RLP 127: DNA Proof Arguments

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 127: DNA Proof Arguments. 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, The 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (45s):
Hello and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer and I’m here with my mother, accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi.

Diana (53s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you doing?

Nicole (55s):
I’m doing great. How about your work? How’s it coming?

Diana (60s):
Well, I’m just getting ready to start a new client project for this month. And my previous client project was a DNA project and we decided to extend the hours on it because I had identified one of the clusters that we needed and need more time on that second cluster. You know, it doesn’t have quite as much DNA evidence in it as the other one did. It’ll take a little bit more time to tease out those common ancestors, so always have good client work to do, and it’s always kind of fun to start a new project and then to have extra time on an existing one.

Nicole (1m 37s):
Absolutely. I’m entering the second phase of a client project as well. And I’m excited because I laid out the research suggestions for the future so clearly that my work is just so cut out for me.

Diana (1m 48s):
That’s a really good feeling when you know exactly where to go and what to do. And I kind of have the same scenario with this project. I know what I need to do. And then you just have to sit down at your computer and focus on it, right? Yeah.

Nicole (2m 2s):
We’re getting really close to proving the answer. So it’s exciting.

Diana (2m 6s):
Yeah, it’s a fun spot to be in.

Nicole (2m 9s):
All right. We have a couple of announcements. So our study group for 2021, we have figured out the dates and the times and the registration dates. So make sure you check that out on our website and we’ll put the link in the show notes, but the spring study group will be without DNA and the fall study group will be with DNA. And if you’re interested in joining us as a mentor, please consider sending us a report that you’ve written. And we would love to look at that. And we’re excited to have more mentors work with us in this study groups. We just ask that you have experience using the Research Like a Pro method and finishing it up with a report during the study group to be a mentor, you would host a group of other study group members and discuss how the projects that they’re working on are going.

Nicole (2m 56s):
So it’s fun. Also, if you would like find out about any sales or coupons that we have, make sure you join our newsletter. And we send that out weekly on Monday. And some of you have been asking about our DNA online course, that’s coming out, we’re getting that ready. It should come out in January of next year, Research Like a Pro with DNA, and you can watch the lectures and do the assignments on your own time at your own pace.

Diana (3m 23s):
Well, I have just been doing feedback on the Research Like a Pro with DNA reports, and I’ve been so impressed with how people in the study group have made progress. Several of them have solved their cases, and everybody has made progress and has ideas for what to do for the next phase of their research. So it’s been really fun reading and seeing how the process is working for them.

Nicole (3m 46s):
Yeah, it is really fun to see people finding the answers to their research questions, and then many people didn’t find the answer yet and they’re still going to continue their research. Today we’re talking about DNA Proof Arguments. So when you have solved a case, you feel like you found the answer and you have a lot of evidence. The thing to do is to write a proof argument. And so we’ll talk about that today. And a lot of the work that goes into writing a proof argument comes in the research that you’ve done and the reports that you’ve written. So a lot of what you do is organizing previously found information into a logical argument. So we’re going to talk about an organizational structure and preparing figures and tables and the things that we need to do, like requesting permission from living people and reviewing DNA standards, which we’ll actually talk about those in an upcoming podcast episode.

Nicole (4m 37s):
Okay.

Diana (4m 38s):
All right. So let’s talk about proof statements, summaries, and arguments. When I was first starting to work on my accreditation, I had really not understood the difference between these. So I think it will be beneficial to us to go through these and talk about how they relate to DNA. Proof statements are simple phrases that state a genealogical fact, and in order to prove something in just that one statement, you have to be able to provide a footnote with one or two citations as documentation for the statement and that information should not conflict. It should have the same date, the same place. It should all come together. DNA evidence sometimes use an a statement when a relationship is very obvious, like an autosomal DNA match between a parent and a child.

Diana (5m 27s):
Most of our DNA evidence is not obvious though. We have varying relationships that could come with an amount of centimorgans. So we don’t often use proof statements for DNA evidence, but we may be able to use a proof summary with DNA evidence. So let’s talk about what a proof summary is. That is when you’re proving a genealogical fact, and you need more explanation than just that one statement. You might need a bulleted list of evidence, maybe an explanation of conflicting evidence that is easily resolved or two to three paragraphs of explanation. And DNA evidence can be used in a proof summary. For example, if you have Y-DNA results that show a close genetic distance between two men, and then you can prove their relationship with traditional records that could be done with a proof summary.

