RLP 225: How Multiple Relationships Affect DNA Match Analysis

Nicole (1s):
This is research like a Pro, episode 225, how multiple relationships affect DNA match analysis. 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 (47s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (49s):
Doing great. I got a deed from a fellow researcher today that I asked him to grab. It was kind of cool.

Diana (56s):
Tell me more about it.

Nicole (57s):
Well, I had heard from a cousin that there was a loose deed in a courthouse in the county in Virginia that I’m researching, and he said he had copied it when he went on a research trip, but he lost it and couldn’t find it in all of his papers. And so I was hoping to incorporate it into my project I’m doing for the study group about the common ancestor we share. And I remembered that a friend in our previous study group had said if I ever needed to help looking up something in that county, that he would go get it for me. So I contacted him and I sent him kind of the information that the cousin had shared about when the deed was and who it was between and stuff.

Nicole (1m 38s):
And he went to the courthouse and the clerks wouldn’t let him search through the deeds, but he gave them the description and told them they would call him back after they looked for it. And they called him and said, Well, the first researcher couldn’t find it and the second one couldn’t find it. So then we called in our veteran researcher and she was able to find it in the loose unrecorded deeds.

Diana (1m 58s):
Oh wow. That’s so interesting that they had somebody who was a better researcher.

Nicole (2m 3s):
Yeah, and it’s interesting that it wasn’t recorded, you know, it makes me wonder like why didn’t this ever make it into the deed books? But they held onto it in the courthouse. They just, it just wasn’t ever recorded, I guess.

Diana (2m 14s):
Wow, that’s such a great example of calling the courthouse and looking through list papers, seeing what you can find and how amazing that they would actually go to the bother to do that. That’s great,

Nicole (2m 25s):
Right? I mean, you would hope that they would be willing to share those old records, but I guess some clerks are too busy and don’t want to be bothered.

Diana (2m 35s):
Yeah, and I can see how if you just have constant things to do, that’s would be last on your list, so Well that’s really neat that you got that deed.

Nicole (2m 42s):
Yeah, it was cool. The coolest thing about it was that it was in the original hand of the scribe and then there were a bunch of grantors because they were all dividing their father’s land and then selling it to one of the heirs. And so a bunch of signatures at the bottom, and you could tell they were in different hand, the first person to sign it had a shaky hand and then a couple of them were signing with their mark, which was not an but an asterisk, which was interesting too.

Diana (3m 8s):
Oh, that is interesting.

Nicole (3m 10s):
So yeah, it was neat.

Diana (3m 11s):
Oh, that’s great. Well, let’s do our announcements. We’ve got our study group with DNA starting in February of 2023 and registration begins December 1st, so watch for that. That’s coming up so fast. And we have our peer group leader application on our website and we are also excited about Route 2023 that will be in person in Salt Lake City. And Nicole and I will both be doing presentations. We’ll have a family lockup booth that’s going to be lots of fun. So registration is now open. You can go to the Roots Tech page and register for that.

Diana (3m 53s):
They will also be doing a virtual option, so if you can’t make it in person, you can still have something that’s going to be online. But I’d highly recommend coming out in person because there’s just nothing like the in person experience of Roots Tech. It’s so fun.

Nicole (4m 13s):
I was just thinking about all of the influence that Roots Tech has had on me over the years, and I still remember the first time I ever attended a Roots Tech conference was at home. There’s always been, it seems like some of the keynotes and classes online to watch even in the early years. I think it was maybe like 2016 or 2017 that I watched from home. And I just thought, Oh, how fun would that be to go and be at a family history conference? And so the next year we went together and I don’t remember exactly which years these all were, but it was so exciting to be there in person and just the energy level is so high and choosing which classes you want to go to and there’s so many choices and the exhibit hall is just like magical place.

Nicole (5m 3s):
So Roots Tech will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first family history conference I went to and it’s still one of the most fun and exciting ones that exists.

