RLP 146: 23andMe and Ancestry Trees

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 147, 23andMe and Ancestry Trees. [editor’s note, this is episode 146]

Nicole (46s):
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. Let’s go, Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (51s):
Doing great. Just excited to talk about our DNA topic.

Diana (56s):
Well, DNA is always fun. I have to admit

Nicole (59s):
What are you working on or doing?

Diana (1m 1s):
Well, I’m writing up my research report for my Isenhour project, which has been my own personal project for the study group. And just this last week and doing the research I’ve pinpointed the location where the family was living. You know, I had the county, but counties are so big and it’s hard to know specifically where in the county. So I went back to the 1830 census and I noticed that the township was Lorance, L O R A N C E, and found that on the map. And then I’ve been reading my book on the Ozarks that I talked about last episode history of the Ozarks. And it talks a little bit about this settlement in this area where it was a lot of families of German origin settling there, which fits in perfectly with our Isenhour’s, who are coming from North Carolina and were a German settlement.

Diana (1m 52s):
They had originated in the United States and Pennsylvania, and then come down to North Carolina. So I’m kind of excited to get this all written up and make all the connections that I need. So kind of fun.

Nicole (2m 5s):
Yeah. That’s interesting about the German connection with a name like Isenhour, it’d be harder to forget, you know, your origins, even though it was several generations removed from the immigrant ancestor on that Isenhour side. Yeah. From what I remember, our immigrant Isenhour was at least three generations removed from the ones you’re working on. Is that right?

Diana (2m 26s):
It is right. So it just makes you wonder how much they kept to that. Or maybe it’s just because they were a group together and Lincoln county, North Carolina, and because they kind of grew up there for a generation or two, and then they moved out together to Missouri, you know, so they were writing back home and saying, come out here, the land is great. There’s this great community. And so it’s just the continuation of the community. Yeah. So obviously I have a lot more research to discover that, but this is the first phase of this project and just kind of putting some of the pieces together.

Nicole (3m 5s):
Now that I look at the tree again, I’m noticing that Martin Isenhour was actually born in Germany and that’s the grandfather of John D Isenhour.

Diana (3m 14s):
So, so not that far back.

Nicole (3m 17s):
Yeah. His father Johannes Hans Isenhour was also born in Germany and then died in Pennsylvania. So he must have brought his whole family over and we don’t really have that much information that we’ve researched on our own for those family members. But maybe now that you’re going back in time from Missouri to North Carolina, maybe we can start to get a little more sources and information about that immigration.

Diana (3m 42s):
Yeah. I definitely want to continue with following this line back and doing our own sourcing on it because this was one of those lines when we first began that had been well researched. And so we looked at it and it looked pretty good. And so we added it to the tree, but as far as examining all the deeds and the probate and all the records and writing reports and bringing it all together, we haven’t done that. So I definitely want to do that on this line.

Nicole (4m 10s):
Yeah. I’m so curious now about that in German community. And it does seem like they definitely moved as a community. So it’s very fascinating.

Diana (4m 19s):
It is. Well for announcements today, we have our fall DNA study group coming up. I can’t believe that we’re talking about fall already, but our spring group was winding down and registration will be starting in June. So if you’re interested in becoming part of our DNA study group, be sure you join our study group email list. And if you’re interested in being a mentor for that fall DNA study group, you can check out the application that’s on FamilyLocket under study groups and as always join our newsletter for special coupons for good deals on our courses. We have things coming up that you’ll want to make sure you know about.

Nicole (5m 2s):
We have a listener spotlight today. I found a little treat. So our listener that we’re spotlighting today is Fiona Coleen. And she said, I can’t recommend the Research Like a Pro podcast and book enough. As a genealogy novice I learned something in every single episode, but I think even seasoned genealogists would also find the information very useful. Nicole and Diana break down difficult concepts and provide so many valuable resources. I love how they relate to one another and bring so much worth to their discussions. They are very detailed oriented and provide a clear roadmap for tackling complex family research projects. I especially enjoy the episodes with Robin when DNA topics are discussed.

Nicole (5m 43s):
I have a question about DNA matches, my paternal DNA matches outnumber my maternal matches almost three to one. Other than luck of who tested, why might this be? Could it have anything to do with the fact that most matches come from a very specific location, for example, in one of the Hebrides Islands and endogamy might be playing a role in identifying shared matches? So thank you Fiona Coleen for this review and for your question, that’s a really good question. I see this quite often with clients and other people’s DNA Matches that I look at that one side of the family sometimes has a lot more matches than the other.

