RLP 213: Five Takeaways from an Advanced DNA Institute Course

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 213 Five Takeaways from an Advanced DNA 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.

Nicole (40s):
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. Let’s go. Hi, how are you today?

Diana (45s):
Hi, Nicole. I’m doing great. How are you doing?

Nicole (49s):
I’m good. I’m excited. We’re getting ready for our next Research Like a Pro study group. That’s happening this fall.

Diana (54s):
I am too. I’ve been trying to think of what project I want to use for that. That’s always fun to do your own project. And I have so many doing some thinking. I kind of wanna do something that gets prepared for the DNA study group in the spring, so I can do the really good documentary research And then add on DNA for a second phase.

Nicole (1m 14s):
Absolutely. You probably have a lot of good future research suggestions from your recent Dillard project.

Diana (1m 20s):
I do. And I also have this Mary Clemsy Cline hanging out as a brick wall ancestor on my tree that I’m also curious about. So I’m kind of going back and forth. Do I continue with Cynthia Dillard or do I just jump to something new? So I will keep thinking

Nicole (1m 36s):
Mary Clemsy Cline don’t we have mitochondrial DNA for her line.

Diana (1m 40s):
Yes. I just got that from my cousin. So I’m, I’m actually really kind of interested in that. The challenge is that, you know, with mitochondrial testing, you’ve gotta have a good testing subject to test your hypothesis. So I’ve gotta do some targeted testing. So it might be really good to do a foundational project so I can trace some descendants of my hypothesis father And then have them test and preparation absolutely. For the DNA study group.

Nicole (2m 4s):
Hey, that’s a great idea.

Diana (2m 6s):
I think I might wanna do that one now that we’re talking about it.

Nicole (2m 10s):
Yeah, but I don’t want you to leave behind the Dillards cuz you did make good progress on that too.

Diana (2m 15s):
I know. I know. Well I found Eli to Dillard as a very possible a probable brother to Cynthia. So yeah, it is kind of, you know, challenging which one do I wanna do? I will look at both of them really think through what would be fun to do this time?

Nicole (2m 33s):
Well fun. So by way of announcements, of course we said the study group is beginning. This fall and registration is ongoing currently the registration ends at the end of August. So if you’re thinking about joining us for the study group, please sign up. Just so you know, the schedule for the research like a pro study group this fall is that it will begin on Wednesday, September 7th, and we will meet every week for nine weeks, but we will have a break for the week of October 19th to give you an extra week just to do all of your research and follow your research plan. We always have two weeks to write the report. And the second week is a lesson on adding in things about copyright plagiarism proof, just continuing to think about writing.

Nicole (3m 19s):
So there’s two weeks for research and two weeks for writing, which I think is helpful.

Diana (3m 24s):
Yes, I’m really glad we added that extra week. And you know, we take feedback after every single study group and really listen to what our peer group leaders and our class members have to say and try to incorporate that. And so that was one of the huge requests was we need more time to write and we need more time to research. So we’re excited to have that built into the study group.

Nicole (3m 47s):
Absolutely.

Diana (3m 48s):
Well, we have a listener’s spotlight review to read and this listener says the hosts are very good at discussing the topics, which they tend to break down into small chunks of knowledge, delightful to listen to this mother-daughter team, excellent source for learning how to become a professional and what you need to do to prepare. So thank you so much to that listener. We appreciate that. And that is one of our goals is to always make things accessible and take hard concepts and break those down for you, which is what we’re going to do today because we’re going to be talking about my advanced DNA course that I took recently from the genealogical research Institute of Pittsburgh.

Diana (4m 32s):
And this course was coordinated by Blaine Bettinger who is a notable expert in the field and probably my very favorite DNA teacher because of his ability to break down difficult concepts and make them easy. So I’m excited to talk about some of the things I learned and you know, obviously we had hours and hours of learning and so we’re not gonna cover it all in this podcast episode, but just kind of the major things that were my Takeaways that I really learned.

