 Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to day 2 of Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2015. This is the third year we've been back for a past. This series of DNA lectures is kindly sponsored by Family Tree DNA who have a stand outside and do feel free to buy any DNA kits you have from them. Hopefully you learn a lot from this morning's lecture from Debbie who has put together this wonderful talk on DNA testing for beginners. Now Debbie is an honorary clinical associate. Honorary research associate. Honorary research associate at University College London. She is the author of many books on genealogy including the surnames handbook and DNA and social networking. Some of which you can get at a discounted price if you buy the DNA test. So we're doing everything. We're bending over backwards forwards and sideways. We're trying to convince you to get yourself tested. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Debbie to you. I work with her very very closely over in the UK and she's a great colleague and a great presenter. So please give a warm welcome to Debbie Kent. Thank you Boris for those kind words. I feel a bit embarrassed now that we've moved up to expectations. Okay now I have actually made a PDF of this presentation available on my Dropbox account. So if you want to make a note of that you can download the PDF file and it's got all of the links on clickable links so that you can click through and look at all the websites and go back and refer to it. There is actually a lot of information that I'm hoping to share with you and the more you go over it the more you should be able to understand it. Okay everyone written that down who wants to? Okay. Right so I'm going to be explaining to you this morning about the three different tests that we can take to use for our family history research. The first test we're going to be looking at is the Y chromosome DNA test or the Y DNA test and this is the test that follows the direct male line which is normally the path of surnames and that can be used for recent genealogy but also to explore your D-palates history going back for 200,000 years or more. The second test that we're going to be looking at is the mitochondrial DNA test and this explores the direct female line your mother, her mother and so on back in time. This again can also be used for genealogy within the last five or six generations but also to explore your very deep ancestry going back about 200,000 years. And the third test which is the newest of the three tests is the autosomal DNA test and this test will give you matches with genetic cousins on all of your different family lines but the limitation of this test is actually limitation of the DNA it's best used for matching cousins within about the last five or six generations so within about the last 200 years or so it can take you back further than that but it becomes much more difficult interpreting the results. Before we look at the different tests I just want to explain about a few of the basic principles of DNA testing that apply to all the tests. First of all I want you to think of DNA not as something different and scary it's just another type of record that you use in your DNA research. We don't make conclusions based purely on the DNA we use it in combination with all the other records before we draw any conclusions. And the other basic principle of a DNA test you only get value out of a DNA test if you're in a matching database there are all sorts of companies that will sell you a test but unless they've got a database you will get nothing out of it and the success all depends on who else is in the database sometimes people are lucky when they first test and they get a match that would help them other times they have to wait but once you're in the database you just keep getting notified of matches in the future and the other important caveat is that to make use of these tests we have to make the DNA test has to be done on living people we can't suddenly turn around in ten years time when a database is ten times the size and say I wish I'd had a great uncle Ernie, his DNA tested he's probably been cremated anyway but even if you do want to go around digging up cemeteries you have to get permission and it's very very difficult and very very costly so it's like oral history if you don't get it done now if you don't get that interview done with your auntie Nelly or whoever you've lost that chance if you don't do it when you can but it can sometimes be a long term investment but family tree DNA you can nominate a beneficiary for your account and this is something I would advise everyone to do so if you get your parents tested make sure you get them to nominate you as a beneficiary so that's something that's very very important to do now how can we use DNA testing for our genealogy research first of all we can just use it to verify existing family trees and we can use it to test hypotheses about particular relationships so if you've got two people with the same surname you can't trace their lines back any further if you do a DNA test it will tell you whether or not those two men share a common ancestor and if you've got say two people and you're not sure if they share the same great-grandfather or great-grandmother you can do an autosomal DNA test and check if they share the expected amount of DNA in common it can be very useful for helping with brick walls if you've got an illegitimacy in your line or if you're adopted and this is something that really relies on the power of the databases as the databases get larger and larger the chances of people overcoming those brick walls get much bigger sometimes it can just give you a geographical focus for your research so if your ancestors went off wandering I've got lots of people in London trying to look at research in London is impossible and they usually come from somewhere else if you then match with someone who's from a particular part of Ireland or the UK then you've actually