 Okay, good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Genetic Genealogy Ireland Dublin 2018. This is our second event of the year. We had our first event up in Belfast in February. So it's great to see so many people in the room. It's also great to have us live on Facebook. So this is being streamed across the world and we're also recording this for the Genetic Genealogy Ireland YouTube channel. This presentation and most of the presentations will go up online sometime in November over the course of several weeks. So it is great to be back here again. This session, all of these lectures are sponsored by Family Tree DNA. So I'd like to give a very big thank you to Family Tree DNA for sponsoring us for the last six years to give these DNA lectures and broadcast them around the world. And it's organized by members of ISOC. So volunteers from ISOC like myself, like Debbie, ISOC is the International Society of Genetic Genealogy and you are all welcome to join. So please go downstairs and check that out. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker of the session which is Debbie Kennett. And Debbie is going to talk to us about DNA for beginners. Now Debbie is a seasoned genetic genealogy. She has been around since the beginning because she was very interested in her own particular project which was the Crews DNA project. She has a blog called Crews News and that is a very very popular blog. She also has an author of several books and she's also an honorary clinical research associate with University College London. So it gives me a great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague Debbie Kennett. Very much Maurice. Oh, and I switched on. There you go. Okay, we're ready to go. Thank you very much Maurice for that warm introduction. Now I have put my PDF version of my slides up on Dropbox so feel free to take a photograph of that. And I don't mind if you want to take photographs of my slides throughout the talk and share them on Twitter or anywhere else you want to do so. So long as you don't use them again for your own purposes. Okay, so first of all, how do people in the room have actually had their DNA tested? Wow, that's so... So I'm doing a talk for beginners. I must rather run to the assumption that everyone here wouldn't have tested so I'm actually really surprised and encouraged by that response. So one of the things I always say to people before they test is to think about what you want to learn from a DNA test. So this is me as a little baby. I was born in Gloucestershire, so I have a British passport so you may think I'm 100% British. My mum was born in Deppford in London but my dad, he was born in Cork in Ireland. So does that mean I'm now 50% British, 50% Irish? If you go back through the generations, my dad, although he was born in Ireland, his parents are both born in England and most of my ancestry is actually from the UK and as I go further back in time, I've got Ireland and Scotland creeping into my family tree there. And if we go back even further, the number of our ancestors starts to double every generation and once you get back to like 16 generations, you have thousands and thousands of ancestors. Once you go back a thousand years, we all have a billion ancestors, more ancestors than humans who have ever existed. So what that means is all of our pedigrees are these complicated trees like this of lots of interconnecting ancestors. So if you want to take a DNA test, the question is which ancestor do you want to find out about and they're a particular test that will tell you about a specific ancestor or do you want to find out about your whole family tree and how do we represent that complexity. And so the companies will all promise that the DNA test will tell you who you are and where you really come from, but it's not quite as simple as that. Our DNA test is very useful. It's a very useful tool, but it is just one tool that we use and I think you need to think of it as a genealogical record and like any other type of record that we use, you don't use DNA on its own. You use it in combination with other records. There are some rare occasions when a DNA test can actually be a life changing, can initiate a life changing discovery process but for most people it's not going to upturn your life. And with DNA it relies that the way we get the value out of the DNA test is not just by testing ourselves but by who else is in the database and who we match in the database and how we match those people. So the power of DNA testing lies in this combination of DNA with genealogical records and this is what we call genetic genealogy. And the power of genetic genealogy is increasing now that we have some really massive databases. So the first test became available in the year 2000 and in those days there were only two different types of tests, YDNA and mitochondrial DNA. I started in 2007 and a lot of people have never even heard of DNA testing for genealogy in those days and then in 2009 we had the first autosomal DNA test but it's really from about well 2013-2014 onwards as the price of a test started to come down and we started to see companies advertising on TV and it really started to take off. So more people tested in 2017 than in all the previous years combined and that number is going to keep growing and growing and we're eventually going to have millions and millions hundreds of millions of people throughout the world who have tested. So we have three different types of test. The first test is a Y chromosome DNA test. Only males have a Y chromosome so only males can take this test and this test follows this all male surname line and I'm going to be covering all three tests as we go through the the talk. The second test is the mitochondrial DNA test which tells you about your all female line. Both males and females have mitochondrial DNA so anyone can take this test but it only tells you about your female ancestors on that one specific line. And the third test is the autosomal DNA test which gives you matches with genetic cousins who are related to you on all of your different ancestral lines but it's best used for making connections within about the last five or six generations. So just a little bit of