RLP 129: Preparing a DNA Proof Argument for Publication

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 129: preparing a Proof Argument for Publication. 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.

Nicole (40s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer, co-host, and I’m here with my mother accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi.

Diana (54s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing?

Nicole (57s):
Great. I’ve been getting ready for the holidays. Of course, when this comes out, it’ll be after the holidays, but it’s a fun season. What have you been doing?

Diana (1m 9s):
Same, working on holiday stuff, getting house decorated. We’re getting ready for Christmas and yes, this will come out after Christmas. So I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas and time spent with families if possible, and if not that it was a peaceful day for you. So I have been working all month on my RootsTech videos. When RootsTech went virtual, they informed us as speakers that we would need to prerecord our lectures and have them done by December 31st. That makes a lot of work in December that I wasn’t really expecting I would have to do cause generally RootsTech is the end of February and we have until then to get our syllabus done and get our lectures done.

Diana (1m 51s):
And so pushing that deadline up quite a bit, was a little difficult that I am working hard on those and we’ll meet my deadline of December 31st getting all my videos recorded.

Nicole (2m 4s):
Yes, me too. I’m working on that. And luckily they’ve kind of asked that you keep the video to 20 minutes unless you really need to do a longer one. And so I think you’re doing some longer runs with three 20 minute segments, but mine, I decided I would just do 20 minute videos.

Diana (2m 18s):
Yeah. I probably going to wish I had done just that because I do have several segments and I haven’t really added up how many hours of recording, but I think I have a good five hours of recording. Maybe it’s only four. I don’t know. I will be working hard this month on getting those videos done, but they’re all really fun topics and I’m excited to share some of these classes with people. So it’s all good.

Nicole (2m 44s):
All right. Well today we’re talking about Preparing a Proof Argument for Publication. This comes from a blog post that I wrote about how to write and publish a proof argument with DNA Evidence. So at the end of that article, I had some advice from different authors who published DNA articles in the NGSQ National Genealogical Society Quarterly. So we’re going to be sharing some of those pieces of advice because Diana and I have not published in a journal yet, although it’s definitely on our to-do list. I know you want to do that next time.

Diana (3m 18s):
I do. And I have a couple of different cases that I’m thinking of. That is my goal next year, at least to submit, I know it wouldn’t get published next year, but at least the submit and get started and try the process.

Nicole (3m 30s):
Yeah. And I am first, I’m going to work on my portfolio and then when that’s done, I might be able to submit my case study from the portfolio to a journal. So I’m thinking about that. And of course I would love to publish in lots of journals someday, but right now my focus is just finishing this portfolio

Diana (3m 48s):
Well, and you do have to focus on that. It is pretty all consuming. So next year can be your year.

Nicole (3m 55s):
Yes, but this advice about publishing in a journal is really interesting. And I think as we’ve been doing our NGSQ study group, we’ve had a lot of these kinds of questions about the process, but it’s like wondering how much it gets edited from the original manuscript. So it was really fun to email several of the NGSQ authors who did these DNA articles and ask them about it and kind of some of the decisions they made with how they met the standards and different things. I asked them about some of the benefits of publishing in a journal and also some of the challenges that they experienced before you publish in a journal. So the advice was given to make sure that you really review the guidelines for that journal that you plan to submit to because each journal has a different way of doing things in a different process.

Nicole (4m 41s):
So they have published documents, just a couple of pages about their guidelines and the editorial process. So reviewing those before you submit to a journal, I think it’s just very good advice. Of course, we want to know what’s required and what they’re looking for. And so reading articles that have been approved and published in that journal is of course, another really good thing to do before you submit

Diana (5m 5s):
Let’s talk about some of these benefits and challenges of publishing in a journal. The first one that we’re going to talk about is the satisfaction of a conclusion. And Jill Morelli said that the best part was the satisfaction of proving her conclusion. Jill said, “I had known about the problem of identity on my husband’s grandfather for 30 years, and even tried to find some relatives of the Wood family, but was unsuccessful. It is always satisfying to get to a conclusion.” Now, the proof argument that she did included DNA. And so she also talked about one of the difficulties of this was contacting test takers because she had to get that permission. And she said, “my husband did not know any of the test takers so we couldn’t draw on a long history of building trust.

