RLP 221: Autosomal DNA Coverage – Part 2

Nicole (1s):
This is research Like a Pro episode 221 Autosomal DNA Coverage part two. 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome to Research like a Pro.

Diana (46s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (47s):
Really great, just working on my portfolio. Feeling good, How about you?

Diana (52s):
It’s awesome. Well, I’m so excited because I opened up my mail today and there was the latest issue of the National Genealogical Society quarterly. It is volume one 10 number three for September, 2022. And I was just thumbing through it and looking at a few things and I saw our names. We have our very first review under that section for research, like a pro with DNA at genealogy guide, defining and confirming ancestors and DNA evidence. Just so excited. This was reviewed by Anne Raymond and as a certified gene and she just did such a nice job. Thank you Anne, so much for your positive words and really thorough review.

Diana (1m 35s):
She goes through each chapter and explains what it’s about and how it can help people. So we’re very happy to have a nice review out there in the NGS q.

Nicole (1m 45s):
Well that’s wonderful and Anne is such a great genetic gene and so she’s such a good person to review the book and I’m so thankful she did that. Thank you. Anne, if you’re listening. Alright, our announcements, we have researched like a Pro eight going on currently in our study groups. And then for the next study group we’re gonna have research like a pro with DNA registration begins December 1st and it will go from February 1st to May 10th and to be a peer group leader and have complimentary access to that study group just apply on our website. And as always you can join our newsletter for information about sales that we’re having on our online courses and study groups.

Diana (2m 31s):
All right, well let’s do a listener spotlight. And this listener says, I recently discovered research like a pro and am making my way through all of the prior episodes of superb content. Diana and Nicole present a professional way of doing genealogy in an approachable and helpful manner always from the point of encouragement. So that’s great. Thank you so much for

Nicole (2m 55s):
That. That was nice. Well, today we’re going to continue our discussion of coverage and in our last episode about autosomal DNA coverage, we talked about how testing multiple descendants of your research subject can help you find more relevant matches. And we talked about some examples of applying Paul Woodbury’s coverage formula and the Daniel Arnold project that I’ve been working on. So today we’re going to share a different example of how expanding coverage can help solve a research question. And this one is focused on a couple that I’ve talked about a lot before, Bar Behar and John Robert Dyer. My husband’s third great grandparents who lived in Hawkins County, Tennessee and the 1830s to the 1880s and Barba.

Nicole (3m 39s):
She was born in Hawkins County about 1813 to 1818. And John Robert Dyer’s origins are still in question, but he was born about 1810 to 1813 in either Tennessee or North Carolina. And I began researching this couple a while ago, the hope of extending the Dyer patrilineal line, my husband’s line, my son’s patrilineal line and quickly reached kind of a dead end with John Robert Dyer. So I worked on doing a lot of DNA analysis and documentary analysis for that couple.

Diana (4m 14s):
Well I think it’s interesting the setting of this because so many of our client projects or our own ancestors get stuck right in this period in Tennessee and knowing how to use DNA to work through a brick wall like that is really, really helpful. So I think you’ve learned so much from this project.

Nicole (4m 38s):
It has been a great learning opportunity for me and as I’ve done the research like pro at DNA study group, this has been a product I’ve done several phases of in the study group

Diana (4m 49s):
And I think it’s just good to know that there is something more you can do. Often when we come to the end of the documentary records as we see it, you know, maybe it’s really not the end, but we can’t think of anything else to do. The DNA will point to some kind of a clue that gets us started again. So let’s just dive into the DNA portion of this. What DNA test takers did you start with for this project?

Nicole (5m 15s):
Well, I first had my father-in-law who took the ancestry DNA test and then I also had him do family tree dna, their Y DNA test. And we started at Y 67 and later upgraded it to the big Y 700 and I also asked his two brothers to take the ancestry DNA test and then I transferred all three of their tests to my Heritage Family Tree DNA in Jed Match. And then when I had all those three brothers, I came across connected dna, Shelly Crawford’s website for building network graphs and she had an option where you could order a network graph that combined the matches of related people.

Nicole (5m 58s):
So I gave her all the match list for the three brothers and she created a network graph showing their combined matches. So that was really neat and that was my first experience using a network graph and it was really a a positive one. I loved using it and she had created an Excel spreadsheet that went with it that really helped with the pedigree triangulation. So it was really positive.