Nicole (5m 3s):
Yeah. I wish I could have come. Did you have a lot of people in the class

Diana (5m 6s):
We had about 60? So yeah, that’s a good amount. And we had a case study that we followed all week. We had homework, a Blaine gave us a little piece of it to do each day. And so that was fun because you know, you always learn a lot as you’re doing the actual work and research and applying what you learned. And so that was fun.

Nicole (5m 28s):
Very cool. Let’s just dive into your first takeaway. What was the first thing that you learned about that you really were excited to hear about?

Diana (5m 36s):
Well, Blaine had warned us that this class would be heavy on the science and I wasn’t sure if I should be worried about that or excited about that and kind of a little bit of both, but I should have known that he would break that science down and really make it understandable. You know, the companies all have their white papers, which is their scientific paper and those aren’t always the easiest to understand from a layperson’s point of view. And so even though I have read many of those and studied those and used those and looked at those, sometimes it just doesn’t stick. So I really appreciated this course because as he was teaching, so many of the things clicked into place, things that we’ve read or studied in the past and you know, how you just have to hear things over and over sometimes to really get him to click.

Diana (6m 26s):
And that’s kind of what happened with a lot of these concepts. So the very first class we had was on why DNA testing at family tree DNA. And that was so good because we talked a lot about the big Y 700 DNA test. And we have a lot of clients who have taken that big Y 700 and want to know what it means and how they can use it. That comes up in our DNA study group all the time. And I think it is confusing. How does that big Y 700 compare to first of all, the big Y 500 used to be offered or even just the tests at 37 or hundred 11 markers, the STR tests.

Diana (7m 8s):
I know you have used the big Y 700 with your Dyerproject. Right?

Nicole (7m 12s):
Right. I was hopeful. It would be really helpful. The thing we need is just more people from the Dyer branch that my father-in-law’s on to test to make it more useful. So recently got a 111 match, which was so exciting. And so I don’t know, I might ask him to upgrade right now, I’m just doing his Genealogy. So

Diana (7m 35s):
That is really exciting. Well, and that’s one of the things we learned. So I’m gonna back up just a little bit before we get to that and give our listeners just a little bit of clarification and background on this, because this is something that I think everybody gets confused on. So with the Y DNA to get really simple and clear, it only is past the Y chromosome is only PEs down through the male line. So you have father, son, father, son, along the way, the DNA tests, the Y chromosome. If you’ve heard somebody say they’ve tested at 37 or 67, used to be a test you could take or 111 markers.

Diana (8m 15s):
That means that they are looking at the STR, which is short tandem repeats. And sometimes you hear people call those the stutters and that is being compared using a chip. And they’re looking for all the differences between the test takers by chromosome and the standard chip. And then they’re comparing that to everybody else. That’s taken the test. And then you get to see who you compare to. So it’s basically just the compare test. Then they decided they were going to do a sequencing test where they are looking at the whole chromosome and they were using the big Y 500 and looking at 500 places.

Diana (8m 57s):
And this time they’re using SNPs, that stands for single nucleotide polymorphisms, which is why we just call ’em SNPs. So the big Y 700 was a big upgrade from the previous big Y 500. And this one actually discovers new snips through that sequencing. And like you were saying puts you on the Y DNA haplo group family tree. So if you have got like a father or a son, an uncle or a cousin who could also do the big Y 700, you’ll be able to see your family group on the Y DNA haplo group, family tree, you’ll have a very unique capital group with a bunch of letters and numbers, and you’ll have your own little place on the tree.

Diana (9m 42s):
So it was interesting to learn more about what you can do with that. So if you don’t have any good matches at 111 markers, the big Y 700, won’t give you any more matches. So people often wanna say, well, should I upgrade? And not necessarily, you know, you might wanna just reach out and get some targeted testers and see how they compare to you at one 11 And then could go forward with the big Y 700. That’s

Nicole (10m 9s):
A great explanation of how to know if you’re ready to use the big Y 700 test. So for people who are thinking about doing a Y DNA test, tell us a little bit more about what is a good testing strategy.