Diana (5m 50s):
Basically all the contact with the five test takers were cold calls. Two of those test takers in the first minutes of the phone call said they wouldn’t test. I listen, listen to some more and eventually both decided to test.” So I think that’s really interesting making a cold calls, asking people out of the blue to do a DNA test, but what created fights to just keep listening to them, talking to them and getting to know them. Cause you’re having to build a relationship right there on the phone.

Nicole (6m 18s):
Yes. Adding DNA evidence into a proof argument or publication requires a lot more work and a lot more time. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that you’ll see in this episode today because all of these different authors that I interviewed were ones that had done a case study with DNA evidence in it. So it was just a lot of extra work finding and talking to people, getting their permission and having them take the test. And it also costs extra money too. Yeah. And that’s one of the challenges that another author, Nancy Weiner said was contacting DNA donors. Nancy wrote in June, 2017, “Parents for Richard M.

Nicole (6m 60s):
Vaughn of Howard county, Missouri published in the NGSQ.” So all of these are from the NGSQ. She said that locating and contacting DNA donors was very challenging. And then once they responded, it was challenging getting the written permission forms back in order to use their results in a publication. So she gave some really good advice and talked about, you know, if you’re going to use DNA evidence, and if you need permissions, get those permission forms upfront before committing your time and money to an individual’s testing and analysis. Because if you don’t, then you might not be able to use it in your publication. And people have the right to withdraw permissions at any time. And she said, I’ve never had one do that where I got permissions to start with, but a couple bail after the testing, by then refusing to give permissions.

Nicole (7m 46s):
Live and learn she says. So I think that’s a really good piece of advice that if you’re planning to use DNA evidence and you’re testing a lot of people and paying for their testing to you, give them the permission forms upfront before you commit your time and money to their testing.

Diana (8m 4s):
That is so interesting. During the first DNA class I took at SLIG, one of the speakers talked about how much money he had spent like, oh, I don’t even know how much, probably hundreds, if not thousands of dollars trying to get all these different people to test. So that is our next thing to think about that time and money is a real consideration. And Vic Dunn, who wrote “Determining Origin with Negative and Indirect Evidence, Silas H Feagins of Virginia and West Virginia” had some things to say about this. And that article was published in March of 2017. And he said meeting the genealogy proof standard can be time consuming. I’ll quote his thought here.

Diana (8m 45s):
“I had reached a conclusion about Silas H Feagins parentage early in my genealogy of life. And it put it aside for about a dozen years with plans to publish at some point. However, when I did start writing it, I realized I didn’t meet the GPS since I needed to eliminate all the other Feagins’ parental candidates, which ended up being a significant task. The article is basically complete when I decided the argument could be bolstered by adding the DNA evidence. Be prepared to spend a lot of time and possibly money, particularly if you have to pay for some of the tests like I did.” So I thought that was interesting that he had this entire proof argument done and then decided he really needed to add the DNA, which we kind of talked about in our last episode, Patti Lee Hobbs also mentioned the time commitment that incorporating both documentary and DNA evidence requires.

Diana (9m 34s):
And she said, “don’t forget the documentary research and be proactive in gathering more DNA evidence. Some will try to use too little DNA evidence to prove the case. And they don’t seem to know how to gather more. Gathering the DNA evidence takes a lot of time.” And I think Nicole, you and I have both noticed this, that DNA research takes so much time. It’s just a big project when you want to add DNA to something, but it’s so valuable. It might be the only way you could ever really prove a conclusion. So, you know, I think as long as we realize that there is time and money involved, if we’re going to do that in publishing an article, then it helps.

Diana (10m 16s):
I think the frustration enters in when you don’t realize how much time it’s going to take and you think, okay, I’m going to spend this many months. Then you realize it’s going to be a couple of years. So good to be prepared.