Diana (6m 22s):
And that really spurred your interest in creating your own network graphs, right?

Nicole (6m 26s):
It did. I thought, oh my goodness, this is so helpful. I’d like to learn how to make my own.

Diana (6m 30s):
Yeah, and I’m so glad you did because now you’re teaching lots and lots of people how to make those. So it sounds like you had some good base test takers and then you know, when you’re working with DNA you still have to have a focus. You can’t just be looking at that network graph and thinking, well, okay, what do I do with this? What are all of these lines and circles? You know, you have to focus in on slumping. So we are talking about behi behar and discovering her mother. So how did you decide to focus on that piece of this puzzle?

Nicole (7m 7s):
Right, cuz as I mentioned, I had been hoping to extend the dire patrilineal line. So as I reviewed the matches in the network graph and things, I found many matches whose lines went back to Thas in Hawkins County, Tennessee. And so because I was having a little bit more success finding the THA side rather than the Dyer side, I decided to switch my focus from finding John Robert Dyer’s parents to finding brushy be Tharp’s parents. And I quickly found that Louis Tharp was bar’s father. And I actually wrote my proof argument for the pro gen study group about that and just focused on proving that Louis th was the father of Barba Tharp dire, but then determining which of Louis Tharp’s two wives was the mother of Barba was trickier.

Nicole (7m 59s):
Lewis had married Joanna West first, and then after her death he married Judy Vernon. And at first I thought bar’s mother was Judy Vernon the second wife because her descendants shared so much more DNA with Baba’s descendants than with Joanna West. However, there was some conflicting evidence with bar’s birth year being before the time of Louis The’s marriage to Judy Vernon in 1817. So I wasn’t sure exactly when Barba was born. The census records were all over the place. So I, you know, kind of went back and forth. Finally I, I noticed some DNA matches in the connected DNA network craft that seemed to be going back to an ancestral couple further back on Joanna West side of the family.

Nicole (8m 45s):
So I decided to pursue the hypothesis that Joanna West was bar’s mother and I just thought that was more likely

Diana (8m 53s):
So interesting. So even though you had a really large group of descendants that came through Judy Vernon, obviously if Joanna West is the mother, then those matches are coming through the father of John Robert Dyer, not really through Judy Vernon, it’s just hard to tell because it’s a couple.

Nicole (9m 12s):
Yes, exactly. And so for those cousins who came through Jo Vernon, they would’ve been half fourth cousins and a couple of them shared as high as like a hundred centor, which is off of the histogram for half fourth cousins. However, there are only, you know, maybe like a hundred or so maybe I can’t remember exactly how many submissions for half fourth cousins, but there’s just not enough for the data to be statistically, statistically significant. So I decided to not rule that relationship out.

Diana (9m 47s):
You know, it also makes me wonder because of the setting, you know, in Tennessee, if there are just multiple relationships contributing to that inflated amount of dna,

Nicole (9m 59s):
That’s entirely possible. However, most of the people that are descended from Judy Vernon did not share that much. So although I only started with three test takers, you know, my father-in-law and his two brothers, I expanded to get multiple descendants of John Robert di Barchi Behar. And so I got a descendant from each of the children of that couple to share their DNA results with me on Ancestry. And then looking at all of their matches, I did see that on average they shared those descendants of Judy Vernon shared a normal amount that would be expected for a half worth cousin.

Diana (10m 38s):
Oh, okay. So it was just like an anomaly.

Nicole (10m 41s):
Yeah, there were just a couple outliers and I thought maybe I could use that to eliminate the possibility that they were half worth cousins. But then I realized I couldn’t because I thought it’s still possible that somebody could have inherited, you know, the same large segments and matched that high.

Diana (10m 60s):
Interesting. All right, so in our research, anytime, whether it’s with or without dna, we need a research objective. So how did you write yours? Sometimes those can seem a little tricky, especially when adding in dna.

