RLP 168: IGHR Advanced DNA Evidence Course Part 1

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 168 IGHR Advanced DNA Evidence Course Part One. 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.

Nicole (41s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go, hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (50s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (53s):
I’m doing well. We had our first session of the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group yesterday. And I started working on my assignment. What I want to do this time is either work on Barsheba Tharp’s mother, because I have a hypothesis for that, or Barsheba’s husband, John Robert Dyer, which I’ve always been working on trying to figure out his parents still have no idea who they were. I have some clues, but there’s a lot to be done on that. So I have one of my father-in-law’s cousins whose DNA was shared with me. So I just started working on clustering for him and just figuring out who his close matches are and that kind of thing.

Diana (1m 35s):
Oh, nice. Well, I need to get started on my project and I’m doing one of my brick walls that everyone has heard about that is trying to figure out the parents that Cynthia Dillard and I have got the DNA of a cousin who is two generations closer than me. So I am going to get started on the same thing in clustering, his matches, and finding the appropriate clusters to work on. So here’s to hoping we can figure out our problems this time. Maybe we can do it.

Nicole (2m 4s):
Yeah, it’ll be nice to work on our own research.

Diana (2m 8s):
I know I’m excited. I’ve been putting this off or waiting for the study group to do this because it’s going to be an involved project and I want to really focus on it. So it’s going to be really fun to work each step. And I love the process and doing it in a steady group because it’s not overwhelming. I just know I need to get this assignment done and then I’ll do the next one. And at the end you have complete project. It’s like this little miracle.

Nicole (2m 33s):
It’s very fun to finish. I know you’ve been really busy working and also on your syllabus for SLIG how’s that going?

Diana (2m 41s):
That is going great. And I don’t think I’ve talked about that on the podcast yet. I am coordinating with my colleague Lisa Stokes, and we are doing a SLIG course. It’s a brand new course. SLIG. If you don’t know that terminology stands for is the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy and it’s held in Salt Lake City, we’ll be in person in January, January 10th to the 14th, and we’re doing a course all on accreditation. There are still spots available for anybody who wants to sign up. You can go to the Utah genealogy association website to find more information, but we have put together a really great course and it will help anyone who’s interested to get on the right track for getting that credential.

Diana (3m 26s):
So, yeah, I had six syllabi that I had to get ready for peer review with my group of presenters. So got that done, which is always great to get those syllabus documents done. There’s so much work.

Nicole (3m 40s):
Yes. Congratulations on getting them done so you can peer review each other’s what a good idea.

Diana (3m 45s):
Yeah. Well, we just felt like where we are all talking about accreditation. We want to be on the same page. We want to be right in line with ICAPGEN’s requirements and make sure we’re not missing anything. We want to have it all put together really well.

Nicole (3m 58s):
Yeah. That’ll really help with being consistent.

Diana (4m 1s):
Yeah. Well, our announcements for today, we’ve got an announcement about our study groups. We’ve been letting everybody know, but in case you want to plan your Genealogy education for 2022, we will be doing our DNA study group beginning, February 16th, and registration for that will open in December. So you can watch for that. And then in the fall, we will begin in September and that will be our traditional Research Like a Pro study group. So we’re hoping to see a lot of new faces as well as people who’ve done it with us before. It’s always so fun when we get return friends who come in and do the study group with us again and again, we love that.

Diana (4m 45s):
So be sure you join our study group newsletter to get our coupons. We always do a special when we open registration and you’ll need to be sure that you’ve joined that newsletter via FamilyLocket to get those special coupon codes.

Nicole (4m 59s):
Great. And then also join the FamilyLocket newsletter so that you can see our new blog posts and podcast episodes and any other deals we do on our e-courses

Diana (5m 9s):
Right? So today’s topic is going to be all about Nicole’s course. So you’re going to let us know everything you learned. Just kidding. You’re going to give us some highlights of your Institute course that you took this summer on DNA, which was an advanced course. What was the title?

Nicole (5m 28s):
So I took DNA as Genealogical Evidence Advanced with Karen Stanbary and it was through IGHR otherwise known as “IGER” the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research, which is hosted by the Georgia Genealogical Society. So I took advantage of the fact that they were doing a virtual Institute and I didn’t have to travel. So that was convenient. And I could watch the lectures from home on zoom.

