RLP 163: Tracing 19th Century Germans Part 4

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 163, Tracing 19th century Germans part four.

Nicole (45s):
Hi everyone. And welcome to Research Like a Pro.

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

Nicole (51s):
Well, I am excited to talk about DNA today, so I thought I would tell you guys some of the fun things I learned in my IGHR course last week about ethnicity, since we’ll touch on that today. I don’t know if you guys have heard, but FamilyTreeDNA has said that they’re coming out with a new chromosome painter that will have a chromosome painting of your, my origins populations. And so that’s exciting because that’s one of the really unique tools that 23andMe has had their ancestry composition painting. So it’ll be nice to have that in another database as well at FamilyTreeDNA. So we’re looking forward to that and know Paul Woodbury. He gave usa whole lecture on how he used that 23andMe chromosome ancestry composition painting to kind of help him narrow down some really important clues for an African-American research project.

Nicole (1m 42s):
So it was cool to see it in action.

Diana (1m 44s):
Oh, I would have loved to have seen that lecture sounds great. And Paul is a really good teacher, but I also love that 23andMe tool. And I have used that for some research projects. So it’s exciting that FamilyTreeDNA is going to have one as well. So I’ve also been doing a little DNA stuff. I’m getting ready for a presentation as part of the IGHS big conference in September. And they asked me to teach a class on pedigree triangulation. So that’s really fun. You know, we have a whole section in our new book Research Like a Pro with DNA about pedigree triangulation, and I use that and two or three of my projects.

Diana (2m 24s):
So anyway, it was fun putting together the syllabus and now I get to put together the presentation. So it’s kind of been fun to return to some DNA stuff.

Nicole (2m 32s):
Welcome back to Heidi Mathis. She’s going to be talking with us today about using DNA to help us with our German research. Hi, Heidi.

Diana (2m 39s):
Good to be back.

Nicole (2m 41s):
So let’s jump right in. What do we need to think about when we are going to start researching recent German ancestors when it comes to using DNA? And maybe we should define what we mean by recent?

Heidi Mathis (2m 55s):
Yeah. So with autosomal DNA, we’re looking at anywhere the past five or six generations just to be safe. And when we’re using with German DNA, DNA has obviously been an amazing tool that helps us solve our genealogical brick walls. And that last episode, we talked about how I could use it for my ancestor, Burkhart Schlag, and couldn’t find his church records, but I could find records of his nieces and nephews and I, and the fact that my dad and my aunt had pretty good connections with those nieces and nephews gave him the confidence that there was a family connection. And so, you know, you, you might be able to use that with some of your German ancestors, but in general, Germans have an advantage with church records and other documentary evidence.

Heidi Mathis (3m 39s):
But I have found that you’re at somewhat of a disadvantage with German ancestors when it comes to using ethnicity and DNA. There’s just a lot less people of German ancestry taking DNA tests I have, I’ve noticed, a recent German ancestry. For instance, my dad who has seven great-grandparents, who were of recent German ancestry in, at Ancestry as 300 4th, cousins or closer. So I think that’s a lot fewer than a lot of people. So some of the reasons why there are fewer Germans taking tests is that Germany itself has strong privacy laws and that some German families had smaller families starting in the latter half of the 1800s.

Heidi Mathis (4m 21s):
And so just your total pool of people is maybe a little smaller. I think that one exciting thing is that you might find more German cousins on MyHeritage because I think there’s more Europeans on there. And the other thing that’s really tough about using DNA with Germans is that German DNA does not seem to be very distinct. And I’m going to be contrasting that with, with Irish DNA where Irish DNA does seem very distinct. And part of the reason for that is that Ireland is isolated on this island for hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of years, whereas Germans were in the middle of a continent, surrounded by neighbors and all kinds of mixing that went on there.

Heidi Mathis (5m 5s):
And so I think that accounts for why German DNA seems a little less distinct. So one of the things I hypothesized in my blog post was just kind of thinking about how could you compare a more genetic genetically isolated place to a less isolated place and how you could think about that when you’re, when you’re using DNA with your ancestors.

Nicole (5m 29s):
And that’s such a good consideration, you know, there’s several things that would make DNA from Ireland different than DNA from mainland Europe and different countries. Changing boundaries is just one of them. But also the fact that Ireland is an island and that there’s a lot of population segments that people just have because they lived in Ireland and that kind of thing too. Okay.

