RLP 193 : Five Takeaways From the DNA Proof Arguments SLIG Course

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 193: five takeaways from the DNA proof arguments SLIG course. 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 authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (50s):
Hi mom. I’m doing great. So what have you been working on in reading?

Diana (54s):
Well, you and I have been studying the same article for our NGSQ study group. This was such a fun article to discuss and to read several times. It was by Warren Bittner and the title is: Pity the Poor Fool and fool is kind of a play on the surname, the German spelling is P F U H L. So, Pity the Poor Fool, the Bavarian Origin of Lawrence Pfuhl of Lake County, Indiana. So this was all about a German immigrant to the United States and trying to find his Homeland in Germany, which is such a difficult challenge, and what so many researchers are always trying to do.

Nicole (1m 32s):
Right? That’s one of the things I really appreciated about this article is that it’s a common research question, finding the immigrant origins

Diana (1m 41s):
And the fun thing about this one was that the author had to dive into a different records that actually solve the case because in a lot of the European records, we use church records because they’re so good. You get the baptisms, you get the marriage, you get the burials and you can often just put together the families fairly easily once you get to the right location, but that’s the trick getting to the location. And so you always want to get the associates in the United States to lead you to the old country. And in this case, he had this really good associate, but the problem was the associate didn’t show up in the hometown in those basic records.

Diana (2m 22s):
And so, you know, that’s a conflict, if your associate’s not in those basic records, then

Nicole (2m 27s):
How do you know that you have the right town

Diana (2m 29s):
Exactly.

Nicole (2m 30s):
Yeah. He even talked about that in there that you can’t just assume that because you found a person with the right name and even the same parent names that you were looking for, that it’s your person, because a lot of people had the same names, even though it seems like an uncommon name in the United States in Germany, it made it might’ve been a common one.

Diana (2m 48s):
Exactly. So he had to actually go to a little bit more difficult record set, and that was the confirmations. And in the confirmations, he found evidence of this associate in the town and it all came together. So that was a really good lesson for us that sometimes you have to dig deeper and we all know that it’s just fun to see a case study where you actually see that happening.

Nicole (3m 16s):
Yes. And he had to read a lot of records line by line and translate things from Latin. I really appreciated the way he worded things in his article. You know, when we write about records, it’s, I think it’s really important to not say things that the record doesn’t say, like, for instance, when you talk about the 1850 census, if you see like a family group living together, you can’t assume or say that it’s a family group because no relationships are given in that census. So you can just say, you know, this man lived with these people and he did a really good job with raising all of his different statements of not saying more than what the record showed, but when you put all the evidence together, it made a really good case and it was really helpful to study an expert’s writing style.

Diana (4m 2s):
I agree. And the other thing I always love to do with these articles is to read the source citations and scan those, to see the kind of sources that they’re using to see if there’s something unique that I haven’t used before that I want to try out. And I like to read the article through and then read it again and really look at those source citations. And in this case, probably at least half of them are those church records because they’re so important to the case in Germany. And the U S records were the things that we, that we use census records, naturalization records, some land records.

Diana (4m 42s):
So it’s always really instructive to read these articles. And I would just highly recommend anyone out there to get a subscription to the National Genealogical Society and start getting their Quarterly and reading it. Once you actually belong to the society, you can read all the past articles. So you can search by locality and try to find articles just about your locality and see what kind of sources they’re using. They will have citations to the laws and to the histories and a lot of resources for specific areas. So really good resource that we may not always think about.

Nicole (5m 22s):
Absolutely.

Diana (5m 23s):
Well, let’s get to our announcements. We hope everyone listening, enjoyed RootsTech, and that you were able to watch some of the presentations live. It’s always fun to be part of the live program. Maybe we were able to visit with you in our booth. And if you weren’t able to visit with us live, you can still go to the expo hall and check out what we had in the booth. We had a lot of videos. You can watch our recorded class sessions, lots of tips and tricks, really short videos. So hopefully you take advantage of all the great content that RootsTech put out there. And then coming up, we have got an in-person conference and this will be the National Genealogical Society conference.

