RLP 246: RLP with DNA 8 Part 2 – Segment Data Tools

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 246 RLP with DNA Chapter eight, part two, segment Data Tools. 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 (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome to Research like a Pro. Today’s episode is brought to you by find agra.com. The best place to search online for burial information for your family, friends, and famous people at Find A Grave. You’ll find details about cemeteries and individual member memorials for the people buried in those cemeteries. Hi everyone and welcome to research like a Pro.

Diana (1m 6s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (1m 8s):
Great. Just been using Airtable a lot and loving it. How about you?

Diana (1m 13s):
I’ve been doing the same. I’m working on our study group project and it was the timeline assignment and I’m working on proving through dna, my connection between Thomas Beverly Royston and his father John Kerry Royston. I have a really mammoth research log in Google Sheets that I use for accreditation, you know, back 2016, it’s got like over 150 rows and the problem with those 150 rows I can’t group and sort it like I like to do on air table site, imported the whole thing into air table and I am so excited to have it there and be able to manipulate it to look at all the different people and all the different records.

Diana (1m 55s):
It’s a little bit of work to put it in there, but now it’s done and I’m ready to use. It’s pretty exciting.

Nicole (2m 1s):
Awesome. So you can sort and excel, right? But you just can’t really group?

Diana (2m 7s):
Yes, so I did it in Google Sheets and I would, I would sort it by record type or I would sort it by location. I think those were the two main things. I had set up the columns for sorting, but I couldn’t do the grouping and I couldn’t create a new view say of just John Kerry Royston because for that four generation project I had to detail all of his wives, all of his children, and he had at least two wives and children by both of them. So when I say research log, it is really thorough of his entire family and often I want to just look at like one of his sons or look at one of the wives. So I had to add some fields When I did import it into Airtable, I had to add an individual field so that I could easily group by the person or do select views I guess for selecting views.

Diana (2m 57s):
I could have maybe just any mention of this person. But anyway, I added a couple things so I could really use it how I wanted to,

Nicole (3m 5s):
How great. I was just using Airtable for a project with managing different course members in our online courses and just, you know, working on that and, and I was trying to use an Excel CSV file and I was annoyed that I couldn’t filter it and group it the way I wanted to and I thought, why am I even doing this? I’m just gonna put this in air table. So it was so easy to to import it and Air Table recognized certain fields that could be a certain field type and just gave it that field type and it was so nice.

Diana (3m 39s):
That is awesome. So you just imported the whole thing without selecting any fields or Right. Wow, that’s awesome.

Nicole (3m 45s):
It was nice.

Diana (3m 46s):
It’s fun. We’re always learning more about what we can do at Air Table. Well, let’s do announcements, which brings me to, we have our new Airtable quick reference guide available as a PDF download from our website and we have our research like APRO webinar series for 2023 going and we are so excited to be sharing monthly case studies featuring the research psycho APRO process and projects that have had DNA added to them as well. Our next research psycho APRO study group is this fall, we’ll begin the end of August and end the beginning of November and we have our peer group leader application on our website. So if you’ve been thinking you’d like to be a peer group leader, we invite you to apply for that.

Diana (4m 27s):
You’ll get to complimentary registration and get to J work with a small group of people in the study group. We have our newsletter available for the latest and greatest that we are doing and we have our coupons that come through that newsletter for our courses. And also the next big conference now that Roots Tech is over and done is the National Genealogical Society Conference that’s in Richmond, Virginia that’s open for registration. So you can attend in person or you can be part of the virtual segment of ngs. So I invite you to go check that out on their website and get registered for that.

Nicole (5m 9s):
Yes, and although I won’t be able to attend ngs, we are going to have a booth there, so if you wanna come find us in the expo hall at the NGS conference, then you can see Diana and I’ll be managing our virtual booth from home,

Diana (5m 25s):
Right? We’re excited to be there in person and we’ll have our books and we’ll have flyers and it’s always just fun to talk to people. I love, you know, hearing how your research is going and you know, just what’s going on with fellow genealogists. It’s awesome to connect,

Nicole (5m 43s):
Right? And if you want a laminated version of our Airtable reference guide at conference booths is pretty much the only place you can get it because we don’t sell that on our website. We only sell the PDF download. So that’s another fun reason to come see us at the booth.