got that focus for your research and then rather than focusing on a whole country or a whole continent you can just hone in on the particular region so what you're really hoping for is that the people you match have done all your family history research for you and they save you all the trouble it doesn't always work out that way but sometimes you can strike lucky and find the right people within a surname project we can actually look at surnames how many different lineages there are for a particular surname and we can look at different variant spellings and the origin and evolution of a surname a lot of us in the Guild of One Names studies are actually running DNA projects and we're using DNA in that way just to look at the surnames that we're researching and it can just be fun to take a DNA test just to see what it throws up and to see who you match and it is just something rather nice about having that genetic relationship with someone even if you can't even work out how you're related and one important caveat if you don't want to know the answer don't ask the question sometimes people don't get the answers that they were expecting DNA does sometimes show up surprises as does family history research sometimes show up surprises and once that knowledge is there you can't undo it we have had one case of babies who were mixed up in hospital that was thrown up by DNA testing we do sometimes have men testing who find out they're not their father's son but those cases are very rare and in fact normally when these things do come to light it's the sort of closure people just like to have that knowledge about their identity and lots and lots of adoptees who are just desperate to have that knowledge and DNA doesn't provide the way of giving you that okay so the first test we're going to look at in more detail is the Y chromosome DNA test and the Y chromosome is one of the sex chromosomes so if you're a female you have two X chromosomes and if you're a male you have an X chromosome that you get from your mother and you have a Y chromosome that you get from your father so of course the important point about this is that only men can take this test but there are lots and lots of females involved in DNA testing so when we're usually the ones who are out there recruiting people and running the surname projects and trying to get all our men to swap for us and have their DNA tests you'll notice all the volunteers on the family tree DNA staff they're all females all desperate to get people into their projects now when you do a Y chromosome DNA test it's important to do it in a surname project and there are now over 8,400 different surname projects and there are I don't know how many different variants there are so all the common surnames are represented in a surname project and a lot of very rare surnames you may, if you do have a particularly rare surname then there may not be a project for you but there are also lots of geographical projects there's a very large island DNA project that you can join and there are various regional projects where island does well so do make sure you join a project and then you get the help from the volunteer project administrator who will also help to interpret your results for you so the test works on the principle that the Y chromosome when it's passed on from the father to son is passed on virtually unchanged but just every now and then in that copying process you get little mutations that occur like little typos, if you're copying a piece of paper every now and then you get little blemishes and then once those mutations occur they get passed on to the next generation so the DNA test looks at particular markers on the Y chromosome where these mutations are known to occur and then it's really like a number matching game each marker you get a number and then all your numbers go into a big database and then they're all compared and then that's how the matching process works so it's a bit like a sort of lottery except the advantage of this is that you don't have to keep paying every week to be in the lottery just stay in there and then the more people that test the more people you like to get matches with so this is what a DNA test result would look like at the bottom here it's just a string of numbers and you might well think, what is that going to tell me and the answer is absolutely nothing on its own the whole value of the test is actually in the comparison process so normally the more markers that match the closer the relationship and then if you have too many mismatching markers then we say that there's no relationship in a genealogical time frame or in the time when surnames came into being and this is just a sample from one of my projects normally we would test at a minimum of 37 markers I can't fit 37 numbers on the PowerPoint slide there but these results are five men all with the same surname and you can see the top two rows every single number is identical so they have what's called a perfect match and that confirms that those two men they share the same surname and they share a common male ancestor on the next two lines you can see that the numbers almost match it's just one number that's different so again one mismatch is okay that's within what we expect so again those men are related so all four men are related but what does sometimes happen as I've got in the microtech here when you just have one mutation that can define different branches of the tree so I've got two men I think it's in Canada who have number 28 and then two men back in England who have the number 27 on that marker so even without having any paper trail if I had another DNA result I could tell just by that marker which branch they belong to and then the bottom line you can see that there's so many different numbers there that those two men even though that man even though he's got the same surname he does not share a common ancestor with those people we do get sometimes people who are desperate to prove they've got a match