Diana (10m 20s):
All right. So Blaine gave us such a good analogy for comparing the test. The Y 37 test only compares your DNA across 37 of those STR on the Y chromosome. So he compared that to an old black and white TV that is grainy. And doesn’t give a great picture. So anybody who is as young as you, Nicole, probably doesn’t even know what that’s like, but you know, sometimes in movies you’ll see the old black and white TVs pretty bad picture. Then the Y 11 1 11 tests compares the DNA across 111, which is a lot more of those TRRS and can be compared to a nice color TV with a clear picture.

Diana (11m 0s):
You know, this is what we had before our high definition TVs came across and I remember getting our first color TV and just being so amazed. It was so awesome. I was really little, but I remember how great it was. And then the big Y 700 compares across 700 STR and is like high definition TV with incredible clarity. So that’s amazing, you know, just how much more it compares. So that’s why if you’ve got someone who’s tested at 111 and they haven’t done the big Y 700, they’re just gonna compare across the hundred and 11. But if they do the big Y 700, you can compare across 700.

Diana (11m 40s):
Anyway, it is a good idea to just start with 37 or 111, And then move to the big Y if that looks to be promising. So just remember it’s best for testing hypotheses, not to go fishing for DNA matches. So if you have researched an ancestor and you think he belongs to your family, traces known male descendants, find a candidate for targeted testing and have him test, and you can always start with 30 by 37 that’s least expensive test. And then you can upgrade if you decide that you want to do more and more testing that in a nutshell is what we got. And of course in our class, we talked a lot about the, the block tree and interpreting everything on that.

Diana (12m 26s):
And you can actually read it all. And the big Y 700 white paper that family tree DNA puts out,

Nicole (12m 34s):
Oh, they have a white paper. How did I not know that?

Diana (12m 38s):
Maybe, maybe it’s not obvious. I don’t know, but my blog post has a link to it.

Nicole (12m 44s):
Thank you.

Diana (12m 46s):
And Blaine has a really good blog post too. And I have a link to that in the blog post. We could put that in the show notes where it’s called thinking about a big Y test at family trade DNA, where he goes into a lot of how to interpret it and the results and what you’re looking at.

Nicole (13m 4s):
Yeah. I just clicked onto the big Y 700 white paper. And I’m excited because I just feel like it helps to understand a little more about what you’re doing when you do those tests. And I paid for this one before I really knew anything about it. Just thought I would do it just to learn about it. And so it still learning

Diana (13m 25s):
Well, and that’s the thing. And, and Blain said that too, that we’re all still learning and the companies keep upgrading and changing. And so, you know, what may have been true a year ago may not be true today. And so just like in all of our Genealogy, we are continually learning, but I think with DNA, the learning curve is much higher because we’re really, they’re just discovering new ways to analyze the DNA.

Nicole (13m 51s):
Well, that was a good takeaway. So what’s your next takeaway?

Diana (13m 55s):
Okay. And this one came up several times throughout the week and it is to be wary of small segments. And I really appreciated this because we see this so much in the genetic Genealogy world where people are so excited because they share a match with someone and it completely confirms our hypothesis of a common ancestor, but then the match is only 8 cMs, and it’s really small. And even if it’s a triangulated match, a segment match with someone else that could be going back to a very distant relative, you know, population segment and not be a common ancestor. So it’s something we all need to be aware of.

Diana (14m 36s):
So, you know, a small shared segment generally, I mean, for sure, under 10 cMs, but even under 20, we could have something that might not go back to a recent common ancestor. So there’s two terms that come up all the time that you might have heard of. And one is IBS are identical by state. And the other is I B D identical by dissent and the ISOC Wiki gives really good definitions. So if you haven’t heard of the ISO Wiki or don’t know about that, it’s the international society of genetic Genealogy, and you can go there and put in any term and get a definition and explanation links to posts, articles.