Diana (5m 56s):
That’s

Nicole (5m 57s):
Right. All right, well let’s get started with today’s topic. Today we’re talking about research like a pro with D N A chapter eight and last episode we covered the first part of the chapter about genetic networks and pedigree triangulation. And today we’ll talk about the second part of the chapter, which is about segment data and chromosome browsers. So let’s talk first about segment triangulation. How can this help you? Well, this method can sometimes help you trace your family tree back even more generations than you knew you could. And triangulation relies on DNA segments that are shared by you and at least two of your matches on the same chromosome who have the same segment and it’s coming from the same ancestral source.

Nicole (6m 39s):
And if the common ancestor shared between these three or more individuals can be figured out by looking at family trees, then that triangulated DNA n a is compelling evidence supporting a proposed relationship. The way this works is that somewhere back in time your ancestors passed DNA to their children who passed it to their children. And over time that segment of D N A that was passed on got a little bit smaller and a little bit smaller and it eventually ended up with you. So the goal of looking at segments and doing triangulation is to figure out the ancestral origin of the segment that’s shared between you and two other individuals. Sometimes you might have a segment of D N A that you can’t identify a common ancestor, and that could be that the common ancestor is just further back in time than there is documentary evidence available to trace the trees back that far to make sure that you’re using a segment that’s all shared by the same people and that it’s a valid segment to analyze.

Nicole (7m 40s):
The segments need to overlap enough that it’s a long enough segment of DNA N So if you’re only overlapping for like three or 4 cent Morgans, that’s just not quite enough. You’d want to have segments that are closer to 10 or more cent Morgans in size. So only some of the DNA testing companies have segment data to do triangulation with GEDMatch. My Heritage 23 and Me, all three of these have the ability to report segment triangulation Family tree D n A provides segment data, but they do not provide triangulation information. You have to do the extra work to contact your matches and figure out if the other two individuals share that same segment with each other.

Nicole (8m 26s):
Ancestry DNA does not provide segment data at all. So you cannot do segment triangulation if all you have is Ancestry DNA N, but you can transfer or upload your ancestry d n results to other companies to find matches there and to see the segments you share with others at other databases. So one of the key takeaways from this section about triangulation is to make sure that it’s true triangulation. You need to make sure that the other people who are part of of your triangulation group share that same segment with each other. And it’s not enough that you share with one person and you share with a second person at the same spot that’s only two legs of the triangle.

Nicole (9m 9s):
The third leg of the triangle is seeing that those other two people also share that same segment and you might be wondering why wouldn’t they? Sometimes that does happen where it’s just on a different chromosome, so they aren’t sharing that. So we just have to be careful and aware of the possibility that they may not share that same segment.

Diana (9m 30s):
Well thanks for taking us through that. Those are some really good things to think about because there are limitations to what we can do with our DNA and we need to be aware of that. Well, you may be wondering how you even look at the chromosomes on the different testing companies. And as Nicole mentioned, we can’t look at it on all the companies, but there are three testing companies and JED Match that do provide a chromosome browser. And the chromosome browser lets you visualize the DNA that you inherited from common ancestors and lets you compare segments that you share with DNA matches. And so you’ll be able to see the chromosome number, the start and end points of each segment.

Diana (10m 10s):
But it’s an important thing to remember is that you have two copies of each chromosome. So you inherit one from your father and one from your mother. And if you’re going to try to triangulate, like you were talking about Nicole, you have to make sure that these overlapping segments are on the same chromosome copy. And that can be tricky because you gotta compare the right chromosomes. So if you examine the DNA segments you share with your DNA matches and know how you are related and the common ancestor you share, then you can assign those segments to that ancestor, which is really exciting. And after that segment has been assigned or identified as belonging to an ancestor, then you can compare segment data from other DNA matches.

Diana (10m 52s):
Just keep in mind, just because the match shares the same segment on the same chromosome, it doesn’t mean they necessarily descend from the same set of common ancestors. It could mean they descend from an ancestor of the most recent common ancestors. So for example, I share a lot of DNA with my first cousin. We also share a lot of great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents and great-great-great grandparents. And so we have to think about that little segment of coming back, you know, much further perhaps than we would initially have thought of. So it’s really fun to start working with this and the more you do it, the more you get comfortable with it. So if you’ve never looked at your chromosome browser on your DNA testing company, here’s where you can.