we did have one person who was trying to explain his mismatch with chaos theory but I'm afraid that's a very novel idea and it just doesn't work so if the results don't match then you just have to go back and look at your paper trail records and there's going to be another explanation when you're taking a test normally the standard entry level test is a marker test and that's the one I would recommend that you start with and you can upgrade for the same, there's no extra expense if you upgrade at a later date to 67 or 111 markers it's not always necessary to do that if you are trying to explore an illegitimate line I would always recommend having at least 67 markers because when you're looking at matches and other surnames you need that extra confidence of the additional markers I won't go through all of that but you can look at the PDF afterwards just for the extra detail so when you get your results and this is what it looks like you get a personal page on the Family Tree DNA website and you've got all sorts of things that you can explore there but the most important part of the results is the page where it shows your matches and these are my dad's matches at 37 markers his surname is Cruz and you can see on there that he's got matches with other people with the same surname which was very handy so at least we know that he's from the right line and also he's got matches with other surnames now it is quite common to find matches with other surnames especially when you get the matches when you see where it says genetic distance that shows the number of mismatching markers so when it's genetic distance of one that's only one mismatching marker when it's a genetic distance of four that's four mismatching markers and when you get out to that level sometimes those matches they can predate the formation of surnames and it is quite common especially with Scottish and Irish names you do actually tend to get matches with a number of different surnames that's more to do with the surname history and you've got clans and sets and things so the surnames are much more fluid the results I put them on a project website these are the results for my cruise project and each colour band represents a different genetic family so all the people in that first blue group they all have matching DNA results and you may just be able to see they've all got slightly different variant spellings and they're from all over the place they've got one line from Ireland I've got one from Cornwall some from Devon, some in America Mr Rainey in that group and this is something that does happen quite often this is what we call an NPE the Emily Yardesino has coined a very nice word for this, not the parent expected these are quite common sometimes you already know that you've got an NPE from your paper trail in this case the person didn't know he'd been sitting in the family tree DNA database didn't match anyone else from his Rainey project and then one of my project members tested and they had a perfect match and when they looked at their records this was actually in America and they were both in the same place I think it was South Carolina or somewhere and the two fams were living side by side so there were a lot of things like that that do tend to happen but quite often you do know in advance I just wanted to share a little story with you just to show the power of DNA testing sometimes in the absence of paper trail records this is I had somebody contact me before I'd even started doing DNA testing looking for help researching his ancestor Henry Cruz and according to the family stories Henry Cruz was the sole survivor of a shipwreck of the coast of South Africa and he was supposed to be the only person who could swim and he managed to swim ashore and this bay in South Africa in Hawxton is actually called Harris Bay but the problems arose when he started to look at the South African records and there was just nothing that would provide any clues about Henry's origins we had a death notice from South Africa which gave us his date of death in 1862 and his age of death aged 36 years and it told us he was born somewhere in Great Britain so we were now trying to look for someone who was born in 1826 somewhere in England somewhere in Scotland, somewhere in Wales at least that had ruled out Ireland but so he actually was one of the first people who joined my DNA project he'd spent a huge amount of money researching cruises in all sorts of different English counties trying to find a Henry Cruz for the right date and all of them were all drawing a blank and they were either died or we found them still in English records but then eventually we got the answer through DNA testing and he's got his match page and in fact he matches another one of his relatives from the same line now but you can see that all the matches three of them are from this line in Ogbourne St George in Wiltshire the other one is from Berkshire and in fact that Berkshire tree fits in with the Ogbourne St George tree so now as a result of this DNA test we know exactly which tree he belongs to and we're now just trying to make the connection unfortunately it goes through London which does rather complicate matters we've provided the focus for the research so we know where to start looking rather than having to look all over the place now I just wanted to go back to this page the other part of the test results that you get is your haplogroup and the haplogroup is the thing that tells you about your deep ancestry and that's this you can see those colours there the red and green colours there let me just go to the next page now the haplogroups they can be informative to a certain extent about your deep ancestry because the haplogroups they have their own geographical distribution patterns so if you were a haplogroup H for example you would be from India if you were a haplogroup A you would be from Africa if you were a haplogroup C4 there's a certain amount that you can learn just by knowing the haplogroup