Diana (6m 20s):
A really great example of using autosomal DNA Evidence in a narrative pedigree is found in Angela Packer McGee’s presentation that she did in October of this year, 2020 at Family Tree Webinars. And the title of that is Using DNA test Results to Confirm a Pedigree. And this is really a great webinar to watch, Angela goes through different relationships on her family tree and shows how she’s written proof statements and proof summaries to genetically prove her family tree on a certain line. That is something that we should probably all be thinking of doing even those lines that we know, or we think we know everything about.

Diana (7m 4s):
That’s a really good practice. And it’s a good way to start with using your DNA and learning how to write about it as starting with something that you know, so consider that, that maybe you don’t need to prove something far back in your family tree at first. And you should just start with your close relationships and show how you can use the DNA as evidence in those. Okay. Now proof arguments. This is what we probably will be doing a lot with our DNA, because quite honestly, we are using DNA because we have a real mystery in our family tree. We’re trying to find that grandparent that we do not know, or we’re trying to find the parents of an adoptee.

Diana (7m 46s):
And so in these cases, we have to come up with a proof argument and these are longer than a proof summary. These are for complex cases that we have to use a large body of evidence for. Proof arguments often include multiple pieces of completing information that are not easily resolved, or sometimes you have multiple hypotheses and that you have to disprove those one by one. So a good example of that is if you’ve got people with the same name in the same area, maybe you’ve got four John Smith, and you’re trying to determine which one is yours. And so you have to one by one, eliminate each of those until the one left standing, you can prove is your John Smith.

Diana (8m 31s):
And so these are complex and this is where we often want to use DNA to help us come to proof. And then within that proof argument, which would probably be several pages long, you would have simple proof statements and proof summaries that help build the case. You could have just one proof statement for a birth because you actually have a record that proves a birth. And so within these larger proof arguments, we’ll have smaller bits of proof. Now, when we are using DNA and a proof argument, we may have many test takers and we may have to evaluate several types of DNA. And so these can be quite complex.

Diana (9m 11s):
If you want to read more about types of proofs and writing proof arguments, I highly recommend Tom Jones’s book, Mastering Genealogical Proof. When I was preparing for accreditation, I worked through every single chapter of that book to really understand and to learn everything I needed to know. And so that’s a great place to start. If you haven’t heard of these terms, proof statements, proof summaries, and proof arguments, chapter seven is all about that.

Nicole (9m 40s):
Yes. It’s a great book to really get a foundation and understanding genealogical proof. So it’s, it’s a really good one to work there before you attempt to write a proof argument. So once you understand, you know, what you’re writing, whether it’s a proof summary or a proof argument, then you’re ready to choose your organizational structure. So proof argument is typically like a standalone article or case study or essay type of thing that you can write with the title such as Who are the Parents of Barthsheba Tharp. And then within that document, you would outline all the evidence that points to the parent that you have concluded is correct.

Nicole (10m 23s):
You may have a lot of research that points to this certain person and you have preliminary conclusions reports, and now you need to assemble everything that you have into a proof argument. So you can reuse some of the writing and tables that you’ve already created in your reports. If you’ve done that, and maybe you have had several phases of research that you’ve completed on this. And so you’re kind of gathering up all of your body of evidence and selecting the most important evidence. So an important thing to do first would be to just make an outline of your evidence, putting together all of the most important pieces of evidence, that point to your answer. And then as you list out your evidence in a range of logically, you can think about the best way to organize it when I’ve read articles and the NGSQ, I’ve noticed three different ways of organizing that evidence.

Nicole (11m 12s):
One that is pretty common is to put the documentary evidence first with all the clues from traditional records. And then typically that evidence will point to a specific conclusion that is then tested with the DNA evidence. And then the final part of the proof argument will show the DNA evidence that supports the hypothesis. So that’s one way to organize it. Then another way that these DNA Proof Arguments have been organized in various NGSQ articles is by weaving the DNA evidence and the documentary evidence together. And this happens more often when the proof argument is using DNA to point to a specific person and the traditional records don’t point to anyone specific that it’s just too much of a mystery and there’s, there’s no clues pointing to it.