Diana (11m 36s):
My heritage has the chromosome browser, one to many 23andme has advanced DNA comparison, family tree DNA has chromosome browser. Jed Match has the tool titled one-to-one autosomal DNA comparison or one-to-one XD a comparison. And then for their tier one, which is their paid level, they have the 2D chromosome browser, the 3D chromosome browser and compact segment mapper. So you’ll see that GEDMatch has quite a few tools that you can use. So I’d encourage you to just go log into your DNA and take a look at those chromosome browsers and see what you can find and and understand what’s going on with that reporting of your dna.

Nicole (12m 20s):
So as I was talking earlier about segment triangulation, I was thinking about how in the past segment triangulation has been talked about as the gold standard for genetic genealogy. And I think a lot of people have the misconception that you need to have segment triangulation in order to write a proof argument and that’s just not the case. In recent years. Clustering and pedigree triangulation has kind of become more of a tool that’s used more often and using the total amounts of shared D n A with matches and not including segment data is an acceptable way of writing a proof argument.

Nicole (12m 60s):
And you can look in various case studies in the National Genealogical Society quarterly and see that not all of them do segments where there is segment data available, it can add additional evidence to the body of evidence, but where it’s not available or where it’s not necessary, it’s not used. So I don’t think you should take away from this that you have to use segment triangulation in order to feel that you have reached the level of proof. It’s a tool just like the other tools and it can definitely be useful, but it’s not always required,

Diana (13m 35s):
Right? The genealogy world has changed a bit with their interpretation of how to use the segments, which is I think a good thing because of that random recombination we are just not going to inherit as much. It gets so much more difficult to try to triangulate on a segment when we’re working far back in time. It’s much easier to gather this body of evidence of shared matches and all these people in the same genetic network. So it’s a good shift, but I think it’s just so important to still understand how to use segments, which is why we’re talking about it today,

Nicole (14m 6s):
Right? And it can be so helpful to find more matches that are relevant to your case. And so the next thing I’m gonna talk about are some third party tools that can help you with that to identify DNA segments that are relevant to your project. So let’s go over some of these segment triangulation tools. Genetic affairs@geneticaffairs.com, they have a tool called Auto Segment. Auto Segment is able to be used for segment data from My Heritage 23 and Me Family Tree DNA and Jed Match. What’s great about this is that it can take matches and segments from all these websites and put them into one report. That’s really useful because it’s kind of helping you compare segments across companies and you can’t do that with just shared matches.

Nicole (14m 53s):
But when you have a specific segment that people are sharing, you can see if that segment is shared by somebody at 23 and me and somebody at My Heritage, there’s another tool at Genetic Affairs which is very similar and it’s called the Hybrid Auto Segment tool. This is the one that puts all of the data into one report. The regular auto segment tool just puts together a report from each company separately. So the hybrid auto segment tool is the one that’s pretty exciting and having all that segment information in one place can really streamline the process of analysis that can just be a huge time saver. However, I will say that when I’ve used that in the past, it helps to limit the parameters so that you don’t have such a huge report or a massive spreadsheet because for one it can become too large that you can’t load it and sometimes it doesn’t include all of the people that you wanted to include because it was too large.

Nicole (15m 49s):
So just be aware of the limitations of that. Another option for compiling DNA segment data is to use the DNA jed com client and that can help you extract data from testing companies. And then you can use different tools like J Works and K Works, which are tools from DNA jed com and then look at that data in a spreadsheet. So then you can see how the DNA segments that you share in common with your matches are forming triangulated groups. And then you can work on identifying the most recent common ancestor. So to use DNA jed com, you just need to get an account there and you need to subscribe to get access to their program called the dna jed com client.

Nicole (16m 31s):
Then using the client on your computer, you can download your files from Family Tree DNA 23 and Me, my Heritage and Jed Match. Downloading the files does take some time, so you might need to set your computer to not go to sleep and then let it run overnight to extract all the data. Once you’ve gotten all the data, then you can use the tools. And so one of the tools is J Works, which is a downloadable Excel macro program that sorts your segment data. Another one is K Works, which is an online version of J Works created by Kitty Cooper and that sorts your DNA data and creates a spreadsheet of overlapping segments. And this is accessible through the DNA n jed com website. If you subscribe to GEDMatch tier one, you can also use the autosomal DNA segment analyzer at DNA jed com.

