RLP 158: RLP with DNA eCourse Part 1

Nicole (46s):
Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (51s):
Hey, I’m doing great. How about you?

Diana (54s):
I am doing well.

Nicole (56s):
What have you been working on or reading?

Diana (58s):
Well, I’m finishing up the book that I’ve been reading for several months. It takes me a while cause I just read two or three pages a day. It’s pretty full of information. So I take my time, but it’s the history of the Ozarks Volume One by Brooks Blevins. And this very last chapter is about the society. And this is all about the time period, maybe 1800 to 1860. It’s the antebellum period before the civil war. And this last little bit has been really fascinating because it’s about schools and talk about how they had something called subscription schools, where people would pay a dollar a month to send their children to the school.

Diana (1m 38s):
And it was basically whoever decided they’d set up a little school and be the teacher. So it’s been kind of fun to think about how the educational system was so different. Back then, there was no state mandated educational system. It was more of a business. You want to make some money, you can set up a little school and sometimes they’d have some sponsors, but that’s been kind of fun.

Nicole (1m 60s):
Huh? That seems almost more fun than working for the, the state. You know, if you could set up your own business for a school, that’s like what we do, I guess we have our own little class.

Diana (2m 13s):
Yeah. I kinda like not being mandated. I’ve, when I taught fourth grade and, and you taught junior high and you do have those specifics and it was not as fun. It was more fun to create your own curriculum and be creative than to do what you were told to do.

Nicole (2m 29s):
That’s funny. I was really lucky when I taught at school and my history classes or middle school, I had three levels, six, seventh and eighth, and it was a charter school. So I kind of looked at what the state of Arizona wanted us to teach. But then the charter school had like their own plan for what each grade had. And it didn’t always match up with this, the state’s guidance. So I asked the principal and they just gave me a lot of leeway to kind of do whatever I thought was best. So I really enjoyed my teaching experience with that charter school.

Diana (2m 58s):
Yeah. Anytime you can be creative and I know of make up your own curriculum based on the needs of the students and your background and what seems relevant at the time. I think we have a really fun experience.

Nicole (3m 11s):
Yeah. That reminds me. I finished reading the book The Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate and the present day storyline was about a teacher who was in Louisiana trying to teach high school English. And she had brought in all of this local history and basically a genealogical research on the student’s ancestors’ and it was really neat. It was just a fun idea to think about teaching students, to dive into their own personal and local history too. Right. And learn the skills they need to. And that was something we did and my middle school history class as well. So I could really connect with that story.

Diana (3m 43s):
That’s right. I love that part of the book because some of those kids were really struggling with school. They just didn’t want to go to school. They didn’t want to pay attention, but once they started connecting to their own family’s history, it completely changed them. And that is fictional. But I think it’s real life application that you saw when you were working with students and their family history. Absolutely.

Nicole (4m 6s):
It’s really exciting as a student to receive a project where you’re actually doing something real meaningful. And, and that’s what I like about local and family history, it’s that you’re actually like discovering new things. You’re actually doing history and not just reading about what some other historian has found.

Diana (4m 24s):
Right.

Nicole (4m 25s):
So that’s fun. So let’s do some announcements. We have our study group for the fall of 2021 it’s Research Like a Pro with DNA and registration is ongoing. It might be getting close to being full. At this point, we are recording this in advance. So we don’t know if the study group is full, be sure to email us, to get on our waiting list. You can email me at Nicole@FamilyLocket.com. And if anyone has to drop out, for any reason, usually happens one or two people have something come up, then we can get you in. So make sure you get on the waiting list. We’re always looking for more peer group leaders. So if you’re interested in that, look at our application on our website for the study group.

Nicole (5m 6s):
And then if you can’t make it for this fall study group, we’ll look forward to seeing you hopefully, and our next study group in the spring. We have two every year. Today, we have a fun giveaway from Genealogical Publishing Company. Because today we’re talking about DNA, we’re going to be giving away a quick sheet about Genetic Genealogy by Angie Bush. It’s the second edition that she came out with in 2019, that’s called Genealogy at a Glance Genetic Genealogy Basics. So if you comment on this blog post that’s associated with episode 158 of Research Like a Pro, then you’ll be entered into a drawing to be chosen as the winter of that quick sheet.