Diana (5m 58s):
Yeah, that’s been really one of the great things about COVID if we had to have a great thing about COVID that we got to do so many institutes in the last several months from home. Well, I’m excited to learn some of your key points and takeaways. I know that Karen is really focused on the Genealogy Proof Standard, which is fabulous and having DNA be part of that. So what were some of your takeaways from the Genealogical Proof standard?

Nicole (6m 27s):
Karen is fun. She does a lot of things in the course to help us learn. And one of them is that she does these golden nuggets, key points and takeaways from the lectures. And so the lectures will give us a little golden nugget guy, a symbol that the instructor thinks that something they’re teaching is a key point that we should take away. So that was fun. And at the end of the week, we compile all of our golden nuggets and list them out and she types them. And then when we get our certificate in the mail, we also get a paper that is the golden nuggets sheet. So that’s kind of fun. And the course was really focused on case studies and the homework was focused on introspection.

Nicole (7m 10s):
How can we become more thoughtful in our DNA research and in our genealogical research? So that was interesting. We didn’t have a lot of like assignments where you have to do writing or use a tool or something we’d just kind of reflected and wrote in our assignments, some answers to questions that the instructors gave us. So the course instructors were Michael Lackapoe, Paul Woodbury, David Wrencher, Kimberly Powell. And of course Karen Stanbary. And like you said, Karen Stanbary is wonderful with teaching about standards and the Genealogical Proof Standard. So one of the first lectures she did was kind of a fun quiz about the standards and the Genealogical Proof Standard.

Nicole (7m 54s):
Some of the things that I took away from that were that the Genealogical Proof standard is not like a step-by-step process for how to do your research. It’s a metric or a standard for measuring your completed research to see if you’ve done everything you can to meet Genealogical proof. So I think sometimes people think of the genealogical Proof standard as a step-by-step process, but it’s really not. And what is interesting about it is that it really just applies to completed research, not researching progress, like research reports that we write for clients because we have time limitations on those. And so we can’t always get to Genealogical Proof in a 20-hour project for a client.

Nicole (8m 39s):
So that was a really good point to think about. We also talked about the fact that when you do meet the GPS, the Genealogical Proof Standard, you don’t need to have perfect certainty that your answer is a hundred percent correct. You just need to meet the GPS and do your best to do reasonably exhaustive research. And sometimes reasonably exhaustive research. Doesn’t give us perfect certainty, but if we can eliminate all the different conclusions that are possible, then we can come to a conclusion. So I thought that was helpful. And it does talk about that in the Genealogy Standards manual.

Diana (9m 17s):
I think you had some really good points there, especially that in a phase of a project that you’re doing, you don’t necessarily come to Genealogy Proof because you can’t, you know if you have a time limit. So that’s so good to remember. We don’t have to prove it in our first go-around at the project.

Nicole (9m 36s):
Yeah. You know, after we talked about the GPS, I was reviewing chapter one of Genealogy Standards by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. And on page three, it talks about how possibilities for which no known evidence exists, do not discredit a proved Genealogical conclusion. And I love that because it kind of eliminates the idea that even those might-have-beens, if there’s no evidence for them, might’ve been, then you don’t need to worry about it. You know? So if you’ve done that reasonably exhaustive research, you will have found all of the different pieces of evidence that might have been. And you can either eliminate those. Or if you can’t, then you maybe can’t reach a conclusion.

Nicole (10m 18s):
But if you can’t eliminate the other ones and come to a conclusion, then you don’t have to worry about things that might’ve been, unless there’s evidence for them, kind of like that. Cause sometimes I think there’s like a lack of evidence. And you know, we always wished that there is direct evidence to answer our question, but really we can use all these pieces of indirect evidence, eliminated their candidates and then come to a conclusion. And that’s okay, that meets the Genealogical Proof Standard. As long as we’ve done all the reasonably exhaustive research and documentation and writing conclusion and whatnot and resolving conflicting evidence. So I liked that. And I think it’s good to realize that we don’t have to have that perfect certainty.

Nicole (10m 57s):
But another thing is that a conclusion can’t be partially proved. And that was a fun discussion point because Karen quoted Tom Jones, who says there are no partially proven conclusions saying a conclusion is partially proved, is like saying you are partially pregnant. Which I had to laugh because being currently pregnant, I know that there’s no way you could be partially pregnant. You are all the way pregnant and it’s very different to be pregnant. And so you will know, I always have to laugh at those people who are on the TV show, I’d never knew I was pregnant because I’m like, how did you not know?