Diana (15m 23s):
It’s really, really a good place to get information. So let me just give you the definition of these terms, quote, in genetic Genealogy. The term IBS is generally used to describe segments, which are not identical by dissent, and therefore do not share a recent common ancestor. IBS is also used in genetic Genealogy to describe small IBD segments, which are shared by many people both within and between populations in which have no genealogical relevance. So, you know, it’s just important to know if we are looking at a segment that’s relatively small, it may not come from our fourth great grandfather.

Diana (16m 5s):
Like we had hoped, you know, we might be receiving that from an ancestor much further back or a population segment that everybody in the population shared and this, you know, of course occurs in populations that share a lot of DNA like endogenous populations, which we’ll talk about in a minute. So one of the, the scientific things that we learned, because remember this course was all about the science. And we looked at the family tree DNA matching 5.0 white paper, and that had a table that showed the increasing danger of false positives segments that are IBS. So those segments that don’t, you don’t inherit from a common ancestor.

Diana (16m 48s):
And it was really interesting to see this table and they showed as soon as you got less than six Centor, that percentage of segments increases exponentially. It went up to like something like 99% of them were just population segments or very, very old segments. So, you know, that’s why each company does have a threshold to maximize the I IBD segment. You know, they try to minimize those IBS segments and try to make it so that we get a good balance of matches, but then taking out the false matches or false positives. So, you know, my takeaway was those thresholds are not perfect.

Diana (17m 30s):
So we have to do our own analysis. We’ve gotta really be careful. And if we are trying to use small segments, we use a lot of DNA test takers. We try to get a big network of people rather than just two or three,

Nicole (17m 44s):
That’s a good way to mitigate those small segments. Another thought I had was when you’re talking about, you know, as the size decreases the higher, the chance it is that it’s IBS identical by state. And I was wondering, do they just happen to be the same sequence because of chance and not necessarily like a false match, but the smaller you go, the higher, the chances that you might just have the same sequence with people there.

Diana (18m 10s):
Yeah. That could be, yeah, because it says they could have no genealogical relevance.

Nicole (18m 16s):
So you didn’t inherit it from a common ancestor for several reasons. Maybe it, it just happens to be the same sequence there, or it’s a false match where it weaves back and forth.

Diana (18m 28s):
Right. And we did talk about that idea of phasing, if you can get your DNA phase so that they kind of know these, the segments from your either father or mother have those divided up that does make it a little bit better. Well, actually quite a bit better for the, the truly false positives, you know, the segments for it’s just weaving back and forth. So, yeah, there’s just a lot to think about with the small segments and you have to be careful.

Nicole (18m 57s):
Thanks for that. That’s a really a good reminder. Tell us some more about what you guys talked about as far as the shared center Morgan project, since that’s Blain’s project.

Diana (19m 6s):
Well, this was really fun. And we, as the shared Santa Morgan project all the time, that’s our key thing in taking the amount of DNA that we match with someone, putting it in there, getting the possible relationships. And so we did spend some good time learning about that and the science behind it, which was great. So for any of you listening that are new, you can find this shared center Morgan project tool on the DNA painter website. It’s completely free to use Johnny Pearl hosted on his website. And what you can do is once you put in the amount of DNA you share, you will be able to see the different types of relationships.

Diana (19m 52s):
And then you can just click on the relationship that you think it’s your hypothesis for how you connect to that person. And you can see where that falls on the histogram. So when I say histogram, just think of a bar graph, and it’s showing the distribution of shared DNA for reported re relationship Blaine had 60,000 people approximately send in how much DNA they shared with their first cousin and their first cousin once removed and their second cousin and their second cousin once removed. So it was a crowdsourced project where people said, this is how much I share. And because DNA is inherited randomly, you get different types of relationships for different amounts of DNA that is shared, but when you put it all together, you get to see where, you know, most people fell in that.

Diana (20m 51s):
And so the histogram clearly shows that graph. So for instance, in the first cousin, once removed, you have a really high bar for 500 cMs being the amount of DNA shared for the first cousin once removed, there were almost 1200 people that reported that relationship. So that’s a lot, you know, that’s pretty good, but then you’ve got clear out on the shoulders of that. You’ve got nine people that reported a thousand cMs. Okay. So that’s like twice as much as most people did. And then on the opposite end, you’ve got 97 people that reported only 200.