itself in Ireland about 90% of Irish men are going to be haplogroup R1B and knowing that you're haplogroup R1B on its own probably isn't that helpful but there are extra tests that you can go on and take which will help you to determine which particular sub-branch of R1B that you belong to and some of the talks later on today will be exploring that in more detail but if you are interested in exploring your deep ancestry then make sure once you know your haplogroup you join the relevant haplogroup project there are lots of haplogroup projects all run by volunteers who are experts in their particular part of the Y tree and they are very very helpful at offering advice and telling you which is the best test to take if you want to go on that deep ancestry route and just a word of warning about the haplogroups we have got a couple of British companies unfortunately who tend to get rather carried away with storytelling about haplogroups and how people are... the hairy bikers, I haven't yet seen it but last week they had some program where they were telling the hairy bikers that they were Vikings and all sorts of things the haplogroups are not associated with being Viking or being Viking or being Celtic or being a Pict but the haplogroups tell us about living people and the distribution of the haplogroups today they do not tell us about the distribution of haplogroups 1,000, 2,000 years ago so you have to be very careful drawing conclusions we've got a website set up at UCL where we debunk some of these myths from some of the dodgy companies out there if you wanted to have a look at that ok so the next test I want to look at is the mitochondrial DNA test Mitochondrial DNA is passed on by a mother to both her male and female children so everyone can take a mitochondrial DNA test and this test traces your direct maternal line so your mother, her mother and so on back in time this is probably the most least useful of the three tests one of the problems is that surnames are not passed on by a mother to her daughter so you don't have that surname clue when you're trying to recruit people to test but also it does have quite a low mutation rate so it will give you a match but the match could be a thousand years ago two thousand years ago which is not quite so helpful but until recently whenever you read stories about DNA testing in the news and ancient DNA testing it was always mitochondrial DNA but was used so things like rich the third that was mitochondrial DNA so I've just put this chart up just to show you again the line of inheritance I find people always get very confused about the mitochondrial DNA but it's just this one very specific line it's not every ancestor on your mother's side it's just that all female line of inheritance and then the males they're effectively a dead end so the male receives the mitochondrial DNA but cannot pass it on there are two different types of mitochondrial DNA tests that you can take now when the test first came out you had the low resolution test but the cost of sequencing is actually plummeted in the last few years and now I would suggest if you're going to do a mitochondrial DNA test you may as well do what's called the full sequence test so this is the mitochondrial genome and you can now sequence the whole thing every single base pair on that genome one six five six nine letters there is a test called the MTDNA plus test which just tests that little bit at the top that little blue bit called the control region which is only about ten percent but it's not really worth doing that these days and the full sequence test is on special offer at the show here today so it's cheaper than the price I've got there a couple of hands the exact price now with mitochondrial DNA again you get a matching page on the family tree DNA database and these are my matches and you can see that they give you their most distant known answers you can see that I've got matches with someone from with ancestry from Spain and someone with ancestry from Romania so you can see that those matches are actually quite distant with mitochondrial DNA what we're looking for is someone with an exact match you can see the genetic distance one and three for those I don't have anyone who matches me exactly with mitochondrial DNA but even when it is an exact match it can still be very very distant family tree DNA reckon that if you have an exact match the common ancestor might have lived about about 550 years ago 95% of the time but that still means that 5% of those matches will be outside that time frame but it can still be very useful in combination with other records and also for purposes of elimination sometimes as well and again with mitochondrial DNA we get hacker groups the letters and numbers are completely different from the Y DNA hacker groups just to make life difficult for us now in Europe we've got a number of prevalent hacker groups H is the most predominant one that's around about 40% or more throughout Europe and in Ireland as well and there are a number of other ones that are at lower frequency sometimes the hacker group on its own can provide useful clues we do have some people who take a test and discover their hacker group M and that's normally found in India and that's if you're hacker group M that's normally a legacy of an ancestor who was out in India in the time for the Empire and if you're a Native American then you have a hacker group A,B,C or D so lots of Americans are desperate to have Native American ancestry and this is one way that sometimes you can actually prove that connection and with mitochondrial DNA again there are lots of hacker group projects so do make sure you join the relevant hacker group project there's a list in the ISOG wiki I run the hacker group U4 project we've now got about 800 members in that so if anyone's hacker group U4 I'd be very pleased to see you in my project and one of the nice things about mitochondrial DNA is you can compare your results with some of the ancient DNA specimens