RLP 241: RLP with DNA 4 – Create a Research Objective

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like A Pro. Episode 241 RLP with DNA four Create, a Research Objective 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 Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at FamilyLocket it.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 (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com breakdown Genealogy Brick Walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro

Diana (57s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (59s):
I’m doing great. I’ve been working on my certification research report, so I’m making progress.

Diana (1m 5s):
Oh, hooray. That’s such a good feeling.

Nicole (1m 7s):
How about you?

Diana (1m 8s):
Well, I did the 14 day mini challenge that we had running and I’ve been working on getting my report written up for that. So I decided just to take a little piece of my Clumsy Klein project and that was to Discover more about this John Klein that I learned about in our fall study group, but didn’t know anything about him and one of the land records said he was from, or of Pulaski County, which is where Little Rock, Arkansas, the state capitol is located. And so I decided to research him in Pulaski County and I found absolutely nothing. There is no sign of him in Pawlowski. I don’t know if he was lying or if he was just, you know, in Little Rock for a little bit.

Diana (1m 50s):
He’s not on the census, he’s not in tax records or land records or probate, and Pawlowski has good records. This is not a bird county, so you know that negative searching, you have to try to figure out what sense to make of it. So I’m just hypothesizing that he was perhaps down there just briefly,

Nicole (2m 9s):
Maybe just living with a relative or friend for a short amount of time so that he didn’t end up like owning land or paying taxes

Diana (2m 17s):
Or something, whatever. Yeah, he didn’t settle there. He had land patents up in Isard County and the previous year that was 1850, he was supposedly of Pulaski the previous year he was of Fulton County, which is the neighboring county to, so you know, I really do think he probably just went down for a bit, but it open up the question about where was he in 1850 then. And there are a few other John Kline that I need to research and see if any of those could be him.

Nicole (2m 43s):
Huh. Mystery.

Diana (2m 46s):
The Klein mystery continues,

Nicole (2m 48s):
But it is good to check one of those to do items off the list.

Diana (2m 51s):
It is, it just puts you a little bit further on the path with some more ideas of what to do. So I’m going to be using this case in the DNA study group, which brings me to our announcements. We currently have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series for 2023 going, and we are just enjoying this so much. We have monthly case studies featuring Research Like, a Pro process and case studies adding d n a as well, which is great. And so we would invite you to check that out if you miss the first couple of webinars. They’re all recorded and you can go back and watch them as much as you want. And then we have a whole slate of great webinars coming up through the year.

Diana (3m 33s):
Our next Research Like, a Pro study group will be in the fall, starting the end of August and going through November of 2023. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader, we’d love to have you apply. That application is on our website. And then as always, join our newsletter for any coupons to see what’s new, latest blog posts, podcast, et cetera. And then we would just note that Roots Tech is just around the corner. It’s still open for registration and we hope you’ll join us in person or if nothing else, pop online and see if you can watch some fun classes. And the National Genealogical Society Conference is also open for registration and that will be held in Virginia.

Diana (4m 17s):
It will also have an online feature. So some exciting things this spring for learning about how to do Genealogy better.

Nicole (4m 25s):
Well, for our listener spotlight, we’re going to continue our review from Kimball Carter where he shared some FamilySearch changes with us. So the last feature that he talked about is the ability to add other relationships, including slavery to the tree. He says this makes it possible to input persons who are enslaved and connect them to the slaveholder. Because I have many enslaved persons in my Ancestry, I am using this in hopes that it might help the descendants of these people eventually connect to them. If you look at the link to John Carter, scroll down the page and then you’ll see other relationships and two enslaved persons are listed there.

Nicole (5m 5s):
If you click on Daniel, you’ll see that he was also enslaved by Presley Neal son-in-law of John Carter. Then I’ll put the link to John Carter’s profile in the show notes. Kimball also says you can also include the relationships of apprentice employment, godparent, household neighbor, and relative by selecting them from a dropdown menu. I love that. Anyways, Kimball says We all get frustrated with people changing things on FamilySearch tree, but hopefully using the new alert note feature, which we talked about last time, we’ll slow people down and deter people from making changes without first reading these notes. The new features showing other relationships is also a great addition in my opinion.

