Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about Diana’s RLP with DNA study group project. The first assignment is about analyzing your pedigree and choosing a research question. Diana has decided to study her brick wall to identify Cynthia (Dillard) Royston’s father. She shares how she began by working with a cousin’s DNA matches. Part of this assignment is to assess close DNA matches to help separate the matches into clusters of shared matches.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 172 RLP with DNA part one, Assess and Analyze. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.
Nicole (41s):
Let’s go, Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole, what have you been working On?
Nicole (50s):
I’m doing great. So as a lot of, you know, I had a baby and he’s healthy, he’s doing great. And we’re having a good time getting to know him and all my kids love him and want to hold them all the time. It’s very fun.
Diana (1m 3s):
That’s so awesome. And I’m so glad I got to come and be there and then help with the kids and get to meet him.
Nicole (1m 9s):
That’s great. [inaudible] I have been starting to get back to researching doing some genealogy again, and we’ve been talking about already for the last hour and a half. It’s kind of funny. Take a little break from podcast recording and we just get together and can’t stop talking.
Diana (1m 32s):
Yeah. It’s fun. Fun to talk about everything genealogy and catch up. So
Nicole (1m 38s):
Yes. So one of the things we were just talking about that I’ve been working on is interpreting Big Y DNA results. And I’ve been looking at a report and just trying to understand and interpret how Big Y can help us with our genealogical questions. And I was watching a video on YouTube where somebody had been sharing a lot about how to understand Big Y results. And it was really helpful. One of the things he mentioned was the snip tracker website. So if you haven’t looked at that before, it’s really neat and it can help you figure out the time to the ancestor of that specific snip or haplogroup from your Big Y DNA results.
Nicole (2m 26s):
So, you know, that’s one of the things that’s really difficult and kind of subjective with the Big Y results is knowing how many years it’s been since that mutation happened. And so, although it’s not a hundred percent accurate, at least it’s a way to estimate and kind of look at that. So I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, but if you’re doing Big Y DNA analysis, that’s definitely a website to check out.
Diana (2m 50s):
Yeah, that’s great. I just decided to look at that while you were talking. And I think this will be really fun to use. I’ve got several client projects that are using Y DNA and sometimes those closest matches are valuable, but most often they’re too far back and it is just difficult to understand how to interpret those and how to use those. And so I’m looking forward to learning more about that. I think everybody’s just trying to figure out Y DNA and how best to use it.
Nicole (3m 18s):
Yeah. There’s a lot of things to think about with Y DNA. You know, I think it’s possible that sometimes we look at the results and we misinterpret them because we’re not seeing the surname that we thought we would see. What have you been working on?
Diana (3m 32s):
I’ve been working on our study group project. This has been a fun project. This DNA study group, I returned to Cynthia Dillard Royston and decided to start writing blog posts about it. And so we’re going to also talk about my project on the podcast so everybody can follow along. It’s funny, whenever I bring up Cynthia in a class or something, people will say, oh, I feel like I know her because you talk about researching her all the time. And so here we go again, but it’s been fun. I love revisiting research with new tools and new ideas.
Nicole (4m 6s):
Yeah. And I think you’re going to make progress because the DNA you have, it’s awesome. You have two generations closer than yourself.
Diana (4m 13s):
Yeah. And I’ve discovered some new things. So it’s going to be fun to talk about. Well for announcements, study groups for 2022 are now scheduled. Our spring study group begins February 16th and it will be another DNA study group, Virginia in the spring to give us a little bit more time. And then our fall study group will begin in September. And that will be our traditional Research Like a Pro study group. So we hope everybody listening will consider joining one of those. It’s a really fun way to make progress and to get to know other people researching similar cases as you, and to get other people’s feedback on your cases. That’s one of the most valuable things, super fun.