Diana (21m 33s):
So he said to be aware of those outliers, that amount of DNA shared by that relationship, if, if it’s way out there on the far right, or the far left, you need to really make sure that it’s a true outlier or could the relationship be different. And he said, especially be wary if it is higher than it should be, because that could be pointing to a different relationship or maybe two shared ancestors. And we’ve seen this in our DNA, we’ve got some cousins that married and we share through both of their lines. And so those DNA descendants share a little bit more with us than you would think for our relationship.

Diana (22m 17s):
So just again, analyzing not taking it for granted that you are right being sure that you’re really examining every scenario.

Nicole (22m 27s):
Yeah. It’s a good idea to just test out different ideas and see which one could be right. Like you said, because how many times have people made erroneous conclusions because they just didn’t look into it very close.

Diana (22m 40s):
Right. And it’s so easy to see those histograms by clicking on the relationships and comparing, you know, if you’re right there in the middle, then you’re like, okay, that’s, that’s pretty good. But if you’re on the outside parts, take a closer look. And of course there’s going to be outliers. That’s the way it is. You know, we did share, We do inherit different amounts of DNA, but we just wanna be careful.

Nicole (23m 3s):
All right. Well, that was a good takeaway. What’s your next takeaway?

Diana (23m 7s):
Well, this is another one that we talked about a lot and that was realizing the danger of confirmation bias. So this was a course on science and genetic Genealogy is based on science. So we need to use the scientific method of trying in every way possible to disprove our hypothesis. And if we can’t disprove it, we can conclude that the hypothesis is confirmed. So how often do we want it to match, to work out? You know, we found this hypothesized ancestor and in through line shows, we have some matches. We’re like, oh, yay. I did it right. But there’s so much more that we need to do to try to disprove that hypothesis before we can actually conclude it’s confirmed.

Diana (23m 54s):
So we have to be careful. And so there are some things we talked about how we can avoid confirmation bias and test or hypotheses. And the first thing is to check the sites of the segment, just what we were talking about. So if we’re avoiding those small segments, that is really a good thing to do to make sure that we’re really sharing a recent common ancestor and not common ancestry from hundreds of years ago.

Nicole (24m 19s):
Yeah. I wonder how many times we find a match and think that the relationship is closer and we search through the trees and we just can’t find any relationship, no common ancestors. And then aha. Perhaps they’re related so far back that we’re not gonna find it.

Diana (24m 36s):
Ah, yes. And that has happened to all of us. It’s disappointing, but it, it is a fact and we just have to realize that. So the next part of that confirmation bias, making sure we’re not doing that is to ask, does the proposed relationship and amount of shared DNA make sense? And just as I was talking about the shared center Morgan project, we have to see if the relationship we’ve hypothesized works is if it’s larger than the maximum, we look more closely, see if there was a different relationship or more than one way we are related. And if it’s smaller, we can go back to our analysis and decide if we were correct.

Diana (25m 18s):
You know, so many of these things are simple. They seem simple, but you need to do the work. All right. So the final part of confirmation bias that we’ll just talk about today in this podcast is this idea of tree completeness. So I’ve said a couple times we might share DNA with a match on more than one line. And if we don’t know how complete our matches tree is, and we don’t know how complete our tree is, then we don’t know if we’re gonna share more than one line. So we always need to assume the possibility that we share in a different line than we’ve hypothesized. So it, maybe we only share with one ancestor, maybe it’s a different ancestor than we thought.

Diana (25m 59s):
And so we have to be really careful that we have as complete a tree or be aware of our tree is not complete. And the same with our DNA matches. And this is tricky because on ancestry, we often have matches who there who have a very small tree with maybe four people or 20 people. You know, even if it’s like a hundred people, that’s not a very big tree. So we have to be careful and look at the trees.