Nicole (17m 16s):
And this program reports which people share DNA in common with others. And so it kinda helps you go beyond just the overlapping segments to finding likely triangulation groups. All of these tools are helpful for streamlining the gathering of your data into one place and examining and analyzing it to figure out the D N A segments you inherited from specific ancestors,

Diana (17m 39s):
Right? And I think it just takes some experimenting to see how to use it. And you know, we always teach to research by objectives. So if you have an objective to research maybe a a fourth great grandfather, it could be really helpful to try to find some segments that you and your matches all triangulate on or just to even identify some of those chromosomes. Which leads us to our next topic, which is visualizing DNA segments. And this is one of my favorite parts about working with segments. We call it chromosome mapping and it aims to identify the ancestral origins of specific segments of dna. And I love visual, you know, anytime there’s a visual that that’s what I’m all about.

Diana (18m 21s):
So through this process you can see which segments you inherited from your specific ancestors. Now you have to remember, you can’t visualize your own dna, you can only see the DNA you share with your DNA matches. So when you have a chromosome map, you are the base person or your test taker is the base person. But we’ll, we’ll talk about just our own. We are the base person against which our DNA matches compared and the chromosome map will show the segments you share with the DNA match. So you can use your autosomal DNA results to build this map of your chromosomes. And we have some great tools to do that with.

Diana (19m 3s):
The first one is DNA painter, which is my favorite because it’s easy and it’s fun and it uses color and it uses just segment information. It doesn’t use your raw dna. So that ensures privacy because people can’t see the nucleotides in your raw dna, just get to see your segment information. But once you identify a common ancestor between you and your genetic match, then you can assign that bit of DNA that segment to a match and you can paint it. So whenever you hover your mouse over a specific little segment, you have painted a certain color, you can see what the names of the ancestors are.

Diana (19m 46s):
And as you continue to do this, you will eventually create a chromosome map. DNA painter is fun because it tells you how much of your genome is painted. And I think at this moment I only have about 50% of mine painted, I need to return to that. But one of the problems is that we can’t use ancestry data, which is where so many of our matches are. And so we have to use our results at 23 and Me, my Heritage and Family Tree DNA to pay our chromosomes or GEDMatch. If people have uploaded to GEDMatch their ancestry dna, we can use that. But it’s a fun visual and the way that it can really help you is if you have identified some DNA segments from say a third great grandfather because you have connected with that DNA match, you know what your common ancestor is and you’ve done the tree work to see that their tree and your tree all go back to the same person.

Diana (20m 41s):
Then if you get a new match who also is on that segment that gives you some clues about how that match fits into your family tree or who your common ancestor could be. So we can really use it for some good analysis of our DNA and to give us some help. So one thing to know when you go to DNA painter, you can create your chromosome map for free on DNA painter. And when you go to create it, you will see two lines for each chromosome because we have a maternal and a paternal chromosome. And on DNA painter, the top line represents the paternal copy and the bottom line represents the maternal copy. Now that is not always the same with the other websites.

Diana (21m 21s):
You can’t always assume that it’s paternal and then maternal. So just be careful with that. But know with DNA painter, that is how it is set up and you get the chromosomes from one to 22 and then you even have the X chromosome at the bottom of the map. So it also features a cluster auto painter tool, which gives you a new chromosome map from the DNA segment cluster data in cluster HTML files and auto cluster reports from some of those companies. We’ve been talking about genetic affairs, my heritage dead match, and the colon leads method at DNA jed com. So a lot of really neat things that you can do with DNA painter.

Diana (22m 3s):
Now there is one other tool that you could experiment with and that is G dat. So G D A T, which stands for genealogical D n A analysis tool and it’s an app for Windows, Mac or Linux that helps you use your autosomal D N A test results for genealogy. So you may have used back in the day the tool genome MA probe and this is a replacement for that unlike DNA painter where it’s all online, this one you you use on your own computer. And so some of the things it can do are chromosome mapping triangulation in common with grouping the ability to mark most recent common ancestors, X DNA inheritance path ancestors.

Diana (22m 47s):
And so it’s something that if you are willing to spend the time and learn a new tool you might love it just depends on how your brain works and if it’s something that clicks with you,

Nicole (22m 58s):
Right? That could be said for all these tools because some of them I just never use and other tools I use all the time. So we kind of develop our favorite tool and it helps us, we get good at it, it helps us find the matches that are relevant and I think that’s okay.