Diana (4m 55s):
And we as always we’ll have peer group leaders for that. And peer group leaders do get complimentary registration. And so there’s an application on our website. You can go look at that, see what’s required for that, and start working towards being ready to apply, to be a peer group leader. If that sounds interesting to you as always join our newsletter to make sure you’re getting the, any deals that we have out there.
Nicole (5m 21s):
Thank you. So let’s dive into your research project for the study group. We encourage people to come with some ideas about what they might want to research. So the first lesson, you don’t have to have your objective ready. You just kind of have some ideas. So what research question did you have that you wanted to do?
Diana (5m 39s):
I really knew I wanted to work on Cynthia. As I said, I had discovered that she was a Dillard through three of her children’s death certificates. And I have worked so hard with documentary research to find a father for her and everything just kept coming up as a big negative. And so I decided I really needed to go, you know, into the DNA and see what I could figure out
Nicole (6m 5s):
With the study group gives you a chance to follow all of the steps of the process. So how are you hoping that this would help you along the way?
Diana (6m 17s):
I think sometimes when we’re working on a project and we’re returning to it, we just want to dive in and start doing stuff. It’s kind of like going on Ancestry and just putting in surnames into different collections and not having a focus project. And I felt like I really wanted to just do that because that’s easier and that’s more fun. Sometimes you think that’s going to be more fun, but then you end up not making any progress. And I wanted to go through all the steps of the DNA process and just take it slowly and work really diligently at each step. And I’m really glad I did because it’s going to make a difference. So for this project, I am going to be using the DNA matches of my second cousin twice removed Victor Parker.
Diana (7m 2s):
And he’s given me permission to use his name and talk all about the project in my writing and on the podcast that is really valuable to generations closer. So Cynthia is my third great grandmother, but she’s, Victor’s great grandmother. And so I only got about 3% or less of her DNA, but he could have gotten up to 12.5% of her DNA, which is going to make a big difference in finding relevant matches.
Nicole (7m 29s):
So did Victor know anything through oral tradition or things that were passed down on his side of the family about Cynthia and her husband?
Diana (7m 37s):
No, in fact, I was the one that revealed to him when I figured it out that our surname was Dillard. So it was probably 10, 15 years ago. And you had to order the death certificates. And I ordered those and was so excited when I saw that three of them said Dillard and you know, he and I had been in contact. I don’t even know how we connected back in the day. And I emailed him when I said, Cynthia’s maiden name was Dillard. And he says, oh, that’s my middle name. I mean, it, the Dillard name was in the family, but it did not connect that that was her maiden name. Isn’t that so interesting. Oh,
Nicole (8m 15s):
I remember when you told me that that’s so funny that you would think that, you know, with your great grandmother, you would know her name and you would have heard some things about her, but you know, every family is so different with how much they talk about their ancestry. And in our family, we talk about our ancestors a lot. You know, your mom was interested in it and dad’s mom was interested in genealogy. So we just had a lot of people doing research and we talked about it a lot, but it just sounds like other families don’t always do that. And that’s perfectly normal, but it’s interesting that he had the name as his middle name.
Diana (8m 45s):
Well, and part of it is that Cynthia moved to Texas, whereas Victor’s lines stayed in Alabama. Oh. So that can make a difference to, you know, they move out to Texas and then she dies. And so there’s no back and forth. There’s no going to visit grandma. You know, I think that makes a difference. And if you lose touch with other family members, you don’t have addresses, you know, they’re out there somewhere, you know, within a generation or two, you really can’t lose those connections and the names. And especially if there’s nothing written down anywhere guessing maybe that’s what happened.
Nicole (9m 22s):
So all we know about Cynthia is that she was born about what 1814.
Diana (9m 26s):
Yeah. I think about 1816 is the one I’ve settled on. She’s one of my women that gets younger with every census enumeration, but the ones that make the most sense places for about 1816. And she consistently is born in Georgia. However, on the children’s death certificates, they all have different information. And of course the informants are different. One says Florida, and then to say Alabama and non-state Georgia. So,
Nicole (9m 56s):
So people just didn’t know very much about grandma Cynthia Dillard.