Heidi Mathis (5m 49s):
Absolutely. And if you do Irish work, you, you definitely run into those segments that you’re sharing with a lot of people who you probably do not have a recent common ancestor with, but who are all from the same part of Ireland?

Diana (6m 3s):
Yeah. Well, ethnicity estimates, I think we have to remember as an evolving science and as we’ve all noticed that our estimates change, it’s kind of fun to take screenshots of what it is currently because you know, that’s going to change in the future and it’s fun to see how they evolve, but, you know, if we do have some German ancestors, can we use ethnicity estimates at all on the websites? Or what do you think about that?

Heidi Mathis (6m 30s):
Such a great question. And I think the general overall answer is that it’s probably not going to be as useful as say Ireland would be or another more distinctive group. But the first thing to think about when you’re thinking about German ethnicity results is they really do mirror the history and the geography of Germany. Like we were just talking about German lands have been a crossroads in the center of Europe. There were all kinds of trade routes like the Hanseatic league and all the rivers, like the Rhine river. There was so many occasions and wars and religious differences that cause so, so much mixing. And I talked about that in my first blog post. And that, it’s kind of interesting how that shows up in the DNA.

Heidi Mathis (7m 13s):
And in my blog post, I posted this really interesting graph from Ancestry’s white paper on ethnicity, and it showed that it kind of averaged their German panel. And the German panel comes from people who have four German ancestors from the same area of Germany. And if you look at that, that overall graph of all of them, it had signals that were not just from Germany, that the highest signal was from Germany, but the next highest signal was from England and then Eastern Europe and Sweden and Norway and the Baltic Scotland, Wales Jewish, and, and France, that was kind of the order that, that, that reference panel came in on.

Heidi Mathis (7m 54s):
And it just shows you that if you are totally German, if you have four German grandparents from the same area, you are not going to show up as German on an ethnicity test. And so I think we all have to just remember that as German Americans, that even though you have a lot of ancestors from Germany, you may not look totally German on your ethnicity test. One kind of interesting example I had was that my, my dad has a great grandfather who was from Pomerania and that is just up on the Baltic sea. And that was a territory of Sweden for a long time. When my dad got his ethnicity results, he had a little bit of Baltic and a little bit of Swedish in his DNA results.

Heidi Mathis (8m 36s):
So I can’t say for sure that that great-grandfather’s where that Baltic and Swedish came from, but that’s my guess, because, you know, on MyHeritage, my dad does match a lot of Swedish people and, and we don’t have any known ancestors from Sweden. I’ll, you know, sometimes a German may have moved into that person’s family tree, but sometimes not. And it just shows how, you know, those could be population segments from Sweden and that got somehow my dad got, so I think that’s super interesting and just reflective of the history of Germany in my blog post, I had a second graph that showed the German reference population and how it overlaps with these other groups that it is similar to.

Heidi Mathis (9m 21s):
There were some Germans in the reference panel, overlap with the English, some overlapped with the Dutch, some with Scandinavians and Polish. And you could just imagine that the Germans who overlapped with the Poles probably were from the area that was near Poland. And so what you notice on that graph that I posted from the white paper is that the German reference panel seems to be the most spread out. And it seems to overlap with the most countries. And it just shows that it is the country in the center of all these other ethnicities. I think that that was just a great visual reference for how Germans can be so hard to distinguish from their neighbors.

Heidi Mathis (10m 4s):
And so if you have a person who has a German parent and an English parent, their ethnicities are not going to show up as all that different, but if you had someone with a Greek parent and a German parent, you are going to see some separation there. And so ethnicity, isn’t like, you’re not going to never be able to use it. But as I noticed matches that my dad has that have all German ancestors, you know, they often have a German signal, but they have like a big English signal too. So I think you’re just going to be able to use it less than some other ethnic groups

Diana (10m 40s):
That is so interesting. It’s been fun looking at your blog posts in these images and just really imagining all that mixing and, you know, we use the term ethnicity essence, but the real term is add mixture, which means the mixing of all these different populations in their genetics. And it made me think of my friend who is full German. Her parents immigrated after world war II. And I remember her telling me that she got her ethnicity results and she said it was so weird. There was all this Scandinavian DNA in it, which was really surprising to her. So I think that was probably common with a lot of Germans, just like you, you had that experience with your dad.

Diana (11m 20s):
And I wanted to note too, that you can look at the ethnicity of your DNA matches. You know, like when you’re looking at your shared match on Ancestry, you can see the comparison of your ethnicity as well as that, of your match. And that can be a really good tool if you’re trying to figure out which line they’re on, if you had like the Greek and the German side, like you mentioned, but then it’s also just fun to look at in and to just see what other people’s ethnicity estimates come out as. Absolutely.