Diana (23m 15s):
I do too. Sometimes it’s good to experiment with new tools and see if we might like to use those for a certain project or a case, but if we get really good at some of the tools, then maybe that’s just fine. You know, we don’t have to try every single tool that’s out there,

Nicole (23m 30s):
Right? You know, I usually focus on my network graphs and figuring out groupings of people that way. And then like with one of my proof arguments recently after I had come to my conclusion I wanted to add some segment data, so I just kinda went to GEDMatch and I knew there were certain people that I’m already using in my project that are in GEDMatch. So I just went and kinda looked to see if I could see any triangulated segments there with some of the basic tools for segment analysis. And sure enough I did find one. So I just created a simple table for my report, including the segment data of this triangulated segment. So I didn’t use a fancy tool to help me find that. I just used my other tool to figure out my whole case and then at the end I used a simple triangulation tool to add a little bit more evidence.

Diana (24m 16s):
Nice. And that was for a specific project. That’s not necessarily what you would do for every single project. So I think we have to remember, especially with DNA, that different projects might warrant some different treatment of how we work with the dna.

Nicole (24m 30s):
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Nicole (25m 12s):
Okay, let’s talk about a new topic, visual phasing. If you hear that word and it strikes fear and dread into your heart, that’s because it’s a more advanced and challenging tool and that’s okay. It’s a, it’s a time intensive way to map your chromosomes and it can provide a detailed map that identifies the DNA segments inherited from each of your four grandparents. So for that reason it can be very beneficial In DNA painter, like Diana mentioned, sometimes you only have 30 to 40% painted, whereas with the visual phasing often you can complete an entire chromosome map so that you know at each part of every chromosome which part was inherited from which side of the family.

Nicole (25m 56s):
When I’m looking at my best chromosome map that I’ve done, by best I mean most complete, it’s my grandpa elders and it’s 48% complete. I thought that was pretty good, but still chromosome one, the paternal chromosome is pretty empty. That’s like the longest chromosome and I barely know anything about that chromosome. I just know like two small segments and where they came from. So depending on how many matches you have in the companies that have segment data, you may not be able to identify just through segment painting, non-DNA painter, all of the chromosomes and which parts of them came from which side of the family. So visual phasing can help you do that, but there’s a lot of requirements to get started with it.

Nicole (26m 40s):
One of them is that you need to have a set of three siblings and so if you don’t have three siblings, it’s gonna be a lot harder. And some people have tried to do it with two, but it’s just much better to have three. So I don’t know that I would recommend trying it unless you have three full siblings and it does take focus and patience. Karen Stanbury describes it as a logic puzzle like Sudoku where you’re sitting down and you’re trying to figure out the answer to a puzzle almost. If that sounds fun to you and you have three siblings, then you might wanna consider trying it. What you need to do to get started is get the Excel program that Steven Fox wrote. And so if you join the visual phasing working group on Facebook, then you can get that Excel program.

Nicole (27m 25s):
There’s a five part series on Blaine Becher’s website with instructions on how to do visual phasing and he also has a whole chapter in the book Advanced Genetic Genealogy edited by Debbie Parker Wayne that teaches about visual phasing and how to do it. And that’s kind of what I’ve used as I’ve learned to do visual phasing.

Diana (27m 45s):
Yeah, I love reading Blaine’s chapter and his blog posts and and attending his classes on visual phasing. I think it’s just a fascinating process, but I haven’t tackled it cuz I don’t have three full siblings. I only have one half siblings. So you know, it hasn’t been high on my list to do, but I think you definitely should keep working on that.

Nicole (28m 6s):
Honestly, I haven’t felt that I need to, it’s just honestly the number of matches on ancestry with trees make it so that that’s where I focus most of my time. Ancestry matches don’t have segment data, so I spend my time on the low hanging fruit and like I said, sometimes I will look at segment data later, but it’s not currently in my process to use a lot of segment data.