Diana (6m 12s):
It’s May 25th through 28th in Sacramento, California. We are very excited because we will have a booth. We will be there in person. And we’re both speaking. So, Nicole, what is your topic?

Nicole (6m 25s):
My topic is, air table research logs organize your DNA and FAN club research,

Diana (6m 30s):
Which will be fabulous. And then I have got three presentations, one titled from California to Virginia, confirming the immigrant ancestor with the paper trail and Y- DNA. And then I have research planning for the win, next steps for breaking down a brick wall and finally getting things done and family history, productivity, tips, and tools. So I’m excited to be talking about three things that I really love. It’s going to be a fun week. So we hope you might be able to join us.

Nicole (7m 2s):
Yeah, I’m looking forward to going to Sacramento and being together with others and, and it will be fun to have a booth there and bring some of our books and things and be able to talk with people. Again, I really miss the in-person conferences

Diana (7m 14s):
I do too. And the excitement, the energy and the expo hall. It’s just not quite the same when you’re at home all by yourself,

Nicole (7m 22s):
Right. I’m really looking forward to your talk about Y-DNA and from California to Virginia, that was a topic that you’ve done a lot of research on and are kind of continuing to revisit with the Y-DNA. So that’ll be neat to hear.

Diana (7m 35s):
Yeah, it was my research that became my fourth-generation project when I applied for accreditation. And so I did a lot of research. I have a lot of fun things to share with that presentation. Well, as always, you can join our Family Locket newsletter to get the latest coupons for our courses, and let’s get to a listener spotlight. We haven’t done one of these for a while, but this review is titled Informative Podcast. And the listener says Diana and Nicole’s podcast is one of the best genealogy podcasts available. I enjoy the range of topics from resources to methodology, to DNA, to history.

Diana (8m 16s):
Thanks ladies. So thank you so much for that review. We love all of our reviews. It’s so great to hear from all of you.

Nicole (8m 23s):
Yes. Thank you. All right. Well, today we’re talking about my SLIG course, Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, for January. And the title of the course was DNA dreamers, inaction, writing proof arguments with Karen Stanbury, the coordinator and other instructors included Tom Jones, Nancy Peters, and Scott Wilds. I really wanted to take this course when I saw it, but I couldn’t sign up because it was scheduled to be in person in Salt Lake in January. And I knew that, you know, after having a baby in September, I probably wouldn’t be able to either take the baby with me or leave the baby. So I just didn’t sign up. Well, then SLIG went virtual and I got on the waiting list.

Nicole (9m 6s):
And about a week before I got notified that I got to do it. So I was pretty excited because I had practiced writing a DNA proof argument in my PROGEN study group and had a lot of thoughts and questions. And it just was something I was that I am currently interested in studying, and it really wanted to continue that study. Anyway, the course went really well. I had the chance to work on a proof argument that kind of came out of the other preferring that I wrote in PROGEN, which was used in our book as an example, who was the father of Barsheba Tharp. So in this class I worked on who was the mother of Barsheba Tharp. We spent some time writing every day.

Nicole (9m 47s):
We had peer review at the end of the day with our peer review partner. And then we had lectures kind of teaching us about some of the best practices for writing proof arguments. So the first day was all about organizing and defining the problem, summarizing the methodology and the answer and drafting the middle and talking about DNA, test takers and results. We also had a day where we studied other people’s DNA proof arguments and talked about, you know, what they did well and what we would change. And we talked about figures and tables and how to add those. And then the next day we talked more about writing and how to do clear writing, improving paragraphs, avoiding pitfalls, evaluating verb choices, and all kinds of things like that.

Nicole (10m 32s):
And then the next day we talked about meeting the GPS, that genealogical proof standard. And we talked about rubrics for the case study and the BCG portfolio, because a lot of the people in the class are working on that, including myself. So that was helpful. And then we talked about creating footnotes and documenting parent child relationships. And then the last day was fun. We talked about polishing and submitting, you know, if we want to submit to a journal, we had Nancy Peter’s talk with us as one of the editors at the NGSQ right now. And she told us kind of the process for peer review and, and how to submit. And then we talked about things like obtaining DNA test taker permission, because we need to do that when we’re publishing.