Nicole (11m 51s):
So why might a German person’s ethnicity show up with a lot of British in it? Cause I’ve seen that happen as well.

Heidi Mathis (11m 59s):
Yeah, that one was the one that always kind of threw me for a loop because you know, my dad doesn’t have very much English. He does have he’s about one 16th Colonial English, but the rest of him is, is German. So his particular results were that he was 67% Germanic plus 8% other associated ethnicity is like he had Eastern Europe and Baltic and Jewish, but then he was 25% Scotland and England. And he has absolutely zero recent Scottish ancestors. And so that was kind of puzzling. But then I had to remember that, you know, England was the second, most common ethnicity for a German reference panel member.

Heidi Mathis (12m 39s):
And my dad would not qualify as a panel member for sure because his, you know, ancestry’s from all over Germany and their his great-grandparents and not his grandparents. So I think my dad’s results are more or less what you would have expected, but mine were, I thought kind of curious. My mother, she could have some Scottish, some real Scottish in her because she had some Irish ancestors from the north of Ireland that I think had Scottish roots. But I don’t think I have very much Scottish ancestry, but that’s my number one category on Ancestry right now. And so what I was kind of hypothesizing was that the German ancestry was getting a little bit more lost maybe in subsequent generations than the Irish was when I compared them.

Heidi Mathis (13m 27s):
I have, for me, most of my great-great-grandparents were born in Ireland or Germany. And looking at me shows the difference in how German and Irish ethnicity might work. My mom has six Irish communities on her ethnicity results, and I have, I got five of them. So my great-great-grandparents were coming through loud and clear on the Irish side. But on the other hand, my dad had two German ethnicity groups and I got zero of those. And yet, you know, it’s still the same great-grandparent difference away. And so I just think that that, because Irish DNA is much more distinctive, it shows up in those ethnicity results much more clearly.

Heidi Mathis (14m 15s):
And I’m just going to have smaller pieces of German DNA than my dad. And so it’s just not coming through in the same way that my dad’s does. And so I thought that was kind of an interesting example of how it might be working in subsequent generations.

Nicole (14m 28s):
Wow. That is really interesting to think about the fact that it kind of gets lost as it gets to be smaller segments and it’s passed down. Whereas the Irish DNA, it still comes through pretty strong, but I think that scatter graph is really helpful for understanding that. So make sure you guys check that out on the blog post it’s from the Ancestry ethnicity estimate white paper.

Diana (14m 49s):
So let’s go to little bit different part of DNA and talk a little bit about the IBS and IBD segments, which IBS is Identical By State.

Diana (16m 2s):
And IBD is Identical By Descent. Guide us through that, Heidi.

Heidi Mathis (15m 7s):
Okay. You know, I’ve just kind of theorizing here, but I like to think about German versus Irish for two reasons. One is that as I’ve been saying one leans kind of towards endogamy, not true endogamy, but kind of towards endogamy on the Irish side and one doesn’t and that’s the German side. And the other reason I look at it this way is because these are the two ethnicities that I deal with the most. And so, you know, I just think in these terms, and so I’m trying to generalize this principle of more distinctive versus less distinctive DNA. Here’s how I think about it. So relative isolation has made Irish DNA easier to identify in DNA tests and for good explanation of this, Jessica Morgan has a post on using Irish DNA and she had a great example that I would love to turn people towards.

Heidi Mathis (15m 56s):
I think that when you have more isolation that you get an accumulation of IBS or Identical By State segments, which are just another way of saying that, that these are population segments that I think are accumulating more in an isolated place like Ireland. When you have an IBS population segment, you might share a long segment with somebody that you do not have a recent ancestor with. I’ve found many examples of this when looking at my mom’s Irish side, what you’ve instead found is this population segment that’s just very common in that particular part of Ireland. Cork, for instance, there seems to be a lot of people from Cork and they seem to have some very common segments.

Heidi Mathis (16m 39s):
And I think that those segments are what Ancestry’s picking up on when they say, okay, this person is from Cork, is there, look, they’re actually seeing that IBS segment. And so why would Germans have fewer localities like they do for, for, you know, Ireland has several localities and I think there’s fewer for Germany. And the reason might be that there just hasn’t been quite the accumulation of those IBS segments. And again, this is me theorizing, but I’m just guessing that because Germans were probably less isolated in general, there’s probably more mixing going on when you have a segment in common with a German match on your German side, that I, I tend to take those seriously as probably being an IBD segment for two reasons.