there's a website called Upadia where they've got all the famous DNA hacker types and hacker groups so if you take a DNA test and a hacker group J1C2C then you should be able to claim Richard III as your relation he's actually got a very rare signature and there's only a very small number of men in the whole people in the whole world at the moment who actually have a match for his signature so the chance is low but you just never know now with YDNA and mitochondrial DNA the only company that I would recommend that anyone would recommend using now of the family tree DNA they've been around since the year 2000 they have the world's largest database of Y chromosome DNA results over half a million now they have over 8400 surname projects they have the world's largest database of mitochondrial DNA results they have more full mitochondrial sequence results than any of the academics so some of the family tree DNA results are sometimes you can actually contribute your results to scientific research if you want to and they are also they have a partnership with something called the Geographic Project and that now has over 700,000 participants from all over the world and those people can transfer their results to family tree DNA so what it means is it's actually a very rich international database we've got people in the database from Russia Poland Turkey all over the world so whatever your line or tracing and wherever it's from you should find people in the database from that from those countries Asia is perhaps the only continent that's badly underrepresented in all of the databases now a lot of surname projects have offers for free DNA test when make sure you have a look at the poster by the family tree DNA stand we've got a list of all the surnames offering free DNA test these are surname project administrators who've got sponsorship from their project because they want more men in their project and particularly men from Ireland because a lot of the American projects in particular they are desperate to find out where they're from in Ireland so they're very happy to pay for all of you to be tested in the hope that they're going to match you so do have a look at that list of results and the page is also up on the iso wiki so do check that regularly to see if your name is included on there final test I'm going to be looking at is the WaterSomal DNA test and this is the one that gives you matches with your genetic cousins on all of your different family lines now we actually have three different companies that offer this test 23andMe is primarily a health test and that's the main focus of that test so that's probably not the best of options for these people here today so it's normally the two companies that we would normally use FamilyTreeDN and Ancestry now if you're American you can test with all these companies and the price is exactly the same it's $99 regardless of which company but if you're Irish or if you're British it's a very different picture Ancestry and 23andMe both charge lots of money for shipping and also they charge us a lot more for the tests so when you actually add in all the factors if you want to buy a DNA test from Ancestry it would cost you 161 euros if you want to buy it from FamilyTreeDN it only costs you 97 euros so for that reason most people over here one of the things I should say about WaterSomal DNA is it helps to have lots of close relatives tested so that's another reason why we tend to use FamilyTreeDN because it's just so much cheaper why pay more when you actually can get much more from one company the databases are all very different sizes FamilyTreeDN and DNA have actually been going doing offering their AutoSomal DNA tests for about 3-4 years now AncestryDN and you just launch theirs so Ancestry on paper have a massive database with 1 million people but it is about 95% in America so if you're trying to find those connections with America then that's fine a lot of Irish people are but it's going to take time for that database to build up FamilyTreeDN have been selling their tests for 3 years they have a smaller database but it's a better database of people in the UK and in Ireland and they also have all sorts of tools that the other companies don't offer so you may not know what raw segment data is at the moment or a chromosome browser but those are tools that you all find really really useful to use which you don't get from Ancestry but if you're adopted or you've got a sort of legitimacy it's best to be in all the databases because you just never know where those matches are going to come from and if you do test with Ancestry you can transfer your results to the FamilyTreeDN database and the transfer is free but there's a small fee of $39 just to unlock the matches okay so what do we actually mean by autosomal DNA so we saw earlier we actually have 46 pairs of, we have 46 chromosomes, the chromosomes come in pairs we have one set of chromosomes from our mother and one set of chromosomes from our father and one pair of those chromosomes there, the sex chromosomes so if you're a female you get the two X's and if you're a male you get an X and a Y and the other ones are called autosomes. Now the key feature of the autosomes is that they recombine so the DNA gets shuffled up so the DNA that you get from your parent is actually like a patchwork of the DNA from all four of your great-grandparents so unlike the Y chromosome you don't have that strict inheritance pattern and then this test can be taken by both males and females and it gives you a representation of all of your ancestors on all of your family lines but it's best used for matching with cousins within about the last five or six generations about the last 200 years or so and this works on the principle of matching DNA segments. DNA is passed on in big chunks and you get big chunks of DNA from your parents and then as each generation passes those chunks of DNA start getting smaller and smaller so the larger the segment and the more segments you