very basic biology in every cell in our body we have we have that there's a nucleus of the cell and within that cell are these structures called chromosomes which are the genetic codes sometimes called the blueprint of life and chromosomes come in pairs we have 23 pairs of chromosomes 22 from our mother 22 from our sorry 23 from mother 23 from our father and 22 of those are known as the autosomes which are like a patchwork of DNA from all four of your grandparents. And then the final pair are the sex chromosomes so if you're a male you will have a Y chromosome and a from your father an X chromosome from your mother if you're a female you'll have two X chromosomes. Though if you take a DNA test you always need to be prepared for the unexpected and this was the case from the early days onwards but we are seeing this happening more and more once you start to get databases of millions of people the one in a million surprise is going to happen to a fair number of people. So one of the things that could potentially happen is you may find close relations that you didn't know existed and we see this happen quite a lot. This particular case a lady called Kathy took a DNA test and she discovered a half-brother that she knew nothing about she was in Ireland he was in London he was adopted given up for adoption at the age of six months knew nothing about his family and as a result of that DNA test he found not just Kathy but he found that she was one of nine siblings so he went from having no family at all to having nine siblings and the other thing that you may find is that you are not who you thought you were so this is an absolutely incredible story of a lady called Alice Plabuk who took a DNA test just out of curiosity in the early days and she was expecting the results to come back that she was like 50% Jewish but it came back that she was 50% sorry she was expecting 50% Irish and she came back 50% Jewish and so she went on this long process of doing a huge amount of detective work she tested all her siblings they came back and they matched her school siblings and it eventually transpired that her father wasn't Irish at all and he was the one where the discrepancy had occurred so they tested various other people tested and eventually they transpired that her father when he was born he was in hospital and there were two babies born on the same day in this same hospital and the parents had actually taken home the wrong babies so the Jewish parents had taken home the Irish baby the Irish parents had taken home the Jewish baby and this came to light all these years later and there are actually four cases now we know of where hospital mix-ups have occurred so that's four in 12 million but there may be a few more in the future and I've got the links in the the pds here so both of those stories are well worth reading especially the the hospital mix-up story there okay so I'm just going to look at the the each individual test in turn so Y chromosome DNA testing is this all male surname line and now for Y chromosome testing family tree DNA the only company that we can use for genealogy purposes they're the only company who have a matching database where you can match with other people who share your surname and to get the most out of this test you really need to be in a surname project and if you're the first person who's tested with your surname you're not really going to get much out of it but there are a lot of very active Irish projects now and I think most Irish surnames will be represented in the project so you'll have a good chance of matching someone so family tree DNA also do mitochondrial DNA testing and autosomal DNA testing so it's the only company where you can actually take a test and have all three results in in one account use for genealogy purposes so there are a whole range of surname projects I just put up the the page here of the McCarthy surname project which is one of the really nicely run ones and the the project admins they're all volunteers but they will help you to understand your results and they will put you in groups on the project results page and if there isn't a project for your surname there are also lots of geographical projects so there's a very large Ireland DNA project and there's a whole range of regional projects that you can join for Ireland and when you get your results this is what the results page looks like so I don't have a Y chromosome but I've tested my father so this is what his page looks like and the important part on this page is the the matches and we'll click through and this is what my dad's match page looks like now so his surname is cruise cru w y s and you can see he matches other people with the surname cruise but you where's the pointer okay okay so you can see on his matches he matches other people with his surname cruise but he also matches other people with different surnames and that is quite common because obviously not all surnames originated at the same time and some of these matches actually go back quite a long way as well but we've now got the confirmation from DNA testing that this surname cruise goes back a very very very long way and then the results we put them in a surname project like this and then we group them into what we call genetic families so all the people in this group they're all related to each other this new colour bar here that means all these people are related to each other and another group here and it goes on down the page so I think for most certainly for most Irish people when you take a test you're likely to find someone who who matches you but it's not necessarily the case for everyone and the other thing that we can get out of a Y chromosome test is some information about our deep ancestry and this is through what we call a haplogroup so you will get a haplogroup and that tells you which branch of the human Y DNA tree belong to and each of those branches they have origins in different parts of the world so for Irish people the majority haplogroup is haplogroup R1B which is right down the bottom of the chart here in the corner and the other one you may find is haplogroup I and sometimes you get old haplogroups showing up so haplogroup A is normally found in Africa