Nicole (11m 13s):
And then, like I said, every day we met with our peer review partner and shared kind of what we’ve been writing and asked for help and comments. So it was really neat.

Diana (11m 23s):
That sounds like a fabulous course. And I love how it was broken down by day, you know, like a real topic for each day. So good. Getting peer review is so important in our writing. We say that all the time, but you just don’t realize that until you actually participate in something like this, how valuable it is to have somebody else looking at your work and DNA is especially difficult to write about. It is so hard to write it clearly. So what a great course to just work on writing about DNA all week long. Yeah.

Nicole (11m 56s):
When we met with our peer review partners, it was just like for half an hour and we went into like breakout rooms with them. And so we could share a screen and show a couple of paragraphs and our word document that we’re writing. And, and so I would like read a couple of things and ask like, what do you think of this? And how can I do that? And, and it was just good to have somebody to talk with about it.

Diana (12m 17s):
I agree. And I’m just thinking about your day one, where you were organizing the writing. I think this is one of the challenges is to figure out how to put together all of this work that you’ve done. And so I like that you talked about defining the problems, so, you know, what was the problem exactly. And then summarizing everything that you did. That’s awesome. Well, I know you had some takeaways from the course that we’re going to talk about today. So what was your first takeaway?

Nicole (12m 46s):
Yeah, I had a lot, so I just chose five random ones for today. Well, some of the ones that really stood out to me, the first one was that proof arguments can include a degree of uncertainty. And I think usually there will be some uncertainty, but I really appreciated when Tom Jones was teaching about, you know, writing the conclusion to a proof argument. He talked about that when you write your conclusion and you can use words that suggest the decree of uncertainty that you have with your final conclusion. So you can say things like the evidence suggests or it’s likely that. And I thought that was interesting because when we’re writing research reports, we always use qualifiers because it’s research in progress and we don’t have all the information or evidence yet, but even with a proof argument, it was kind of illuminating to realize that just because we have, you know, the GPS we’ve written a proof argument, it doesn’t mean that we’re a hundred percent certain.

Nicole (13m 43s):
This reminded me of chapter one of the genealogy standards, booklet that chapter is about the genealogical proof standard, the GPS. And it has a part in there that says that meeting the GPS neither requires nor ensures perfect certainty. Genealogical proofs are never final, a known evidence, may arise changing the outcome. So it kind of helped me to feel like I can write a proof argument, even though, you know, I don’t feel a hundred percent certain if I have done the reasonably exhaustive research and I’ve checked everything that I can think of and resolved all the conflicts, then it’s okay. We can still write that prefigurement and sometimes, you know, we might not be able to resolve some complex.

Nicole (14m 28s):
So maybe we can’t write a proof argument about that, but if we can resolve the conflicts and do the reasonably exhaustive research, even if we aren’t a hundred percent certain, we can still write the proof argument.

Diana (14m 38s):
Right. And the GPS gives us the formula. So as long as we follow that formula and feel like we’ve done all, we can, then we can write that up. And I think it’s instructive to think about how the NGS cue, what I was talking about earlier that does have case studies that correct past research. And it doesn’t mean the past research was bad and they might have met the GPS. There was just something new that came up that changed the outcome. So as long as we realize that is always a possibility it’s okay.

Nicole (15m 10s):
Yeah. I think one exercise that we can all do to learn about this is to go read the conclusions of a lot of the articles in the NGSQ and kind of like circle the words that show the degree of certainty or uncertainty, and you’ll see those words and those conclusions.

Diana (15m 27s):
Right. Well, let’s get to your second takeaway.

Nicole (15m 32s):
All right. So takeaway number two was about the shared set, an Oregon project and the standard deviation. So when Karen was teaching us about getting meanings from shared DNA to use as evidence in our proof arguments, she told us that when the shared DNA falls outside of one standard deviation of the mean for a particular relationship, more analysis might be needed. So I actually had to do some outside learning outside of the class to really understand more about standard deviation, statistics, histograms. And so I thought I would share some of that today because the Shared cM Project is such a valuable statistical study that we need to use in our DNA research.