Diana (28m 32s):
Well and don’t you think that a lot of these tools were developed, you know, years ago and we did not have the number of DNA matches that we have now, especially on Ancestry and so you know, people were trying to figure out how to use DNA and how to figure more things out and so they developed a lot of these tools and so I’ll be really curious to see what we are using, you know, a year from now, two years from now, we may completely change our methodology using different types of tools. So it’s really evolving,

Nicole (29m 1s):
Right? I would say that probably the tool that I use is DNA painter to map segments. So same, I highly recommend that. Yeah, So there are some challenges with mapping chromosomes and DNA segment painting and one of them is that you may share multiple common ancestors with one of your matches. So then how do you assign a DNA segment to one set of common ancestors? If you have a double cousin, then which set of ancestors did that segment come from? You just have to use caution with those and maybe wait and compare multiple matches and then over time you might be able to figure it out. But those cases where you do have double cousins pedigree collapse and inmy are actually the times when mapping DNA segments can be even more useful because it can help you sort things out and help you figure out, okay, this segment seems to have come from this side of the family and this segment came from the southern common ancestor that we share.

Nicole (29m 59s):
So then it can help you use that as evidence because then you’ve kind of figured out how much you actually share because of a certain common ancestor. So it can be a challenge but then also a solution to a challenge. So let’s just go over really briefly some situations that you may see in your family tree that you need to be aware of as you’re doing segment mapping. So I mentioned pedigree collapse. This happens when people who are related like first or second cousins get married or have children together, then those children have pedigree collapse because they have fewer unique ancestors because their parents are related. So their pedigree instead of getting bigger at each generation, at a certain point the pedigree only has six instead of eight unique ancestors.

Nicole (30m 48s):
End domy is similar, just more severe when pedigree collapse occurs over and over in someone’s tree because people choose to marry within their population group. This sometimes can occur in geographically isolated populations, religious populations, the same type of effects of our monogamy can occur when you have different things like founder effect or different problems where a lot of a population is wiped out and then those who are left are kind of the founders and they, you know, marry each other. So anyway, the children of these communities with inmy and populations that have similar effects to inmy, the children inherit a lot of DNA from the same people.

Nicole (31m 33s):
And so that can really introduce challenges for separating d n segments into specific common ancestral couples because they may share a lot of small segments with matches and those all came from different common ancestors because they share with the same person in four different ways. They’re a third cousin on this side, a fourth cousin on that side, a fifth cousin once removed and a sixth cousin. And so if they are that many relationships with one match, it just makes the analysis and the segment map being quite challenging. And then the last challenge is that there’s sometimes a lack of pedigree completeness. And so if you don’t know your tree and it’s not complete to a certain level, then it can make it really hard to identify where a certain segment of D N A came from.

Nicole (32m 21s):
And of course we all have brick walls or dead ends in our tree so we can all relate to this, but if you have several lines of your family that can’t get back further past a grandparent or great-grandparent, then that’s going to complicate your segment mapping quite a bit.

Diana (32m 35s):
Absolutely. Well that was a great discussion on segment mapping and visualization of our segments. So many fun things to consider and try out. So let’s shift gears a little bit and let’s talk about some DNA tools and methodology for the other kinds of DNA inheritance. We’ve been talking all about autosomal dna, but now we’ll do a little bit on mitochondrial y DNA and XD A because those are very useful types of DNA inheritance that can help us to discover more about our ancestors and we wanna know what kind of tools we can use for those. So we’ll start with mitochondrial dna and the tools that we use for mitochondrial DNA are haplogroup reports and the matching report at Family Tree dna.

Diana (33m 22s):
So we get these reports and what do we do with it? Well, just like any other source, we analyze it, we correlate it with our documentary research to try to address some conclusions. So here’s what you get from each company concerning mitochondrial dna. Family Tree DNA is the only company that offers the full sequence mitochondrial test. So this is where you’ll actually get matches on your mitochondrial line, but just know that those matches can be very, very, very far back and they don’t have surnames coming through the female lines and so it can be very difficult to figure out how you’re connect to them. But we use it for targeted testing.

Diana (34m 3s):
So if we find an ancestor and we find a very possible mother or a sister, we can trace down their descendancy lines and find a mitochondrial test taker that we can compare to. And so it’s very useful, we just have to understand it. Now what if you’ve tested at 23 and me? Well, you will get a high level haplo group for your mitochondrial haplo group and you get your autosomal DNA results. And so sometimes you can compare and see if people are on the mitochondrial lines just from their their haplo group Living DNA also reports that haplo group and gives you autosomal DNA results.

Diana (34m 43s):
My heritage and ancestry include tested mitochondrial DNA markers in their raw data download files. And so if you want to, you could maybe somehow use that to estimate a mitochondrial DNA haplogroup. And then there are tools for estimating a mitochondrial DNA he group such as James Licks tools@jameslicks.com. So we don’t talk a lot in genetic genealogy about using mitochondrial and all and different tools, but it’s, it’s interesting to think that it might be a way to break through a brick wall and one of your female ancestors. One of the things you wanna do is you want to actually see which ancestors could be used for mitochondrial dna.