but it did show up in some men in York sure a few years ago haplogroup H is normally found in India but if you were say a Romani Gypsy something like 50 I think it's like 25 percent of Romani Gypsies turn out to be haplogroup H because they had an ancient origin in India so you'll be hearing much more about haplogroups and SNIT testing there's all sorts of advanced tests that you can do if you're interested in exploring this side of your family history and but just to give you an example of how Y DNA testing works I just wanted to share with you a story from my own surname project and I many years ago I had somebody approaching me about his ancestor Henry Cruz who was shipwrecked off the coast of South Africa and the according to family legend Henry was the only person who survived the shipwreck and that was because he was able to swim and he managed to swim to shore and then he lived in South Africa and the bay in South Africa is actually named Harris Bay in his honor and when we started to do the family history research the records in South Africa are actually very difficult to obtain and we got a death notice which told us that Henry was aged 36 years when he died his mother's name was Mary and he was born in Great Britain so okay is that what gives narrows down the choice to three countries and we've got a birthday to 1826 approximately but it's before all the censuses so he was actually one of the first people to join my surname project and when he first tested he had no matches at all but eventually the matches did start to come in and now this is what his match page looks like and you can see that all the people on his match list they all have most distant known ancestors from three of them from a little village in Wiltshire and the other one from a little village in Berkshire and in fact I've been able to link that family tree to this one so now even though we cannot make the paper trail link we know that Henry Cruz must somehow fit into this family tree we think it the connection is somewhere through London which is always a challenge to do but I think eventually we will be able to work out what that connection is so sometimes DNA testing will be very very powerful in actually providing answers when you have a brick wall just simply through the through the matches that you get the second test I wanted to discuss is the mitochondrial DNA test which follows this all female line it's passed on from a mother to all of her children both male and female but it's only the females who pass it on to the next generation so this works in the same way when you take a test at family tree DNA you will get a list of matches like this and my matches are all quite distant and I've got people who share ancestry from they've got Spain, Romania but I don't have any exact matches and it's really only the exact matches that we're interested in with this test. Now family tree DNA do give us a chart where they estimate that if you have an exact match your common ancestor lived about 550 years ago although the the charts there we've not been able, Henry Millard has not just tried to reproduce those figures and has not been able to and we think that it may actually be much much more distant than that and with mitochondrial DNA you also get a haplogroup and these haplogroups they let us in numbers don't correspond with the y DNA ones but they also have their own geographical distribution so if you ended up being a haplogroup A, B or C or D or probably have Native American ancestry which I think is probably unlikely for someone from Ireland if you were haplogroup L you've probably be from Africa and if you were haplogroup M you're probably from India and then in Europe we have a whole range of haplogroups and it's haplogroup H that is the most common about 40% of people in Europe are haplogroup H and sometimes the haplogroup itself can be unexpected and informative so a few weeks ago I was at the families in British India Society and they are actually using mitochondrial DNA testing because a lot of them have an ancestor a female ancestor from India and they will end up coming out with an Indian haplogroup haplogroup M and often that is the only evidence the only record that they have of that Indian ancestor and the most famous application of mitochondrial DNA testing for genealogy purposes is Richard the Third and this is a good example of how it's not just DNA testing on its own that provides the answers it's all the records combined together so it was amazing feat of genealogical research they had to trace the line of descent so Richard the Third his mitochondrial DNA is not passed on to anyone so they had to go to his sister and then trace the line of descent from his sister Anne of York right down to the present generation from female to female to female I think it was the 13 generations on one side to get to Michael Ibsen and 15 generations on the other side to get to Wendy Daldig and then they compared the results of Michael Ibsen and Wendy Daldig with the remains and they one of them had an exact match I believe and the other one was just a one mismatch so they had confirmation from the mitochondrial DNA but the Y DNA did not of the people that they tested did not match the remains so they then did a statistical analysis looking at all the evidence and so these things like the scoliosis and when you look at that there was only a very small number of people who would have had scoliosis at the time the mitochondrial DNA evidence was in favor of the identification the Y DNA evidence was not in favor but when you added it all together they came up with an assessment it was 99.99 percent certain that the remains were that of Richard the Third but it wasn't mitochondrial DNA that provided the answer it was everything combined together okay so the third test is the autosomal DNA test which will give you matches with genetic cousins on all of your ancestral lines and there are now five different companies that will offer this test so 23 and me were actually the first company to offer this test but their test is really more focused on medical issues and Family Tree were the second company to to launch this test and then Ancestry DNA joined the market my heritage