test and when his test came through it was a father-son relationship so she was able to meet her father the sad thing was that he could not remember who the mother was it was obviously been a bit of a gore in his day and he just had no memory of who her mother was so she's still trying to find her mother but we are seeing more and more stories like this in America in particularly they're getting successes virtually every week now not everyone wants to go public sometimes it's just a quiet thing that they like to keep to themselves not mysteries like this in your family tree this is the way to get the answers the other part of this test will give you ethnicity percentages these are all rather vague at the moment these tests are useful for determining differences at the continental levels so it will tell you if you're looking for African ancestry or Asian ancestry it will pick that out but it's very difficult at the moment to determine differences between populations in Europe so these are my results are all pretty vague all my answers are from the British Isles but I've got these percentages here that match with Finland and Eastern Europe but I don't set too much store by any of those but the results should improve over time as more reference populations become available Daniel Crouch will be talking here about the people of the British Isles project which I believe is tomorrow and they've done some wonderful research where they've collected samples from it's about 5,000 people and all their grandparents were born in the same English county and when they started to plot the results on a map they were able to detect unique clusters within the British Isles so they found for example you can see on here they've got a unique cluster here in Cornwall they've got another cluster in Devon this bit is what's known as Little England in Pembrokeshire that formed a unique cluster North Wales was the unique cluster and up in Orkney they had differences between the North Island and the South Island so eventually results like this will be incorporated into the database and we should get much more accurate ethnicity estimations and the good thing is once you've taken the test your results can be updated as more populations become available and you can get more accurate data every couple of years or so there is a big project in Ireland called the Irish DNA Atlas Project this is still ongoing at the moment and they are collecting samples from people in Ireland with 8 great grandparents all born within the same region which is a very strict criteria I think they're having trouble finding people to join the project but if you happen to have 8 great grandparents born in a rural region then do get in touch with them I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear from you they understand they're collaborating with the people of the British Isles Project so we should eventually get some very interesting results from both of those projects a quick word about Jedmatch if you upload this this is a third party website so when you get your autosomal DNA results you can actually use this website and you can do a functional analysis and this is particularly useful if you're interested in these ethnicity percentages because there's all sorts of different tools that you can use for that this is just the sample menu here they've got a whole load of different admixture percentages and you can compare your DNA with ancient populations and all sorts of other things like that and you can do eye colour predictions and also it gives you a way of comparing your results with other testing companies that mostly applies to Americans because Ancestry DNA their test is only available in America and there's another company 23andMe who mainly sell their tests in America so that's also a useful way of comparing your results with other people so here's one sample this is what's called the Eurogene's admixture proportion I don't tend to get very excited about this type of thing but some people do and they set great store percentages but you can go there's a whole range of these that you can run through and get all sorts of different percentages and you can read into them whatever you like just a few words about Family Tree DNA who are the main testing company that we use they have the largest Y chromosome DNA database now over half a million Y chromosome DNA results they have the largest mitochondrial DNA database in the world with over getting on for 200,000 mitochondrial DNA results they host all the surname projects when you take a test it's always very useful to join a project so make sure you join a surname project there are haplogroup projects and there are quite a few geographical projects as well as an Ireland DNA project I run a project for Devon there are projects for different English counties there are also sub projects within Ireland if you wanted to order extra tests if you're interested in deep ancestry you can also do that through Family Tree DNA they even do what's called a big Y test now where you can sequence as much of a huge chunk of your Y chromosome which is the most advanced type of test available and Family Tree DNA also have a collaboration with the Geneographic project and this is a deep ancestry project but they're testing people from all over the world they've now tested people from over 140 different countries and those people can transfer their results to Family Tree DNA and it's a really nice international database and you get people from Germany, France, the Middle East loads of Russians and Poles and all sorts of people from all over the world who are joining the database and if you are lucky if your name is on the list of free Y DNA tests this is a page on the ISOG wiki all the surnames on that list you will find on the Family Tree DNA stand downstairs if your surname is on that list if you're a male you will qualify for a free DNA test at this show so go and have a look at the stand and see if your name is on that list there if you're looking for resources ISOG is the main resource that's the International Society of Genetic Genealogy and we have a wiki where you'll find all sorts of useful information we have a very active Facebook group there's a new main list and also you'll find a lot of the blogs lots of information on the blogs so do go and have a look at those and just one last thing I have got two books that I've written one is the one on DNA and social networking and also the surnames handbook I have got a few copies with me but only a handful but Emily Alicino who's done another book on genetic genealogy hers is actually much more up to date than mine and she's got lots of copies of her book so you can get those at the back of the room after this talk so just to sum up we've looked at the three different types of tests the Y-DNA test is the one that follows the surname line, the father's father's father's line mitochondrial DNA is the one that follows the mother's line the mother's mother's mother's line autosomal DNA is the one that gives you matches with all your genetic cousins on all your family lines but only within about the last five or six generations the cost of these tests has plummeted in the last few years so if you were worried about the cost it's no longer a reason for not testing and the more people who test the more success stories we will actually get it's very important to test people while you still have the chance you can't suddenly go back in 10 years time and say I wish I'd got Uncle Albert or Auntie Joan tested when you are taking tests it's best used if you've got a particular hypothesis you want to explore but it can just be fun going on what we call a phishing ship just to see what you might find and when you take a test you just never know what you might catch thank you very much Debbie the microphone is back on now we don't have time for questions unfortunately because we're right up on the mark so can I just say thanks very much for sharing your expertise and wisdom with us Debbie has got books here so if anyone's interested in buying one of her books then please contact Debbie I'll be here for the next two days so you can always catch me probably somewhere on the family tree if you want any questions answered okay great thanks Debbie