RLP 61- Analyzing Your Sources in a DNA Research Project

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, Episode 61: Analyzing Your Sources in a DNA Research Project. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone, welcome to the show today. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of The Research Like a Pro Genealogy Podcast. I’m here with accredited genealogist, Diana Elder and our genetic genealogist, Robin Wirthlin. Hi everybody.

Robin Wirthlin (1m 1s):
Hi.

Diana (1m 2s):
Hi.

Nicole (1m 2s):
We have been getting ready for our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group. Diana, do you wanna talk about that?

Diana (1m 11s):
Sure. We are so excited to start teaching some of the things that we have learned and discovered about how to actually put together a real research project using DNA. And it makes me think back to two years ago when we did our very first Research Like a Pro study group. You know, I had written the blog posts and I really wanted to test my theories and see if it worked on any type of genealogist. And I was kind of nervous about that study group, but oh my word, it was so fun to see everybody just take hold and make progress and do so great, and that’s exactly what we’re hoping with our DNA study group. You know, we’ve got a lot of people signed up to do it and I’m just excited to see the same thing happen with the whole concept taking hold and people making progress with combining DNA and their traditional research.

Diana (2m 1s):
It’s kind of an exciting time. I always love starting something new and different. It’s gonna be fun

Nicole (2m 7s):
If you are thinking about joining our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group, as of now, there’s a few spots available when this is being aired we’re starting it the next day from now. So if you’re thinking of joining last minute, go ahead and do so. There’s still spots available, we’d love to have more. Well today we’re talking about Analyzing Your Sources in a DNA Research Project, so that’s why we’ve got Robin here and we’re going to be talking all about sources, information and Evidence and then we’ll talk with Diana about how she applied that to one of her projects.

Diana (2m 39s):
So before we do that, let’s do our review. This review is by Dig My Past 804 and it’s titled, “One of Top Three.” “Mother and Daughter are perfect bouncing comments off each other and always a terrific topic. I listen to podcasts at night to fall asleep by, but this one is so entertaining and educational that I have to, to turn it off after two episodes or I would be up all night listening.” I love that. “Of my top three, cannot choose which is best, the guise, the mother-daughter, or the extreme. Only comment for this show, whomever does your meta tags needs to add more search friendly terms as if you look up Genealogy Podcasts, Research Like a Pro does not come up.

Nicole (3m 22s):
Oh my goodness, I have been trying to fix that. I don’t know how. So if anybody out there listening knows how to do good meta tags for our podcast, let me know. There is no category in Apple podcast for genealogy, so it’s kind of tricky. But I do have it as one of our tags. Our tags are like genealogy and family history and the usual tags. Who knows? Maybe it’s just Apple Podcasts, the way that they have their search work. It doesn’t seem to favor the tags that I’ve put in. Who knows? Maybe there’s just too many. Alright, well let’s get started in today’s episode, kind of a review from the last time we talked about A DNA Research Like a Pro at DNA project.

Nicole (4m 5s):
In episode 57 we spoke about how to look at your family tree and choose an ancestor or ancestral couple to research using DNA evidence. So if you want to kind of follow along with the whole process of researching Like a Pro DNA, go back to 57 and listen to that one first. And then when you come to this one, you can learn about the next step. So first you create a research objective and then you start combining all the information about your ancestor and the question that will further your research and analyze that evidence and the sources and the information. So let’s ask Robin kind of how to do this and what she recommends for reviewing all your sources information and Evidence.

Robin Wirthlin (4m 49s):
Thanks Nicole. Well, sources play such a vital role in genealogical research and we all know that the quality and the quantity of those sources matter. Elizabeth Shone Mills, who is a really renowned genealogical expert, says that sources give us information from which we select evidence for analysis. A sound conclusion may be considered proof and we want to be able to have really sound conclusions. And DNA is such an amazing new tool in genealogy because you can make some really good conclusions and it can be a confirming piece of evidence for the relationships that you are documenting.