and living DNA and if you test at 23 and me or Ancestry they will not accept transfers but if you test when if you test with those companies you can do a free transfer to Family Tree DNA my heritage and also living DNA at the moment although that is starting to change at my heritage they they're going to be ending the free transfers in February and at Family Tree DNA although you get the matches free you have to pay $19 to get the so-called ethnicity report and I think living DNA it's only through Find My Pass at the moment they're doing those free transfers and I think you will have to pay at some point for the extra features so what the the tests are divided into two parts you get with the test you get the cousin matches which I'll cover later but you also get what's officially called a biogeographical ancestry analysis the companies call them ethnicity estimates although really ethnicity is is not genetic it's really how you define your your own identity and you'll find that the results will vary from company to company and also from each company will update the results so I was recently updated at Ancestry DNA I was originally 21% Great Britain according to their results and then overnight I went from being 21% Great Britain to 94% Great Britain and I dropped from being I was 20% Irish on the old version of the test and now it's dropped to 6% and Ancestry also have what they call regions so they will also assign you to particular communities and this is using a different type of methodology and it's using information from the matches and these are actually accurate within about the last 200 years so if they put you in a community for say Cork or Kerry then it's pretty certain that you have got some ancestors from those places but you'll note that there's a big gap and there's nothing for Leinster so that's it's because these communities are really more of a reflection of the sort of history of the of the regions and the more that people sort of marry within their communities the more these regions show up in the results and here I am at 23 and me I am 59.7% British and Irish here and I've got some French and German which I didn't have at Ancestry some Scandinavian and broadly Northwest European and it's different again at my heritage here I've got a nice 12% Italian which no one else seems to detect and you will find this is common if you test with all the different companies you will get these different results at Family Tree DNA I am now 100% British my husband who has all British Ancestry 15% British but if you look at the broader picture all the results give this broader picture of Northwest European Ancestry so the big details are all accurate it's the finer details that don't seem to be quite so reliable but I think that's also a problem it's you just cannot capture the complexity of someone's ancestry with a simple DNA test living DNA is a new British company that's set up which is they specialize in at the moment they've got access to data from the people of the British Isles project so if you have mostly British ancestry they will be able to give you a very fine regional breakdown and it doesn't work so well for Ireland at the moment but they are trying to get reference panels for Ireland to give that same breakdown for Ireland so for me those results do correspond pretty well with my known ancestry but they tend to produce if you if you're safe from America and have very distant ancestry they tend to provide very over-precise results and people with say German ancestry get end up having results for English counters which isn't really relevant to them so the the other part of the test is the matches and this is really the the most useful and the most important part of the the test and so the matching works so first of all if I just explain how DNA is inherited so we each get 50 percent of our DNA from our parents from each parent and we get on average 25 percent of our DNA from our grandparents and the DNA that we get from our parent is this sort of patchwork of the DNA of all four of our grandparents but the there's a wide variation around those averages so you may only get 19 percent of your DNA from one grandma and you may get 31 percent of your DNA from your grandpa on that side of your family and then as you go further back in time we've got an average 12 and a half percent from the previous generation 6.25 percent from the previous generation but you will find that you get more DNA from some ancestors than you get from others and we can then use the the the information about the amount of DNA shared to make predictions about relationships so if you share 100 percent of your DNA with someone you're either matching yourself and you've tested yourself and you've forgotten about it which some people do and or you've got an identical twin and if you share 50 percent of your DNA then it has to be a parent-child relationship or a full sibling relationship and there are ways of distinguishing between them but once you start to get further out if you share 25 percent of your DNA then there are a number of different possible explanations for that relationship so again it's if you don't have the genealogical information you have to go back to the genealogy records to try and work out what the relationship is and it actually becomes starts to become much more difficult once you get out beyond the sort of third fourth cousin level because of this random variation in the way that DNA is inherited so here is a representation of my family tree and the thing that we find is that once you go beyond about six or seven five six or seven generations you have some ancestors in your family tree who are your genealogical ancestors but who are not your genetic ancestors so you may have a match with someone and you may have a legitimate genealogical relationship with them but it won't just won't show up in your match list so with autism or DNA testing it's really important to make sure first of all you test the oldest generation and get them tested while you have the chance to do so because by testing myself and I've tested my parents that takes me back one more generation and fills in some of those blanks there and if you can't test yourself you