Diana (5m 15s):
I agree. So I don’t know if you remember, but that very first one we went to, they always had these big events at the beginning to kick off each day their speakers. And the very first one that we went to, it was a guy who rode his motorcycle up the aisle. Do you remember that? Yeah. He was like a storyteller on I think BYU tv. Anyway, he rode right past us. It was so fun. It was like, what the heck? This is amazing. So it was fun. And then the next year I believe we went as ambassadors, so we got to sit up in the front in the special media area and then we started teaching. So it’s been really fun and it has been a huge part of our research lives and our family history business.

Diana (6m 0s):
You know, everything that we do

Nicole (6m 2s):
Well, we hope to see a lot of you there at Reed’s Stick. Well, our listener Spotlight today is a fun review. It says, I recently discovered R L P and I making my way through all of the prior episodes, superb content. Diana and Nicole present a professional way of doing genealogy in an approachable and helpful manner always from the point of encouragement. Thank you for that review and I’m glad that it’s encouraging to hear us talk about things and and we hope everybody who’s listening gets some encouragement to keep going on your difficult research cases and to approach it in new ways that will help you make discoveries.

Diana (6m 44s):
Yes, that is our goal. Well, today we’re going to talk about some really fun concepts of this whole idea of multiple genetic networks or pedigree collapse or end domy. And so often when we’re looking at our matches, we just are not sure exactly what we have. And the reason we see this is because some of our DNA matches share more than one common ancestral couple with each other, and we could have one of these scenarios. And I wrote a blog post and we talked about it in a past podcast about endo gummy pedigree collapse and multiple relationships.

Diana (7m 24s):
What’s the difference and why does it matter? And we talked a little bit about all three of these scenarios, but today we’re going to go more in depth on multiple relationships and talk about how that might affect chromosome mapping, the total amount of shared DNA and network analysis.

Nicole (7m 42s):
Yes, I’m excited to talk about this because I think it affects a lot more people than we thought in the past when we would see people in multiple clusters and we have a lot of overlapping clusters and things, we would think, Oh, this means pedigree collapse. But when we dive in, oftentimes it just means there are multiple relationships between the DNA matches where they’re sharing more than one common ancestral couple. And so today I’m gonna share an example from my husband’s family tree. The two families from my husband’s family tree that I’m gonna talk about are the Richard’s family and the Robins family. I had a blog post that we’re gonna be talking about that has some of these images I’m referring to.

Nicole (8m 23s):
So if you want to see kind of the diagrams and the images, be sure to pull that up. It’s called How multiple Relationships affect DNA match analysis. And the first image you’ll see there is a diagram showing two test takers, test taker A and test acre B, and how they are double third cousins through the Richards family and the Robinsons family. So in my husband’s family tree, he has George Franklin Richards who married Alice Almyra Robinson. Then what happened was George Franklin Richards had a sister named Sarah Richards and she ended up marrying Lauren Robinson, which was the brother of Alice Robinson.

Nicole (9m 11s):
So you have essentially a case of two Richard’s siblings marrying into the Robinson family so that if any of their descendants are DNA matches, they’re going to have two common ancestral couples, the parents of the Richard Siblings and the parents of the Robinson siblings. So this is such a common scenario. I mean we talk about it with our own family tree. This happened, right, Diana? Yep. And so it doesn’t mean that there’s pedigree collapse, it just means that because siblings are marrying siblings, their descendants are going to have two sets of common ancestral couples. So that’s what we call multiple relationships.

Diana (9m 50s):
I’m so glad we have figured out the difference between multiple relationships and pedigree collapse because I think this happens more often than we know and it really is important to understand the difference. So I’m glad we’re going through another example and talking more about this. So let’s talk a little bit about the effect of multiple relationships on chromosome mapping. I know you’ve been doing a lot of chromosome mapping, so what are you seeing?