Nicole (5m 38s):
Yes, that is exciting. In the past we’ve just had to hope that what we’ve found is accurate and that we won’t someday later find a piece of evidence that overturns our conclusions, right? But now we can really go ahead and confirm a lot of those relationships. And of course DNA evidence does overturn previous conclusions as well. It’s just another piece to help us come to better conclusions. I like that.

Robin Wirthlin (5m 58s):
I like it, too. And I think something important to keep in mind is that if you learn that DNA is showing that you’re not related to someone that you thought that you were related to, that does not discount the richness of the relationship that may have been in that family because the person who raises a child is their parent and loves them and is so important. This is finding the biological origins of that family line.

Nicole (6m 28s):
That’s such a good caveat because I think it is sometimes very earth shattering to find out that your parent is not your parent. I was just talking to someone last week at Education Week who found out that his wife’s parents were the adoptive parents and that her biological parents were different, and it was hard, you know, it’s just a shocking discovery. But it does come down to you have two now, you have your biological parents to learn more about and you still love and honor your adoptive parents. I think it just takes some time to adjust, right?

Robin Wirthlin (7m 2s):
It does. It’s emotional. I found some previously unknown information in my family and sometimes you have to take a step back emotionally and adjust to the concept and consider out added value, an added life experience and move ahead with the new knowledge in positive ways.

Nicole (7m 22s):
Well if we take, you know what we’re talking about, DNA evidence and we apply it to the Research Like a Pro process, then we’re at the step right now where you analyze what you already know. So in Research Like a Pro, you dig out all of your papers and locate the sources on the FamilySearch tree or whatever online trees you might be looking at, and you just gather up everything that’s already known about them. You kind of are doing a review of the literature, what has been written about this person, you know, what has already been found about them on on trees and in your own papers. So when you’ve gathered all of these sources together, a thorough analysis of everything found in there can help you see what you need to do next.

Nicole (8m 2s):
It’s kind of like your starting point for the research project. What do I already know? What’s already been found? What am I going to do next? So how do we do that with our DNA evidence, Robin?

Robin Wirthlin (8m 15s):
Well, after you’ve tested your DNA, you have this additional source. It fits right along with the other sources that you’ve gathered sometimes in getting down to the nuts and bolts of defining DNA and how it fits in. We just need to review how that goes. So basically you’re a source in the form of the DNA that can be used as evidence to either support or not support a family relationship. You have to use DNA in combination with genealogical records and known family relationships and then it’s used to give proof of those relationships. So the first thing that we need to do as we analyze the sources and the information they hold and the evidence that that information provides are look at the types of sources.

Robin Wirthlin (9m 5s):
So we know that there’s original derivative and authored narratives in the category of sources. So a person who takes a commercial DNA test is an original source, that’s the highest quality of sources.

Nicole (9m 22s):
That’s so interesting that a person is the source because that is, you know, a pretty unique source that we’re using. Typically a source we talk about as a book or a collection of papers with DNA evidence, it’s pretty different. It’s a person and the actual DNA that’s within their cells of their body.

Robin Wirthlin (9m 42s):
Right. It is interesting. So then sources give types of information. It can be primary information, which is firsthand information or secondary information, something that’s taken from another source or undetermined information. We don’t know, like in a newspaper article, we don’t exactly know where that information came from. It came from somewhere, but we have to label it as undetermined because we can’t identify the author of the source. But human original sources give their primary information in that form of DNA test results. So if you look at the raw data of your DNA, it looks like a string of letters, A-G-C and T, which stand for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine.

Robin Wirthlin (10m 30s):
You can’t really make much sense of just that string of letters. When that string of letters is compared to the strings of letters from other people, then the DNA companies will tell you what is the same, what do you share in common with other people. Then the result is they give you a list of the people who share varying amounts of DNA with you. So that’s your DNA match list and we talk a lot about the DNA match list through the blog and through the process of using DNA and genealogy because that’s the data that we are gonna be examining and using in conjunction with our genealogical records.