Nicole (16m 21s):
And, and when we talk about it as evidence, it’s really helpful to understand all this. So if you go to Blaine Bettinger’s Shared cM Project PDF 4.0 published in March, 2020, he says that one of the new things with this version is that he’s included standard deviations for miosis groupings and for each relationship category. And he says that the standard deviations were added to provide additional information about ranges and variation within a relationship range. So let’s define some of these things. So a meiosis grouping, if you’re not familiar with that, is a grouping of similar relationships that have the same number of separating meiosis.

Nicole (17m 6s):
So these separating, meiosis are also called recombination or reproductive events. So for example, two meiosis, separate full siblings, and three of meiosis, separate half siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and grandparents. It’s good to think about these relationships as probably having similar amounts of shared DNA and you can group them together. And the more number of data points that we have for each of these meiosis groupings, the stronger the data is, that’s why sometimes it’s better to use the meiosis groupings than the specific relationship that you’re looking at. And I know I’ve talked about this in the past, but like for example, the half fourth cousin, there is a separate histogram for that one and there’s separate data for that, but there just weren’t that many submissions to the Shared cM Project for that relationship.

Nicole (18m 4s):
So for the half fourth cousin relationship, there were 89 submissions and the minimum and maximum was zero to 74 with an average of 30. Well, when I was doing my Barsheba Tharp project, I found some half fourth cousins that shared more than 74 cM. So it caused me to be confused and think, well, maybe these aren’t half fourth cousins, maybe they are full fourth cousins and my research is wrong. So then I was in Paul Woodberry’s course at the time, and I had a consultation with the teaching assistant Gretchen, and she was telling me that you need to look at the meiosis grouping instead. So that relationship half fourth cousin is in meiosis grouping number 10.

Nicole (18m 47s):
And that one includes other relationships that have the same number of separating meiosis that half fourth cousins do, but there’s a lot more data. And so there were 2,633 submissions for this grouping with a minimum of zero, a maximum of 126 and an average of 28. So this was better information for me to realize, okay, this is still a possible half fourth cousin, even though they share like a hundred cMs of DNA.

Diana (19m 21s):
Okay. So for someone listening that wants to know how to find this, where specifically to they go to see those meiosis groupings on, is it on DNA painter, the Shared cM Project?

Nicole (19m 36s):
Yes, I think so. You can click on any relationship to see the meiosis groupings pop-up that was kind of a new thing that was added. I just always go to the PDF that Blaine Bettinger shared on his website, the Genetic Genealogists.com. And I’ll put a link to the Shared cM Project version four in the show notes, but you can see the full PDF at his website or DNA painter.

Diana (19m 59s):
And I love that we have official so that we can see exactly what the data is telling us.

Nicole (20m 6s):
Yeah, let’s talk about that. So what is a histogram? I wanted to kind of re review this for myself. And so I found a video on YouTube and, you know, histogram is defined as a graphical representation or just a graph that organizes a group of data into ranges. And so at the bottom of a typical bar chart, there’s just like one number. And then how many people have that number? Well, this is different. It’s a range of shared DNA. So each bar is for a bin or a range. So that’s along the X axis at the bottom. And then the Y axis is the frequency. So a histogram is a frequency distribution chart.

Nicole (20m 49s):
And so the Y axis has the frequency of that range. So how many people submitted that amount of DNA for that relationship? And so you can kind of see what the most likely ranges for that relationship. And what’s interesting about this is that for each relationship or each mouse is here being as that, the histogram frequently forms a bell curve, and sometimes the histogram is skewed, left or skewed, right. But usually it’s a curve. And so when I talk about bell curve and statistics, that means like a normal distribution where it’s symmetrical and the highest point of the histogram is in the center with symmetrical bars going down to the right and left.

Nicole (21m 36s):
So when we talk about a standard deviation, that means like one standard deviation above the mean, and one standard deviation below the mean will include 68% of all of the data. So that you’re kind of getting the most frequent range of shared DNA within one standard deviation of the mean, and the mean is just the average of the data. And so you’re just trying to get a range of shared DNA that’s more normal and more frequent and kind of excluding some of that outliers on the tails of the bell curve. And then if you go to two standard deviations above the mean, and two standard deviations below the mean 95% of the data will fall within that.