Nicole (5m 46s):
Kim just wanted us to read this on the podcast to share it with people so that the more people that use these features will then recognize their value and it will make the FamilySearch family tree better and more user friendly and helpful for everybody. So Thank, you so much Kimball for sharing that with us.

Diana (6m 5s):
Yes, I love what Kimball said that we read in the previous podcast that he had sent in these suggestions. So I think that lets us know that FamilySearch is listening to us as researchers and as users of the FamilySearch family tree, that they are trying to improve it and make it better, which I think is wonderful. You know, that just gives us so much hope that this tree will continue to become more and more valuable and more and more accurate as as we, you know, help everyone to do better research. Well, our topic for the day is chapter four of our book Research Like a Pro with DNA. And chapter four is titled Create a Research Objective.

Diana (6m 47s):
And this is something we have talked about a lot on the podcast. If you’ve been listening since the beginning, you’ve heard us talk about objectives a lot. But we’re going to talk about objectives Now from a DNA standpoint, here’s the thing, you have tested yourself, you probably have tested several relatives and you have got so many DNA Matches, thousands of Matches on all these different companies and you’re kind of sitting back and wondering what to do with all of this. So think of it this way. All research begins with a question and you know you have some questions in your family tree, at least I hope you do because I have a lot in mind. and I would feel bad if some of you didn’t have any questions in your tree.

Diana (7m 28s):
So you want to focus on a definitive and answerable question that can help you move ahead on the dead ends in your pedigree. And so documentary research can answer many questions, but some of them will especially benefit from using DNA and it’s really important to try to frame a question that DNA can help with. And then once we have that question, we can create our Objective that will guide our research process. So if we don’t have an Objective, we’re just always spinning our wheels working here and there, you know, sitting down, looking at your match list, trying to identify someone and then coming back to it a week later and working on something else.

Diana (8m 11s):
And you perhaps feel like you’re not making any progress with your dna, which is the whole reason we wrote this book to teach you how to do a project based on an Objective. So we are going to talk about three specific DNA research objectives.

Nicole (8m 27s):
So the first type is to identify an individual. This is specifically talking about people with the same name who, which one is which. This is really important because a lot of the time there will be multiple people named John Smith in the location and often D n A can really help you determine which one is which. An example of that is when Diana was tracing her Royston Ancestors kind of at the beginning of her research, she had gone back to this, this John Royston of Ogel, Thorpe County, Georgia. And he appeared first in Georgia records in 1803 and she had thought that he must belong to the Virginia Royans of Gloucester County. He would’ve been born about 1750.

Nicole (9m 8s):
But the only problem was that there was another branch of Royans from Maryland and they also had a John Royston born about the same time. So in 2004, another Royston researcher invited Diana to join A Y D N A project to determine if her line matched the Virginia family. So she located a close cousin who was a male with an unbroken paternal royston line and had him take a Y D N A test. And that result matched other royston men who were from Gloucester County, Virginia. So she knew that she wasn’t from those Maryland Royston, but from the the Gloucester County Virginia Royston. So that was just a wonderful way that she used D N A to help identify an individual and separate him from another individual of the same name so that now she knows her Ancestor is the John Royston of Virginia and not of Maryland.

Diana (10m 2s):
Right? That was such a fun project to be part of. And that was my first introduction to dna, you know, that Y D N A project that was just at the very beginning of when we could start using this for Genealogy. And then we did that Y DNA project through Sorenson Labs, which subsequently sold that to Ancestry and now we can’t access those early results at all. But through my Y dna, I was able to go manually put in the results of, I believe they were five test takers. And so now I have those kits preserved in one place. And so that’s kind of a shout out to Maida Y dna. If you tested in the early days and still have your test results, you can go upload those there and you have to manually put it in, but it can preserve your research.