Diana (35m 26s):
And if you go to DNA painter, they have a tool there you can upload or create your family tree and then you can show the mitochondrial DNA path and that’ll help you visualize the ancestors from whom you inherited mitochondrial dna. Now you might want to seek out people that can be test takers for each of your different lines that you don’t yourself carry the mitochondrial DNA for. And then that will help you to do further research and analysis. So one thing you can do if you do take the full sequence test at Family Tree dna, you can contact your matches and see if you can try to identify a common ancestor, but it can be kind of difficult to do that.

Diana (36m 10s):
But you do get a match list at Family Tree DNA and at 23 and Me you can use that haplo group to see if you can make some connections. And the same with living dna. Now Genetic Affairs does have an auto tree analysis of family trees for mitochondrial or Y DNA matches and so that can help you to do some more analysis and then just know that Family Tree DNA Advanced Matches is the only tool that uses all types of DNA available to help you determine how closely related a match may be. So Family Tree DNA is a great place to do your testing, you know the Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA and also the autosomal.

Diana (36m 54s):
So you have all that together. Now if you want to learn other resources, the IS OG Wiki is a great place to start. It brings together a lot of different articles and there are a lot of projects out there for mitochondrial DNA that are not necessarily about genealogy, but you know, these geographical projects or the phylo tree, trying to see where the earliest ancestor came from. I know that on Living dna, my son tested there, so he got the haplo group for his mitochondrial dna, he inherited that from me. So it’s my mitochondrial line and it goes back to Scandinavia to the Sammy people S A A M I.

Diana (37m 37s):
So that was fascinating to me because that is my maternal line straight back to Denmark. So that was kind of fun to see that actually show up in his DNA as his mitochondrial line. So if you’re interested in any of those projects, you can certainly start exploring that and see how you can use that in your genealogy.

Nicole (37m 57s):
Let’s talk about why DNA and some tools to help with that. Of course, like you mentioned, there’s the DNA painter ancestral trees that shows the mito and Y D N A inheritance path, which is pretty easy. It’s just father’s, father’s father. Then there’s also the Y D N match list at Family Tree DNA N, which is the only company that actually gives you lists of Y D N matches. There’s some other places you can find why D N A matches like the mito yd.org database. And so if people have uploaded their why results there. Diana has typed in the results from her Royston project that was done by Sorenson D n A there. So some people have uploaded or added their results there, especially for these defunct companies.

Nicole (38m 42s):
You can also look@whyfull.com for more YD matching and why D warehouse.org. So those are some different like third party databases for Y D N A matches. But the only testing company that gives you a match list is Family Tree DNA, N A Y D N A tests. And so that’s where you would start. Now within some of the companies who provide A Y D N A haplo group, you can learn more about the haplo group predictions. So Family Tree d n will give you haplo groups and 23 NME Living d n and GEDMatch can all provide haplo groups. The surname and haplo group projects at Family Tree d n are very useful.

Nicole (39m 23s):
These projects help you identify which markers differ between you and those of unmatch. And then those differences can be used to identify significant mutations and help you identify other individuals who do not match. And then their results can be negative evidence for dissent from a certain ancestor, which is often very useful. So those surname projects and other projects like Capital Group projects can be extremely, extremely useful. And I’m a member of several surname projects with various test takers. So the Family Tree, D N A Y matches also has a tool called the TIP Calculator.

Nicole (40m 6s):
This is a time predictor and it estimates the number of generations between you and your Y D N A match and the comedy ancestor. When we came out with our book research like a Pro with dna, the TIP report was kind of outdated and very recently the Family Tree DNA has released a new TIP report, which has used a new scientific algorithm to help calculate the time to the common ancestor. So be sure to check it out if you haven’t seen it recently. The TIP report is great now, it’s much better. It provides hopefully more accurate year ranges for the the time when the common ancestor lived. There’s a tool at the Family Tree DNA website called the Y D N Haplo Tree, which can help you find out where you are in the tree.