Nicole (10m 28s):
Absolutely. And Patti Lee Hobbs, her article was wonderful. DNA evidence really pointed to the parents. She didn’t have any clues besides that. So it’s interesting, like some of these articles decide to add in the DNA evidence at the end to bolster the argument, like Vic Dunn. Whereas other ones, there was no answer before the DNA pointed to someone. So I really recommend hers. It was published in March of 2017 and it’s called DNA Identifies a Father for Rachel, Wife of James Lee of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.

Diana (11m 0s):
And that’s a good article because a lot of us have that exact same scenario. We have these women far back on our trees that we have no idea where they came from. And I think this was a major brick wall for a lot of us. So her article really does point to some good solutions to that using DNA.

Nicole (11m 18s):
One of the benefits that came out as I interviewed these authors was the validation that comes from the peer review and the edit team and others looking at your article and seeing if it meets the standards. So when I talked to Elizabeth Shown Mills, the author of the first NGSQ article to use autosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA, her article was called Testing the Fan Principle Against DNA: Zilphy (Watts) Price Cooksey Cooksey of Georgia and Mississippi. And this was published in June of 2014. She said, “when we attempt to reconstruct the past, no matter who we are, we all have doubts about the accuracy of our conclusion.

Nicole (11m 59s):
If we don’t have those doubts, we should. Peer review provides outside perspectives and critical analysis that help us refine our arguments and reevaluate conclusions.” I loved that after talking to Elizabeth, it just made me want to submit all my work to a journal, to have wonderful peer review and outside perspective. But then I realized, you know, a lot of what we do in ProGen study group and the Research Like a Pro Study Group provides some of that similar type of help. You know, the outside perspective, submitting to a journal is a wonderful way of getting that expert feedback because the people that are peer reviewing there are known experts in their field. So study groups are helpful;

Nicole (12m 41s):
Even better when you get the expert feedback, right?

Diana (12m 46s):
Absolutely. And I love it in the study group when I get feedback and a lot of our members are really accomplished genealogists. But you know what? I also love getting feedback from beginning genealogists because a lot of my clients are not genealogists or hobbyist genealogists. And I want to know if I am writing clearly. And so any feedback is super helpful, but I do love it when there’s someone who’s actually done some research in that area and they know the methodology and the records and they can suggest something that quite honestly, it slipped my mind because that happens. We’re all human. It’s great to get peer review. Yeah.

Nicole (13m 24s):
And one of the challenges that comes along with submitting to a journal is the restraint of how long the article can be. So when I talked to Elizabeth Shown Mills, she said that that can generate a huge amount of documentation regarding validating parent-child links. So when you do a DNA article, then you have this huge descendency tree with all the DNA matches. And then you have to show how each one of those DNA matches descends from the common ancestor and provide documentation for the links. So what she said is that that’s one of the challenges I had to name the evidence for each generational link and just judiciously choosing the most important evidence.

Nicole (14m 6s):
I’ll quote what she said about this. “Currently authors and editors tend to handle this challenge by attaching note references, to every fact asserted in tables and charts, with a separate set of reference notes to document each of those assertions in complex cases, writers may also provide the editors with a supporting file of documentation that goes beyond what is provided in the tables that supporting evidence will then be evaluated by peer review and editorial review. After which the editor presents the shorter version to the Journal’s readership with the implicit promise that the supporting evidence validates the assertions that could not be more robustly documented in the paper itself.”

Nicole (14m 47s):
So of course the articles have been edited down from their original state, but I think it’s also helpful to know that some of those parent-child links the documentation for those have also been edited a little bit too, so that there’s not a 20 page attachment showing all of the documentation. Elizabeth also mentioned that this is not necessarily a DNA specific problem because when she was an NGSQ editor, people would submit really large manuscripts as well. She said that I had an author submit a manuscript in a box 14 inches by 11 inches by five inches. And the manuscript was the top item.

Nicole (15m 27s):
Below it were five file folders and they footnote 17 file A, footnote 17 file B, et cetera, all the way through file E. So sometimes an assertion requires a lot of documentation. And one way that I’ve seen Elizabeth and her articles get around that is to cite another article that she’s written that’s been published on her website. So you can keep the article to a more manageable length.