can test say siblings or aunts and uncles and so if you test a sibling your sibling will have a completely different representation of your ancestor's tree than you and may pick up matches that you don't have so you can just take a test if you want to just to see what it throws up in the in the database but if you want to take it some a lot of people want to take a test because they've got a particular hypothesis that they want to explore so if you wanted to test your second cousin to make sure that you really are second cousins we know from test results that 99% of second cousins should show up as matches we've not yet had a case of a second cousin who does not show up as a match where the reason is that they were not genealogically related but once you get out to the third cousin level you will find some third cousins who will just will not appear in your match list purely because of the random way that DNA is inherited but what you would expect is if you test lots of people from the same family so if you were to test yourself and all your siblings it may be that you don't match that third cousin but you would expect at least some of those other siblings to match and at the fourth cousin level it's you know ancestry claims 71% that's a sort of theoretical amount and the other companies say around about 50% and that around about 50% of a fourth cousin should match and then it as you get more as the relationship has become more distant the chances of actually sharing a match with a specific ancestor start to drop off quite rapidly but the other side of the coin is that we all have huge numbers of 6, 7th, 8th, 10th and 20th cousins so when you take one of these DNA tests you'll find that the vast majority of your matches are these very very distant matches so this is what my match list looks like at ancestry DNA so I've tested both my parents and luckily there were no surprises there and I've got a couple of second cousins who've tested there now and at family tree at ancestry you can click through and you can see the trees there and I've got something like 20,000 matches there but most of them are very distant matches and it's really only the closest matches you want to worry about and it's the same thing at family tree DNA again they give you the I've tested by parents there and they give you a prediction of the relationship and they have a nice feature where they list the surname and if the surname is shared then it's highlighted in bold and what you will find is each company has a different database so it's especially if you're on a what we call the fishing trip it's important to be in all the different databases because and family tree DNA have been doing this for longer so they've got people who've say taken wine chromosome tests back in the early days who are now deceased but those results can still be used and people can upgrade those results but those people can't be tested elsewhere because the sample isn't available so I've got a third cousin who just tested recently at family tree DNA who is not at ancestry and I've got people who tested at ancestry who aren't at family tree DNA and the other thing that we get at family tree DNA in fact just yesterday I had to change my slides yet again because they've launched a new chromosome browser so this is a feature you get at family tree DNA that you don't get at ancestry DNA and this is the representation of my son and his two grandparents and it can be interesting just to do this process of mapping chromosomes just to help you understand how the inheritance process works and you can see him I sermon his two grandparents how he's inherited in certain chromosome 12 there he's actually got the entire ret entire chromosome 18 from his father and this one he's got almost entire chromosome 13 from his sorry from his his grandmother and just a tiny little bit from his grandfather but you can see how the chromosomes slot together so you can see how it's like a little teeth here that they they all join together so his so my so that actually is also representation of the chromosome that I've got that he's inherited from me and then what you can do is if you then match someone else actually the colors don't shirt very well on here but this is a match with a third cousin twice removed and can you see that little green it's supposed to be more green on my slides but that is where my son matches this particular person and because we know that he's inherited that red bit of his chromosome from his grandfather we know that that bit of his chromosome has been inherited from his his paternal grandfather so you'll hear Catherine Borges talking this afternoon about Johnny painters tool DNA painter where you can actually do all this painting with your chromosomes and actually work out which bits of your DNA came from which of your ancestors and eventually we'll be able to even reconstruct our ancestors from our from their genomes if we get enough people tested so that particular green segment there I am now able to say that that little bit of DNA in me and in my son came from that particular couple Moses Ball and Mary Ann Butler I don't know from which one of the two came from now just to end I just wanted to give you some examples of some stories which illustrate the power of genetic genealogy so this is a story about Kevin Battle who was adopted as a child and he always thought he was an orphan and he went he tried to go back to Ireland to find out about his heritage went to the nuns the sacred hearts home where he was born and the nuns said they have you know they turned him away at the door but he eventually tested and had a match with a first cousin in Wales and from the first cousin match in Wales he was able to be to find that he had a five half siblings in the database four of whom was still living sadly his mother had died a few years ago but he went back to Wales and was able to be reunited with to to meet his half siblings for the first time and sadly his mother had been looking for him for her entire life and when Kevin went Kevin's birth certificate was falsified had the wrong name on and it turned out it was a really sad story because his mother desperately wanted to keep him and she'd run away