Nicole (26m 24s):
Yes, that’s so true. And I had so many thoughts when you were talking about this. And one of them is that sometimes people have a seemingly large amount of people in their tree, but then when you look at it, it’s like only on the father’s side and the whole mother’s side is missing. Yeah. And you’re like, oh, well, we probably shared an ancestor on the side that’s missing then, because that’s a big, I don’t see anyone on the other side. And then another thing is that usually we can tell through shared matches which line it’s on, but we can’t tell that from just looking at their tree. Like sometimes if a match seems really important, I’ll ask them to, to really look at their shared matches and say, well, what side of the family does it look like it’s on for you?

Nicole (27m 5s):
Because unless they share their DNA matches with you, you can’t see their shared matches for the match with you. Right. Anyways. So it’s helpful to ask that, you know, come at it from their direction too, when you’re figuring that match out and tree completeness, I think encompasses the idea of tree accuracy for your match and yourself. Because if the matches tree is inaccurate or they have a, an NPE on their tree, it can make It really difficult to find the common ancestor.

Diana (27m 32s):
And so many times that is the problem that we see, especially with our client projects, because the clients are coming to us because they can’t figure it out. There’s something wrong there. And we, we charted out, We do all this analysis And then discover, yep. There was another, not the parent expected. And there was another event, another adoption or, you know, something, whatever the case was that makes it tricky. So, so many scenarios that come up in DNA,

Nicole (27m 59s):
Right. And we have to consider all of them. And I think that’s what this Takeaways about that sometimes we come up with the hypothesis of, oh, you know, this is the common ancestor, or this is why I can’t find the common ancestor And then we’re just wrong. But because we had that idea, then everything we see confirms that bias.

Diana (28m 16s):
And I just love the idea that this is a hypothesis we’re coming up with and coming at it from the perspective, trying to disprove it, rather than trying to prove it, because we can just clutch onto those hypotheses and want ’em to be true so much that we let things blind us. So put on your science hat. And I think that will help us a lot with our DNA work.

Nicole (28m 41s):
Yeah. I think it’s good to not just come up with one hypothesis, but to think of all the different things that could be explaining what you’re seeing. And then, like you said, go through them one by one and try to disprove each one.

Diana (28m 51s):
Yeah. All right. Well, our final takeaway that we’ll talk about today is on understanding Endy pedigree collapse, a multiple relationships. And I was so glad that we had a class session to talk about this. Actually it came up a few times, but we had one session where we really focused on this one. It was so good because this comes up in our DNA study group too, all the time where people are looking at their DNA results or they do the leads chart. And it looks like they’ve got all this pedigree collapse or endogamy, and they’re not understanding what they’re seeing. And so I really appreciated getting some clarity on this.

Diana (29m 32s):
So endogamy we can define as marrying or reproducing with, within the same population for hundreds of years or multiple generations. And usually we see this in cultural or religious populations, such as Ashkenazi Jewish populations or the Amish population, you know, for cultural or religions that share. And they’ve just married for hundreds of years together. Or it could be for a geographic reason, such as the population that’s been isolated in islands for again, hundreds of years reproducing within the same population. And so, you know, we’ve seen this in many of our projects with ancestry from the islands, you know, Polynesia any of the islands in Tonga Samoa or Hawaii.

Diana (30m 24s):
And so that is endogamy and it affects our genetic Genealogy because people will share many of those small I B D our population segments are very old. So remember I, B D is identical by descent. So are segments that you maybe, you know, got from an ancestor, but they’re just so old and everybody gets the same segment. And so the total amount of shared DNA will be inflated as a result. And your match may look like they are much closer than is actual, which is really difficult with endogamy. And we talked about some solutions, which I won’t really get into, but, you know, the major one is to use larger segments.

Diana (31m 9s):
Don’t use those small segments really look at the larger segments.

Nicole (31m 12s):
It’s so helpful that ancestry helps us figure out how many segments there are and the largest segment now, because that helps with endogamy.