Diana (10m 50s):
So DNA has come a long ways and it was fun to to kind of be there at the beginning with that Y DNA project. But I digress. So we are talking objectives and that was identifying an individual. Now, one that we commonly do is to Discover or confirm or reject a biological family relationships. And so you know, it’s obvious in something like an unknown parentage case that we use DNA to find biological parents. But what about this idea of Confirming a relationship, you know, Confirming that your grandfather’s, your grandfather, your great-grandfather’s, your great-grandfather, and going back on the family tree. And that is so valuable because we want to confirm each of those generations going back and make sure there is not a break in the line.

Diana (11m 40s):
You know, if we don’t have any Matches from a fourth grade grandparent, why is that? Is it because there was something between the third and fourth generation? You know? So it is really, really great to do projects just on Confirming known research using dna. And then of course we want to also try to Discover biological relationships like my females that I’m continually trying to use DNA to figure out the father of now Clumsy Klein and my Cynthia Dillard because documentary research has just kind of been at a dead end for them. And so a great research question would be something like was Benjamin Cox of Texas, the biological father of Rachel Cox who was married in 1848 to William Henderson Schultz in Navarro County, Texas.

Diana (12m 26s):
And that was one of my projects that did several phases in, I was able to prove through DNA that that was a biological relationship. So looking at your tree, you probably can see a lot of specific research questions you could do that have to do with relationships.

Nicole (12m 45s):
Yes. And this is the most common type of Objective for using DNA evidence. Another type of Objective you might have a question about is to Discover a collateral relationship. So maybe you have like a family story that you’re related to a famous individual or maybe an unknown close relative appeared on your D N A mattress and you’d like to Discover the connection. And so sometimes you’ll have an Objective to figure out how you’re related to this person. So an example of this is what is the relationship of my Boone Ancestor to Daniel Boone who was born in, no, in November of 1734 in Pennsylvania and died in 1820 in Missouri.

Nicole (13m 26s):
Another example would be, how am I connected to my D N A match Jane Smith with whom I share 583 cent Morgans? It’s just another type of relationship question, but it’s more specifically focused on collateral relatives like cousin relationships.

Diana (13m 42s):
We next need to figure out who we’re going to research. It’s really important that we know some of the limitations that go along with DNA when choosing our research subject. There’s some things to think about, you know, do we have enough DNA Matches that we can actually make progress? There are some ancestral lines that simply will not have very many Matches because those families perhaps didn’t have large families or they migrated to a part of the world where people are not taking DNA tests. And with DNA we can only use what’s out there. We can do some targeted testing of course, and we’ll talk about that later on in this process.

Diana (14m 22s):
But when we first start, we generally are starting with the DNA that is available at our different testing companies. And so it’s really helpful to understand some of those limitations in working with DNA that are a little bit different than limitations in documentary research.

Nicole (14m 40s):
Let’s talk about the limitations of autosomal dna. So most DNA projects will be using autosomal DNA N because of its broad scope. And even if you are using Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA n it can be really helpful to use autosomal d n simultaneously, but you have to be aware of the limitations of autosomal DNA N it may not be able to answer every Brick wall question, and that’s because only some of the autosomal d n is passed down each generation. And so that means some is lost. And using autosomal dna, it makes it easier to Discover and determine relationships with close relatives and more difficult to identify exact relationships with more distant relatives.

Nicole (15m 24s):
And some of our distant relatives we won’t share any DNA with at all. So due to a recombination, you won’t share autosomal d n a with every single one of your third cousins. You will share with most of them, but not all of them. And then once you get to third cousins once removed and fourth cousins, the percentage of those fourth cousins that you share with goes down. Subsequently each generation you’ll share with less of your cousins. So beyond six to eight generations, the amount of DNA we inherit from a specific Ancestor may be too small to identify its origin definitively, but we can mitigate some of these problems by getting more test takers and doing some things. But we still just need to be aware that if we just have our own test or one autosomal D N A test and we want to find our sixth great grandparent, we’re gonna have some real issues may not be possible.