from the from the mother and baby home and the nuns went after about a year later and stole the baby back again and he was then sold to America to a young couple who'd had a who'd lost their baby and they for a donation of £1,000 to the to the catholic church and so there are stories like this being uncovered all the time so it's anyone who's adopted they now have a really good chart and don't they don't have information about their birth family they have a really good chance of finding the answers through DNA testing through matches and there are some in some cases there are people who when they take a DNA test they open up their match list and immediately they will find in their match list a parent or a sibling and the other thing that DNA testing is now being used for is for solving crimes and you'll be hearing later on today from Barbara Ray-Venter who single-handedly has transformed how crimes are are solved in in America by using a website called GEDmatch so this is a volunteer website you can so you have to it's not using any of the commercial databases so people voluntarily upload their results to GEDmatch and then what Barbara was doing she was using the matches to identify cousins and then reconstructing family trees to identify the name of the suspect and she'll go into all the details of that later on today and foundlings are the other also are people who are finding answers through DNA testing and previously if you were a family you would have no information at all whatsoever about your family. Julia Bell has done a lot of DNA detective work on finding cases and there was a story published earlier this year about a lady called Anthea Ring and she was left on the South Downs in South of England under a blackery bush and essentially left to die but fortunately a family were walking past they heard the baby cry and they rescued the baby and she was then eventually put up for adoption so when DNA testing started Anthea just took a test really just to find out about her ethnicity and she came out with quite high percentages of Irish DNA and Julia offered to help her with her search and eventually she started to get some matches coming in that provided some answers so she had a it was a closest cousin match and they were eventually able to narrow down the mother and Julia Ball so how many birth certificates and eventually was able to connect all the names together and then they were trying to work out who the father was and it was narrowed down to four brothers and the surname was Coyne this is I think it's Galway and Cantimeo and off the four brothers two tested and they were ruled out because they didn't share the right amount of DNA to be the half sibling relationship sorry the parent-child relationship and then they there were two others where they had no descendants but in one case they had a letter and they were able to extract they sent off some for that for testing in pioneering a new technique and they were able to extract some DNA from the letter and that was sent off for testing and that came back as a match with one of the brothers so now even though the father is not alive Julia knows the name of her father she knows the name of her mother and all through the power of DNA testing and large matching databases so I said Julia I meant to say Anthea so I just put up a list of resources there that some will help you and you can get all those from the PDF and that's the end so if you have any questions if you wanted to take a photo of that but it's best to get the PDF if you want to great thanks very much Debbie when do you have time for your own family tree research I have that much time recently I think that's a big problem whether for anybody who gets heavily involved in DNA testing and then become speakers like Debbie is that it takes a long time you don't have time to do your own family research so quite a few people here in the room have actually done a DNA test what who has got a question for Debbie or a general question for the yeah come over here you mentioned in connection with why DNA that to get matches it's best to register with a surname project yeah is that the only way because it presupposes that the surname is the correct trace of origin no no there are lots of geographical projects so even if there's no surname project you can sign up with the island DNA project or you can just test in the in the database so you have to take the test first and then you can join projects when you've tested or you can if you order online you if you order through a DNA project you get a reduced price when you order the test but if if there's not a surname project for you then just join the geographical project and you can actually join multiple projects so if you if your surname is one surname you can join that project and then if it turns out that's not your surname from 200 years ago you can join the other project as well but it depends each project that has its own entry criteria so you have to comply with what the the the project says so some projects are more lacks about entry requirements than others and if it's a different surname sometimes people set a much higher standard so I would normally only allow people in my project with a different surname if they had a match of at least 67 markers and of course there's not just geographic projects but there's haplogroup projects as well oh yes I didn't mention those yes once you know your haplogroup you can join your haplogroup project and then a lot of people do actually get very involved in the in the in the spit testing for haplogroups and there's advanced tests like the big y test that you can now take which is really coming right down to the the present day but that's much more expensive it's um something like the 500 is it 500 dollars now we've got a special show price what's a special show price there's a hundred dollars off the right okay so you normally would be 650 if you haven't done any testing previously now it's 550 but if you've already done y 111 it's down to 350 so that's quite a yeah discount yeah so I think that is what's going in the future where everyone will be doing the big y testing but it's not at a price yet that is affordable for most people but in the