Nicole (10m 17s):
So in your mapping segments for matches with multiple relationships, it helps to map or paint as many matches as possible that don’t have these multiple relationships first. So then once you’ve done that, you kind of have an existing chromosome map so that you know what segments belong to which ancestral couples. Then you can overlay the double cousin segments and see which ancestral couples each segment overlaps with so that you can kind of figure out which segment belongs to which ancestral couple. So I did this, I did like a pretty good chromosome map for my father-in-law, which I’d already done a lot of mapping for his paternal side. So this time I really focused on all his maternal matches and he had a lot of them and that’s I think because a lot of them are Utah descendants of members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Nicole (11m 6s):
And so a lot of them have taken the Ancestry DNA test, which is a company based in Utah. So I had plenty to work with because a lot of them had transferred over to my heritage and are interested in family history and genetic genealogy. And so I was using my heritage. So I just went into my heritage and mapped all of the maternal segments for my father-in-law because this is on his maternal side. So test acre A is my father-in-law and test Acre B is one of his matches at my heritage who is a double cousin who shares both the Richards Ancestral couple, which is Nanny Long Straw in Franklin d Richards and Oliver Robinson and Lucy Miller. So those are the ancestral couples that they shared, and I wanted to see if I could figure out which segment went with which side.

Nicole (11m 51s):
So I overlaid the segments at DNA painter, you know how you can like preview the segments before you assign them. So I did that and when I overlaid the segments, I could see that two of them were overlapping the Richard segments, which I had chosen the gold color for on chromosome five and seven. And one of them was overlapping with the Robinson segment, which was pink on chromosome six. So that was pretty clear to me that like, okay, test taker B has two Richard segments and one Robinson segment. And that’s kind of what I expected to see, knowing that test taker B was a double cousin sharing those two common ancestral couples.

Nicole (12m 31s):
So what I could do at that point is to paint each segment separately by just copy and pasting each one one at a time and a DNA painter and then assigning it to the one ancestral couple, which was Robinson Miller and then assigning the other two to the other ancestral couple Richard’s long straw. So one thing that I noticed is that the segment on chromosome six that belongs to the Robinson Miller side probably was longer than the segment it overlapped. So I decided to go ahead and tentatively assign it to that group, the Robinson Miller Group, but I changed the certainty level because I wasn’t exactly sure if that whole segment was from the Robinsons, maybe like there was a crossover and it was inherited from the Richards side after the part that it overlapped with the known segment before.

Nicole (13m 20s):
So I just said possible for the certainty level, which makes the segment slightly lighter colored than the others of that group. So like a lighter pink. I just kinda like the idea of changing that certainty level to remind myself that this was not so cut and dry as other segments I’ve painted because there are two common ancestral couples in case there’s a conflict later I can look and say, Oh, this was an assumption that maybe I got it wrong.

Diana (13m 45s):
That is such a great idea when I’m looking at your image, I did see that, that the pink is a lot longer than the gold that it matches up with. So that’s, that’s a good hypothesis that maybe there is a crossover there. So the more segments you paint, the clearer this will become. And I just wanted to mention that we paint these segments generally using an ancestral couple because there’s just no way of knowing which of the couple handed down that segment. So in DNA painter, we just give them a label like Richards Robinson and then we just know that segment came from one of those two. But it’s impossible to know at this point. However, if you do get someone that’s related just on like say the Richards line from an ancestor, one generation above that could determine which of the couple it was.

Diana (14m 37s):
Right,

Nicole (14m 38s):
Right. But I think you’re looking at the different color of pink. So there’s pink, which is Richard’s Robinson, which is closer, but the hot pink of chromosome six, that one is when I was talking about the Robinson Miller line. So see how that one is smaller than the gray, which was overlaid.

Diana (14m 53s):
Oh, okay.

Nicole (14m 54s):
So the overlaid part, the gray part, that’s the segment that I’m assuming was Robinson Miller, but I don’t know for sure because it’s not overlapping any other segments either. So like maybe

Diana (15m 5s):
Part of that

Nicole (15m 6s):
Is gold and part of it is pink hot pink. But we don’t know. That’s why I did the certainty level of possible because until I get more matches to compare with, I don’t know for sure if that whole section is going to be able to be assigned to Robinson Miller. It could be Richard’s Dewey or Richard’s long straw. The interesting thing about this Richard’s family is that Franklin d Richards had several different wives and so oftentimes I can assign his matches to his parents because if it came through a different wife then I know it came only from his parents, if that makes sense.