Heidi Mathis (17m 31s):
One is, is for the reason I’m saying that I think that it’s more likely to be an IBD segment in the case of Germans. And number two is that there’s just going to be fewer German matches. So you’re just going to end up taking your German matches more seriously with my Irish matches. I just always keep in mind that this could be a segment that I may not have a recent common ancestor with this person. And the only thing you could do is just try to build out your matches family treats the best you can to be able to tell, oh,

Diana (18m 2s):
Wow, that was a really good explanation of that. And I think it just points to the difference in research localities in Ireland, you can pinpoint these communities, but you can’t use the segments as much, whereas in Germany you don’t get communities, but the segments are better to point to a common ancestor. So it really points to you having to have experience with working with the DNA in that locality. And you just learn that by experience because you’ve done a lot of these projects with DNA and these two localities. Right?

Heidi Mathis (18m 32s):
Absolutely. And just like with all of genealogy, it’s, you just kind of have to have a hypothesis for what’s going on and realize that you could be wrong about it and just kind of keep those two things in your mind. But this is how I think of my German versus my Irish Matches.

Nicole (18m 50s):
Well, there’s another challenge you mentioned earlier with DNA evidence for German projects. And that’s the fact that there could be fewer Germans who are taking DNA tests. So tell us more about that.

Heidi Mathis (19m 4s):
Yes. Besides having kind of non distinctive DNA, another challenge with German ancestors is that Germany has pretty strong privacy laws, which I, I don’t disagree with those at all, but the outcome is that it is, there’s just fewer people who will take a genealogy test. I noticed that there’s quite a few Irish people from Ireland on our Ancestry. I find them all the time. Whereas I found only a few German Germans on Ancestry for my dad. So other people might be luckier than that. And I think Germans in general are just a little bit more conservative about their personal information. So if you have 19th century Germans in your tree or more recent, you’re probably going to have fewer useful matches and probably going to have fewer total distant relatives because fewer people are taking tests.

Heidi Mathis (19m 52s):
And often Germans had smaller families, not all German families, but a lot of German families did have smaller and smaller families. So you’re just probably going to have fewer relatives than a lot of other groups. I I’ve just found that to be the case. Yeah.

Nicole (20m 7s):
I was talking with a person who was trying to find his biological father in Germany and he had a few matches that were, you know, a little more distant, but then he actually targeted tested a person he thought would, would have showed up as this half-brother, but turned out to be a more distant relationship like a second cousin. So he’s still working on it, but yeah, you might have to do more targeted testing with German DNA projects because there just aren’t quite as many that are doing it. I

Heidi Mathis (20m 37s):
Think so, but on the other hand, Germans have great records. And so you just have to just keep that in mind as you’re going through that, the DNA, you want to check it because it could be helpful, but try not to be discouraged. If it isn’t going to help you as much,

Diana (20m 51s):
It’s kind of a balance you use, what kind of resources you have. And sometimes the DNA is a good resource. And other times that’s not as, as useful, but if someone is listening and they have some German ancestors and they really are stymied or would love to try to use DNA. Now, what suggestions do you have?

Heidi Mathis (21m 9s):
Well, the DNA search process is going to be the same for everyone. And if you do have a lot of German in your tree, you’re probably not going to have as many, like with my dad, there’s only 300 4th cousins or closer for him. So that’s not very many. I can really spend a lot of time with each of those matches because there just, aren’t going to be as many, you know, in cases like that. But it’s the same for everybody. You want to start with grouping your testers matches into clusters using the shared matching tools at the various testing company and just seeing the people who are related to you and related to each other. And you want to do your best to figuring out where those clusters go. And then the second really important thing to do.

Heidi Mathis (21m 51s):
I think if you have German ancestors is to upload your, your test to MyHeritage because not only are there going to be, you know, in my experience, more Germans that you’re going to be connecting with from Germany, but you can also filter for different countries. And so you can filter for people who are living in Germany today. My dad also tested at 23andMe and actually his ethnicity results were really good. I thought for his German ancestors at 23andMe, but you know, since people don’t post their trees as much at 23andMe, it can be a little less helpful. But yeah, if I had a German ancestor client, I would definitely want to see if they would be willing to, to post their tests at MyHeritage.