Nicole (11m 13s):
Wow, that was a lot of great information. I bet a lot of people maybe weren’t aware that the raw test results is just a string of the letters A, T, C and G. You know, my dad, we were talking with him last week at Education Week about that and it’s kind of surprising to think about that. That’s all it is that your DNA is just a list of all of these nucleotides and what order they appear in and most of them are in the same order as everyone else I think, aren’t they? And there’s many different points of comparison where they typically are different and that’s where they’re lined up and compared with other people. And we can see, you know, really close relatives will have a lot of those points of comparison matching up and really distant relatives will only have one or two points of comparison that seem to match up.

Nicole (11m 60s):
That makes sense that you know the information there is the primary information and then what we make it mean. That’s what becomes evidence, right? Because without context and understanding some background information of DNA evidence and how it works with familial relationships, it’s just information. It doesn’t mean anything. But when we combine it together that brings us to evidence.

Robin Wirthlin (12m 28s):
That’s right. And that evidence is pretty compelling. It’s pretty strong, strong, you know, you’re right when you said that about 99% of human DNA is the same, it’s about 1% that has the variations and the DNA testing companies test 600 to 700,000 spots in our DNA and then they see the variations in that and how they line up with other people. The more DNA you share means the closer the relationship, the less DNA you share means it’s a more distant relationship and that’s where you must have those genealogical records to validate and discern what these relationships are.

Robin Wirthlin (13m 14s):
DNA is inherited randomly and it recombines and so the percentages of DNA that you share with someone in your match list, they’ll vary. You know, before we talked about my first cousin once removed who shared 700 centimorgans with me, but he only shared maybe 300 centimorgans with my brothers and sisters. We really need to have some documentary evidence to be able to place these people in our DNA match list into the right relationships or we might run off on a trail that is not going to lead to sound conclusions.

Diana (13m 50s):
I love that you said that because I have heard DNA experts speaking and they’ll say the DNA doesn’t lie, but our analysis of it can be wrong. I think that’s what we really have to be careful of is making sure that we understand how it works and being careful with our analysis. So let’s talk about another kind of source that we use with DNA and that is family tree information. We’re always so excited when we see on our DNA match list that someone has an online tree and why are we so excited? Because then we can try to see how we connect with them and who our most recent common ancestor could be.

Diana (14m 31s):
How has this come down through the ages to be that we connect with this person just like other sources, we have to look at those online trees and analyze them. One tree might be fabulous and be put together with so much good research and another tree could be sort of speculative and not have anything backing it up. So just like all of our other sources, we have to analyze them and look to see how good the information is in there and how accurate we think it is. I know that I was looking at an online tree that I seemed to be connected with and the ancestor was completely wrong and I knew that ’cause I had done a ton of research on that line and it just kind of pointed out to me that we have to do our own verification of those family trees as we’re working with our DNA results so we don’t get headed off in the wrong direction.

Diana (15m 28s):
Let me just kind of recap and see if I understand this right. Okay, so the original source is the person, then an authored source would be the family tree because the family tree is the combination of all sorts of different things. You know that people have put together original and derivative sources and so we generally say a family tree is an authored source and the more accurate it is, the more credence we can give to that information. So if we don’t have a tree for any of our matches, then what do we do with that scenario, Robin?

Robin Wirthlin (16m 7s):
Great question. As I look at my DNA match list, the vast majority of the people do not have a family tree attached to their DNA results. So what you need to do is some good traditional genealogical research, look for obituaries that mention that person, look for other records, census records, city directories, other online family trees that may connect in with that family line and use those other trees as a hint to build the tree for this match. That is a wonderful possible good match.