Nicole (12m 5s):
So the DNA was used as the main clue to point us to the answer. So sometimes the DNA evidence will be shared right at the beginning. And then the documentary evidence will be just woven in with the DNA all throughout one article that really does. This is Karen Stanbary’s, Raphael Arriaga article. She points out that the adopted woman, Joanne, the test taker, didn’t know her father. And the only thing that they had was that he might’ve been of Mexican descent. And so that clue was then used with DNA evidence right away at the very beginning to show some possible candidates.

Nicole (12m 45s):
And then throughout the article, she eliminates each candidate until she’s left with just one conclusion. So that’s a really good example of weaving the evidence. Jill Morelli’s article does that as well as she identifies an unknown grandfather of the test taker. And then another really interesting one is Patty Lee Hobbs article DNA Identifies a Father for Rachel, Wife of James Lee, of Huntington county, Pennsylvania. And this one was interesting because it’s a little further back, it’s a more distant ancestor, a woman who she didn’t know the maiden name for, and there were no clues in the traditional records that pointed to any specific family there were just people who lived in the same town with her, but she didn’t even have the maiden name.

Nicole (13m 30s):
Well the DNA evidence was presented right away at the beginning because it pointed to a specific family that she then could go into the traditional research for. So that one was another one where the DNA evidence was woven throughout the whole article. And then kind of a unique way of using the DNA evidence and organizing it is to put the DNA evidence first and then just ending the DNA evidence right at the beginning and the rest of the article is all documentary evidence. And this is occasionally used when the DNA evidence is like, Y-DNA, it’s kind of simple and you just put it at the beginning. It points to this specific patrilineal line. And then the rest is traditional research showing how this ancestor with unknown parentage connects into this patrilineal line.

Nicole (14m 18s):
And that’s what Darryl Jackson did in his article about George Craig of Howard County, Missouri. He starts with the DNA test results, suggesting a common ancestor within a close number of generations. And then just using descendancy research to find somebody who could match up. So as you choose your organizational structure, just think about what you have and what makes sense. It should be logical leaving the reader through each evidentiary item. Just remember, it’s not usually the best idea to present the research in the order that you found things, but to put them in order so that the reader can understand logically why this is the case.

Nicole (14m 59s):
So yeah, as you outline it, it should become clear the best way to do it.

Diana (15m 4s):
Thanks for running through all of those different ways to organize DNA. I have really found this with my client reports as well, trying to figure out the best way to organize which one do you do first. And so that gives us a lot of food for thought, and I highly recommend studying those articles and just seeing for one thing, the wording, you know, how do you word some of the DNA Evidence? We’ve learned how to word evidence like in the censuses and maybe certificates, but you know, with DNA it’s like a different vocabulary. And so reading how other people have presented it is so very beneficial.

Diana (15m 44s):
Okay. So let’s talk about figures and tables. You cannot just write paragraph after paragraph about DNA evidence because no one will be able to follow you. You have to be able to put in some charts and things to show that descent. And so one of the things that you do at the beginning of your proof argument typically is to do a diagram, showing your test takers descent from the common ancestor. And this gives a solid foundation. You have to be able to prove every single one of those generational links that to the common ancestor from your tester, that’s your foundation. And so that has to be right upfront.

Diana (16m 26s):
And I love it when I’m reading a report or a proof argument that shows me the diagram, and then I can read the narrative. I like to see the visual. Remember that as we are writing about DNA and, and using these figures and tables that we have to privatize our living individuals. And we have an entire podcast on Privacy and Permission in episode 125. So you can go back and listen to that, but here are some different types of ideas that you might want to use in a DNA proof argument, different types of charts or figures. Often we will see lines of descent from a common ancestral couple, and we will see, we use lucid chart, but there’s other things that you can use.