Nicole (11m 12s):
Well for the recent research, like a pro with DNA study group earlier this year, my objective was to test a specific hypothesis. So my overarching research question was who was the mother of Barba Tharp? But for this phase of research, I wrote my objective about testing the hypothesis. So I wrote determine if Joanna West was the biological mother of Barba Tharp Barba was the wife of John Robert Dyer and they resided in Hawkins County, Tennessee from 1830 to 1880 bars. Sheba was born about 1813 to 1818 in Hawkins County, Tennessee and was the daughter of Lewis Tharp born 1786 in Faar County, Virginia Lewis was married twice first to Joan West in 1805 in FA County, Virginia, then to Judy Vernon in 1817 in Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Nicole (11m 58s):
So I just decided to use unique identifiers for all the people that I was including in my hypothesis.

Diana (12m 6s):
Well that’s really good because you have a lot of information, you’ve got a lot of different dates and names and luckily there are just two locations, Hawkins County and FA Care County, Virginia. But you know, our objectives aren’t meant to be a lovely piece of work. They’re supposed to be guiding us and helping us focus on the project. So good job on that objective. So what starting point did you information did you have on this specific objective?

Nicole (12m 34s):
Well, I already had some documentation from a fellow researcher who had documented Joanna West parents and grandparents and he had sent me some documents in land plats and so that was great and if my hypothesis about Joanna West being the mother of Barsy with was correct, I thought I would find many matches to descendants of John West and his wife Beth Shua Arnold, as well as matches to descendants of Baba Arnold’s parents, Humphrey Arnold and Harriet Ann Smith. So I used the network graph of my father-in-law, his two brothers to look for these matches and I searched for pedigrees of DNA matches and clusters that were connected to Barsy with ours cluster.

Nicole (13m 17s):
But I didn’t end up finding those connections. It was a little bit frustrating. I couldn’t find what I was hoping to find.

Diana (13m 25s):
Doesn’t that happen a lot in our research? Yes. So when something like this happens and you’re working with dna, you actually can add more evidence, which is great because with our traditional research, you know, we can’t go add a census, we can’t go add a birth record when there isn’t anything there. But with DNA we can actually get some more evidence. So what did you do for that?

Nicole (13m 49s):
Well, since I was kind of stuck with the DNA matches of my father-in-law and his brothers, I decided to expand my analysis to additional test takers. So in my previous research to discover John Robert Dyer’s parents, I had asked multiple descendants of John Robert Dyer and Barsh with a, to share their results with me like I mentioned earlier. And this was all on ancestry, but to this point I hadn’t really analyzed their results beyond looking for dire matches. So I decided that I would really dive into doing that, analyzing these other test takers matches with the focus of looking for a brush shebas mother this time. So I kind of looked at what I had already, which is just a couple matches that seemed to go back to this Humphrey Arnold ancestor grandfather of Joanna West.

Nicole (14m 38s):
And I checked the matches to see if they matched the other test takers and one of them did in a bit of a higher amount of dna, and I’ll call this test taker Sally. So I decided to focus on Sally’s matches and I downloaded her matches with DNA jcom and enter common with or shared matches. And I used the Gey program to create a network graph for Sally’s matches at Ancestry from 12 cents up to 240 cents. Then I isolated clusters that included bar with ARBs descendants and any connected clusters and I reclused those matches to make a cleaner network graph that only had the relevant matches that were focused on this dire side of the family, the dire tha side.

Nicole (15m 22s):
After I did that, I started doing pedigree triangulation on the clusters and found one that had several matches whose trees went back to Joanna West’s grandparents Humphrey Arnold and Harriet Ann Smith. And this is what I had hoped to find with the network graph of the dire brothers, but it was elusive. And so I was thrilled to see evidence of DNA matches from Joanna and her grandparents and it appeared that an entire blue blue cluster cuz each cluster has a color, would give me helpful evidence if I could expand those matches trees far enough back.

Diana (15m 56s):
Wow, that is so exciting and it’s amazing. Just a different test taker could illuminate this whole little piece of the tree.

Nicole (16m 4s):
Right. And I think what happened with the dire brothers is that the threshold for the lower end of their graph was 30 and I think with Sally I went down even lower, but she also had more matches to these descendants. She just di happened to inherit more DNA from this particular ancestor.

Diana (16m 24s):
Well that is just wonderful and it’s good thing also to just think about redoing those network graphs perhaps in in changing your parameters. I think that’s something else to think about.