Diana (5m 46s):
That’s so fun that our friends at Genealogical Publishing are providing that for us. Well, let’s dive into our topic. We are here with a guest. Our guest is Allison, and she is a member of our Research Like a Pro with DNA online course. And she’s also done our regular Research Like a Pro course and was a peer group leader for our last Research Like a Pro study group. And so we thought she’d be perfect to come on and talk about her experience with the course and DNA. So Allison, just tell us a little bit about yourself and why you are really interested in genealogy and Research Like a Pro experienced all that good stuff.

Allison (6m 31s):
All right. Well, I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So I have been doing genealogy for about 10 years. I started with my mom and I started doing it as a hobby and as time went on, I kind of found myself doing it for all my spare time. So I decided to figure out how to do it a little bit more professionally. So that’s when I came across Research Like a Pro the first time that was a few years ago and I took your e-course and it really boosted my confidence. And it actually led me to applying for the study group for level one for ICAPGEN. And I am currently working on my four generation project.

Allison (7m 12s):
And as I’ve been expanding my education in genealogy, I kept coming across Genetic Genealogy and I kind of had no idea how to approach it. So when I heard about the Research Like a Pro with DNA e-course I was really excited because I felt, I knew the Research Like a Pro process and I was comfortable with it. And so I knew that if I could add DNA with that, that would increase my skills and increase my evidence for my different projects.

Diana (7m 39s):
Oh, absolutely. And I think it’s so fun that you started with your mom. So you guys are just very similar to Nicole and me and doing this together, which is always really fun.

Nicole (7m 50s):
So Allison has been writing some fun blog posts for us about her experience as she does the Research Like a Pro with DNA course. So we thought we would talk about that today and the podcast and do a couple of episodes about it, just so that we can have some more chances to talk about incorporating DNA evidence into a project. So Allison, and tell us about your project and the first step, which is to analyze your pedigree and figure out some options for your DNA.

Allison (8m 19s):
Yeah. So in the course, you guys explain that you think autosomal DNA, you can only really go back six to eight generations. And that was the DNA I had access to for the project I’m using my mother-in-law’s DNA. Her name is Leslie. So I’ve been using her family tree for my level one project for ICAPGEN. And I started looking at some of the problems I was facing in this project and thought about how DNA could help me overcome them. So one of the problems I thought about was I had through traditional research decided that Mary Ella Parker, who is Leslie’s grandmother and was the daughter of William Edward Parker.

Allison (8m 59s):
But I was talking with some cousins while we were exchanging information and they said, oh no, Mary was the son of Zilla, William and Zilla were married, Mary is the daughter of Zillow’s first husband, Mr. Barnes, nobody knows his name. All we know that his last name was Barnes’. And I was like, well, that doesn’t track at all. So I thought that DNA could maybe help me. Well, I wanted it to prove my point, but maybe disprove my point that she was either Mr. Barnes daughter or William Parker’s daughter. And then the other question I thought about was Zilla, so Leslie’s great, great grandmother. She is a Beck and that has been shown pretty thoroughly in traditional research, but I found this one record that totally threw me off that has her and her siblings names being changed from Lewis to Beck.

Allison (9m 49s):
So Zilla Lewis has been changed as Zilla Beck, and I was like, wah, wah. So I thought that DNA could maybe help me figure out who this Lewis connection is. And if she biologically a Lewis, was she adopted, things like that.

Nicole (10m 2s):
Oh, these are both excellent questions for utilizing DNA evidence because both of them, you are trying to find a biological parent. And that’s what DNA is really good at helping us do. Cool.