Diana (31m 21s):
It really does. And so you can sort your matches by that. Try to find people who are related more recent, not this very, very far back. So it’s just something to be aware of if you’re seeing that in your DNA results, or if, you know, in your history, you know, doing your family history, that you are will have one of those populations. So the next one we’ll talk about is pedigree collapse. And this occurs when cousins reproduce and a person will have the same set of ancestors in more than one place in the tree. This often gets confused with endogamy and pedigree collapse over many generations can result in endogamy, but just endogamy, that’s more pedigree collapse, and this scenario can affect matching to closer matches, but it fades quickly because of segment loss.

Diana (32m 15s):
And it won’t have a huge effect on downstream matching. And I thought that was really an interesting takeaway because I hadn’t thought about that so much pedigree collapsed. You can usually figure out where it happened, but it’s not going to have such a large effect.

Nicole (32m 32s):
Yeah. In my Dyer case where I found that two cousins married each other, those descendants all formed a very tight genetic network, but then it is true that it doesn’t have a huge effect on the matching, I guess, because I don’t know, I could just figure it out. They were more distant, I guess.

Diana (32m 51s):
Right. And I think that’s the key. You could figure it out. You could see where it happened and It really does affect mostly the descendants. So just because you match to some of those people, it’s not going to affect you as much as those descendants who have that in their tree. So if you have got the same set of ancestors in more than one place in your tree, then you have pedigree collapse. But if you don’t, if you just have a set of cousins who married, that is what we call multiple relationships. And that’s what I was talking about when we discover that we are related to a DNA match through more than one line. So for instance, if you have siblings that marry siblings, the descendants of couple one could share DNA with descendants of couple two through both lines.

Diana (33m 40s):
And it only affects the descendants of those two couples and their shared matching. And then with the loss of segments in each generation, this effect will be reduced. So you’ll look for this in fairly recent ancestry. And this happens in our family tree. I have got my great grandparents, doc Harris and Alice Frazier and their siblings married each other. So we have a Frazier Harris marriage And then another Frazier Harris marriage through their siblings. And so that’s multiple relationships and it’s my great grandparents. So I do see matches cuz that’s fairly recent ancestry that this occurred, but you know, for you Nicole and your children, and as those generations go through the amount of shared matching, won’t really be inflated as much because every generation, some segments are lost.

Diana (34m 30s):
So I thought that was really interesting. That was a good way to explain that those are three different scenarios. We just need to look at our trees again and see if we can figure out what is going on.

Nicole (34m 43s):
That’s a really helpful explanation. And all three of those things can affect how we analyze the DNA matches. So it’s good to be on the lookout for ’em, but it’s also good. Like you said, to understand the differences between them. So we don’t misdiagnose our tree as having endogamy and when we just have some multiple relationships with the DNA matches,

Diana (35m 1s):
That’s exactly right. So I was grateful for that because I think that I have been guilty of saying that I’ve got petty, good collapse in my Southern lines and that could be true, but I have several lines I haven’t discovered yet. And so I can’t really say that for sure, because I don’t have complete tree on that side, on my Southern side. So I think I might just have more multiple relationships.

Nicole (35m 28s):
Yeah. It’s totally possible. Well, thank you for sharing all these great Takeaways. If anybody is interested in taking this course, how can they learn more about it?

Diana (35m 36s):
Blaine will be be repeating this course next summer. And it will be in person in Pittsburgh as part of the genealogical research Institute of Pittsburgh. You can just go to the website, learn about the specific dates, how to register and you’ll have to travel because it’s going to be in person. But I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in just digging in. I was so glad I was able to take it virtually and maybe it’ll be available virtually someday in the future, but next year it’s in person.

Nicole (36m 9s):
All right. Well, that was a great kind of summary of some of the good things you can learn from taking an advanced DNA Institute course. And there are several out there and we hope that you guys will consider signing up for one. If you’re ready to take your learning to the next level, as far as advanced DNA, thank you Diana. And to all our listeners, we hope that you gained a nugget of information from this and can go forward with more confidence in using DNA evidence in your Genealogy research.

Diana (36m 39s):
All right, good luck everyone. Have a great week. Bye bye-bye.

Nicole (37m 20s):
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.