long run that is is the way to go and of course the advantage of being in a haplogroup project is that the haplogroup project administrators have a much greater overview of your particular branch of the tree of mankind than you will have just as a serename project administrator so it's very very important especially if you're running a serename project that you encourage all your project members to join the relevant haplogroup projects and there probably will be several of them so that you get a better overview of what your dna means and who it hooks into so for example in my farrell dna project it was the haplogroup project administrator that pointed out that my farrells were related to a bunch of harrells so how are the harrells and the farrells related to each other it's because when they went over to america the irish for farrell was oh for all but if you put a h in front of us it becomes oh harrell and that's how the farrells became the harrells and there's a very very clear genetic link between them of course the harrells in america when we told them they were irish they were very surprised we've got another question down here thank you greetings from canada i have a question when you showed the various slides with the match of the various companies yeah and there's quite a range how does one believe which one when it says suddenly you showed i think romanian a few other areas and then you're more british how does that how do you believe which one well i think you have i think donna rutherford had a very very good answer without and it was the correct one is the one that best fits your preconceived idea dollars at the front so i have to give her acknowledgement for that it's to do with the way that the companies work the those populations out so each company compiles a list of reference populations so what they're doing is they're not really telling you you're 50 irish they're telling you that we've got 30 populations in our database and we put them into clusters and you match this cluster with that 50 percent of your dna you match this cluster with 20 percent of your dna and if your particular ancestry is not represented then you'll get another population instead so i saw some results for someone from garner all his grandparents were from garner and he came out at something like 85 percent nigerian and when i looked at the reference populations there were no reference populations for garner and there was a reference population for nigeria so they were just matching him to the nearest population so it's a clue at the at the continental level the results are reliable and if you've got something like jewish ancestry jewish people are what we call endogamous so they marry within their own community so they when you cluster populations jewish people share as a cluster so if you get results that show you are 50 jewish then that means you've got a jewish father or jewish mother or either that or two jewish grandparents but at the once you start getting down to the lower levels it becomes much more difficult to distinguish people and it all depends on which populations are in the database and how representative they are of that population as well because our genetics is not defined by country borders and you know the population of britain is very similar to the population of cornwall and you've got all these boundaries that they're not hard boundaries it's all in in climes gentle climes so i think the high percentages certainly the continental percentages are reliable and if you get high percentages of something like irish that's generally reliable but as it drops down especially if you only get one percent it's not generally that's generally just a noise so one of my sons came out at naught point one percent native american with one of the tests despite having no access is it had a set foot in america we have another question here just in relation to the native american because of my results came back from my heritage there i was with the one point two percent native american right and of course i was flabbergasted but there are other people on my heritage who share my name and also have that same native american connection now they email them but they haven't come back to me but yesterday i was watching some program and they were saying that the in relation to the lady she's a professor and she taught she was a native american and she told herself that was being it was a huge scandal over it but this expert was saying that the native americans and in like what we consider to be native americans are skewing DNA testing they just haven't done it so if you get a native american popping up on your DNA test you're probably from the south americas somewhere like peru or somewhere like that is that true yeah and yes the reference populations they use are generally from south america um so there there's a whole scandal of native american testing you've probably seen all the things about elizabeth waran and her native american test where it's become like a sort of political hot cake um so and because of the way that it that the way that the americans are trying to sort of appropriate that culture and claim native american ancestry and it's the same in canada as well a lot of people in canada who claim that they are metty um and they've been trying to grab the land and tribal rights so you've got that whole culture behind all this so it's not surprising that the native americans don't want to test there was one report one article i came across because i started looking it up then like heaven i possibly have native american ancestry and i said one professor in cork was doing research on this because i have helped up for several people and he said to go back to our 15 house years ago when the bearing was straight to there and it had a group of people coming along a one tour north and one tour in south and that's how like at the time it wouldn't be considered native american yeah possibly it could be in your dna for as long as 15 thousand years well that show up still today yes it well it could be because it depends on which mark as they're using for you know to identify this native american because they they may only considering the american population