Diana (10m 16s):
Well, and I think it’s so interesting that you came up with these questions from doing the research for your four generation project, because I know when I did my project, I dug so much deeper into the records and I had previously, and that is what happens, isn’t it. You dig in there and then you come up with all these extra questions about the research. So after you had these two possibilities, the next step is assessing your close matches. So you have to get started with actually looking at the DNA. So how did that work for you?

Allison (10m 49s):
So not too many close relatives of Leslie have tested. So her father had tested, which was nice because this is on her paternal line. So I was able to sort the matches immediately into her paternal matches. And then her aunt had tested from her mom’s side. So those were the only names that we had recognized looking at together with working with her dad. I was able to identify some of the other ones like as his cousins. So I was able to sort out those first few matches pretty easily. And then I really relied on Thrulines to kind of give me hints as to the rest. And you guys talked in the course, but how Thrulines does not, you can’t always trust it.

Allison (11m 32s):
But I went through the Thrulines and followed the ones that made sense and was able to find a good chunk of matches that were related to the Parkers and the Becks. And I was able to sort them into, okay I know that these are biologically from the first husband from the Barnes. These are biologically from the Parkers, and then these are the Beck descendants. So I put that all in my AirTable. And then what I did was I started putting everything in AirTable through the, in common with, so I would go to the shared matches on Ancestry and then I would sort them all together. And that kind of gave me a good idea of what matches I was working with.

Diana (12m 13s):
Oh, it sounds like you had a great system. I’m glad you mentioned Thrulines because I think so many of our listeners wonder what to do with their Thrulines and you really have to have this specific project. You have to focus in on something. So that’s great. You’re able to use that to sort your matches initially and get those, those good groups going. So

Nicole (12m 37s):
I was intrigued when you mentioned that you did find some descendants of the Barnes father and some that you could sort to the Parker side. So that’s interesting. Do you remember like how many children Mr. Barnes and Zilla had?

Allison (12m 52s):
Yeah, so traditionally we have found that they had two children, but only one of them seems to have had children of her own. So daughter and a son, what actually happened, and I’m not, this is all indirect evidence. So we’re getting into my fourth-generation report. But Sarah Barnes is a daughter between Mr. Barnes and Zilla and she died young, leaving about three children. And those children were actually adopted by William and Zilla. So, and the records, they have the last name Parker, but through family records, it said, oh, no, these are Barnes. So the cousin that I talked to said, oh no, Mary Ella is actually one of those Barnes children.

Allison (13m 32s):
So that’s kind of what I’m trying to sort out.

Nicole (13m 35s):
Wow. That’s fascinating. So the grandparents adopted them. Yeah. The grandmother and her new husband. Huh? Yeah. You know, it’s interesting how many times I wonder this happens in the past that we just don’t even notice or know, or realize ’cause we just don’t have enough information, but there is a case in my own family that I’ve seen before, where I wonder it was during the civil war time and the father I think died in the war, and I don’t know what happened to the mother, but I do see the little grandchildren living with their grandmother in 1870. You don’t have relationships on that census. So it’s just hard to know who’s who, but you can discuss with that indirect evidence and try to put it all together,

Allison (14m 12s):
And that’s exactly what’s happened here is a Mr. Barnes disappears around 1865. So right around the civil war.

Nicole (14m 20s):
Yeah. That’s a hard time for the Southern states. Is this in the south?

Allison (14m 24s):
Yeah. It’s Florida and Alabama. They kind of switched between the two states.

Nicole (14m 28s):
It sounds like you had already started doing some clustering just by using Thrulines and shared matches. So the next step that we encourage people in the course to do is to do a formal clustering of the matches and kind of practice with that. So tell us about your experience with clustering.

Allison (14m 45s):
Yeah. So I had been trying to work on clustering, but as I got to this point, I said, oh, I can probably do this a little. And that’s actually something if I were to go back, I think I would start with clustering before I went through all that in common with, because I think it would’ve made things a little easier, but I did the Leeds method because I really like how kind of straightforward that method is. And it gives you a really clean look at your matches. And what I found was five groups came up instead of the expected four. So on a Diana Leeds website, she explains that this is most likely to pedigree collapse within the family. And that kind of made sense with what I was seeing, because I would go through every match that I had figured out a common ancestor with And I would give them a colored dot for like William and Zilla were orange or the Becks were yellow, things like that.