Nicole (11m 38s):
That that’s funny. But back to the conclusions being partially approved, I think sometimes people find a lot of evidence for a conclusion, but they don’t finish their research. They don’t eliminate the other possibilities and they don’t write a conclusion that builds their case all the way. And so they think, oh yeah, I’ve kind of proved this. There’s still some things out there I haven’t finished proving. So it can’t have something partially prevented either proven or it’s not done yet. Right.

Diana (12m 2s):
So to say, it’s proven you have to do the entire Genealogical Proof Standard, which ends with a written conclusion. You know, you can’t just do the research and say, it’s proven, you’ve got to actually write it.

Nicole (12m 15s):
Yeah. And I think that’s the hardest part for a lot of people is taking the time to write it out

Diana (12m 22s):
Well, and you have to have your source citations. You’ve got to have it documented. You’ve got to have eliminated all the conflicting information or resolved the conflicting information. So there’s a lot to it. And it’s well worth anyone’s time to study that Genealogical Proof Standard. And really, I like that. You talked about introspection to think about where you are in proving a case. That’s really interesting. Well, and because this was a DNA course, you are applying this to DNA. So let’s talk a little bit about how does DNA apply to all of this?

Nicole (12m 57s):
So in the course, we had case study lectures from the different presenters and they would share their documentary research and then the DNA evidence and some of their case studies, they are still researching and some of them, you know, they finished and they’ve written up. So it was really interesting to see kind of where everybody was in the process of applying DNA evidence to their cases. One of the fun golden nuggets that we learned from Michael Lacapo was that DNA is an active tool, not a passive tool. He said that several times in his different lectures and what he meant by that is that you have to be active in target testing and focusing on testing the people who can give you the answers to your research problems and to help you either confirm the hypothesis you’ve come to with documentary research or refute that hypothesis or conclusion that you’ve come to.

Nicole (13m 53s):
So when you start actively using DNA testing to target test people, then you can get a lot more answers.

Diana (14m 1s):
I think that’s really interesting. I remember when I took my first class from Karen, a few years ago and Michael came and did a lecture on one of his cases and he talked a lot about how many people he tested. It was a lot of people. And I still remember that thinking, wow, that costs a lot of money, but we are lucky now because so many people have tests that if we can focus in, on the appropriate people, relevant to our case, they can share their results with us and we can still have their testing, but it is an act of matter that we have to go after that and figure out who those people are and then ask them to share and work with them.

Nicole (14m 40s):
Yes, that has been a wonderful way to increase the base test taker pool just by finding people who are already in the databases, reaching out to them and say, Hey, can you share your results with me so that I can use this to solve, you know, such and such Historical mystery that I’m working on. And I’ve had such great success with that. It’s amazing how many more test-takers results I have, especially at ancestry where it’s so easy to go in and share your results with another ancestry user.

Diana (15m 10s):
Exactly. I think that’s one of the best things Ancestry has done for us is make that available

Nicole (15m 16s):
A little known tool. Going back to Michael Lacapo’s case study, he was teaching us about a case where he was trying to find the parents of a woman born in 1867 named Eliza. So what he did is he presented all of his documentary research and that took most of the time for his presentation. So he had done reasonably exhaustive research in documentary sources and he had come to a conclusion using lots of pieces of indirect evidence. He had rolled out several candidates for Eliza’s parents, and then there was just one left and then he found some clues that connected her to that parental couple.

Nicole (15m 56s):
So then at the very end of his presentation, he talked about how he was able to then find DNA evidence that strengthened and supported his conclusion. And he said that he found a lot of matches at Ancestry using autosomal DNA to descendants of Eliza’s hypothesized siblings and parents that he had come to that conclusion of in documentary research. But what was interesting is he asked, do you think I could have found this conclusion with DNA first? And we were like, well, maybe yeah, but he said it would have been really difficult because in order to find those DNA matches, who descend from the family that he found for Eliza’s family, he had to build the trees back and redo everyone’s trees on Ancestry because they all had errors in them and, or they hadn’t gone back far enough.

Nicole (16m 47s):
So he says that nothing in the DNA matches would have clued him in to the connection because he had to build the trees himself. And once he had already had the surnames that he was looking for, then he was able to build the trees back and figure it out.