Diana (16m 12s):
That is so true, but it’s so great because unlike documentary evidence where we can’t really go add anything historically, we can add DNA evidence like what you said with testing more people and also new evidence appears all the time in the case of just different people testing their DNA and then they show up on your match list. So it’s great. Well let’s talk about the limitations of Y dna. So we discussed this a little bit previously, how the Y DNA inheritance pattern is patrilineal father to son, father to son throughout time. And that it basically is unchanged. You’ll have mutations that happen along the way, but it can go for a very long time being very close to the same Y D N A for several, several generations.

Diana (16m 57s):
So this can be really helpful if you’re trying to connect to a group of individuals that share a surname. In cultures like the western culture where that surname is passed down through the male line. In cultures where you’ve got Patronymics as in Scandinavia, that’s obviously not gonna work as well because you know every male changes a surname. So you use this for whatever you can use it. You may not be able to connect to a specific common Ancestor and that’s just part of why dna. You know, I’ve worked on projects where we know there’s an Ancestor who in common within eight to 12 generations, but you know, you get stuck in Virginia at the sixth or seventh generation and it’s pretty difficult to to go further back.

Diana (17m 45s):
And so that is why we see these really great Y DNA projects that have sprung up where everybody with a Smith surname or everybody with a Jones surname are putting their DNA out there and trying to figure out how they all connect. Now another limitation for why DNA is trying to find a test taker for that. You know, with my Royston project, I was fortunate because we’re talking large families here and my dad was still alive at the time and I said, do you know any of these Royston men? And he said, I know Bill Royston, he’s my cousin. And so my dad was in contact with him and it was pretty seamless to get his dna, which was wonderful.

Diana (18m 30s):
But you may not have a family connection. You might be cold calling someone and saying, Hey, you are the only one that can take this Y DNA test, would you be willing to do it? And it might be that some lines might have died out and so you don’t have a Y test taker. So there are some limitations to Y dna. And then even when you do find your Y DNA test taker, you are all excited to go look at your test results and then you see nobody Matches very closely. Your Matches are all several, we call it genetic distance, several steps away and maybe nobody even has the same surname. And so then you have to try to figure out what happened there. So just know why DNA is not a magic bullet to tell you exactly who your common Ancestor is.

Diana (19m 16s):
It’s a great tool, but it does have limitations and you have to learn how to use it.

Nicole (19m 20s):
So just like that with mitochondrial dna, you have some of the same limitations that it’s even more with mitochondrial because although it is directly passed down through the female line, it changes very slowly over time. So it could be that your common Ancestor with a mitochondrial D N A match is back thousands of years and you may not be able to determine who that was. It may not be able to help you find anything useful about your third great-grandmother if none of her other descendants have tested their mitochondrial dna. N the best way to use mitochondrial DNA is to compare the mitochondrial DNA of a woman’s possible descendants.

Nicole (20m 1s):
So if you have two child lines through two females and you want to see if they had the same mother, then you could test them both and see if they have the same mitochondrial DNA and if there Matches and then that could be one piece of evidence that supports that theory that they have the same mother. Another thing you can do is find out if two women have different mitochondrial Ancestors. If they’re not a match, then that can help you rule out a hypothesis that you have from your documentary research and that’s a little more conclusive than a match. Because if somebody Matches, it could be that their mitochondrial common Ancestor is way further back in time than that third great grandparent that you’re trying to match.

Nicole (20m 42s):
So it doesn’t always tell you the exact answer you want, but it can be one piece of evidence.

Diana (20m 48s):
I think mitochondrial is exciting to think about the possibilities of discovering our female lines, but it does take a lot of work and I’m, I’m working on one of those right now seeing what I can find out.