Nicole (40m 51s):
And they’ve recently updated this quite a bit too, to make it better. And there’s been a lot of updates at Family Tree DNA n a with all of their Y D N A tools. I encourage you to check out the Family tree DNA n a blog to see these recent updates and additions and, and there’s just a lot of new wonderful tools available there,

Diana (41m 8s):
Right? YD N is exciting, isn’t it? How they continue to get better with the analysis and give us, giving us more tools, especially with the big Y 700 tests. It’s amazing. Well, lastly, let’s talk just a little bit about XD a and we really need some tools to help us visualize XD a inheritance in the family tree. And so we want to make sure we understand that. And just like we could with mitochondrial dna, we can go to Y D or to DNA painter and if we’ve uploaded or created a family tree there, then we can use the DNA filters tool to show us all the ancestors that potentially passed XD to us.

Diana (41m 49s):
And then when we’re looking at XD a matches on the websites that provide that, we can figure out that it can only be this certain subgroup of our ancestors who gave us who we matched with on that X chromosome. So charting is really helpful and I know I have a big pedigree chart here up on my wall and I’ve gone through and just marked people that I inherited X from using. I actually use Blaine Beninger Xdn charts, those are on his website and it, it clearly shows it. And once you understand the inheritance, you can just pretty much do it yourself. But it’s nice to have a chart to look at and and make sure you’re, you’re marking correctly, which ancestors gave you the X chromosome.

Diana (42m 31s):
Debbie Parker Wayne has fillable XD charts. Those are on d debbie wayne.com. They’re also charts through the pro Jenny’s charting software. And JC Turner has fillable XD a charts. So you can do some different things, different tools out there to help you see that. And once you have that figured out, then you can go to town trying to figure out how you match up with your XD matches. And then you can also compare your list of ancestors who possibly pass that XD on with your matches and some tools that will help you. There are the genealogical DNA analysis tool or Wiki tree.

Diana (43m 16s):
So those are some interesting tools that I haven’t tried, but I, you know, there’s so many tools I have used Wiki tree before and that’s a, that’s a great tree. It’s a collaborative tree that lets you put DNA evidence on and so you can put your haplo groups on there and start comparing with people using wiki tree, which is great. And then finally we can do some biogeographical information for the X chromosome. So we commonly call that ethnicity estimates. And so we can look to see the locations that our ancestors belonged at some point in the past on the X chromosome.

Diana (43m 57s):
And we get that through 23 and Me because they show you your ancestry composition on each chromosome. And so that could really help as you are trying to figure out how you connect with a DNA match to see what ethnicity or biogeographical information that X chromosome reports. So some fun things that maybe you hadn’t thought of doing before.

Nicole (44m 21s):
That’s great. It really makes me want to dig into X D N A matches. And every time that I have done that, it’s been fascinating because I love how in the X X D N A inheritance pattern, if you go through a line where it goes female, male, female, male, that X chromosome is being passed down intact from the male to the female. So it’s like preserving an older chromosome and segment and segments from that generation because it’s not getting recombined when it’s passed from the mail, the full X chromosome is passed down to the daughter. So it’s exciting to find matches that go through that pattern because it can be for a more distant ancestor.

Nicole (45m 2s):
Now let’s talk about your task at the end of each chapter and research like a pro with D n A, we have a task for you to do. And so after learning about all these different tools, you need to then try using some of them. We encourage you to practice trying out a tool that piqued your interest, something that might help you in your research that you haven’t tried before. And think about the answers to these two questions. Why should I use this D N A tool? How can it help me with your current project you’re working on? Sometimes we need to just learn more about the type of D N A that we are using and understanding that better.

Nicole (45m 43s):
So sometimes this chapter, the task is just to learn and understand more about what’s available and what you can do with it. And then hopefully that helps you with the next step of research, like a pro with dna, which is research planning and understanding what tools can help you might cause you to plan to use them.

Diana (46m 3s):
That’s exactly right. And you know, I always like to compare DNA research to our documentary research. So you might not be using any type of a land or a tax record in your documentary work because you just don’t know how to do that, but it could be so useful. So it’s the same thing with our DNA work. We might be just ignoring why DNA or XD or chromosome mapping, but when we dig into it, then we realize how we could use it. So we often just have to start and learn more about it and then see how it can help us. So thanks everyone for listening. We hope you have some fun this week experimenting with DNA tools and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (46m 40s):
Okay, bye

Diana (46m 42s):
Bye-Bye.

Nicole (46m 44s):
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 family lock.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@familylock.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.