Nicole (22m 20s):
And then if you go out to three standard deviations at the mean 99.7% of the data will fall within three standard deviations. So that’s kind of what normal distribution of a histogram would be like and how standard deviation goes into that. So it’s just a way of finding outliers and what Karen was trying to teach us with this is that if you do have outliers, even if it falls within the total range of the Shared cM Project for that relationship, if it falls outside of that one standard deviation at the mean, that might be a clue to you that you need to go and do a little bit of extra research to make sure that there’s not a problem with that DNA match.

Nicole (23m 1s):
And, you know, maybe they’re sharing too much because they have more than one common ancestor in common, or maybe they’re sharing too little because they had a mis-attributed parentage event somewhere in their tree. And then they are actually like a half third cousin instead of a full third cousin. So if you look at the bell curves for like the first cousin histogram, that one is very symmetrical. So the mean, or the average amount of shared DNA for a first cousin is 866 shared centiMorgans. And to calculate the standard deviation, there’s like a formula. So you can like put all the information in the formula and figure it out well, Blaine Bettinger figured it out for us. He used Excel, which has a formula for standard deviation where you just select all the data points, then say, tell me the standard deviation.

Nicole (23m 48s):
And so the standard deviation for the first cousin histogram is 161. So you can calculate the range for one standard deviation within the mean for first cousin, by taking that data and just adding 161 to 866, the mean, and you get 1,060, and then you subtract 161 from 8 66 and you get 705. So the range for that one standard deviation from the mean would be 705 to 1060. So if your first cousin DNA match falls within that one standard deviation of the mean range between 705 and 1060, and you have documentation for that, then you’re good to go.

Nicole (24m 29s):
But let’s say that your cousin falls like at the lower and like outside of the 705 and is on the tails of like one of those outliers, then maybe you’d want to do a little more digging just to figure out if that is really what it is. Then if you look at another example, like the fourth cousins relationship, that histogram is not very symmetrical, the top of the curve is toward the left and the tail goes toward the right. So the mean of a fourth cousin relationship is 35 centiMorgans. And then there’s some submissions that have higher amounts of shared DNA. And so the graph is what they call statistics skewed, right?

Nicole (25m 13s):
Because there’s a long tail going toward the right. And so the standard deviation is 23 centiMorgans for this fourth cousin histogram. Once you get shared amounts of DNA higher than 58 centiMorgans, that’s the tail of the histogram and not many fourth cousins share more than 58. Then if you look at a second cousin histogram, that relationship has somewhat more of a normal distribution of data. It’s skewed a little bit to the right and the average or the mean is 229 with a standard deviation of 86. So you can calculate the standard deviation above and below. The range would be 143 to 315.

Nicole (25m 55s):
So for example, like if you have a tray second cousin relationship, but the shared centiMorgans falls outside of this range of 143 to 315 more evidence might be needed. Karen Stanbury shared with us some ideas for strategies or what you can do if this happens for additional analysis. And one of the simple things you can do is just compare that DNA match to additional test takers. So if I have my dad tested and his second cousin is outside of that, but I also have my aunt tested, I can just compare my aunt’s shared DNA with that match. And maybe then it will be within the right range, you know, one standard deviation from the mean, and that will just show that, you know, my dad’s DNA shared with her was just an outlier.

Nicole (26m 37s):
Another thing you can do is check for more than one set of common ancestors. If it’s too low, check for mis-attributed parentage, and you don’t need to throw out outliers from your evidence, but just check for more evidence. One really important point that was made in our course several times was that we shouldn’t overplay the statistical evidence. And remember that it’s just one part of the body of evidence, you know, it can usually be consistent with or support the documentary evidence, but it doesn’t give the final answer always.

Diana (27m 9s):
That’s a really good point because sometimes that relationship just has not been reported when we’re getting out into the weeds of unusual relationships. And so you do have to look at the whole body of evidence. I think it’s really important to think of this idea of just checking for a little bit more evidence. It’s kind of like when you’re looking at a census and you see something that doesn’t quite seem right in the family, then what do you do? You go looking for more information, like maybe you’re seeing somebody that looks like a half sibling, you know, in the census recording just because of their age or birth place. And so you go looking for more information and it’s the same way with the DNA.