Diana (17m 11s):
And so you’ll have your little lines coming down to each generation and then you’ll end up with the tester at the bottom. Sometimes we want to just show the lineage of a single tester to the research subject. So just that one line of ascent up to the research subject. Often we’ll want to do hypothesized relationships to the research subject. What I’ve seen a lot in dad is if we’re trying to show hypothesis, we can use like a dotted line showing that this is a possible parent or a possible child. So dotted lines work well for hypothesis. And then we might be showing the pedigree of a tester or of a DNA match.

Diana (17m 55s):
We might be showing triangulated matches, showing bars with overlapping segments. As you are doing your DNA project, you will be creating a lot of charts and tables just to help you understand the evidence. And so a lot of times I will be using something that I’ve already created and helping me visualize the project. And so it’s not that difficult to then take those parts of my research and turn those into the figures that I need in the report or the proof argument. So parent-child links are obviously one of the most important things we need to show, and you want to have at least one citation per link.

Diana (18m 39s):
You know, we are trying to be good genealogists. We don’t just say this child was in this family. We have a citation. We have something that shows that recent case studies in the NGSQ have also used ancestry trees to document the parent child links. So if you’re trying to show a line of descent and it’s several generations long, that could take up a lot of space, if this is being printed in a journal. And so we’re starting to see authors linking to their tree, which would have all of the citations on it. And this doesn’t mean that the authors haven’t reviewed that usually it’s a tree that they have completed and that they have all of their sources in that tree.

Diana (19m 28s):
A good example of this is in the article by Melinda Daffin Henningfield in the NGSQ, and she was the first one to include an author-made ancestry tree in her DNA article. So that’s a good example to go look at. And I honestly think that might be the way that we’re moving towards, because it does take up a lot of room, with all of those citations, proving each one of those generational links. So if you want to read the article, it was from March of 2019 in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, or as we call it the NGSQ. And when asked about that, Melinda said that when she first sent her manuscript and it was 25 pages and had two figures and six tables, each of which might take a page, and then the parent-child links were in a separate appendix that was six pages long in 10 point type.

Diana (20m 22s):
And so they have a page limit of about 20 pages and you can see how they would have to come up with a way to condense that. And that was the solution was to cite the family tree. All right. So tables are also very beneficial in writing about DNA. When we use DNA evidence, we have to talk about the shared centimorgan amounts. We have to discuss triangulation of segments. There’s all these numbers that we have to show. And again, we don’t want to just write that out. That would lose our reader, and it’s not the best way to show the information. So usually you want to include that in a table or a figure pair to some different types of tables that we might want to use.

Diana (21m 9s):
We could have a table that shows the total shares centimorgans that base tester share with each other. We could show the shared segments among testers. We could depict the total shared centimorgans and proposed relationships between testers. The total centimorgans shared among base testers and DNA matches triangulate as segments, tree completeness of testers, the Y-SCR values of testers, so many different things. And again, as you’re writing, and as you’re doing your research in these DNA cases, you’re often creating these tables right within your research document is what we like to use and helping you to make sense of the information.

Diana (21m 57s):
And then when you go to put it into your report or proof argument, then it’s ready to go. So it’s just a good way to look at the evidence to compile all the numbers and the information.

Nicole (22m 9s):
Absolutely. I think tables are really important in DNA proof arguments. So you may be wondering when should DNA evidence be included as part of a reasonably exhaustive search and do I need to include DNA evidence in all my proof arguments? And the answer is no. We do need to consider when we’re research planning, whether genetic sources might help us with our question. DNA standards, talk about that and in standards 12 and 14, but the use of DNA is only a required when we want to state that our relationship is biological. You can’t say that a relationship is a blood line or a genetic relationship, unless you’re using genetic sources to help you improve that.

Nicole (22m 51s):
But you may just be wanting to prove that this is the family that raised somebody or the family that lived with them. So not all cases will require the use of DNA evidence. And there’s a lot of indirect cases that have successfully proven the case without it, before we ever had DNA evidence, there’s many cases where DNA would not apply or would not be useful. I even found an NGSQ author who stated that mitochondrial DNA could have been helpful to her if a matrilineal descendant had existed, but they hadn’t. So sometimes just sharing that you could have considered the use of DNA, but it wasn’t possible, or wasn’t relevant can be enough to show that reasonably exhaustive research element of the genealogical proof standard.