Robin Wirthlin (16m 47s):
The other thing is that you can write to the person, we’ve talked about that quite a bit, see if they know anything. Sometimes that person doesn’t know anything about their family history, you have to put in some time to build the tree. You don’t have to go into super depth in building that tree. It can be a more of a surface build. Just make sure that you’re using accurate information to link the generations and the siblings and the other people together.

Nicole (17m 19s):
That makes sense. You know, when we’re making a quick and dirty tree, it could be easy to use less credible sources, but I think as long as we are able to find at least one good piece of information that comes from an original source that links the generations going back from parent to child and child to parent, then that can help us to make sure that we’re not making big errors.

Robin Wirthlin (17m 46s):
That’s right. And I wanted to touch back on that concept that you are a source, and your DNA is information that can be used as evidence to prove a relationship. So it’s kind of like you have a book that you find on the shelf at the library, that’s the source. You open up the book and then you find information in the book and if it can help build the case of the relationship between two people. Then you use that information as evidence to prove a relationship. DNA is the same way. You’ve got a source, you’ve got information, how will you use that to help prove a relationship?

Robin Wirthlin (18m 29s):
So you just have to remember to use it in conjunction with genealogical records to have a sound conclusion.

Diana (18m 37s):
I love that comparison to the book because we are all used to doing that, pulling out a book and getting information out of it and using it as evidence. It’s just a little bit more tricky wrapping our minds around DNA. So thank you for that explanation. I’m gonna remember that that we are like the book, the information inside of it is our DNA and then we use that as evidence as genealogists and those listening to the podcast, we just have to hear this over and over and we have to use it to learn it. So if you’re feeling like you may never figure out how to use DNA, just be patient with yourself. Every little bit builds and the more you hear it, the more you read it, the more you learn it, you’re gonna get a solid foundation.

Diana (19m 21s):
Just remember back to when you were a baby genealogist and a census was like brand new to you and now maybe you know everything there is to know about a census, right? So in the future we’re gonna know everything there is to know about DNA and we’ll be such experts and we’ll look back and think, remember when we didn’t know anything about DNA?

Robin Wirthlin (19m 38s):
And you know it’s a great point. Everybody starts somewhere and so just the fact that you’re listening into the podcast, you’ve, you’ve got a basis there and you’ll keep learning and applying the information in your own research and it will, it will become more and more familiar and you’ll be able to use it with more and more expertise.

Nicole (19m 59s):
So Robin, I have a lot of people who are new with using DNA for family history research and they want to know how can knowing that you’re a match to another person help you identify an ancestor?

Robin Wirthlin (20m 14s):
That’s a great question. When you share DNA with someone who’s related to you on a specific line of a family, then that can be used as evidence to be able to prove that an historical person is your in common biological ancestor, or not. For example, if you have a second cousin that is identified from a DNA match list, then you can tell that you share great-grandparents. So your most recent common ancestor is that great-grandparent or the great-grandparent couple. Those great-grandparents passed DNA down through their children, which are your grandparents, down to their grandchildren, which are your parents, and then down to you, which are the great-grandchildren.

Robin Wirthlin (21m 3s):
So it kind of makes a triangle. You and your cousin share DNA back to your great grandparents, and you can use those kind of comparisons with people in various relationships and go back and see which ancestral couple is your in common ancestors. And like Diana’s been using the Cox family as in her research project, they’re quite a ways back so she’s using a lot of people to help substantiate that relationship because it’s farther back and she’s using smaller segments. The amazing thing about DNA is that when as she builds the case with all of these people, she can come to a pretty sound conclusion who Rachel Cox’s father is.

Robin Wirthlin (21m 54s):
It’s exciting.

Nicole (21m 54s):
I love that, that you talked about a triangle. That’s a really good visual and I think, you know when we see that we are a match to a person and we don’t know who the common ancestor is between us, it’s kind of like we have just a piece of the triangle, we have two legs of the triangle, we know that we’re connected to a common ancestor, we don’t know who it is, but we know we’re connected to each other through our matching DNA. So then it’s our job to go and see if we can figure out who that common ancestor is through kind of doing a lot of research on the match’s family tree to figure out if any of their surnames are in common with ours and doing that pedigree triangulation and matching it up.