Diana (27m 50s):
There is an outlier, somebody off of that standard deviation go look for more evidence, see if there’s a different relationship than you thought. So such a good takeaway. Well, what is takeaway number three.

Nicole (28m 3s):
Okay. So this one was about writing. So to get over writer’s block, the takeaway is just write, and don’t let all of the things you have to do hold you back, just let it flow. And don’t worry about like making all of your tables and figures and citations, right then. Hopefully you have already made a lot of your citations when you were doing the research originally. And so you just need to work on like getting all of your ideas on paper and getting a rough draft put together. And we talked about the fact that it’s okay to have a terrible rough draft of your proof argument. It’s just really helpful to get your ideas down and then you can start rearranging and editing and you’ll do a lot of editing.

Nicole (28m 44s):
And one idea that was given us to add placeholders for tables and figures, and even the citations, just to add later when you edit your rough draft, you all probably get rid of a lot of those extra words, because when you’re writing, it’s easier to just like write things as you might say then, but then when you edit those out, it makes it easier for the people who are reading it to understand because they have to consume less words. The more words there are, the more they have to read, the more they have to like digest. So Tom Jones, as you know, is the great teacher of how to write in a simple, clear way.

Nicole (29m 24s):
And of course he did the classwork, he does live editing of people’s writing samples. And so it was really neat. I learned so much from just watching him talk about the reasoning, why he’s cut, you know, cutting out certain pieces and rearranging things to make it easier to people who are reading it and also making it really clear so that there can’t be misunderstandings.

Diana (29m 47s):
I love that one. I took his class on writing as well. It was so instructive to see him take one of my paragraphs and literally cut out two thirds of it to get down to one third that read much clearer and was much better. It was just amazing.

Nicole (30m 4s):
Yeah. I think sometimes we think we have to talk a lot about different pieces of information, but I think in a proof argument, you know, it’s kind of different from a research report in that way where we don’t need to go into all of the details. We just need to simply let the information speak for itself. And any discussion of the source, if it needs to happen is in the footnotes. You know, sometimes in the narrative, we do need to talk about a source if it really is important part of the evidence, but typically that discussion is just, you know, in the source citation, you know, you use the records to give you them permission, but you don’t talk about the records as much as possible.

Diana (30m 44s):
Right. And just to clarify this as for a proof argument, when, when we’re writing research reports, that’s where it’s appropriate to talk more about the records. So, you know, we have two different types of writing, but even in research reports, I really like to try to use more active voice and talk about the people more than the records, unless it’s something really important about the records. So, you know, it, it comes down to just a good balance.

Nicole (31m 12s):
Yeah. And it really just depends on each case. And often in a research report, especially ICAPGEN teaches that you should talk about the reasons of why the source was consulted because your audience is your client. And they want to know if you spent your time wisely. So

Diana (31m 27s):
Exactly

Nicole (31m 27s):
You have to talk about them.

Diana (31m 32s):
Right. Okay. So take away number four.

Nicole (31m 36s):
This takeaway is about organizing your sentences. And we spent some time talking about how to write a paragraph and takeaway is that when you write a paragraph, you should organize your paragraph with topic sentences and transitions. So when you write a proof argument, you’re going to be dividing it into sections and into paragraphs. And each paragraph should have a single topic. And usually the first sentence of a paragraph is the topic of that paragraph just basically tells what that paragraph will be about. What it does is it signals to the reader that they are transitioning to a new topic and gets them ready to understand that topic. And so it’s really helpful for the readers.

Nicole (32m 18s):
That’s really what it’s for. It helps your writing be clear and makes it so that the reader doesn’t feel like you’re just jumping around to new things all, all the time. And one thing that you can do is use little transitioning words and phrases from one the end of one paragraph to the beginning of the next paragraph, that kind of build logically on the previous information. And sometimes that just means that you connect by using a similar word that was used in the previous paragraph so that the reader can make that logical connection. So it’s good to think about dividing our writing into paragraphs that focus on a single topic.