Nicole (16m 36s):
Yes, that’s such a good point too. So after looking at all of Sally’s matches, then I went to check and see if the other test takers shared DNA with these identified descendants of Humphrey Arnold. And many times I found that my father-in-law and his brothers did share DNA with these matches, but just in smaller amounts that weren’t included in that first network graph. And this is a challenge when using shared matches at Ancestry because ancestry doesn’t show shared matches in the shared match list that are less than 20 cents, you know that shared less than 20 cents with you and the other person. So luckily I was able to find the matches who shared more with Sally and then check how much those people shared with my other test takers just by going to the Matches ancestry profile page and using the dropdown box to do one-to-one comparisons.

Nicole (17m 23s):
So I continued to use shared matches of these original identified matches to find more descendants of Joanna West side of the family. Through this process I ended up finding matches who also descended from Joanna West parents, John West and Shiba Arnold. And those ones were a little bit harder to find because they only had a few children together before Baba died. And so there’s a lot more descendants from Humphrey Arnold and Ann Smith because they just had so many more descendants. At least that’s what I think. But it was satisfying to also find matches from Joanna West parents’ generation who came through her siblings.

Diana (18m 2s):
Right. That is such a good point about looking at how many children a couple had and then even going further to look at how many children those children had because sometimes, you know, a couple will have maybe five or six, seven children, but then several of them die or they don’t have any children or they only had one or two. And then you have these other families that have 10 children and everybody had 10 children and that really can skew your DNA results and how many matches you’re going to have from those lines. So a really good lesson to just keep in mind when you’re working with your dna, especially this far back, it makes a big difference. Well let’s talk a little bit more about dna.

Diana (18m 45s):
So these are people that are quite far back from your test takers. How much DNA are we actually talking about? How much did they share with the the dire descendants?

Nicole (18m 57s):
Well these ancestors are five to seven generations removed from the test takers. So the amounts of DNA shared were small and not all the test takers shared with all the matches from Joanna was line. This made it really important to have a large group of test takers who would share their results with me, with just my father-in-laws and his brother’s matches. I wouldn’t have had enough DNA matches sharing over 15 centor of DNA to make the case. And I say 15, but I also use smaller amounts too. But generally it’s better to use larger segments. If all of the amounts of shared DNA were less than 15 centor, it would’ve been a week case study, some of those segments could have been false.

Nicole (19m 37s):
But because I had the results from Sally and other descendants of brushy behar, I was able to find sufficient evidence to show a connection to Joanna West and her parents and grandparents. So it’s best to have more than one of your test acres sharing with a distant match to show evidence that it, they’re all connected along the line in your hypothesis. And so it’s best to have matches who share more than 10 to 15 centor. So in my blog post that goes along with this episode where I kind of wrote this out, you can go and look at the amounts of shared DNA in the table, but you can see that I have two tables that I pulled from the report I wrote for the study group.

Nicole (20m 17s):
The first one shows how much DNA shared from Humphrey Arnold descendants with Joanna West and behi Behar descendants. And it ranges from like eight Senate Morgans all the way up to 49.

Diana (20m 31s):
49 is great, right?

Nicole (20m 33s):
And then the other table is sharing with Joanna West parents, John West. So John West had two wives, so I just included all of the matches from either of his two wives with and compared those with Barba a descendants. And that one ranged from 8 cent Morgans up to I think the highest is like 32 cent Morgans.

Diana (21m 0s):
These tables are amazing. So for anyone listening you’ll really wanna go look at the blog post and see how Nicole can configured these tables because it shows, you know, the descendants and how they all match to each other, their hypothesized relationship. And she brings in the shared center Morgan project range and mean for relationship and the standard deviation. So it just puts all its data. I mean this is a lot of data that you have in this table so that you can really analyze it and I like how you arranged it with the closest relationships first, or I’m not sure if that’s what you did, but you do group it like all the first cousins once removed and then six cousins twice removed and then six cousins.

Diana (21m 45s):
Is that, is that how you, you kind of did it or just kind of turned out to be like that?

Nicole (21m 51s):
I can’t remember but it was in the table with the John West where he had two wives. I did put all the half relationships at the bottom of the table. So I guess I did group it somehow.