share in common the closer the match is and of course the difficulty is that when you've got a match with a third or fourth cousin it could be on any one of your family lines so then it's the difficulty of going back to the paper trail and seeing if you can find the connection and because of the more limited time frame with this one you really need to make sure you test the oldest living relatives first and it also is really helpful to test other close relatives to get the confirmation of the matches and also for the purposes of elimination so if you test yourself on a second cousin and you both match another person in the database and you know it's on that same line as your second cousin so this is how the inheritance process works I would recommend you have a look at the page in the Isle of Wiki and all to so more DNA statistics we get 50% of our DNA from our parents and we get roughly 25% from our four grandparents but it's not an exact amount of DNA that we get from our grandparents you may get 28% from one parent and only 22% from another and then as each generation passes the amount of DNA that you get in common is diluted and then you only have a very small amount of DNA that you share in common with the more distant relatives and the other thing about all to say more DNA is that as time progresses we actually start to lose ancestors from our genetic tree so you will have some parts of your family tree where you simply have not inherited any DNA from those ancestors so this is another reason for testing as many people as possible so if you test your sibling they may just have that DNA from the ancestors that you don't have and that's also a good reason for testing your parents if you can so I've tested my parents so that actually takes me back one further generation and so that will actually help to fill in some of those gaps there if you're trying to test a particular hypothesis about relationships these tests work best with the very close relationships so if you test two second cousins and they don't match then you need to start asking questions but for the more distant relationships the chances of matching are they start to decrease with each generation so when you get out to something like the fourth cousin level only about 50% of fourth cousins will actually show up as a match ancestry have do something called phasing which they claim which in theory should improve the confidence but because they don't provide us with the data so we can verify that the matches it's more difficult to actually know if that is working in practice it's still very early days with what to say more DNA with the interpretation of results so things keep changing and they probably will continue to change over the years one of the features though is that when you take a test you will end up with lots and lots of matches with fifth and distant cousins simply because we have so many more fifth and distant cousins so those will be most of your matches but you probably won't be able to find the connections with the very distant cousins and with all to say more DNA I'm showing you screenshots from Family Tree DNA this is, you get a page of matches in fact you get pages and pages of matches and this is what it looks like so I've tested both of my parents luckily they turned out to be correctly my parents and I tested my son fortunately and also you get the predicted relationship so here you can see I've got these other people they're predicted to be my second to fourth cousins and it goes on I've got about 500 matches and most of them are actually fifth to distant cousins and then it's a question of trying to contact your matches you get the email addresses of your matches and trying to work out how you're related to the other people I just wanted to show you the segment process this is a comparison between a grandfather and a granddaughter so the orange segments there are the bits of DNA the chunks of DNA that they share in common and you can see that it's quite a random process and they've got let's say chromosome 18 there they don't share any DNA in common at all whereas on say chromosome 14 there they share the entire chromosome so it's a very random process and then over time those blocks of DNA start to go away so once we get out to third cousins you can see they only share a few small blocks of DNA in common there this is what we call the chromosome right this is what something you get from family tree DNA that you don't get from ancestry and I just think it really helps to understand the sort of biology just having these features there now if you're lucky the people you match will have listed their surnames and I'm just going to show you one example from my own research where the autism DNA was very very helpful this is actually my my dad's matching page and one day I looked at the results and this person he had the surname Cruz in his surname system if you share the same surname it's highlighted in bold and this person was in Canada and all his ancestry was from Prince Edward Island in Canada and we had a possible link through my dad's tree from Devon where we thought somebody had emigrated and they'd gone out to Canada but this was something we'd not been able to prove through the paper trail records because this person just disappeared from the records after the 1841 census in the UK and I'd found someone in Canada who had the same surname who I thought might have been the same person but I had no way of proving it I even managed to get a marriage certificate from the archives in Charlottetown you can't see that very well but all it gave me was the name of the bride and the groom no other information, no other identifying information so we just had nothing that would connect the family in Canada with our family in England but the the autism or DNA result was able to firm that up and also we had a match with the YDNA as well but the key thing about this is the match was not with someone with the Cruz surname he actually had so the autism