Diana (32m 57s):
Well, this whole idea of a topic sentence is something that we learned long ago in our writing classes. And if we haven’t been writing, we’ve probably forgotten how to do that. And it is so important when I’m reading reports, that’s one of my pieces of feedback that I almost always give the writer is this needs a topic sentence. We’ve got to tell our reader, what’s coming up in that paragraph, especially when we’re getting deep into a research case and it’s getting confusing, make sure we’re helping our reader the most we can. And I love that idea of good transitions because that can be tricky too. So, you know, I would just say it’s all comes down to practice and having somebody else read your work.

Nicole (33m 42s):
Yeah. And I gained a lot by studying other people’s transitions and that’s one of the things I love about our NGSQ study group. So one exercise you can do to practice with topic sentences and transitions is just to get out a case study from the NGSQ and pay attention to each paragraph, try to figure out what the topic of the paragraph is. Try to find the topic sentence, which is usually the first sentence, but it can be the second one or the last one, but usually it’s the first. And then also see if you can find transitions, you know, any kind of words or phrases that link one paragraph to the next and help the reader see the flow.

Diana (34m 22s):
Okay. So I have a paragraph from the one we were just studying about Pity, the Poor Fool. And I thought it’s just a great explanation or description of what we’ve been talking about. So Warren Bittner starts off with talking about the civil records in the United States and the importance of, you know, tracing the records that you have in the U S before you jumped back to the old country. And in this case, all the only place they had was Bavaria. Well, you know, that’s a huge area who knows where in Bavaria. So here’s this transition to the next section, “Civil records named Lawrence’s birth place only as Bavaria, at least one of his associates, however, could have come from the same place and left specific information about it.

Diana (35m 7s):
Lorenzo’s Catholic marriage, community, and burial suggests Catholic records would identify his associates.” So that is his great paragraph. That’s pretty much summing up that there was nothing in the civil records except for Bavaria. And that now he’s going to talk about the associates in Catholic records, which has the heading for the next section. So such a beautiful piece of writing to explain where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Nicole (35m 35s):
Yeah. That’s a really good example because that end of that paragraph signaled a transition and then the reader can clearly see the heading of the next section is about that.

Diana (35m 46s):
Yeah. And you know, that just comes from practice and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

Nicole (35m 52s):
Yeah. And actively trying to do that. If you know that that’s something you should be doing, then you can incorporate it.

Diana (35m 58s):
Right. You have to be mindful. Okay. Well, what is our final takeaway? Number five.

Nicole (36m 3s):
All right. This was on the last day. And Karen was teaching us about how to get permission from test takers, because if you want to publish it, you need to get permission from the matches. So really stood out to me is that she was so persistent with getting permissions. If they didn’t respond, then she would look them up in tax databases from public county websites and see if they were landowners. And then she would send them a letter through the mail. So that’s the takeaway is don’t give up on contacting your DNA matches to get permission, even if you have to send them a letter through the mail. And sometimes that’s more successful for getting people to open it and read it because how often do you get a real letter these days?

Diana (36m 48s):
That’s awesome. I can totally see Karen doing that. Persisting. I have several matches that I probably should do that.

Nicole (36m 55s):
Yes. I’m going to do that. And I have had to do that a couple times. You know, there was one match who I really, really, really wanted to reach. And I could tell you was too old. I just guess that he wasn’t using the MyHeritage message system or for email. So I didn’t think he was getting any of my messages. So I just found his son on Facebook and contacted him. And then he gave me his brother’s phone number. So I called him and that was great. And the son helped me have him take another DNA test at Ancestry. It was really great. Then another one that was this similar situation where he was an older guy and hadn’t been checking messages. I ended up finding a relative of his, who did respond to emails, who also was a DNA match.

Nicole (37m 39s):
And they gave me his address. So I wrote him a letter and then he called me when he got it. So that was a really good one too. You just never know the best way to contact people. So why not try a letter in the mail?

Diana (37m 52s):
That’s right. Try all your avenues. Well, it’s always so fun to talk DNA and especially to talk more about writing about it. And that’s kind of where we’re at, where we have done a lot of research and use DNA. And now it’s time to start figuring out how to write it up and put it out there as proof or some of our connections.