Diana (22m 2s):
Well it doesn’t matter, but it is fun to look at the same relationship and see the difference, like you mentioned at that FI fifth cousin once removed, it goes from 41 Santa Morgans to eight. So the exact same relationship, but really a big difference. But luckily there were two others that had 40 cent Morgans and 34, so some really good numbers there, much better than those eights. And these all are in a cluster, you know, these are all in a group, which is what we’re looking for,

Nicole (22m 37s):
Right? And really that’s what happens when you test and check the amounts of shared DNA with multiple descendants of your research subject. Far behar, they’re sharing with all these other people. So it, it shows you that it’s not just, you know, one test taker and he actually matches them on a different line. If you’re using multiple test takers that come from your research subject and they’re all matching people from the same couple you’ve already built like this network of descendants of barba, you know, so you’re, you’re like making your own network,

Diana (23m 16s):
Right? And it just adds so much more reliability to your hypothesis. All of this is to test that hypothesis and what we’re doing with this DNA work is trying to disprove it as well as to prove it, you know, because we don’t want to have confirmation bias and say, oh this just looks right, I think it’s right. You know, we wanna really examine all the evidence. So good job pulling this all together. So we talked a lot in our last episode about coverage, you know, that idea of a portrait of an ancestor and then trying to get additional DNA from descendants to, to light up different parts of that ancestors picture or face to show that we’ve got more of of their DNA sampled.

Diana (24m 3s):
So did you do that for this project?

Nicole (24m 6s):
Well, for this blog post I thought it would be fun to work on doing that. So I hadn’t done it in the study group, I ran out of time, but I did make some coverage calculations and the coverage diagram to kind of show how much coverage I started with with just the three Dyer brothers when I, you know, first started and then how I increased the coverage by adding more descendants of Barbi Harpe. And then I even added two additional descendants of Joanna West through another daughter, Elizabeth Tharp, who was a sister to Bar Behar. So I have those three charts in the blog post you can look at to see how it increased the coverage of the research subject.

Nicole (24m 51s):
So with only my father-in-law and his two brothers, I only had about 11% coverage of Barba and John Robert Dyer and that 11% includes both John Dyer and Barba because you can’t really separate that out unless you go back a generation. So it’s possible that half or more came from the Dyer side and not the th side. What I actually found was that more of the DNA was from the TH side and then I think the other part came from John Robert Dyer’s mother’s side, which I’ve found to be the Doherty tailored family. So just 11% for that couple. But then as you know, I increased the coverage by adding more test takers and so I added seven test takers and doing that I was able to achieve about 38% coverage of Parva and John Dyer and this significantly increased the number of matches that I found that were relevant to my research question, the mother of Barchi Behar.

Nicole (25m 54s):
So that was exciting.

Diana (25m 56s):
Yeah, that is so much more to go from 10% up to 38. That’s wonderful. And I do love your figures where you use the color coded with the orange. It’s really wonderful to have visuals on this. Well did everyone share similar amounts of DNA with Arnold and West Descendants? You know, we’ve talked a little bit about that, but what did you notice as you were analyzing?

Nicole (26m 23s):
Yeah, since we’re talking about coverage, I thought it would be interesting to dive in this little deeper because the point of getting more coverage is that, you know, some descendants won’t share as much as others. And so you wanna try to get a more spread out sampling of how much people are sharing with your hypothesized relatives. And so in most cases, the dire brothers, you know, my father-in-law has two brothers. They aren’t sharing as much DNA with the matches as test taker four and test taker five are, So for example, one of the matches shares 49 centor with test taker four 16 centor with test taker five 15 centor with one of the Dyer brothers and 14 Santa Morgans with another of the dire brothers.

Nicole (27m 6s):
So if I just had the dire brothers, the evidence wouldn’t have been that good, but because four of the test acres share with this match, it’s a stronger case.

Diana (27m 14s):
Yeah, it is so interesting. It really helps you see that random inheritance of DNA when you break it down like this. Yeah. All right, well we’ve talked a lot when discussing DNA projects about trying to get independent descent lines, you know, different children from a couple, not just matches coming through one line. So how important was it in this project?

Nicole (27m 39s):
Yeah, I think that it was really important and that’s why I focused on getting one test acre from each of the children of Barba Har. But then when I went back a generation to test the hypothesis that Joanna West was the mother of Barba A and then using matches from her parents and grandparents to help test that out, then I really realized I needed to increase the coverage of Joanna West too, not just Barba harp. And since in my previous research I had already identified matches descending from Louis the, and both of his wives, Joanna West and Judy Vernon. I already had been in contact with some matches who were descendant of Joanna West through her daughter, Elizabeth th And so I reached out to them and asked if they would share their matches with me at Ancestry.