Diana (10m 1s):
Well, and the interesting thing is one of the informants was actually the sister. And so she would have been also a daughter and she might’ve thought it was Florida, which makes me really curious about where is this Florida connection? Was there a family member that came to visit them? That was from Florida and maybe that had to come from somewhere. So I am curious about that. That’s always kind of bothered me, the Alabama one. You know, that one I think is very likely that they would say that because they only knew her living in Alabama. So they may not have known anything else, but Florida, right.
Nicole (10m 40s):
If I asked my kids where they thought I was born and they probably wouldn’t remember that I wasn’t born where we live now, they would, you know, just probably not know,
Diana (10m 48s):
They would probably say Utah, because that’s where grandma and grandpa live. It would make me think you were born in Utah. It can get a little fuzzy. Well, and I look at, I look at my dad, he was born in California, but then they moved right away to Oklahoma and then they were back and forth to Texas and Oklahoma and then back up to California. And so if somebody had asked a non genealogist in the family where he was born, probably would have said, oh, wasn’t he born in Oklahoma? Or Texas, for example, in Texas and not, not thought of California at all. Yeah.
Nicole (11m 18s):
Its interesting that informant knowledge level. Sometimes it’s not what we would expect. So we have Victor Parker’s DNA. So how much DNA did he receive from her about
Diana (11m 30s):
He should have received about 12.5%. We don’t know for sure, but he would have gotten a good chunk. So there should be some matches to her Dillard line. Now the matches are not going to be as close to her. Probably he’s one of those that has long generations. His dad was older when he had him and his dad was so he’s got those long generations and most of the matches are going to be like me where it’s the third or fourth great-grandparent. And so that’s still several steps. So we’re talking still relatively small centiMorgans it’s not like I’m going to find a match that’s got 150 centiMorgans,
Nicole (12m 11s):
Unless you find another long generations type of person.
Diana (12m 16s):
Right.
Nicole (12m 16s):
So, yeah, that’s a good thing to think about what to expect and how many centiMorgans you’d expect a match to share when they’re coming from this Dillard line.
Diana (12m 25s):
Right.
Nicole (12m 25s):
So the first step in the Research Like a Pro with DNA process is to just choose a research question. And, you know, when we talk about this, we just kind of think of it as like a general idea of what you want to research. And then in the next lesson, we narrow it down to a specific objective. So that’s kind of the way we talk about things. And so when you did your pedigree analysis and looked to see what research questions might work, what did you find
Diana (12m 51s):
In my pedigree or in our pedigree chart? I do have two women that are problematic. And so one is my Mary Clemsy Cline. I really want to do a project on her sometime, one is Cynthia Dillard and I’ve been working on her. And then the other line you’re working on, which is the Welsh Keaton line. And you’ve made some good progress on that. So, you know, those are the ones closest in that I’m stuck on. And I think you, you know, you look at a lot of different things. Do you have enough DNA for that? Or for me, it just goes with, what do I feel like doing it that’s time.
Diana (13m 31s):
And this time I really felt like I had a good lead with using Victor’s DNA instead of my own. And I wanted to seek Cynthia some more.
Nicole (13m 40s):
I think you are on the right track. It’s funny when I look at your dad’s pedigree, which is what we’ve been focusing on, ever since we started family history, it seems like you’ve kind of taken his dad’s side and I’ve taken his mom’s side. So I’ve got Eddie Bell Harris’s ancestors and you’ve got Charles Leslie Schultz was the ancestors, although you’ve done research on all of the lines. So,
Diana (13m 60s):
But that is true. Yeah. Well, but you did work. You did start working on the Welch’s and for some reason we have worked more on the Schultz side and then the Harris side we’ll get back to the Harris’s. We’ll get there. We have done work on them. It is funny though how certain ancestors just pull you in
Nicole (14m 18s):
That one ancestor you just really want to figure out.