Nicole (23m 38s):
So when you’re writing your proof arguments, you may want to include the different types of DNA and why certain ones were used. Sometimes you’ll see an article that will say that autosomal DNA was used, X-DNA was looked at, but it wasn’t helpful and Y-DNA wasn’t useful because of this, and so forth. So just showing that you have considered the different types of DNA and if they were useful or not. I asked some of the NGSQ articles about this question about, do we always need to use DNA evidence? And some of the answers I got back were really helpful. And Nancy Wiener said that you shouldn’t look at DNA evidence until you’ve exhausted all the documentary sources first, because if you can build a documentary case with indirect evidence, and it’s pretty solid, then going to the additional effort involved in doing a DNA study may not be worth it because it is so much extra work and time getting permission from all of your test takers and trying to meet all the DNA standards of tree completeness and it just is a lot of extra research proving all the parent-child links and so forth.

Nicole (24m 47s):
So just remember that you don’t have to includes DNA evidence, and it can be a lot of extra time, money and work if you do. So don’t feel like it’s now required in every single case.

Diana (24m 59s):
I think that’s a really good point because we may be starting to think that we need to have DNA backing up everything, but sometimes just the documentary evidence in and of itself is really strong and does not need to have DNA. So I guess that’s just the judgment call after we have done all of our reasonably exhaustive research, then we can decide. And I think we kind of know when we should be adding more to our proof. I’m thinking of my George Dillard case, because really the documentary evidence, I should say, the circumstantial evidence pointed to him being the father for my Cynthia, but then the Bible pages disprove that.

Diana (25m 40s):
And there was no DNA evidence coming through either. So we kind of know when we have further questions that we need more work on a case, even when we feel like we’ve done a lot of research.

Nicole (25m 51s):
Yeah. And I think it’s really useful sometimes to look at the DNA evidence to give us that feeling that okay, we are on the right track because even sometimes when we have a pretty solid indirect case that we feel like is pretty strong, but then we’re missing some DNA evidence. Like you said, like you couldn’t find any matches to descendants of George Dillard. That’s a pretty big sign that maybe we got it wrong. And I think it can be really helpful to us to have that additional evidence to help us with our indirect cases to feel like we did get it right.

Diana (26m 24s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (26m 24s):
I think even if we decide not to include it, it can sometimes be helpful just to know that it does exist.

Diana (26m 30s):
Right. I agree. I think that’s one of the biggest boons of DNA evidence. It lets us know that we put it together correctly. And that’s how I felt with my Benjamin Cox and Rachel Cox DNA project. I just knew Benjamin had to be her father. And so with the DNA evidence, so strong on that case, it was wonderful. So that’s going to be my first proof argument that I need to actually get completed. I’ve got several reports. I just need to get it fashioned into a proof argument now. So 2021, that can be my goal.

Nicole (27m 2s):
Yeah. And I was just going to say, I think sometimes we might think we have DNA evidence pointing to something, but when we actually evaluate that evidence, we realize it’s not exactly what we thought it was. So I think it is really important that if we do look at the DNA evidence to really evaluate it all the way and not just kind of glance at it, but really look at it, think about the DNA standards, look, to see if there’s more than one common ancestor, you know, before you use that to mentally sense your case. I think sometimes we make assumptions about what the DNA is telling us and don’t fully examine it. So I think it’s important to make sure that we really look at it carefully.

Diana (27m 44s):
I agree. Totally. Yeah. And we’re going to be talking more about that in future episodes. There is so much to learn about using DNA in genealogy and it has been wonderful to have been working within the set of group parameters because we have focused so much on different pieces and you really have to just build your foundation of DNA knowledge and how to use it in Genealogy.

Nicole (28m 9s):
Yes. Well, next week we will talk to you guys more about the DNA standards and how those can help us evaluate our proof arguments and see if we have met the standards and the genealogical proof standard. So we look forward to talking with you guys about that next week until then have a great week.

Diana (28m 24s):
All right. Bye bye everyone. Bye bye.

Nicole (28m 28s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next study group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com. To share your progress and ask questions join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our eCourse or study group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.