Allison (15m 38s):
And I noticed that for the Deece family, which is on align for my mother-in-law, that I wasn’t really researching, they were showing up in all of these clusters. So I was noticing, okay, the Deeces have married in to multiple of these groups. So I’m going to have to sort that out as I go through this research.

Nicole (15m 58s):
Yeah. That’s so common with Southern research. We have seen that in my mom’s DNA as well, where there’s a marriage between the Frazier side and the Briscoe side, and then siblings married siblings. So there’s like double cousins there. And so they end up being two dots, which is nice because, and ancestry, you can give people both dots and that always tips me off. This is like a double cousin here. Yeah.

Allison (16m 23s):
And that’s been so nice because as I look at a match, I can just look at shared matches. And if I see the little pink dot, which means the Deece is there, I can say, okay, I need to be looking for multiple recent common ancestors for these people. Or maybe I can try and find a match that has a little bit less of the endogamy going on.

Nicole (16m 41s):
It’s always nice. If you can just not use those ones that didn’t, you know, have multiple common ancestors.

Diana (16m 49s):
Yeah. Those are tricky. And in the south, we have to be always aware of that. I just wonder how many more I haven’t recognized or haven’t identified because of the ones that you’ve talked about. And Nicole, they’re not that far back. And so we knew about those sisters and brothers marrying, but have a feeling we have a lot more situations like that further back that we just haven’t discovered yet.

Nicole (17m 12s):
Yes. I think I’m finding some more extra connections between the Harris’s and the Welch’s. So that’s the thing that I’m like wondering, huh?

Diana (17m 21s):
Yeah. Well, and I think anytime they’re in the same location, that percentage of that’s going to go up, that they inter-married. So Allison, I love seeing your chart. Allison shared in her blog post her Leeds methods chart. And I agree that it is so fun because it is clean and I love the colors. And I think it’s nice if you can use the color dot system to correlate with the colors on the Leeds method so that when you go and look at it back and forth, it’s really clear what’s going on, but what was your next step? You talked a little bit about AirTable, and this is where, in the process, we encourage you to start making some connections and reaching out and logging notes and the correspondence logs.

Diana (18m 4s):
So how did that work for you?

Allison (18m 6s):
So I went through and I reached out to quite a few cousins. Pretty much anyone I had put in my AirTable I tried to send a message and I didn’t get a lot of responses, but it was very fun, their responses I did get. A lot of times I find that the people that respond are the people that are into genealogy. So they’re excited to hear about what you learned about the family, and then they have things to share with you. So we had a lot of fun doing that. I was actually able to just get some quick questions answered. Like one of my questions was Mary Ella Parker who married and she died in 1950, but I’ve never seen a picture of her. And I thought, well, I should have a picture of her.

Allison (18m 46s):
She died in 1950, but reaching out to some cousins, they explained that she wasn’t really close to our side of the family because she went and lived with her daughter Varella up and down in south Florida. So they didn’t really get to know her. I’m like, okay, well maybe if I find Varella’s descendants, I would be able to find some pictures. And then some people said that we are related to the Parkers, like Bonnie Parker from Bonnie and Clyde. That was the story that they always had. So that was a fun story to hear about. I think one of my favorites was kind of helping someone figure out where they came from. So I was talking to this one cousin and he knew three of his great grandparents for sure.

Allison (19m 27s):
But one of them, he didn’t know. He said, all I know is my father’s mother’s maiden name was either Beck or Hit. And I don’t know where she was born, but I know that she had ancestors in Florida and she had a relative in Center whose last name was Dockings. And because I’d been doing so much research on this family for my four generation project, well, first off I knew that Beck was one of my last names. I knew we were from Florida. And I knew that one of the Beck sisters had moved to Center, Texas and married a Dockens. So I actually was able to send him everything I had. And because I had taken a research log for that research, and I was actually able to find that his grandpa was the informants on her death certificate.