Diana (14m 22s):
Yeah. So Cynthia is the one I’m figuring out this time. I hope
Nicole (14m 26s):
So in the next step in the process is to kind of assess the DNA matches, see the, who the close matches are and just kind of figure out what you’re looking at when you see the DNA match list. So how did that go with Victor’s DNA matches.
Diana (14m 41s):
It’s really interesting. When you start working with someone else’s DNA matches, you don’t know who anybody is, you don’t even know their tree very well. We work with our own trees that our own so much that when we see somebody come in and we see the shared matches, and we know that first cousin is really easy to group them. So I decided I was going to have to start with his closest matches and see where they fit in, even though a lot of those would not be relevant to the project, but I found again and again, that that’s so important to provide that foundation for the research, especially with DNA, because you have to make sense of the DNA and having that foundation of how even those closest matches fit in helps so much, even if it’s not your DNA that you’re using.
Nicole (15m 28s):
Absolutely. And just knowing, you know, if there’s a close second cousin or first cousin on that other side of the family that can help you sort the matches and find the ones that are relevant, by looking at who’s not in common with that person. So it’s good to just get a sense of who’s tested and be able to sort the matches that way. So speaking of sorting the matches, we always recommend doing some kind of basic separating or clustering of the matches at the beginning of a research project. So that was part of this first lesson. So what did you do?
Diana (15m 58s):
Well, I decided to, to go Leeds chart for one, I think it’s just really fun. I like creating the colored blocks, you know, for the different matches. And I feel like doing it manually helps you get a better feel for what’s happening with the family. I just think that’s a great way to get started with clustering. It helps you understand the whole clustering methodology. So I used a Leeds chart to do all of Victor’s DNA matches from 90 centimorgans up to 400 centimorgans . So you don’t use his very closest matches, like the first cousins you’re trying to get down to at least second or third cousin levels.
Diana (16m 40s):
And all of his lines are out of the south and they’d been right there in Alabama. And so I thought there may be, what’s going to be some pedigree collapse with some shared ancestors, multiple shared ancestors. And I did find that because if you don’t have any of that, then you have your leads chart separate out really nicely into four main groups, one for each grandparent. But in this case, I ended up with, I believe 12 groups, so 12 different colors, but Dana recommends combining those groups that overlap and I could clearly see the overlap. And so rather than try to get four grandparents, I just was able to get two main groups.
Diana (17m 24s):
So there were the Parker Royston group and then the brown hill group. And so I just put that label on each one of those and each one of them had about four or five colors. So that helped me know that there was the inner marriage between those lines, but it also revealed that there was no overlap between his maternal side and his paternal side. So that was good to know that there’s pedigree collapse on his maternal side and on his paternal side, but those two didn’t go back and forth. So if that makes sense. Yeah.
Nicole (17m 54s):
That reminds me that you can do a search to see if the person’s parents are related by looking at runs of homozygosity. And I think that’s available on generally.
Diana (18m 5s):
Oh, I should do that. That would be great to do that, to see you
Nicole (18m 8s):
If the person’s parents are related, but it sounds like you found that they probably were not at least in closer generations, right? There’s also some different automated clustering things that you can do at the beginning of a project. Did you do that?
Diana (18m 22s):
Yes. So we ran a DNA to tree report and that is on either the iPad or an iPhone, and that works really, really nicely with Ancestry results. And so this gave me just a different view. It gives you the, the typical clustering views, where you get colored clusters, and then you have gray squares out to the side or underneath the squares that show they connect to other clusters as well. And that also showed some of that pedigree collapse or people matching on in several different clusters. But it was nice because I could use the leads chart and just verify what I had done.
Diana (19m 5s):
And I was able to put a label on each of the clusters of those main lines, the Parker Royston line and the brown hill line, so that I could see what I was working with.
Nicole (19m 15s):
So once you had started to narrow down who’s who, and which matches you want to focus on, where do you keep those organized?