Diana (22m 36s):
We tell all of the people that we work with with DNA to make sure their DNA is on all the different websites, because you really never know where that good match is going to pop up. So it just makes sense if you’re really trying to break down a brick wall to get your DNA out there, different places. So that’s really good to know that you have discovered more helpful people at MyHeritage.

Nicole (22m 57s):
So tell us more about how you can use MyHeritage and some of the things that you’ve done.

Heidi Mathis (23m 3s):
Yeah. I like to do is filter for the largest segment on MyHeritage, as well as looking for people who share the most DNA because often people with the largest segments are people who have a more recent common ancestor with you. So I filter for that. And then I also like to filter for Germany and I like to look and see who pops up there with the largest segments. But I also like, depending on the person on his family tree and researching, I will also filter for a country that’s nearby. For instance, my dad has another great-grandfather who is from Sprenburg. Germany and that’s really close to the Czech Republic. And at one time was in the state of Bohemia and the person this great-grandfather married was actually from the opposite side of Germany, in lower Saxony, near the Netherlands.

Heidi Mathis (23m 51s):
And so they’re actually from really different parts of Germany. And my dad had a second cousin who had this same set of great-grandparents and I was able to transfer his results to MyHeritage. And I could see the segments where the second cousin was matching my dad. And then I selected for people from the Czech Republic thinking that that anybody who my dad matched from the Czech Republic was likely to only match this one great-grandfather because he’s the only one from that side. So that’s an assumption I was making, but I did find this one really amazing Czech match. And he had all four grandparents from right around that border area.

Heidi Mathis (24m 34s):
I downloaded his segments and put them up. And then I tried contacting him and he just took his test off the site. And so I unfortunately did not copy down his family tree, but then that guy was matching my dad like 60 or so centiMorgans. So anyway, that was kind of a little heartbreaking, but at least I could, I have a segments and I could see that they were close to overlapping with the second cousin. And so, you know, I could theoretically say that that segment was probably from this great-grandfather rather from, you know, another great grandparent, but, you know, I couldn’t say for sure, but that was one way I use the features that MyHeritage to try to zero in, on, on a particular great-grandfather of mine.

Heidi Mathis (25m 20s):
So if you have recent German ancestors, it’s going to be more complex, but you want to focus maybe a little bit more on where your matches might be from and think about like the great-grandmother, who was from Lower Saxony, was right next to the Netherlands. And I do notice that my dad has a lot of Dutch matches and he doesn’t have any Dutch ancestry that I know of. And so there’s some kind of a chance that those Dutch ancestors would be related to my dad through the grandparents that are right next to the Netherlands. And I just love using MyHeritage with ancestors that have more recent European ancestry because I notice it works pretty well, even with my mom’s Irish side as well.

Heidi Mathis (26m 1s):
That there’s just a lot of Irish people on there. And you can tell like specifically what part of Ireland they’re from, and sometimes they’ll post their trees. And so you can make pretty good progress. I think giving it a try is just well worth it for anyone.

Nicole (26m 14s):
What a good idea to use MyHeritage’s filtering feature. That’s a really interesting idea. I’ve never tried that, but it makes a lot of sense that if you’re going to find some German matches or matches from the Czech Republic that you can filter based on where somebody currently resides. That’s cool.

Heidi Mathis (26m 32s):
Yeah. I mean, it’s not necessarily always going to be valid, but I feel like it’s a good way of trying to make sense of all those matches.

Diana (26m 42s):
Well, and that’s what we’re trying to do is sense of our matches and every single website that has the DNA match results all has a different set of tools and we have to experiment with those and figure out some methodologies for using them. So thanks for cluing us into another fun way to use MyHeritage

Heidi Mathis (27m 0s):
Yeah. I was so glad. I think Germans are a good example of like, how can you try to use DNA to get at who your, your matches might belong to? And I think MyHeritage is the key to doing that.

Diana (27m 14s):
Well great. Thanks so much, Heidi, for not only writing the blog post series about tracing your 19th century Germans, but coming on the podcast to talk us through it, because it’s always fun to talk about something and then to be able to go read it. And in your blog posts, you have so many great links in our show notes. For this episode, we’ll also have links to things that our listeners can go check out, but we just really appreciate you coming on and really appreciate your expertise in this part of genealogy research. So we don’t have as much experience chasing these Germans.

Heidi Mathis (27m 50s):
Well, thanks for giving me the chance. It was so much fun.

Nicole (27m 53s):
All right. Thanks everybody. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (27m 55s):
Bye

Nicole (28m):
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