Allison (20m 9s):
So it was very exciting to just make those connections. And it kind of reminds you that when you’re working with all these people that you’re working with people and people’s ancestors, it was just really fun.

Diana (20m 20s):
I love that. Sometimes we see those matches and they’re just the name to us, but when we start communicating with them, yeah, you do realize, oh, these are our relatives and their people that have family want to know about their family too. So that’s great. I love that. I love that you’re researching in the south where we have so much family and research also, it’s so fun. We have Parker relatives and [set and, or] relatives I think there or collateral relatives. So we might be related somehow

Allison (20m 47s):
I run into the Dyers all of the time, all of the time.

Diana (20m 54s):
Well, anybody with Southern ancestry, I always think, well, we’re probably are connected back sooner or later. That’s great. And I think you probably would agree with me that being able to have a place to track that correspondence besides just the messaging systems is so nice. Especially when you start emailing or you’re and other databases not having one central location is really helpful.

Allison (21m 17s):
Absolutely. Especially as I got later on in the project and I would like come across the back and say, oh, I need to message these people and I’d go back and see, I already did. And so that was nice because it helped me maybe if I did want to message them again, at least not send my same template and kind of look silly.

Diana (21m 35s):
And I have been guilty of doing that and like, dang it. Why did I write that on my messaging system? So yeah, we learned these lessons, don’t we?

Nicole (21m 46s):
Yeah. And I have done that too, or I thought, oh, I’m going to message them, but let me check my correspondence log. Oh yeah, I already messaged them once. So then I can tweak my template a little bit to say like, oh, I messaged you a couple of months ago, but just wondering blah, blah, blah. And sometimes it takes two or three messages and I’ll finally get a response. And they’re like, oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see those messages. And I wish Ancestry would be better about showing people, their messages. I think their emails just go to spam or something.

Allison (22m 13s):
Yeah. I found it was actually nice. If I had found a DNA match on multiple of the websites. If I sent them a match through the different websites, you kind of learned which one they used more because they wouldn’t respond through Ancestry, but maybe they would respond through the email that was on Family Tree or something like that. So that’s been useful for me to use the different websites as well.

Nicole (22m 38s):
What a great tip. Thank you. So the next step in the process of Research Like a Pro with DNA is to kind of take some of these matches that you’ve put into your AirTable log, in correspondence log, and begin making a diagram with them to show descent from the common ancestors. So the first diagram is supposed to be just kinda some of the close matches in the DNA results. So tell us about your experience.

Allison (23m 7s):
I kind of knew I wanted to deal on the Sutton Parker backline. So I decided to focus on those. So I started my Lucidchart by making all the Sutton descendants, so everything, and I knew that descended from Mary Ella. And then I went to the Parker and the Barnes. And if you include all of those descendants, there was 13 kids with that. So by the end, I had this massive chart and then I had to go to the Becks and the Becks also had 13 kids. So I started getting a little overwhelmed. I was like, I’m going to spend my life charting these people. And that’s kind of when I realized, oh, I need to focus my family a little bit and I need to focus on what generation I want to work on at this point, because as I put it all out on Lucidchart, it was definitely becoming massive and it was helping me see the connections, but I didn’t want it to get too overwhelming for me, if that makes sense.

Nicole (24m 5s):
Absolutely. I think those diagrams, whether we use Lucidchart or diagrams.net or a scalpel or whatever you like to use, they can just become really large. And it is great to be able to zoom in and do them out. But once, you know, kind of your focus objective, it’s nice to be able to just add the matches with that or relevant to your project at that time.