but we europeans and native americans share common ancestry as you said like 15 thousand years ago um and so you've got no one group left one group went by east and so those markers could actually be those shared markers from all that long long time ago um but there were native americans who came over here so um i don't know if anyone's read adam rutherford's book he's actually got an ancestor who was a native american um who was you know going around touring i think it was circuses or something um but it's still the question know even if you get a tiny trace of native american is that actually from that ancestor is it just asian dna um it could be you know as you say from many many thousands of years ago another question here my uncle did the y dna test my uncle did the y dna test with ancestry some years ago and then just you were just doing that test and of course they've dropped it now yeah i have transferred those results to uh family tree dna but do you know do ancestors keep the samples um they apparently do have the samples there were rumors that they've been destroyed but they've still got them but they haven't decided what to do with them the last time i heard but apparently they're not in very good condition and people who've asked have not had any success in getting the song because it it may be worth trying to write to them but i cannot guarantee success and i'm interested then to hear about a letter being used for dna extraction is that very expensive to do um there is a new company an australian company called to the letter dna which has just started just set up doing that and the other company that was doing it is living dna who are supposed to be launching a new test later on this year but i think it's going to be something like 500 euros um to to do a test like that and it's still very experimental if you look at the two letter dna website they've got a blog and they they're running through different tests at the moment and trying to work out the methodology so it's that you can either choose to be a pioneer and send a sample off and maybe not get results or wait a few years until it's all settled down and uh there's a better chance of success um well they take it off the it's it's not the letter it's the stamp itself it's the back of the stamp the way they're trying to extract the dna but you just have to accept whatever they they do with the letter to get the dna if that's what you want doing i'm sure they will do their best to be um as least invasive as possible in fact with that particular case with the antherian case they they went with they took the envelope went inside and approached the stamp from inside the envelope scraping away the paper until they got to the gum of the stamp which they hoped had been linked by the person of interest and the dna had been preserved in the gum but it took them four attempts to actually get a reasonable reading so it's still you know highly iffy and the type of dna that you're going to get from that is likely to be mitochondrial dna if they're not necessarily autosomal dna although they did get autosomal dna in the antherian case um but there's there are thousands of mitochondria in every cell so there's a much greater chance of getting that than any other type of dna but the new techniques of next generation sequencing much better at extracting the quite small little segments of dna from the information hi i'm from Dublin and you mentioned uh the uh combination of genealogy the combination of dna and and record research um one of the frustrating things about um you're looking at matches is there are so many people who um who have put matches on on databases but they don't have a tree or a jet comp to accompany and it seems to me that um if you want to take you have to give and i just wonder whether you would agree that um that it's essential that if you if you're going to if you want to learn something from your dna that you actually also have to display what you know about your family tree well first of all a lot of those some of those people may not actually have trees that they can share if they're adopted they they won't be able to produce a tree there are because of the marked the increase in dna testing we've got a lot of people now who are testing not because they're genealogists but because they're tempted by the advertising to find out how irish they are or how um native american they are or whatever so um it's now the challenge is to convert those people who are testing into becoming genealogists um and it's really everyone's choice as to what you know what they do with their results and what genealogy research they do but even if you don't have a tree for someone there's still a lot you can do just by the name and by looking at things like the shared matches on ancestry dna the shared matches are the most powerful tool because if you should if you have a match with someone who's got no tree and you see the shared matches and some of those matches have trees you can then narrow down and work out who they are so in some of these cases you know like the golden state killer it's worked out and in a lot of adoptee cases it's worked out they don't contact the matches some of them don't have trees but it's just worked out purely on these networks of matches and the more people are who are in that network of matches the easier it becomes to identify someone and i was able to identify a second cousin recently um who just by the name um just by going from the shared matches and i knew it had to be related on my mother's side i knew it had to they had to have the surname ball or saunders and just by tracing the fan surname back again in the family tree i worked out exactly who she was great well that's all we have time for thanks debbie for your sharing your expertise please give a warm thank you the next presentation will be on the tune babies that will happen in the next five minutes and um we will see you at that point in time that's great thank you just to mention that the show guide with all of the dna lecture's schedule is available downstairs um it's on page 10 of the show guide so you'll see all the lectures there finished photographing i put it down here i have your attention