Nicole (20m 59s):
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Nicole (21m 47s):
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Diana (22m 1s):
Alright, Thank you. Well let’s do a little bit of practice with evaluating some d n research questions. So all of you listening and we’re going to read some scenarios and then you can be thinking about what we’ve talked about with DNA and what DNA could work with on this question. So our first scenario talks about Katherine and Katherine has taken an autosomal DNA test with the research question. Who is the father of my second great-grandfather, Patrick Mikel. Patrick was born about 1825 in Ireland and immigrated to Michigan. He married Hannah, made a name unknown, born about 1840 in Ireland. So can Catherine’s autosomal DNA results be used to help answer her research question?

Diana (22m 43s):
Why or why not? Well, Catherine’s Ancestor, Patrick Macl is well within the range of using autosomal DNA to help answer her research question. So if you remember from the question, he was just her second great-grandfather, the only problem with that might be the number of DNA Matches. So since he was born in Ireland, would there be Matches from his Irish grant to the family? That’s something to consider.

Nicole (23m 9s):
That’s a good thing to think about. If you are just jumping into a new project with somebody’s d n you haven’t looked at before, it’s good to just always be aware that they might not have a lot of Matches on that particular line. All right, so let’s do scenario number two. Steve Bingham Jr. And his father Steve Bingham senior, have taken autosomal D N A tests. Steve’s research question is I want to research my father’s side. I have traced my Ancestry back to my fourth great-grandfather Ralph Bingham, born in 1760 in North Carolina. I want to find Ralph’s father and eventually traced the Bingham line back several more generations. So then our question is, can Steve and his father’s autosomal d n a results be used to help answer his research question?

Nicole (23m 55s):
The answer is yes. Ralph Bingham is within the range of six to eight generations using autosomal d n a to help answer the question. But we should definitely be using the senior Steve Bingham’s autosomal D n a results since he inherited more d n A from his Ancestor Ralph than did his son later. If Steve asks more, you know, questions, who was the original Bingham Ancestor, who immigrated to the United States? Can D n A help answer this research question? The answer is probably that will be pushing the limits of autosomal DNA n a testing. So if we’re all for the fourth great-grandfather and was born on 1760, the immigrant Ancestor could be further back several generations maybe within eight autosomal D N A could possibly help answer the question.

Nicole (24m 42s):
But a limitation would be that Steve Bingham senior may not have inherited D n A from the immigrant Ancestor because of recombination. And so we would want to test other known descendants of that Bingham line to increase the D N A coverage. But really we should be using a Y D N A test here because this is on a patrilineal Bingham line. And so testing Y D N A would increase the likelihood of success and could lead to connecting with other being of descendants and point to an immigrant Ancestor. So we really should get Y D N A at that point.

Diana (25m 19s):
That’s a great idea. Now scenario three, Denise has taken a mitochondrial DNA test. Denise’s question is who is the mother of my fourth great-grandmother Sarah Graves, born about 1795 in North Carolina. So can mitochondrial DNA help answer this question? Well, mitochondrial DNA does trace the maternal line back many generations, but the problem with it, as we talked about with the limitations, is that Denise will likely have many DNA Matches but with all sorts of different surnames because women change their surname with each generation and she would have no clue how they all connect.

Diana (25m 59s):
But if she could identify a possible fifth great-grandmother and trace her female descendants forward, then she could compare mitochondrial DNA with one of those descendants. And if it’s positive, that could help confirm her hypothesis or if it was negative, it would help her to see that you know, more research is necessary that something is happening there. She wasn’t right or there was a break in the link somewhere so she could also see autosomal DNA to further test the theories. So mitochondrial and my DNA work really well in conjunction with autosomal DNA in most cases. You know, sometimes we come to the limit of autosomal DNA with how far back we can go with it, but often we can use it right along with the other two and make really good discoveries.

Nicole (26m 48s):
Right. and I, like what you said about using them together because sometimes there could be a break in the line and we don’t know where it occurred until we look at the autosomal D N A and kind of figure out each generation going back in time.

Diana (27m 2s):
Exactly.

