 Hi, I'm Max again from wiki tree. Great to see you again. Thank you for joining us at Roots Tech great conference We're having a lot of fun. We're tired and we are working ourselves to death today we want to talk to wiki tree or in chief Chris Whitten and DNA Master extraordinaire Peter Roberts who is also one of our great wiki tree leaders about DNA and wiki tree and Kind of what where we've been Where we are and where we're going in the future with DNA on wiki tree Chris Do you want to kind of address what that your vision is for wiki tree in the future of DNA at wiki tree? Well the exciting possibility of DNA is that we could someday Actually scientifically confirm our entire tree, you know, so we have this 13 million person tree but obviously a lot of it is is not correct and The exciting possibility is to correct those errors, which we're working on every day constantly work on that That's one of wiki trees main goals is to have a healthy tree and you can't have a healthy tree without sourced information Sorry, and DNA is the ultimate source So after the genealogy is done that doesn't replace doesn't replace traditional genealogy That's what the family relationships are based on but the DNA can validate or invalidate it Beater so Where did we start when you first started with wiki tree? Where were we with with our DNA was was there any DNA even around as I recall you would get a DNA icon saying that? Somebody had taken a DNA test, but the DNA was not being associated if you don't know why chromosome test it wasn't being directly associated with the direct male line the direct paternal line and And and also with the mitochondrial DNA it wasn't being associated automatically with the direct maternal line Right, and so I suggest suggested that that could be done And so what happens now is that the the mitochondrial DNA goes up the direct maternal line as far back as it can go Then it comes down through the daughters of the daughters of the daughters Similarly with the white chromosome gups up the male line down through the sons of the sons of the sons and this is on wiki Automatically if you say that you take a DNA test you take say what kind of DNA test you took Hopefully you're also in a public database like Y search or mitosearch with autosomal DNA You need to be in Jed match you can compare between the different labs and you can do that through the facilities at wiki tree And so if I go to my great great great grandmother's profile and I've tested I'm gonna appear on her profile You will you'll it'll show that you took a mitochondrial DNA test And if you have a direct maternal line cousin who's also done a Mitochondrial test it will show that on her profile and your profile and it will show on on her profile It will show you I do actually have a Fourth-grade grandmother that I've been able to prove that my grandmother is her Great great great grandmother which which was a huge thing because there was some funky stuff going on in the family Do you think people use wiki tree a lot to help identify those? triangulated groups and autosomal or to identify those people got 37,000 people that have said that they've taken a DNA test not all of them have Uploaded all the information that they could they haven't joined the public databases or they haven't put in their haplogroups So that in that sort, but we do have some really extensive lines that have been tested There's a woman who who did a mitochondrial test and she goes back 35 generations on her direct maternal line That's crazy cool. Wow. I had no idea I mean Peter was just telling me about a paternal line back to the McGregor clan, which is 58 Generations that's the longest right now, but you know the the line still needs to be confirmed by testing another McGregor Who's a very distant male line cousin and confirming that that shared ancestor is is Indeed a sufficient white chromosome match. Well, it is the opportunities to confirm that I mean so it's it's hard for people to visualize, but that isn't just one line then on wiki tree. It's then In infinite number of lines down all those other maternal line paternal lines in that case So there are so many opportunities for people that did not know they have that Relationship if that one distant cousin takes the Y test they can theoretically then Confirm both their lines all the way back up to that first-shared ancestor that it's fascinating to be able to do that Peter we were talking over the past couple days about how you have to have a portion of your tree Public or what exactly what exactly is the privacy issue with sharing your DNA on wiki tree? The only time that the Y chromosome or the mitochondrial DNA is automatically propagated up a direct ancestral line is if The privacy level is has a public family tree, right? A lot of people have joined wiki tree And they're set as red private meaning that that no one can see their ancestral tree And so there's really little point in saying that you've done a DNA test if you are red private And so one of the things that I hope we can do for the future is to get more people that are red private and have DNA results Just to show that their ancestral tree is public and in doing that you're not making your personal profile public, right? Anyone can say that their first name is anonymous or they use an initial for their first name So they can remain private in that regard and what's more your parents can be private Yeah, so you could actually have a public family tree But your parents could have private family trees and they will just appear as private mother private father Then your grandparents will appear unless you're like me and I got my dad wonderful man that he is he tested as well So he also has a public family tree So he doesn't show up as private but the rest of his information is private so it works out really well So for the future of wiki tree and DNA, what do you see? One of the things that I see is that a lot of people now are doing next generation white chromosome testing right and they are getting Snips within a genealogical time frame. What's a snip a snip is a single nuclear nucleotide polymorphism, and it's basically a mutation on the white chromosome that is Usually unique within human history, right? And so I had a particular location on the white chromosome You have a difference where like a C changes to a G and you take that information and go into this next generation It was so you can that would be that it might be let's say your fifth great-grandfather Has that that a particular mutation it was the first one to have that particular mutation in his direct male line And now all of his descendants will also have that same sniff So it'll show up on wiki tree if they have entered that information if you enter the the snip information It will enter it will be there the thing is is that these snips are within a genealogical time frame sometimes and We need to find a way to propagate that snip back to that That earliest known ancestor without going beyond that and a genealogical time frame is is basically back to when surnames began surnames were first Associated directly with male with male lines and also when church records and other records of civil nature were being recorded I'd tell you what it's so interesting We could go on for hours talking to Peter and Chris about what's going on with wiki tree and DNA But we don't have any more time right now. Maybe another time we'll do more. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks Chris Thanks Peter. Thanks Max. Thanks, mate