Nicole (6m 23s):
You’re right, sometimes it is just the luck of who has tested. But another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes a family is just very small on one side, and there are not very many descendants, maybe on the maternal side of the, of your family. It could be that some of the people had maybe just two or three children and then they didn’t have any children at all. So then you just have a more limited pool of people who could have taken a DNA test. And so not only is it the luck of those who’ve tested, but the size of the possible pool of candidates to test is small as well. And then you’re right as well with endogamy that if there is endogamy on the paternal side of your family, that you could have a lot more matches on that side, because almost anybody who tests within that endogamous community would show, probably show up as a match to you.

Nicole (7m 16s):
Because with endogamous communities, everyone seems to share DNA with each other, even if it’s just a little bit. So the shared matches aren’t as useful in those situations of endogamy because it doesn’t really break out into separate clusters. It’s just everyone on the paternal side matches everyone else. So that really could be why, if you do have endogamy, although if it is matches from a specific island, it could be just the fact that everyone’s marrying within the island. And so it may not be quite as bad as an endogamous community, but rather just the population segments that everybody who’s lived in that island all have. So maybe it’s a little bit different than maybe like a Jewish community where they all intermarry on purpose because they’re trying to stay within their religious community.

Nicole (8m 3s):
But anyway, those are the reasons I would probably suggest for why your paternal side of the family has more matches than your maternal. Another thing I did think of though, is that sometimes depending on where the side of the family lives in the world, they may not be as prone to take consumer DNA tests, especially in Europe. There is a lot of caution and hesitation for DNA testing outside of the British Isles. It seems like, and even within the United States, there’s areas of the country where it’s just not as big. On my side of the family where I have Utah ancestors, tons of them, tons of those descendants have taken DNA tests from Ancestry, which is headquartered in Utah, so it’s not too surprising.

Nicole (8m 46s):
You know, once people hear about other people taking a DNA test and they want to try it themselves, then it kind of spreads faster. Whereas in maybe another area of the world, they don’t take the test. They don’t hear about it. Others taking it in, they have caution about taking it. So then it just kind of means that less people on that side of the family, wherever they live will be taking tests unless they are contacted and convinced to do it.

Diana (9m 8s):
I think those are really good reasons. And I just had someone share their Y DNA results with me and they were very curious, just really didn’t understand them. And it was very interesting for me to see how many they had: 10 pages on Family Tree DNA with their Y DNA Matches. I’ve never seen that many matches before. And there were several that I could tell that someone was doing some targeted testing because they had maybe six that had the genetic distance of zero. And when I looked at their family trees, they were all the same family tree. So they must have been all bunch of different male cousins in different places on the family tree. So that was just really interesting to see that.

Diana (9m 50s):
And I contrast that to my husband’s line. Your dad’s line. And very few matches. I mean, nothing like that. It skips from like a couple with a genetic distance of one, to genetic distances of four. So just not as many people have been tested that match up such a wide variety in what we get with our results.

Nicole (10m 13s):
Right. I especially see that with Y DNA Matches that it just really depends on who has gone out there and actively recruited Y DNA testers, because it’s just not as big of a database where a lot of people have decided on their own volition to go and get that tested. You know, it’s more expensive and the results don’t give you a breakdown of your ethnicity, like autosomal results do. So sometimes they’re not as appealing. Yeah.

Diana (10m 39s):
Kind of like you have to have somebody suggest that you do it, or you’re working on a project, so it can be different. Well, that leads us into our topic for today, which is DNA. And it’s going to be really a fun episode. So this is all about taking your DNA results on 23andMe, and then using Ancestry’s tree building capabilities to make connections and discoveries. I was really excited when one of our listeners, Fran Shockley, she’s the Family Story Sleuth, sent an email and showed me her entire process of how she does this. And it was so neat that I asked her to write a blog post for us.

Diana (11m 20s):
And today we’re going to talk about this method. So you’ll be able to go read the associated blog posts and see screenshots and remember how this works, but we’re going to talk through it because I think it’s a really beneficial way to work with 23andMe and Ancestry. The neat thing about 23andMe is that they give you a haplo group and X DNA Matches along with your autosomal testing. That is so beneficial and telling whether that DNA match that you’re looking at as on your maternal or your paternal line. And you may not have had any idea that you could work with your matches in this way.

Diana (12m 0s):
But I know in an adoptive project I did a few months ago, it was a match on 23andMe that was an X match that totally broke open that case. The matches on ancestry were okay. You know, it had a basic idea of the family figured out a lot of different things, but kind of was stuck. And it was 23andMe and that X match, that was the big clue that we needed. Fran works primarily with adoptees. And so that is why she developed this method. You know, whether you’re an adoptee or you just want to make sense of your results I think it’s really helpful. So for our examples, all the names we’re using are totally fictional.