Diana (15m 45s):
Yeah.

Nicole (15m 45s):
So that’s where the Richards Dewey Gold is coming from and there really aren’t that many descendants that match through both ancestral couples of Richard’s long straw. Just a couple because that wife only had like two or three children.

Diana (16m 1s):
Huh. Wow. When you have multiple wives or husbands, that puts another twist in it, doesn’t it?

Nicole (16m 8s):
It does.

Diana (16m 10s):
So what do you do when you have non overlapping segments with this case of you know, double cousins or multiple relationships?

Nicole (16m 19s):
I did come across that and it was tricky to know what to do. So I found another descendant of this sibling marriage, Lauren Robinson and Sarah Richards in the My Heritage Database, and I’ll call this one test taker C, and he shares four segments with my father-in-law testing her A, and when I overlaid these segments on the chromosome map, two of them didn’t overlap with any known segments. So in some ways that’s exciting, right, because you’re getting more of the genome painted, but I didn’t know which side to assign it to, was it the Robinson side or the Richard side? But I needed a way to label these double cousin segments. And so reviewing the tree of test taker a, I thought at first that I could add them to the Richards Robinson group, but that would indicate that it included all ancestors on George Franklin Richards side and Alice Robinson’s side.

Nicole (17m 7s):
But there’s only one line that they don’t represent. That’s the nanny long straw side. So it would be unaccurate to call the unknown segments Richard’s Dewey or Robinson Miller since Franklin Dewey Richard is the most recent common ancestor on the Richard’s side. So I went ahead and labeled the segment group to be very specifically exactly what it should be, which was Richard’s Dewey or Robinson Miller. And I gave it a reddish pink color, like a totally different color so that I would know that it could either be one or the other of those, but not all of those lines that were represented by the closer up grandparent couple. And that was because of what I was saying before about Franklin doing Richards having those different wives.

Nicole (17m 49s):
This match would only be through that one person because he had two different wives. Anyways, it’s confusing, but I decided to go ahead and just give it that its own special label because I can’t be sure yet which exact ancestral couple it is. At least I’ve narrowed it down to these two options and painted more of the chromosomes. So that’s exciting. I just love seeing that message at the top of DNA painter go up to a higher percentage of the genome painted. Every time you add a new match, I refresh that little message and see you now have 41% of the genome painted.

Diana (18m 26s):
That really is great. It’s such a fun program to use and it is just not that hard. You know, they have great tutorials on there to help you learn how to do it and it’s very satisfying and fun. It’s a great tool.

Nicole (18m 38s):
It is great. Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re wanting to understand more about what I was saying with this example, be sure to go look at the blog post because I can show you images of the family tree and you can see how the ancestral couple is just through one of the lines on Franklin Dewey Richard’s side and you can see my chromosome map and how I’ve kind of given it this similar color but slightly of a different color so that you can see that it’s a different possibility. And even though the segment that was not overlapping anything was adjacent to like a further back Robinson line, I can’t always assume that it’s gonna end up being Robinson because it could very well be Richards on that side.

Nicole (19m 25s):
You just never know how many times it’s gonna switch back and forth between the two.

Diana (19m 29s):
Well I think we have a good takeaway, which is that mapping segments for genetic cousins with an unknown relationship can reveal multiple relationships. So if they overlap two separate ancestral couples from different lines, you’ve gotta figure that out, build out the tree, try to figure out the common ancestors that might be extra. It’s just we don’t know until we do the research. So now we saw how multiple relationships can affect the segments and painting those segments. How about the total amount of shared dna? So in my blog post when I wrote about, you know, telling a difference between a Doga me pedigree collapse, a multiple relationships, in my example, I didn’t see that there was that much more DNA that people shared that they became a different relationship category.