Robin Wirthlin (22m 35s):
You’re right, you use the shared matches list to see who else shares DNA with you and that person and that can help you narrow down which branch of the family you are connected on.

Nicole (22m 47s):
What about with YDNA? How do, how do we do that? We’ve been talking a little bit about the autosomal DNA match list and triangulating that way. Is it the same with YDNA?

Robin Wirthlin (22m 58s):
With YDNA the company gives you a list of people that share the same basic DNA with you on the, on a male’s y chromosome. They look at spaces in the DNA where there’s a repeat of the letters and I kind of think those are the STR or the short tandem repeats, and I kind of think of it as a stutter, a little bit that helps me remember the STR where you’ve got sequences of letters that might say G-A-T-A-G-A-T-A-G-A-T-A 10 times and then somebody else, it’s also says that 10 times and then as they compare those two people’s DNA, they can tell how closely they are related because they will have a similar number of repeats at the same markers.

Robin Wirthlin (23m 48s):
Then that report will give a genetic distance. Basically the smaller the genetic distance means the closer the relative or the fewer number of generations since that mutation occurred in that repeated genetic code.

Nicole (24m 2s):
Great. So we kind of have a little bit of a different way of looking at that. YDNA, we’re not doing as much of the shared matches but we’re looking more at our genetic distance and how many generations it has been and then trying to triangulate and see if we can find the same patrilineal ancestor for each match on our match list. And what about how do we analyze our mitochondrial DNA?

Robin Wirthlin (24m 31s):
Mitochondrial DNA is interesting, you know it’s passed just from mothers to their children and then women pass it on to their children. When you take a mitochondrial DNA test, it will give you a mitochondrial DNA Haplogroup. The mitochondrial Haplogroup may go back for thousands of years. And so it tells you that you’re biologically connected to other people who have the same Haplogroup, but it doesn’t measure things in such a close genealogical timeframe that it can be extremely useful. It’s helpful especially in unknown parentage research because you can tell if you’re on the right track or not, but it doesn’t give us as much information at this point in time that will really help us define who let’s say our second great-grandparents are, especially if it’s not on that matrilineal line.

Nicole (25m 26s):
I think it’s a good thing to point out that it’s used for more ancient comparisons between the matrilineal ancestors, and I have seen it used to eliminate a possible mother in a family tree by saying, you know, this group that descended from this woman has a different Haplogroup than this group that descended from another possible mother. So they’re not related. So I think it can be used in the process of elimination to help in that way.

Robin Wirthlin (25m 57s):
Exactly. That’s an excellent way of using that in your research.

Diana (26m 1s):
Let’s talk a little bit about my case study because you mentioned that I’m using the Cox family for this and so I think it’s just helpful to visualize how this all comes together with an actual case study. I chose to do study group, Research Like a Pro study group in the spring and combining DNA with my traditional genealogical research. And I researched Benjamin Cox and Rachel Cox a few years ago and I decided that it would be really fun to try to use DNA to prove this connection when I went back and did my timeline analysis because that’s the step that you do when you’re revisiting your research.

Diana (26m 43s):
I remembered all the great things that I had found and why I thought Rachel was the daughter of Benjamin in the very first place. So the first record I had of her was her marriage record, which was in 1848 Navarro County, Texas. And you know, this was Texas, they didn’t list the name of the father. And so I didn’t have any clues from that and of course there’s no birth records at that time. There’s no church records pointing out who her father was. So what I had to do was look at all the Cox men that were living there in the area. Who else is in Navarro County in 1848? That could be her father and there were two or three other men and one was a James Cox I thought at first was her father doing all the research on on him I eliminated him for a variety of reasons.