Diana (12m 43s):
Fran did screenshots did a whole fictional family tree, so it could be posted online. And so everything we talk about is just a fake family.

Nicole (12m 53s):
I’m grateful she did that because it really is helpful to see exactly how somebody puts it all together and kind of get some ideas for how to use the Ancestry tree tools. So of course, the first thing to do is to create an Ancestry tree. And when working for a client, who’s an adoptee, it’s always best to mark it as private and unsearchable. This is just kind of the way it’s done when doing adoptee research. Then what Fran does is she adds two tags to the client’s profile. The first one is in a relationship tag adopted out of this family just to signify that this tree is the biological family. And then the second is the custom tag that she makes called client, so that she can remember, oh, this is the starting person.

Nicole (13m 39s):
And then you can add whatever tags make sense to you. That’s one of the great things about Ancestry’s my tree tags is that although they provide you some really great suggestions for tags, you can make however many custom tags you want. So then after adding those tax to the client’s profile, Fran will use the haplo groups from 23andMe for the client as the names of the parents. So you don’t know the names when you start, but you do have the haplo group suggestions from the 23andMe results. And you can put those in, and this is helpful, you know, when you’re putting all the puzzle pieces together later to kind of have that there as a clue. So if the haplo group is unknown, like if a female has tested with no father or brother, then you can just use “biological father”

Nicole (14m 27s):
as the name until the father is identified because a woman has no Y DNA and so you wouldn’t get a predicted Y DNA haplogroup from the 23andMe results. So the next step that Fran does is she adds some notes on Ancestry trees. There’s a note section for each profile for each person. So you can open that up and then you can add some details. So she will add the maternal haplogroup, the paternal haplogroup and DNA cousin matches. And if they are from more than one company, she will note which company they’re from.

Diana (15m 3s):
I think it’s really nice that you can put all of your different matches right there, because you might have your DNA results on My Heritage or Family Tree DNA. And this would be a great way to just get some of those closest matches identified. So the next thing that Fran does is add haplogroups as profile pictures. So you can take a screenshot from your notes section of the apple groups, and then you put it in the profile picture for the client. And then that just helps you always see exactly what the haplogroups are for your starting person, for your client. And then you can take a screenshot from the haplogroups of the 23andMe profile and use those as profile pictures for the parents on the ancestry tree.

Diana (15m 49s):
And if you don’t know where to find your haplogroups on 23andMe, you just have to scroll down on your results page. So under ancestry composition, there’s several things you just keep scrolling down and then you can find it and it’ll say, view your report. And when you click on that, it will pull up your specific maternal haplogroup or your paternal haplogroup. So you just have to do a little bit of exploring if you have never looked at that before on 23andMe,

Nicole (16m 24s):
So for example fictional family, Christian Johnson is the client who was adopted and for his profile picture in the example Ancestry tree, it says maternal H1, paternal R-L 21. And then for his parents, since their names are unknown at this point, the names of the parents are just the haplogroup. So Christian Johnson’s father is R-L 21 and his mother is H1 and the profile pictures are those haplogroups.

Diana (16m 55s):
Yeah. And having the visual I think is really helpful. And whenever you’re clicking around in the tree, like can always come back to that and find that visual, which is going to be very important.

Nicole (17m 7s):
Yeah. The next thing to look at is the 23andMe predictive tree. This is created using the algorithm that 23andMe came up with and they use shared matches to kind of put different branches of close family members together, but shows the primary test taker and their closest matches and tries to put them in the right place. It’s a really helpful tool because it helps sort out the DNA matches automatically. It’s like a really basic clustering, you know, your top 10 or 20 matches into little groups. For our example, with Christian Johnson, the predictive tree assigned Jessica Wallace as a first cousin to Christian.

Nicole (17m 47s):
And so that’s a good place to start. And then you can start with the closest DNA match on the 23andMe tree and add that person to your Ancestry tree now as a floating branch. And we’ve talked about adding people to your Ancestry tree as a floating branch before, but it’s just basically floating branch means that they are in your tree, but they’re not connected to anyone yet, because of course, in an adoptee case, we wouldn’t know how Jessica Wallace lines up. We don’t know if she’s on the maternal side or paternal side. All we know is that she is estimated to be a first cousin and the predictive tree doesn’t tell you maternal or paternal.

Nicole (18m 29s):
It just has question marks for the parents and the grandparents and the great-grandparents. And so it just shows you that, like these three DNA matches all go back to the same great grandparents probably. And so you can kind of see that they’re related to each other and it kind of helps you get those groups. So when you really don’t know anything, adding somebody to your Ancestry tree as a floating branch is a way to kind of get started on figuring out how they could link up to the adoptee client.