Diana (17m 3s):
So he had done a great amount of documentary research, eliminated all the other candidates and come up with a really good hypothesis. Then he used DNA to find descendants of that hypothesized couple. So that’s such a good methodology or DNA and working in the 1800s trying to find parentage.

Nicole (17m 26s):
Yeah. And it’s interesting because each case is so different and sometimes you can’t find any clues for a woman’s maiden name at all. So it’s even harder to find a candidate family. In this case, he had all of Eliza’s children’s death certificates that had her maiden name. So he was able to use that to build a strong foundation for what surname he was looking for for her family. But there’s an NGS Quarterly article where Patty Hobbs is looking for a woman’s family, but the woman’s maiden name is unknown. And so she has to use DNA as the main clue for that family.

Nicole (18m 5s):
And she was able to find a cluster of matches, who all came from the right town and they led to this particular ancestral couple. And so that’s how she solved it. So sometimes the DNA will give you the clue to the family. And in this case with Michael, the documentary research was able to give him the clue to the family that he could then support with DNA evidence. So it’s just interesting how each case is.

Diana (18m 30s):
That is such a good reminder. I know with all the different client projects we get in with DNA, I have really found that, that we approach every single one of them a little differently because the situations are different depending on who is tested and the location, you know, as their pedigree collapses, it African-American to so many different situations. Yeah. I love seeing case studies and seeing how different people use tools and methodologies and DNA. So what’s another golden nugget that you got from your class.

Nicole (19m 4s):
So before I tell you any more, I was going to check the name of the article that I was mentioning. So its Patricia Lee Hobbs and the article title is DNA Identifies a Father for Rachel Wife of James Lee of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. And that was in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly 105 from March, 2017. So that’s a great one to go and read. I thought that was really a good case study of finding

Diana (19m 32s):
When you don’t have a maiden name, you already,

Nicole (19m 34s):
You just, all you know is her name is Rachel and that she married James Lee.

Diana (19m 37s):
Well, and how many times do we see that in our research, the elusive female that is so common where we cannot find a maiden name, especially if they live far enough back where the children don’t have death certificates, because you know, my go-to is always the certificates for the children to reveal the mother’s maiden name. And if you don’t have that, it gets so much harder. So that’s great. Well, for anyone listening, if you are a member of NGS, the National Genealogical Society, you can go to their archives and you can look at any of these articles. You can do searches by locality. If you want to just look for people who have done case studies in an area you’re researching to look for records or by DNA.

Diana (20m 18s):
And if you want to have some examples of solving cases, that’s a really good resource. Yeah,

Nicole (20m 23s):
That’s true. And recently they have added a basic index that searches the titles and the authors. So you can put in a title and the article like Texas or DNA, and then find some articles that have DNA in the title.

Diana (20m 42s):
Right. So great teaching tool. All right. Well, I know you talked a little bit about Phasing because I remember that you let me know when you were working on it. So what happened with that?

Nicole (20m 54s):
This was the one kind of unique lecture that we had during the week that wasn’t a case study and Karen Stanbary taught it. And she said that in the last course she taught, which was an intermediate DNA course at IGHR. A lot of people were requesting to have a lecture about how to do Visual Phasing. So she added it to this advanced DNA Evidence Course. She taught us how to do it. And after watching her, I wanted to try it because I have three full siblings at GEDmatch that I got already to go for Visual Phasing and then never did it. So, I wanted to try it. So it was fun to watch the lecture and then to try it on my own.

Nicole (21m 38s):
So I’ll just share a couple of takeaways about Visual Phasing. So what is Visual Phasing? It’s a method developed by Katherine Johnston in 2015, and it uses the shared segments of three siblings. And what you do is you try to identify where those siblings have recombination points on each chromosome, because then you can determine which of their grandparents, they got that segment of DNA from because you know where the DNA recombined in the parent chromosome. So you basically use known matches, and you use a lot of logic and inference and negative space to figure out who the great-grandparent couple is for each segment on a chromosome.

Nicole (22m 28s):
So why would you do this? Well, why you might not want to do it is because it’s challenging and it’s time-consuming. It’s sitting down and working on a logic puzzle for each chromosome. So each of the 22 chromosomes takes time. The reason why you would want to do it is that it helps you create a more complete chromosome map than you can usually get by just mapping the known matches that you find in the DNA databases that have segment data. So it can help you extend those shared segments beyond what is shared with just one match and help you extend it all the way to the recombination points for each person.