Nicole (27m 3s):
So now that we’ve talked about the basics of DNA n inheritance and the limitations of DNA N and some of the possibilities for using d n, you’re ready to choose your research question. You’re gonna need to examine your pedigree chart and think about which Brick wall you could overcome with DNA N evidence. There’s actually a lot of tools to help you come up with some ideas. Some of these DNA testing companies tools include through lines and my heritage theory of family relativity. Let’s talk about some of these tools. There’s a lot of different ones. The first one is surname searches. So sometimes you might have a surname in your family tree that you are wondering more about and you kind of wonder like what is going on with this Klein family?

Nicole (27m 48s):
And you can look in your D N A match list, type in the name Klein and see if you have any Matches who also have that surname in their tree. And that can kinda give you some ideas of if there’s gonna be enough Matches to work with there. Be careful with this technique because just because a match has thatum in their tree doesn’t mean that’s your common Ancestor with them. So it’s important to also look at shared Matches with those people if it’s on the right line of your family and shared locations as well.

Diana (28m 22s):
Right? Another great tool that we have on Ancestry and my heritage are ways to look at the paths from a common Ancestor between you and a shared match. And so Ancestry through lines and my heritage is theory of family relativity. Both use that and as we’ve talked about before on the podcast, we have to be careful with them because they’re based on user created family trees, but they are still really good tools to explore possible research projects. So if you have connected a family tree to your DNA results on Ancestry, the system will generate through lines for you. And then any shared DNA match who has some of the same relatives listed in their tree will appear as part of the descendancy tree.

Diana (29m 5s):
And so you could take a look at the suggested Ancestor and that could become an excellent subject for a DNA research project. So for instance, I had done a lot of research on my Benjamin Cox of Texas and hypothesize. He was the father of my third great-grandmother, Rachel Cox. And when I did a whole DNA project on that relationship, I was able to really add DNA evidence to my documentary work showing that. And so take a look at those two tools, Ancestry through lines in my My Heritages theory of family relativity and see if there is a common Ancestor suggested or an Ancestor that you would just like to confirm.

Diana (29m 51s):
And you can see there’s a lot of Matches and you realize that this would be a great project to confirm that biological relationship that your documentary evidence or your family stories. I’ll say, you know that this is the second or third great grandmother, father, you could do DNA work to confirm that because you’re able to see the path back from your Matches and it gives you something to work with in your project. It’s a great way to get started.

Nicole (30m 18s):
It is great. You know, Ancestry D N A has another great tool to help you and that’s their common Ancestor hints. This is just a helpful tool for looking to see kind of what Ancestors you both have in your trees. You can actually filter your match list by people who have a common Ancestor hint. And when you do that, then you can click on a match and see who the system is suggesting your common Ancestor is. Then you can kind of use that as a hypothesis to start with. Especially you know, those Matches that are further back that are not obvious. So you can use that as a way to isolate specific DNA Matches that can be evaluated as part of your research project and help you see if you have enough Matches to work on that Objective.

Diana (31m 4s):
Well, and that’s a great point. After we’ve done all of this work and in looking at our tree trying to figure out a good research question, then we come to the point of writing our research Objective. Now what if you do have the problem where you really want to figure out that third great grandparent, but you simply do not have enough DNA evidence? Well then you might have to do some targeted testing and that’s where you reach out and ask some other people to test that could help you get more evidence. And so just know, as we’ve said before, DNA research doesn’t come to an end. You can always get more test takers and that can give you more evidence to work with. Once you have decided on your question, you need to write your Objective.

Diana (31m 48s):
It can be concise or complex. We recommend that you break up complex projects into phases. If you are trying to research the mother of a female Ancestor born in the early 18 hundreds, you probably are not going to get that done in just, you know, a 20 hours of research. It’s probably going to take several phases of the project each with its own Objective. So here’s an example of how this works. So if the question is who was the mother of Elsie born 1820, your first phases Objective could be to perform documentary research for the mother of lc. We often just need to build a foundation of the documentary work.