Diana (19m 24s):
Well, in the study group, we teach how to use air table and we have the nice template that you created. And so I just opened up a brand new template and started adding all the relevant Parker Royston matches into the DNA match details table. And because I had done the separation between the two lines, I was able to separate out the ones I wanted. I decided there wasn’t any real need to work on the brown hillside, because that was not going to have any Dillards connected there. Since I had seen, there was no connection between maternal and paternal lines. And so just put in the Parker Royston closer matches.
Diana (20m 4s):
So that was helpful. And I love the, the air table log because as I correspond with people, I can put that in there. I get to put anything like GEDMatch kit numbers, you know, so much information that just goes right in the air table and it makes it so much easier. And also Victor has his DNA on other websites, family tree DNA, and my heritage. And so I can also bring all those matches into one central place. And that is great because it’s so much data we don’t, we don’t want to have it scattered everywhere.
Nicole (20m 41s):
Really nice to feel like you have one central location to put all of your notes. Well, it sounds like you have a really strong foundation for started with this research project. You’ve started to understand, you know, all of the DNA matches for Victor’s results and separating them. You’ve honed in on the matches that are going to be relevant to the project and started putting them into your air table. So you can stay organized. You can start contacting them. Did you make any contacts yet with, with people at this point?
Diana (21m 9s):
So I actually had some correspondence previously that I had completed when I was working with Cynthia and her matches and had found some good matches and figured out who they were. And so I transferred that from another research log before we were using air table, I think our first DNA study group, we were using a Google sheet research log, and I had entered some of that correspondence in there and I wanted it all to be in one place. And so I transferred that over. I did discover a match to Victor who is also two generations closer, and I had contacted her son asking if you would share her results.
Diana (21m 53s):
And he never did that. So I think I need to revisit that because I would be very curious to work with hers as well, or maybe work with hers in a future project. It’s always hard to know how much time do you want to spend on another matches line. So anyway, I did get some correspondence into the slug that I’d done previously. And I think that’s good for anybody to know that if you’ve already done some work and you’ve got that in your ancestry, math messages, or maybe saved an emails, just get that all copied in. So that you’re up to date with, what’s been done
Nicole (22m 25s):
So important because you don’t want to contact somebody again with the same questions that they’ve already answered. You know, we’ve both have done that before where it’s like, oh yeah, sorry. I forgot that I contacted you. So I’ve been getting really good about just going through my ancestry messages and emails, you know, and entering it into the air table log. And then before I contact somebody, I just check my correspondence, log, see what are already done to contact them or their relatives and hi and use kind of that to guide me while I’m writing to them. Like, oh, remember when we talked a couple of years ago, this is what we last talked about just to kind of remind them. So,
Diana (23m 2s):
And it’s much easier to find things in your air table log than on your Ancestry messages. So much easier because you can use the control find to search for anything, and you can organize it however you want. So it’s nice to have them in a place that’s central. And then if you, if you carry on the conversation with email, you know, you can have all that in there as well. Cause sometimes I will say, well, just email me. It’s easier. And you want to make sure you get it all together in one place.
Nicole (23m 31s):
Yes. So this first project had multiple pieces to it and all of those pieces are kind of about getting oriented with the DNA results, getting ready, focusing on the matches that will be relevant. And then you’re ready to go forward with the next assignment and the study group, which we will talk about in our next podcast episode. Great. I’m excited to keep talking about this fun project. All right. Well, we will talk to you guys all again next week. Bye bye. Bye everyone. 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.
Nicole (24m 11s):
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.
Links
RLP with DNA Study Group: Part 1 Assess Your DNA Matches & Analyze Your Pedigree – https://familylocket.com/rlp-with-dna-study-group-part-1-assess-your-dna-matches-analyze-your-pedigree/
SNP Tracker website – http://scaledinnovation.com/gg/snpTracker.html
Video about Big Y on Youtube by Lee Martinez – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcK0IME7mOw
Research Like a Pro Resources
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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