Diana (15m 54s):
Yeah. Sometimes you have proof articles or prove arguments that build upon each other. That is a possibility too. Well, let’s talk about another benefit. And that is just simply improving your writing. Patti Hobbs, who we’ve talked a little bit about her article, she shared that one of the benefits of writing for a journal is that it will help us become better. And she said, “my main aspiration as a genealogist is to write and publish. One can write for themselves, of course, but writing for someone else, especially for those with more exacting standards will drive us to our best work. Then she also shares some of the challenges of technical writing and she said, I have a love-hate relationship with writing. It is painful for me when I’m in the midst of it, I feel terribly inefficient, but the results were so gratifying when we minutely examine every little piece to put it together we start seeing things we didn’t see before.

Diana (16m 46s):
It forces us into a frame of yet further discovery beyond what we’ve already found more superficially. I’m a goal oriented person and knowing that producing a package of Genealogical proof lights at the end, spurs me through the difficult tedious parts.” Okay. I love so much about what Patti just wrote. And we talk about this all the time with the benefits of writing up your research, whether it’s in a report or a proof argument, how it really makes you do better research because all of a sudden you’re writing and then you realize, oh, you forgot to check this, or you need to understand something better about the history or the law.

Diana (17m 28s):
So it is an amazing tool for research writing about your research.

Nicole (17m 32s):
I agree. I think it’s so helpful for making those connections between the evidence that we’ve found and helping us assess whether it’s strong enough or not. Because sometimes when I’m writing it out, I really noticed that it is really strong. Even if it’s indirect evidence, when you write it all out, it seems to come together so clearly. And then other times writing out what I thought was strong evidence. I noticed that it’s not as strong and I need to do more research. There’s just something about compiling everything in one place that really helps you see it more clearly.

Diana (18m 4s):
I agree. And I think she has something else that’s really beneficial. And that’s the idea of a goal. We’ve talked a little bit about setting goals and having a purpose to our writing. And that is a great goal for publishing in an article. You know, you may not know if your research is that great or for that great of a writer, but why not just submit what’s the worst that can happen. They can send it back and say, you need to do more work on this. And then it gives you some feedback and some ideas of what to do better. So I love the idea of having a real goal. And I know when I did my four generation project for accreditation, that goal was wonderful because it made me apply myself and learn and figure out how to do this kind of technical Genealogical writing.

Diana (18m 51s):
And because I knew others were going to be reading it, I worked so hard to make it my very best effort when we do those kinds of things we learn and grow and we make huge strides in our progress as writers. So if you’re kind of feeling a little bit weak in your writing, maybe set a goal to publish in a journal and you don’t have to start with NGSQ. There’s so many journals by other societies that are always looking for articles. And you could certainly set a goal to submit to one of those, maybe the location that your research took place.

Nicole (19m 21s):
Yes. And even our society here in Pima county, we have a newsletter that goes out every quarter and they’re constantly asking for submissions. So you can just try out lots of different newsletters and societies as you increase in your abilities. All right, let’s talk about peer review. This is, I think, a challenge and a benefit both. So LaBrenda Garrett Nelson, whose article came out in June, 2020 about the parents for Isaac Garrett using DNA. She said that the best part about publishing was finally producing documented conclusions regarding my Garrett ancestors in a setting where I would receive expert feedback about ways in which I could tighten the analysis.

Nicole (20m 6s):
Also pushing the envelope by showing how DNA can be particularly useful in the case of communities that left a few records and little direct evidence. Elizabeth Shown Mills talked about this a little bit, that it’s a really compelling reason to submit to a journal, but then I kind of mentioned, oh, I might share my proof argument with a friend for feedback. And she was like, oh, be careful because friends it’s harder for them to give an honest feedback. I mean, not that they’re going to lie, but they might withhold critical feedback because the friendship and not wanting to offend us. I thought that was really an interesting point to think about, too. So ask yourself, can you receive helpful feedback from friends or hiring an editor?