or DNA can pick up matches on all your different surname lines even if it's not the YDNA line that's of interest and this is what it looks like in the chromosome browser my dad on the left you can see he shares three large segments of DNA and I've tested it as well and you can see I've only got one segment of DNA so you can see how the DNA just gets dropped off each generation and we are starting to see some really nice success stories from DNA for problems that were previously insoluble this is a lovely story of Michelle Rooney she was actually a foundling and at birth she was literally thrown out with the rubbish and she was known as the dustbin baby someone came along and heard her crying and just managed to rescue her before the dustbin Laurie came along to throw out the carrier bag and she was brought up by foster parents and she took a DNA test with family tree DNA and she had a match with a first cousin and the first cousin went back to her and they were looking at the family trees and the first cousin thought that perhaps her uncle he seemed to be in the right place at the right time might have been the person who was Michelle's father so they got the she got her uncle to take a DNA test and it came back as a parent-child relationship so Michelle was able, she was actually able to go and meet her father and it was only I think it was about six months after she met him but she actually had that opportunity to meet him and they got on really really well and then as a result of the publicity her mother also came forward and this was quite recently they didn't have to take a DNA test you can tell just by looking at them that they are related but they did test as well and they came back parent-child relationship too so we're going to see more and more stories like this coming out so all those people who were in nunneries and all sorts of things and all sorts of stories now should be solved but it depends on the power of the database so the more people we get in these databases the more we will solve these mysteries and it may be even if you take a DNA test and you don't get any results out of it your results may help somebody else like that first cousin who solved Michelle's problem now the other part of the autism or DNA test results that you get are these so-called ethnicity reports think of these really as entertainment value they're okay at the continental level they can distinguish between Asian European and African DNA but they can't distinguish at the fine level between Irish DNA and British DNA or French DNA and German DNA they will try and give you percentages from different countries but they're not accurate and these results do not correlate with your genealogy so don't be surprised if the results don't match and also you get results from the different testing companies these are my results from Family Tree DNA and they think I'm 56% 57% British Isles and I've got pretty similar results from Ancestry they think I'm 56.7% British and Irish and they can be a little bit of Sardinian in there just for entertainment and Ancestry they're completely different they think I'm only 21% British and I'm 20% Irish and I have just one Irish great great great grandmother I do have one great grandfather who possibly has a little bit of Irish Ancestry that I can't trace at the moment and also the other thing that you find is lots of the Americans come out with really high percentages they've got a match with Americans and they are 85% or 90% British and there's me with my little 21% of British but these results they are improving all the time as more reference populations are added we're actually on the second version of all these ethnicity reports for all the companies at the moment and they probably will keep improving over time I just wanted to mention this website briefly this is a free website called GEDmatch and I recommend everyone uses and regardless of which company you've tested with you can upload your results to this database and they've got all sorts of tools that you can use and if you've come across someone who's tested at 23andMe and you've tested at Family Treaty in there you can put both results on this database and you can do all the comparisons they've got a chromosome prize and all sorts of fancy tools and if you want to look at all those ethnicity reports there's a very wildering range of populations that give you percentages from whatever population you fancy whether it means anything I don't know but it can still be fun to play around with and there are lots and lots of resources ISOC, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy is the major resource for genetic genealogy we have a website and a wiki there's a very active Facebook group there's all sorts of mailing lists if you want to keep up with all the advances there's also some of the blogs and I sometimes write about DNA on my own blog we've got a very nice active community lots of people who are very knowledgeable so if you join one of the mailing lists or the Facebook group and you have questions there's always going to be someone who can help with an answer on the PDF all these links will be clickable so you can just click straight through from there to get all the pages and just lastly I wanted to say because the DNA book I couldn't bring with me because it's too heavy but it is available on Kindle and I have got a few copies of my surname's handbook with me if you wanted to buy that and it's a special offer if you buy a DNA test at the same time so just to sum up we've been looking this morning at the three different types of DNA tests so the Y DNA test is the test that follows the direct father line the surname line the mitochondrial DNA test the direct maternal line and the autosomal DNA test is the one that will give you matches on all of your different family lines it's very important to test people while you still have the chance at the moment these sort of tests are best used if you've got a particular hypothesis you want to