Diana (20m 19s):
It just bumped it up a little bit. So Nicole, what did you find out with the Richards family and doing that same type of a comparison with how much DNA they shared being double cousins and how much they would be just being regular cousins?

Nicole (20m 32s):
Okay, let’s do this. Test Acre A, my father-in-law and test Acre B, who is a double cousin sharing with both of Richards and the Robinson lines, they share 103.90 cent Morgans and then test take A and test Acre C, who also share the same ancestral couples and are double cousins share 88.10 cent Morgans. So both of those amounts are within the range of third cousin, which is, you know, the relationship that they share on both of those ancestral couples. So they’re double third cousins. So if you only knew that they were third cousins through one of those couples, you wouldn’t think that this was outside of the range because it’s right in the range. The mean for third cousin is 73 cent Morgans at the Shared Cent Morgan project and the standard deviation is 43 cent Morgans.

Nicole (21m 18s):
So one standard deviation above the mean is 116 cent Morgans. And so both of these cousin relationships are third cousins. Actually the other one is a half third cousin. So like I mentioned with that one Richard side, he had several wives and so that is a half third cousin relationship on that Richard side. And so they don’t actually share so much DNA that it changes them into the second cousin range. But for the half third cousin relationship, the amounts are definitely on the high end out of the standard deviation, one standard deviation above the mean. So for half third cousin, the mean is 48 cent of Morgans and the standard deviation is 33. So one standard deviation above the mean for half third cousin would be 81 cent of Morgans.

Nicole (22m 2s):
So both 88 and 103 cent of Morgans fall above that. So if all you knew was the half third cousin relationship, you might look at the fact that they’re both above that and think, oh, maybe there’s another relationship and maybe they share another common ancestral couple and that would be a hint to you to look for that. So if you didn’t realize that they had another third cousin relationship and another set of ancestral couples, they’re still in the range. So you just have to really look carefully. And if a lot of matches are above one standard deviation above the mean, that might be a clue to you because like in Diana’s blog post, if all of the matches are above what you’d expect, even if they’re within the range, that’s a hint to look for more common ancestors, right?

Diana (22m 47s):
We’re just always doing analysis trying to see if things fall where they’re supposed to fall. And if they don’t, we look for more.

Nicole (22m 55s):
Right? And you would expect some cousins to share below the mean and some to be above the mean, but if they’re all above the mean and all above one standard deviation above the mean, then you might wanna look into it further.

Diana (23m 7s):
Okay, so what about when we’re doing network analysis, trying to see what clusters or groups people belong in? And typically if people are sharing with two different ancestral couples, there would be some effect. So what did you find for that?

Nicole (23m 26s):
So first I looked at the My Heritage auto cluster report since I was using my heritage matches and doing this painting of chromosomes. So I checked that and the report for my father-in-law test taker a shows some overlapping between the first two clusters. So if you look at my blog post about this, you’ll see the typical matrix cluster report that you can generate from my heritage and they email it to you and they open it up in your browser and you see like the squares and the cells and, and kind of a diagonal line of square clusters going down from the top left to the bottom right. And so the top left two clusters, one’s orange and one’s red.

Nicole (24m 8s):
So the first one’s red and I figured out that was the Richard’s Dewey cluster. And then the next one, the orange one was primarily the Robinson Miller cluster, but there are a ton of gray cells showing that these two clusters have a lot of matches who either belong in both clusters or who have shared matches with people in both clusters. So it kind of forms a super cluster where you see like this red and this orange group and all of the gray squares in the opposite quadrants could all come together and make just one big cluster. And so they’re overlapping a lot. So that’s a hint of multiple relationships. If you see something like that in your auto cluster report from my heritage where two clusters seem really closely connected by all the gray cells, then that could be assigned to you that there are multiple relationships for the people in those clusters.

Nicole (25m 1s):
Some of the test takers maybe are shared matches with both groups.