Nicole (38m 15s):
Right. So if any of you are thinking about taking this course, the next time it’s offered, I really encourage you to sign up. It will be part of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy virtual academy next year in 2023. And so instead of being part of the week long SLIG courses, it will be a virtual course that meets like once a week or something similar like that instead of meeting like every day for six hours. So I think that will be a really good format for, it’ll give you a little more time to write and work on your proof argument. So if you’re needing to write a proof argument, but you haven’t had the motivation and this could be a really good opportunity to get that motivation, get some peer review, get some instruction and practice,

Diana (39m 2s):
Right. And you have a year to get your research figured out. So thank you so much, Nicole, for going through that. I’m really excited because you know, right now we’re in the middle of our DNA study group and I’m really going to look at those deviations, you know, just one off of, of the mean and start using that methodology a little bit more than the entire range. So I think that’s a really good takeaway for me anyway, from our discussion for today.

Nicole (39m 32s):
Yes. And, you know, Karen suggested that I add that to my airtable base. You know, we have right now, the idea was given by another blogger to add the range of the Shared cM Project so that when you put in the relationship and the amount of shared DNA for a match into the airtable log, it will tell you if it falls within the range or not. So I loved that idea. So I think I will try and add that to my most recent update.

Diana (39m 59s):
Are you going to do both, have both of them in there?

Nicole (40m 2s):
Yeah, probably just added.

Diana (40m 3s):
I liked that so that you could see, you know, you have a green check mark that yet within the range, but maybe you’d have a red tech mark well, it falls outside the standard deviations. So you could just see that at a glance. Maybe this is a person that needs more investigation. I think that would be a really good addition to the airtable base. Yeah.

Nicole (40m 21s):
We’ll have to work on that. Luckily, the Shared cM Project has all of the standard deviations listed for every relationship that he has in there all the way down to let’s see, what’s the last one, eighth cousin. So he had, you know, he doesn’t do half relationships beyond half fourth cousin, but he does do like fifth cousin and six cousin and some of the removes like six cousin once, you know, six cousin, twice removed. There’s just so many relationships when you get back that far.

Diana (40m 57s):
So many relationships, so many possibilities,

Nicole (41m 0s):
It’s not that many submissions for some of these. So he is currently asking for more submissions. So if you want to submit to the Shared cM Project, Blaine Bettinger recently posted in his Facebook group, Genetic Genealogy Tips and Techniques that he’s looking for more submissions to the Shared cM Project. And he’s trying to get more than a hundred thousand, I think. So.

Diana (41m 25s):
Yes.

Nicole (41m 25s):
Yes. So go and submit to his form.

Diana (41m 28s):
And I think, especially if you’ve done some good research and you have a good paper trial to some of these, a little bit more unique relationships, like half-fourth cousins once removed, you know, some of those that are out there a bit that are probably don’t have as many people who have traced that or have done good genealogy to know that that is their relationship submit those. I think that that would be super helpful. I know when I was doing my sister’s adoptee project, she had a couple of key matches and nobody had submitted anything. They were outliers. They were the zeros out there on the end. But once I had it all figured out, you know, I could see exactly how they connected to the family tree.

Diana (42m 11s):
So, you know, this was a few years ago and there weren’t as many submissions, but I should go and submit those now because we figured it out. Cause it was a half relationship, something I have second cousin, three times removed or something like that.

Nicole (42m 24s):
Right. So those are less common relationships. So

Diana (42m 27s):
Yeah,

Nicole (42m 28s):
It’s good to go and submit the known relationships. So we should all go do that. I’m going to do that

Diana (42m 35s):
Me too. Well, all right. I think that wraps up this episode. We hope everybody listening learned something from this discussion of five takeaways from Nicole’s course and go and make some discoveries in DNA this week.

Nicole (42m 51s):
Yeah. Say I’m just really thankful to my course coordinators and instructors and also Blaine Bettinger for the Shared cM Project. So thank you a big thank you to all of them and yes, I hope everyone will take a SLIG course or another Institute course or something that will help you learn and grow in your writing.

Diana (43m 11s):
All right. And have a great week everyone. Bye. Bye.

Nicole (43m 16s):
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 books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.