Nicole (20m 49s):
Because even if you hire somebody, they still might feel obligated to be kind or gentle, and not completely blunt about some problems with your paper, who knows? So when you do submit to a journal, you have a double blind process, usually where the peer reviewers don’t know whose work they’re reviewing and the author doesn’t know who submitted the peer review for them, that double-blind process allows for giving feedback anonymously without worrying about hurting people’s feelings. Elizabeth said, “friends will offer a bit of constructive advice, very guardedly, and they worry about hurting our feelings, peer reviewers, don’t. Good peer reviewers understand that their first obligation is to the scholarship and integrity of the journal.

Nicole (21m 33s):
Anonymity allows them to be honest.” So that really gave me a lot to think about when seeking peer review from friends and acquaintances, just asking or hiring people as opposed to submitting to a journal where the process is double blind. So I think that’s a really big benefit.

Diana (21m 48s):
I agree. And I found the other side of being a reviewer with accreditation. We have to review and rate the projects that are turned in, and those are all double blind. They don’t know that I’m reviewing their report. I don’t know who they are. And so it really is helpful because I can go through that and be very constructive in my criticism in explaining how this is not up to standards or how this could be done better or whatever. It’s really nice. I enjoy that so much being able to try to review that and to help them. So it’s fun to do peer review and it’s fun to receive it. Sometimes it can be painful to receive peer review and we just have to decide that we’re not going to be offended and realize that our work can always have improvement once we get past that, then it’s all good.

Diana (22m 41s):
Right? Yeah. Well, let’s just end with a little final advice on including DNA Evidence. And this is to have an open mind, and this quote is from Thomas Jones and he was the first author of an NGSQ article to include just autosomal DNA. And his article was published in June of 2015, too Few Sources to Solve a Family Mystery? Some Greenfields in Central and Western New York. And so his advice, if you’re going to publish a proof argument, including DNA evidence, is this, “do not ignore any potentially useful documentary evidence, keep an open mind about possible conclusions and ensure that you have asserted the only possible answer to your research question.”

Diana (23m 27s):
So there’s some really good advice there. And I liked the idea about keeping an open mind. Sometimes we do get a preconceived idea about what the solution should be, and sometimes it’s different than what we thought it was going to be. And especially with DNA, we have to keep that open mind. So I love that. Yeah.

Nicole (23m 47s):
I also really liked the part where you said to not ignore any potentially useful documentary evidence. And I can see myself doing that sometimes when I’m including DNA evidence. So I think I’ve got a really tight case because I’ve got this DNA evidence and thinking, oh, I don’t need to get that source because, you know, I have this DNA evidence, but I think it’s really important to look at all of those documents that might be relevant. And that’s part of our reasonably exhaustive search. And it really could show us a different conclusion, especially when we’re working far back in the past and we have DNA evidence, but it’s kind of small segments and things though. Maybe it could have come from one of the siblings of the person that we think is the mother or father, you know, there’s different possibilities out there.

Nicole (24m 30s):
So really looking at all of the potential documentary evidence, I think is super important.

Diana (24m 37s):
I agree. Yeah. I worked on a lot of different cases that the documentary evidence is what tied it together after the DNA evidence suggested the possibilities. So it can be both ways. And I think we’ve talked about that in this podcast. Sometimes you have the DNA solely, you know, in an adoptive case, you really do have to start with the DNA, but then you have to use the documents to find those two people in the same location where they could conceive a child. And so we have to use that good blend. And when we write about it, we have to be able to write about both of those pieces. Well, I think it’s exciting that the NGSQ has started publishing case studies with DNA evidence.

Diana (25m 18s):
And hopefully we will continue to see more of those because that teaches us the methodology and the steps and helps us see how DNA is used in real world examples. And that’s what we all want. We want to see how to use it in our own research. So I highly recommend to all of our listeners that you study the DNA standards we’ve talked about and consider studying those case studies and the NGSQ to learn about how to use DNA and follow the footsteps of the authors. So good luck and thinking about submitting an article, or even just starting to write about DNA and your research.

Nicole (25m 59s):
Yeah. Good luck to everyone working on submitting to journals, and we hope that you have success. All right, we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye. Bye

Diana (26m 10s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (26m 9s):
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