Diana (18m 58s):
Right. And we as floating branches, when we’re just trying to figure out how our DNA Matches are connected to us as well. So there’s two ways to do this. You can add them as any kind of a relative, son, daughter, parent, to an existing person in your tree, even though, you know, it’s not the right relationship, then you just go to edit family relationships and delete the relationship that it was not right. And then they just become this person floating out there in your family tree. You don’t delete them. You just delete the relationship or alternately you can go to the search tab at the top of the Ancestry screen and find the person in the Ancestry database, just using search and add them as a new person to your tree.

Diana (19m 44s):
So maybe the person has listed a grandparent on their family tree, or you figured out a grandparent, you could go find them in the database as part of a record, and then add them to your tree that way. So there’s different ways you can do that. And you can do this with any DNA match, but just remember that if you are sharing smaller numbers of centimorgans, it might be more difficult to figure out the common ancestor and to figure out the connection. So typically with an adoptee case, you start with your largest matches because it will be more likely you can find a common ancestor. You know, it’s really nice if you have something like four or 500 centimorgans you wouldn’t start with the matches that are 10 centimorgans, because those are a lot more difficult to figure out.

Diana (20m 38s):
You next would tag the match with two custom tags. So you’ve created this floating branch of a DNA match, and now you’re going to give them some custom tags. And so the first one is going to be which DNA testing company you got them from. So you, them from 23andMe you’d put, use that as a tag, or if you got them from MyHeritage, you know, wherever, but we are talking about 23andMe. So let’s just say, we’ll add that. And then the second tag identifies the associated match. So in this case study that we’re doing, we have added Jessica Wallace as a floating branch to the Ancestry tree.

Diana (21m 22s):
And then we would add 23andMe, and then would add that she is a match to Christian Johnson, who is the starting point of this research.

Nicole (21m 32s):
Yeah. What a great use of the custom tags. I really like the tag for adding what company the matches from. There’s typically several matches from different companies that are useful and adoptive cases. So it’s nice to see that, right? When you look at the profile, this person is from 23andMe, and you can easily get back to their profile wherever they are. And how interesting that sometimes there’s more than one adoptee in a family. I haven’t done a case like that before, but if you do have that, of course would make sense to put the tag of the person who they matched to. And I can see that being useful when you are using multiple test takers for any kind of project where you have, like, I have about 10 kits that I am able to view and manage some of them at Ancestry for my Dyer project.

Nicole (22m 18s):
And so adding some matches as floating branches, or just adding those matches to the tree, it would be nice to put a tag for who they match to. I really like that idea.

Diana (22m 28s):
I was thinking the exact same thing. We have these people that have shared their match list with us, right? And so I’m always going back and looking at their shared match list and remembering how much better just to put it as a tag on the DNA match,

Nicole (22m 40s):
Right? And we typically will keep track of that in air table, but when you’re adding them to your tree, that’s a really good way to visually see it in your tree too. It is, especially those important matches that are really key in the conclusion. Another thing that you can add to the matches that you add as a floating branch are some notes. So opening that note section for the person’s profile, you can add the predicted relationship and the name of the person who they’re matching, and we can put the percent of DNA shared or the centimorgans whichever one you prefer. And then it’s good to put whether or not they’re sharing on the X chromosome.

Nicole (23m 23s):
That’s an important clue from 23andMe that you can use. And then you can also put that person’s maternal haplogroup and paternal haplogroup, and these clues can really help you figure out which side of the family they’re on maternal or paternal. So for our example of Jessica Wallace, we have her predicted as a first cousin, and this is all in the notes. And the shared DNA is 12.37%, 923 Centimorgans sharing on the X with the maternal haplogroup of H1. So now that we have those notes, we can then take a screenshot of that first part of the notes and use that as the profile picture. And I really think it’s cool that Fran does this.

Nicole (24m 4s):
It gives you kind of that pertinent DNA information at a glance so that you can quickly remember, even if you’re looking at the tree in a tree view, the clues that led you to come to the conclusion you came to, just kind of like how we make the diagrams on lucid chart. And we like to have that information just right there at a glance in the person’s box. Same kind of idea. Another thing you can add in the notes section is other information from 23andMe like family surnames or cousin matches that are in common. So going back to Jessica Wallace, she had four family surnames on her profile at 23andMe, she had Wallace Jones, Cline and Sumpter, and then some of the DNA Matches in common between Jessica and Christian.