Diana (27m 29s):
And then there was this Benjamin Cox and he was there in the county on a 1846 tax list. And another really interesting record was that Benjamin Cox and Rachel’s husband who she married in 1848, Monroe Shults, they were working together on a road, they were road commissioners. So I thought, oh okay, so this means they were in proximity. That may have been how she met her husband. You know, it just was another little clue there. And I also realized that Benjamin had this migration pattern from Indiana, both Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, Texas. And guess what Rachel’s birthplace was always Indiana, and that seemed to really put her into this family.

Diana (28m 14s):
The only problem with this was that you know, we have the census records before 1850 and there’s no names. So 1830 census 1840 census, there’s a place in those census records for Rachel as a female in the household but no name. And so, you know, to this point it was all pretty much okay, this is what I think, you know, it’s kind of a conjecture. Is there anything else backing this up with DNA and with DNA when through lines was introduced, I went on my Ancestry DNA results through ThruLines and saw that I had 66 other people who were my DNA matches who also had a connection to Benjamin Cox through family trees on Ancestry’s algorithm.

Diana (29m 5s):
Putting that all together, I decided that I would take this as my project and see if I could really narrow this down using DNA. Anyway, in a nutshell that is my project and so I have all my traditional research and then I have all these DNA matches that supposedly go back to Benjamin Cox. So I’m pretty excited to keep working on this and trying to use those DNA matches to verify my relationships. One of the things that Robin taught us to analyze this, you know, when we’re analyzing our traditional research, we use our timeline, how do we analyze and put this stuff into something that can be viewable and visible and help us visualize.

Diana (29m 52s):
And Robin taught us to chart our DNA matches and this was absolutely brilliant for me learning how to do this on Lucidchart. So Robin, I just have to ask you, how did you even come to using Lucidchart? You know, did you learn that from someone else or did you figure it out for yourself? I’m just so curious.

Robin Wirthlin (30m 12s):
Well I learned it in taking some of the institute classes that are a week long and I liked how the charts were put together in some of the instructors lessons and asked and then they also recommended Lucidchart as a great way of, of putting things together in a visual. Actually for many years I’ve wondered is there some software out there that can help me just draw a pedigree chart so that it looks professional and it can contain the information that I want and Lucidchart does all of that and it’s affordable. I was just thrilled when I learned about it.

Diana (30m 51s):
I decided to use my Cox project and do this So I put on my Lucidchart, you know Benjamin at the top and then I, I did the little boxes all the way down with my relationship to to Rachel Cox, you know, with each his Rachel and then her son and then his, you know, all the way down to me. And then I lined up some of my other matches because they had trees, you know, through line show trees. And then the thing that was really fun was to do some of the analysis process and I would look at how many centimorgans they shared with me and I would use the Shared cM Project tool to see if it made sense and because I had this Lucidchart and I could see specifically that they would be okay, my third cousin once removed and then I could see if the centimorgans for third cousin once removed, lined up.

Diana (31m 44s):
You know, that was really helpful. I felt like that was a great way to do the analysis to see if the relationship probabilities matched the relationships I had drawn or I had visualized on my Lucidchart so thank you. Before that I just couldn’t see any way to make sense of everything as well. I’ve been really excited to have that tool.

Robin Wirthlin (32m 9s):
Sometimes when you’re building those family trees, you’re not exactly sure what the solid relationship is between you and people that you are on your match list and you may even get them into the wrong generation because remember there’s a range of the amount of DNA that’s shared between somebody who’s like a third cousin once removed for example, I did one project and I figured out later on as we got everything confirmed that I had had some people in in a different generation. So then I was able to take that whole section of Lucidchart and bring it so it was accurately representing the generations that were involved.