Allison (24m 25s):
Right. And as I’ve gone forward in the project, I actually have added some of those Beck descendants to my chart, but I’ve used different pages just for my brain. That’s what works better is just being able to isolate what I’m working on. And instead of seeing it all in one big thing,

Nicole (24m 44s):
Yes, that’s a really great feature that I didn’t know about at first. But when I did learn about the multiple pages within Lucidchart, it was wonderful. It’s so nice to be able to just duplicate one page, delete out what you don’t need and put in what you do need and just focus on a subgroup or use it to make all the names private so you can share it. It’s just nice to have different pages within your diagram.

Diana (25m 8s):
So did you work a little bit in your Ancestry tree as well as you were discovering these matches and connecting things

Allison (25m 15s):
I did. And one of the reasons I did that was to make sure that these connections on Thrulines were making sense with traditional research. So I made a private DNA tree that way I could put in a hypothesis and not mess up anyone else’s work. And then also I could put in the living people and linked to their DNA tree, which was really nice. So yeah, I was able to build out the tree and I was also able to focus the tree specifically on this project just to help me sort it all out. And that was really nice as I got into the research phase, because then I could just look up the people in my tree and see, okay, what records or they’re approving this relationship.

Diana (25m 56s):
Yeah. It’s nice to be able to use those in tandem, your diagram, your AirTable log and your tree on Ancestry, or if you’re doing a tree somewhere else, you know, on Wiki tree or within your own Genealogy program or MyHeritage, it’s just nice to have some different ways to visualize and keep track of the information. So as you’re getting going here, you mentioned that you really were starting to find a need to focus in. So I’m guessing you needed to actually choose your project and create your objective. So what did you decide to do?

Allison (26m 33s):
That’s exactly where I was, because I just kind of find myself charting and charting and I said, okay, I need to decide what I’m doing. I realized it would probably make sense to focus on the generation closer than trying to jump a few generations back, especially since this was my first time working with DNA. So I decided to focus on figuring out who Mary Ella’s biological father was. And then I read through the lesson, read through a couple of examples and I wrote out an objective, and my objective reads; the objective of this research project is to use DNA and genealogical records to determine the biological father of Mary Ella Parker born on 22nd of August, 1877 in Baldwin county, Alabama, Mary Ella died on 28, December of 1950 in Columbus, Muscogee, Georgia.

Allison (27m 23s):
And that test taker is three generations from the research subject and autosomal DNA will be applicable. However, third to fourth cousins may not share very much DNA, which can make verifying the exact relationship difficult. The community of the research subject also experienced pedigree collapse so there may be multiple common ancestors with the test taker. Mitochondrial DNA is not useful in this case, it is not an unbroken maternal line and Y-DNA, it’s not useful in this case as it is not an unbroken paternal line.

Diana (27m 52s):
And that’s a really informative that the objective, I like how you have your key identifiers in their, how you talk a little bit about the specific DNA that you’re using and that this will actually be and approachable project because it’s within those generations. So good job in writing your objective telling us exactly what’s going to happen in this project. Was it difficult to create that objective?

Allison (28m 15s):
It definitely took a little bit of trial and error. I’m actually going through the course with my mom, which is fun because we’re able to peer review each other’s work. So we sent each other’s objectives back and forth and we were able to say, oh, I like how you put this, or maybe you could add this. So we, as you can see, we focused on adding the limitations of DNA, kind of why we chose to exactly what we were doing.

Diana (28m 39s):
Oh, well, I love that. I have heard of, of several of our course members doing that, joining with a friend and then helping each other through it. So I think that’s such a great idea.

Allison (28m 51s):
Yeah, it’s been really helpful. It also keeps us on track with getting the e-course done

Nicole (28m 58s):
Well. We have some accountability there it’s really useful. Well, that was fun to hear all about the first steps in your project. And I can’t wait to find out what you determined after you’re done doing the research. We’ll have to talk again and see what the next steps are. And I look forward to talking with you again or no.

Allison (29m 14s):
Thanks. Thank you for having me today.

Diana (29m 16s):
Thanks for listening everyone. And we will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (29m 17s):
Bye-bye. 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.