Nicole (28m 23s):
And so that’s where I got my eighth and ninth test takers. And with their addition, I increased my coverage of Joanna West from 18 to 21%. And you might think that’s just a little bit, but talking to Paul Woodbury originally, he had written in his article, you know, if you can increase the coverage four to 5% by testing another person, then it’s worth the money to ask them to take a test. But talking to ’em later, sometimes even if it’s just going to increase the coverage by one or 2%, it can still be very valuable. And in this case, I did find that it was increasing the coverage from 18% to 21% did help, especially with the John West and Bashiva Arnold generation because these two test takers did end up sharing more DNA with those descendants than my bari Behar descendants.

Nicole (29m 15s):
So maybe Barba just inherited less DNA from that side of her family than her sister Elizabeth did. Who knows? But it helped because then I could show more data points of comparison, strengthening the hypothesis.

Diana (29m 29s):
Wow, that’s so interesting that just that little bit of increase in the coverage from 18.9 to 21.3 made such a difference.

Nicole (29m 38s):
Yeah, and you know, I could have kept working on this finding more matches and doing more tree building, but sometimes it’s more efficient to just ask somebody to share their DNA with you and then use the low hanging fruit from their results where people already have large trees and you can quickly see that they are descendants of the hypothesized couple.

Diana (30m 1s):
Oh yeah, that makes so much more sense. It’s real so easy for everyone on Ancestry to share their DNA results.

Nicole (30m 8s):
It is, yeah.

Diana (30m 10s):
When you first told me about that, it was like this huge light bulb went off on my head and I have since used that a lot. Well what a fun project. I think this is amazing. So as we’re talking about sharing DNA and convincing others to share their DNA with you, I know you’ve done this a lot, so what are your tips?

Nicole (30m 33s):
So I only asked my father-in-law and his two brothers to take DNA test, take a DNA test. The others were matches. I had identified in their match lists in the Ancestry DNA database. And what I usually do is pretty simple. I just send them a message on the ancestry message system and let them know very sustainably my research objective, just I’m trying to do this, this is our common ancestry. Sometimes I’ll tell them how they descend from the common ancestor so they don’t have to go look at their tree and be like, Who are they talking about? I just say, Oh, this is on your grandma, you know, Smith’s side of the family and this is her, you know, great-grandmother.

Nicole (31m 13s):
And, and then I send them the help article at ancestry support called Sharing Ancestry DNA results. And that gives them the steps for how to share. And I think it also is showing that it is like not unusual or strange for someone to ask them to do this because there’s this support article from Ancestry very credible that details how to do it so that they feel like, oh, this is like a normal thing. People must do this, you know, all the time. And so that they can also see that exact steps for how to do it. And then I usually just let them know that it will help me reach my objective to, to analyze their matches and I’ll share with them what they, what I find.

Nicole (31m 59s):
And if you’re working on a goal that involves their ancestors, I have found that many people are willing to share their results with me, and I’m only asking them to make me a viewer or a collaborator, not a manager of their results. So it’s usually no problem for them to just share it with you as a viewer. It’s like very similar to sharing a tree with someone as a viewer, like they can view your tree. And so I’ve found that most people are willing to do that for more difficult people to reach who are older, who don’t check their messages. I have found that contacting their children often through Facebook or sending letters to their home, if you find their address online through looking at land or white pages records, you know, tax records that are available online, sometimes you can get their current address and send them a letter in the mail that often works, but even contacting their children also is helpful.

Diana (32m 54s):
Yeah, and we’re always trying to find the person who is closer generationally, and so often that would be a person who is older, elderly, or even deceased. You know, I think about my mother, her DNA is out there on all the websites, but she’s passed away. And so you know, if anybody’s trying to contact her, it’s not gonna work. But I am the manager on her kit, so they would just contact me. But you just never know with some of these situations. So sometimes you have to really think outside the box and try some other avenues to get access to someone’s results.

Diana (33m 33s):
That would be very helpful in your project.

Nicole (33m 36s):
Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, I hope this example helped everyone see how expanding the coverage of your research subject can help you find relevant matches and solve your research questions that are further back in time.

Diana (33m 49s):
Yes. Have a great week everyone, and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (33m 52s):
Bye-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.