Diana (32m 53s):
Yes, I love the ability to edit it because we do not know and I love that you can use a dotted line to say this is a hypothetical relationship because you’re exactly right. Sometimes we don’t know, like I knew my line was absolutely accurate ’cause I researched it for years. But other people, I’m not sure, I love that we can do a little bit of playing with the lines to show really confirmed relationships or things that we’re just hypothesizing. You know, I just love having a visual. For me, I feel like with DNA research we have got to have something that we can look at and see to help us make sense. So just to kind of recap ’cause we’re coming to the end of this episode.

Diana (33m 36s):
We’ve been talking all about today analyzing our DNA, we’re doing a DNA research project, we analyze with our timeline analysis, our traditional research and then we can use a visual such as Lucidchart to analyze all the DNA matches and see if things are fitting together. Is there anything that you wanna add to this Nicole or Robin before we wrap it up?

Robin Wirthlin (34m 3s):
I just wanna really encourage people to jump in and get started. Even if you don’t feel like you’re an expert, if you can just do a little bit and try creating a chart, even if it’s on paper or with post-it notes. Do something so that you can connect the people who are on your DNA match list into the relationships that you know of that you can trace back to your known ancestors and that will give you confidence and skills that can be used in working with the people that you don’t know in your DNA match list. I know you can do it. Everybody get started at some point and this’ll really be a great addition to your genealogical research.

Nicole (34m 48s):
I just was thinking about the process of doing a Research Like a Pro project like Diana was sharing with her Cox example and how, you know, if you’re not including DNA evidence, you just are building a timeline and reviewing the quality of all of your sources. It’s so great to add in the DNA element here and I love how Diana, you looked at through lines to see what was kind of suggested by that as part of this gathering up all of the sources and seeing what’s already known or at least suggested by through lines and using that to help you kind of analyze are those matches a good match and do they share enough centimorgans that you can use that as evidence and what you might need to do in the future.

Nicole (35m 30s):
It really does inform the whole Research Like a Pro process, being able to see what you already know or what others have hypothesized. Right? And in this case we’re seeing that Ancestry is hypothesizing that you and all of these 66 matches is that how many there were are all descended from Benjamin Cox. Now it’s your job to really go and say that this is proven or not. After you go through all of the steps that you need to do in the Research Like a Pro process to really evaluate the evidence and then turn it into actual proof. It’s exciting to have a starting point with our DNA research and and to have some suggestions from through lines and see these cousin matches and see how they could possibly relate and then be able to take that to the next step, which is verifying the genealogical research that links you to those people and links you all back to the same ancestor.

Diana (36m 22s):
Yeah and you know, one thing I just neglected to mention was that I actually created an objective for this project. I think sometimes you look at all of our matches and we just kind of play around with them and we don’t really do anything with them ’cause we don’t have an objective to focus us in on a specific project. Having the focus of just proving this relationship has been so beneficial rather than just jumping around through my matches. So I’m excited to kind of work through this project because I have, you know, just a few others that I need to work on next. So this was fun.

Nicole (36m 54s):
Yeah, it is helpful to focus in. And in the show notes I do have a link to our last episode that was about DNA, episode 57 where we discuss how to form an objective when you’re doing a DNA research project. So make sure you listen to that one as well.

Diana (37m 10s):
Also, I wanted to mention we’ll have in the show notes a blog post about Three Ways to Chart your DNA Matches that Robin did. Because if you’re like me, you listen to this and you think, okay, I just need to see something to learn how to do this, you can go to the show notes or go on FamilyLocket and, and put in DNA charting and, and find some real specific helps to learn how to do all the things that we’ve talked about today. So good luck everyone with your DNA research.

Nicole (37m 39s):
All right, well thanks Robin for coming on today.

Robin Wirthlin (37m 42s):
Thank you. It’s been great to talk to everybody.

Nicole (37m 45s):
We hope that you will join us again in our upcoming episodes about researching Like a Pro with DNA and hear how to follow an entire project through the end as you incorporate your DNA evidence into your project. So we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye

Robin Wirthlin (38m 5s):
Bye.

Diana (38m 5s):
All right, bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (38m 34s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.