Nicole (24m 53s):
We have a couple of first cousins. We have Tyler Smith and then we have a second cousin, Sam Cline, RV, Shirley Bates and then we have a couple of third cousins, Nancy, Everly, and Joseph Smith. So it’s kind of nice how Fran has organized these shared matches and a little list here by what level of cousin they’re predicted to be. So the, in the notes for Jessica, you can quickly see some of her most pertinent, close, shared matches.

Diana (25m 23s):
Yeah. I love using the notes. That is brilliant. Well, here’s another really brilliant idea. And that is getting back to the haplogroups. So now that we’ve got Jessica created, we’ve got our DNA match profile created. Now we can create a profile for her parents using haplo groups. So on 23andMe, you can go to any of your matches and then you can click on the match. And then again, as you scroll down, you can see the haplogroups of your matches. Then you would screenshot those and use those as in the appropriate parental spaces as their profile pictures.

Diana (26m 6s):
So your DNA match needs to have shared their DNA with you on 23andMe. So in looking at my own results, if someone has not shared with me, I cannot see that, but I have a first cousin who has shared, and I can see her maternal haplogroup. And of course there would not be a paternal haplogroup for a female, but I could take her maternal haplogroup, which should match mine because we’re on the same female line and that would be, become her profile picture. So that is really neat. And so if you do have your ancestry or your DNA on 23andMe you’ll want to contact each one of those close matches and request that they share with you so you’ll be able to use the information.

Diana (26m 55s):
So, you continue doing this, continue adding cousin matches as floating branches or as confirmed relatives, because you can also use your traditional genealogy and start attaching the hints that Ancestry will give you and start figuring out some of the tree, and then you can start making connections. So in our example, Fran has put in another first cousin by the name of Tyler and they have the same haplogroup of H1. And so this would show that they would be related through their mothers. So remembering that Christian is the adoptee, he is also their first cousin and they all share on the X chromosome and they all share the same maternal haplogroup.

Diana (27m 43s):
So right away with these cousins we’re making some connections and identifying who a common ancestor would be. And so it stands to reason that there is another sister or sisters, who could be Christian’s mother, that we would have three sisters. And in this case, there is one other sister Nina who died at the age of 16 on the same day that Christian was born, which you would find out through documentary evidence. So there’s a really high probability based on the documents and on the DNA that Nina would be Christian’s mother. But now we can add Christian to this tree by merging his unknown mother with Nina Jones.

Diana (28m 27s):
You know, this example is a little overly simplified as what Fran says, because real life adoptive cases are rarely that straightforward. Usually there’s a lot more work that goes into it and identifying that common ancestor’s more complex and time-consuming, but this gives you tools. So when you start with your closest match and do those floating branches at the tags, building the tree, as you do this, it starts bringing the picture together. And so it will help you to identify a common ancestor. And just having that genetic line spelled out on the screen through those screenshots makes it so much easier to visualize the potential relationships.

Diana (29m 10s):
So those customized tags and the notes and the profile pictures using the haplogroups, it’s brilliant, a great way to work with your DNA.

Nicole (29m 17s):
Agreed. That’s a really good example. I like simplified examples where it all just comes together and you figure it out, but it is really helpful. Make sure you look at Fran’s blog post to see the visual clues that she uses with the screenshots of the haplogroups and the screenshots at the notes, with the clues, for each match. It’s nice to be able to see that Tyler Smith shares on the X and his mother is H1 and the same with Jessica, you know, that they’re sharing on the X and the mother is H1. And then you have all the sisters, Nina Jones, Sarah Jones, and Beverly Jones with the H1 as their profile picture. So it’s very visual.

Nicole (29m 57s):
It’s really nice to kind of see it like that and kind of see the clues that you’re using to piece the family together when you’ve kind of put it all together to confirm, okay, this is why I put them together like this. And so this fits really well. So yeah, I’m excited for all of the people out there who do adopt the research to check it out and see how Fran organizes her Ancestry trees and uses that data from 23andMe that we can use to help us put the puzzle pieces together when we’re doing these adoptee cases.

Diana (30m 36s):
Right. And sometimes the adoptee case, isn’t like the first-generation sometimes it’s an adopted grandparent or an adoptive parent, or just an unknown, pretty close relative. And of course the same method could work really well for that as well. So really fun to think of new ways to use the information we have to help us make better discoveries.

Nicole (30m 55s):
All right. Everybody be sure to send us in a review or a DNA question or any question, because we really enjoy talking about them. That was fun to have one today. So send those into us by email or in review.

Diana (31m 10s):
All right. Well, thanks everyone. Have a great week.

Nicole (31m 14s):
Bye-bye. By. 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 e-course 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.