Diana (32m 28s):
We’ve gotta get some hypothesis, some ideas, and then the phase two Objective could be research the descendants of lc for potential DNA test takers. You know, we might need to really build down the tree to find those test takers. And that’s a whole phase in and of itself. Then the phase three Objective could be to explore the genetic networks of DNA testers for possible hypotheses. So you know, we’re we’re building guffy graphs, network graphs, trying to find clues, and then a phase four Objective could be to test a hypothesis, say we found somebody in a cluster, it looks like it leads to a clue. We could do a whole project on that hypothesis. And then phase five could be test additional hypotheses, five phases it could take.

Diana (33m 12s):
And even after five phases perhaps, we haven’t completely figured it out, but it really, it does work to get you closer and closer to a final conclusion.

Nicole (33m 25s):
Absolutely. I love breaking up projects into phases. Sometimes you won’t know what phases you’ll need when you first start, so it’s okay to just start by saying, here’s my Objective for this phase and we’ll see what happens next.

Diana (33m 37s):
Yeah, cuz often you don’t know what you’re going to find. You know, sometimes you dig into the documents and you find the magic bullet, you find the record that gives you the clue you need, and then your second phase could be just doing DNA to confirm that. So you know, we’ve all worked on all sorts of different types of projects and some work out better than others, let’s just put it that way. Right?

Nicole (34m 2s):
Well, when you’re ready to write your Objective, you can use key identifying information about The Ancestor to create your Objective. And those key identifiers include full names, spouses, birth, marriage, death dates and places. And these facts help us uniquely identify the person of interest and set them apart from many other people with similar names. Also, one thing to include when you’re writing A D N A Objective is to put in there that you’re seeking a biological relationship you can put in that you’re seeking to test, confirm, or reject a hypothesized identity or biological relationship. So here’s an example of a research question, is Benjamin Cox, the biological father of Rachel Cox.

Nicole (34m 45s):
So if you’re starting off with that research question, then you can add in the details and the facts that help identify each of them. Benjamin and Rachel, since there were several Ben Cox’s in the records at that time period. So these unique identifiers when added help make your Objective so that you and anyone who’s looking at your Objective will understand exactly who you’re researching. So here’s the Objective, the Objective of this research project is to confirm the hypothesized relationship of Benjamin Cox as the biological father of Rachel Cox through autosomal d evidence and documentary research. Benjamin Cox was born about 1791 in Ohio and died between 1870 and 1880 in Bell County, Texas.

Nicole (35m 31s):
Rachel Cox was born about 1828 in Indiana and died between 1870 and 1880 in Falls County, Texas. Rachel married Hickman, Monroe Schultz on four July, 1848 in Navarro County, Texas.

Diana (35m 42s):
Right? And you’ll notice that that has all the unique identifiers. So we have a really good vision of these people where they were at different times in their lives. And those are the things we wanna include our in our objectives so that as we’re doing our research and we come across a record, we can just go right back to our Objective and say, oh, this Matches, or no, this person is way off. You know, it probably is not our Ancestor. So it takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of writing objectives, but it’s really fun to do. And one thing that we have learned through our work with DNA is that it’s better to write an Objective to confirm a relationship or Discover a relationship to just one parent, like to a father or a mother rather than a couple, because that narrows down your DNA a bit.

Diana (36m 30s):
And so something just to think about. Well, your task for chapter four is to examine your family tree and choose two to three questions that could be answered using existing DNA test results. Consider the limitations of DNA evidence in answering each question. Then select one question. Determine whether research project answering that question would be concise or complex. If the project would be too complicated, consider breaking it into phases. Write a research Objective based on that question, using the key identifiers of full names, spouses, birth, marriage, and death dates and places.

Nicole (37m 7s):
All right everybody, I hope that you’ll work on that This week and next week we will talk to you about chapter five of Research Like a Pro with DNA n a.

Diana (37m 15s):
All right, have a great week everyone. We’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye

Nicole (37m 19s):
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 book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket dot com slash 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 dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.