explore but it can be fun to go on what we call a phishing drip just to see what's going to throw up what the databases are going to throw up because when you take a test you just never know what you're going to catch well it's up to you you need to ask the person who's doing the test it's up to them to choose who they want say if you're testing your father you can act as his kit manager and you can then put your name on there but you have to get the agreement from the person who's doing the test yes it's up to you who you choose and you need to make sure the person you're nominating is happy to do that well it's all on the form you put the name of the person in their email address so that they can then contact that person if you don't have anyone to nominate you can also just nominate the person who runs the project that you're in that's for a family tree do you know there's a special page on your web page that has beneficiary you can put your beneficiary details there what about Ancestry and 23andMe they don't have anything like that I think it's something that people can put in their wills it's the same with all the databases that you use I think we now need to wrap the stage where you need to have instructions in your will as to what to do with your digital heritage because so much of our time is spent online it applies just as much to things like Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts and Google Plus accounts and relatives can't access Facebook accounts when someone's passed away unless they've got the password so it would be a good idea to actually put your password in the same place along with your papers so that you can leave it to your descendants questions over here and I got over a hundred and five pages of right results now I had my brother then he purchased as a gift for you know a live DNA test I think I did the 12 is that right yet got that back but it's not unfortunately he doesn't get the family finder benefit that I get this list of people as you were showing on the screen so what is your recommendation should I upgrade to another test or does he upgrade to another test you want your brother to do a family finder test as well because he will get matches he gets matches that you don't get and if he's only done 12 markers I would upgrade to 37 markers so it's an upgrade to 37 and an upgrade for him to be to the family finder yes it is yes there's an upgrade sale at the show here I think it's 15% off if you order an upgrade while you're at the show so if you've got access to his account you can order that here he does not need to take another swap because they really have his sample he won't try I had suspected two irish people in Canada were related close so I entered the DNA YDMA test that I did 67 markers for each which became very close is there an advantage now to doing some other type of YDMA test or the autism test can it be refined enough to say these are siblings versus first cousins using any of those cousins what is the possible relationship what do you think the relationship is to the brothers or first cousins you think the two men in Canada are brothers or first cousins in that case the family finder test will give you definitive answers as to whether or not they're brothers or first cousins are you talking about the ancestors or the actual two people who've tested so the two people who've tested they were both adopted these are male descendants so how many generations back so the family finder test could possibly help with that if the percentages are what is expected of those relationships but you may also get an answer eventually from YDMA with something like the big Y test although that's still quite an expensive option at the moment but perhaps we can talk about that later because that gets a bit complicated and if I have a medical test with a genetic distance of zero that means there is a common maternal and maternal ancestry somewhere it just could be a long way back yeah any other questions we have one question here I'd like to ask a hypothetical question a family of two families and ten children and two brothers and two sisters these ten children are the cousins and they get their biggest DNA test done with the DNA test the type of test that they're almost brothers and sisters do you know when they're really only double first cousins yes it will it gets much more complicated with situations like that trying to interpret the results because instead of inheriting DNA from one side they end up inheriting segments from both sides so that needs specialist interpretation what happens is you end up with bigger chunks of DNA as well they survive for longer right so if those two groups of families didn't know each other they got the test done how carefully will it show that they were an unlast ones and sisters you know what I mean brothers to each other well it depends how far back the relationship is but if it's when you've got cousins marrying you end up with the relationship predictions are out so there's been say first cousins predicted first cousins when in fact they're third cousins well you'd have to do the interpretation all you get from the company is a prediction of the relationship so it's the relationship of the two people who've tested so we would predict that they are first cousin, second cousin, third cousin or third to fifth cousins or whatever it's then up to you to look at the records and to do the interpretation look at how much DNA they shared to try and work out if it is the relationship range that's something again I would suggest you ask for specialist help in one of our ISOG groups for interpretation of the data there's a high technical question very good question as well there's a lot more of that cousins especially when you come to the small rural community how many people have ancestors who came from the small rural community okay that's it and on that note I think we could just thank Debbie for a fascinating talk it's a great question and I think that's it