Nicole (23m 9s):
And use that to identify which ancestral line is shared with an unknown match. So it’s kind of the same idea as making a chromosome map, but it helps you make a more complete chromosome map with less unknowns on it.

Diana (23m 24s):
And to really understand that you have to watch a lecture or read an article and see the visuals because they use color and you know, it is like a puzzle. I think it’s so fascinating and fun. And if I had nothing else to do in my life, I would maybe work on it. I don’t have time to work on it right now, but I like to learn about it. And do you have

Nicole (23m 46s):
To have three full siblings? So that is a challenge too, because I don’t know on your side of the family, which three siblings we could even get none. So you’d have to find a group of three, four of the siblings, cousins that you have somewhere, I guess.

Diana (24m 2s):
Yeah. And I’m not even sure on my paternal side, I have no sets of three. There were just two kids on my mom’s side. There would be more possibly, but I don’t know, I’m more focused on my paternal side and doing the DNA work they are. And so I would have to be going back to second cousins or third cousins. Yeah.

Nicole (24m 23s):
Yeah. So you’d have to find a group of three full siblings who are your second cousins or further. So it just kind of is, you know, if you have three full siblings, then you can like target test them and transfer them to GEDmatch, and then you could try it. So it really just depends on what you have available and who you’ve asked to test and that kind of thing. And then of course, you’re right. It does take time to work on it. The wonderful thing about it though, is that it helps you eliminate three-fourths of the other lines from consideration when you’re looking for the common ancestor with a match. And if you have matches that share less DNA like 30 or 20 centiMorgans, and you can just have one segment and, and maybe that doesn’t overlap with any of your known matches on DNA painter on your chromosome map.

Nicole (25m 10s):
And so you’re not really sure which line they come from. This can be a way to check that against your Visual Phasing chromosome map and see, oh yes, this is on that Dyer Spears side of the family where I’m looking for matches to solve the Dyer mystery. Right.

Diana (25m 28s):
So, yeah, it’s really valuable to have the information, but it is, it is a challenge. And quite honestly, I’m just waiting for it to get automated.

Nicole (25m 38s):
Yeah. I know after watching this lesson and seeing how to do it and practicing with it, I think one of the skills that humans have that computers don’t is a lot of this logic and inference and yeah, it’d be amazing someday to see a computer do it for you. And that would be so great. Can you imagine just putting it in right now, the way that you do it is you use the Fox spreadsheet that Steven Fox created in Excel. It’s not working right now because GEDmatch changed. So he’s trying to fix it, but you can join the Visual Phasing Working Group on Facebook, and then he’s going to post there when it’s ready, but you can set it up yourself. And Karen taught us how to do that, but basically you take the one-to-one comparisons from gen match for each sibling pair, and you just copy and paste what the chromosome looks like for you.

Nicole (26m 27s):
Pick one chromosome at a time and you paste it into Excel, and then you find the recombination points labeled those recombination points. And then from there you use known matches that are second cousins or further away because first cousins are too close. And then you use those known matches to help you figure out which great-grandparent couples contributed. That those pieces of DNA it’s definitely Advanced and challenging and time-consuming, but it was fun to learn about it and to see how it can be helpful and to practice it. So I did learn quite a bit from practicing it on my own. That’s great.

Diana (27m 4s):
Great. And, you know, even if in the future, it is automated. I think it’s always so good that we have a understanding of the logic that’s underlying the tool. If you know, it becomes the tool. It’s kind of like when people are using clustering tools, we always recommend that they do the manual leads method first. So they really understand what the clustering tools are doing for you. So it’s good to practice some of these things and understand how it works.

Nicole (27m 31s):
Yeah. Well, we have quite a bit more to talk about. So I think we will end now and do another episode next week, talking about some more of the golden nuggets from this course. What do you say to that?

Diana (27m 47s):
I think that’s a great idea because it’s fun to discuss all these things that I’m loving, getting this little recap from your course.

Nicole (27m 54s):
All right. Great. Well, we’ll talk to you guys again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (27m 59s):
Bye everyone.

Nicole (28m 34s):
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.