Diana (25m 5s):
Well, and I think it’s good that you pointed out in the blog post too that sometimes we see this, but it’s just because that other color square is a generation further back on the on the tree and so people are sharing with the grandparents and the great grandparents, but in this case it wasn’t that scenario. So you know, it all just points to figuring out the common ancestral couple of that square and then seeing how they relate to the people in the other square and why they’re all sharing so much dna,

Nicole (25m 35s):
Right? So we can at least look at that and say there’s some kind of connection between these two clusters, now let’s dive in and figure out what it is. And so in this case, I figured out that it was that they had some double cousins in there. The computer system has to assign them to a cluster, but really they, they’re in both because they’re their descendants of both ancestral couples.

Diana (25m 54s):
This is such a good example of this and it’s so clear, you know, to see that connection. So what about when you made the network graph? Because I’m assuming you made a network graph.

Nicole (26m 6s):
Absolutely. So the network graph, I actually used Ancestry DNA matches for that and like I mentioned, there are a lot of Richards and Robinson descendants who live in Utah who’ve taken the Ancestry DNA test. And so there’s even more double cousins in the ancestry database from these two lines. What I found in the network graph is that there’s a, a whole bunch of people who are connected to both clusters, so much so that the, the Purple Robinson Miller cluster and the Orange Richards Dewey cluster are just super tightly connected, kind of like a snowman with a big cluster on the bottom mean purple, and then a middle part of the snowman being like stuck to it as the middle part.

Nicole (26m 54s):
Another big cluster just sitting right on top of it and a bunch of like closer matches with larger nodes just kind of intermingled in that middle section, like a belt almost on the snowman of like they’re in both clusters. And so you cannot really separate those clusters very well. They’re not very well distinguished, especially in the middle. But as you go further out to smaller matches, you see some that they’re further away and they’re kind of more separated from the the other ancestral couple. So it’s kind of interesting, but you can definitely see that they’re connected through how close they are and how they’re stuck together.

Diana (27m 33s):
Well that’s neat. Well thanks for, you know, writing this all up and putting it in the blog post and then talking us through it because I think it’s so valuable to understand this concept of multiple relationships and what we see when we try to diagram it or do a network graph or do an auto cluster or paint it on DNA painter with chromosome painting. There’s just so much to learn and work with. Probably the very best visualization of it though is when you draw it out in Luci chart and actually see exactly how you connect. You know, once you have that, then you can keep referring back to that diagram as you’re doing this,

Nicole (28m 11s):
Right? So just remember that if some clusters are very closely connected, check for multiple relationships between some of the matches with the test taker and this will just cause them to be sharing with both genetic networks of those ancestral couples that they’re double cousins through. Although it may appear that there are too many connections to figure out which clusters are relevant and your network graph looks muddy and everything’s overlapping. Don’t worry because the challenge of multiple relationships between matches is really not as difficult as dealing with pedigree collapse or endo. You can do it, you just need to dive in and figure out which matches are connected to both clusters and find the most recent common ancestral couples.

Nicole (28m 57s):
And once you know which matches have multiple relationships, you can label them as such and focus on the matches that don’t have that issue. You can even target them within your Gey network graph and delete them out of the graph. That should help separate your clusters a little bit better. If you have segment data for those matches, you can try chromosome mapping with DNA Painter to help you hypothesize which segment came from which M R C A couple. So don’t give up and you can do this also, if you want to learn more about dealing with Inmy pedigree collapse in multiple relationships, be sure to check out Diane Suthers course. She has a wonderful way of teaching about DNA that helps you gain confidence and you can learn more about Hermy course at her website, your dna guide.com, and then to learn about how to create network graphs like the one, the ones that we’re talking about in this episode.

Nicole (29m 47s):
You can join our online course research like a pro with DNA and in our class we take you through each step that you need to do for organizing and analyzing your matches and applying DNA evidence to focused research questions. So we look forward to seeing you there.

Diana (30m 11s):
Well, everybody have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (30m 15s):
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.