RLP 247: RLP with DNA 9 – Research Planning

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 247 RLP with DNA nine Research Planning. 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. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone, welcome to Research Psycho Pro.

Diana (55s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (57s):
Hi mom. I’m good. What have you been reading?

Diana (59s):
Well, I’ve started reading volume two in the series by Brooks Blevins about the Ozarks, and this one is titled The Conflicted Ozarks. So I thought I would just read the little blurb from Amazon advertising it because it just gives such a good idea of what this book is about. So that blurb from Amazon says Blevins moves on the devastating civil war years where the dehumanizing personal nature of Ozark conflict was made uglier by the predations of marching armies and criminal gangs, blending personal stories with a wide narrative scope. He examines how civilians and soldiers alike experienced the war from brutal partisan warfare to ill-advised refugee policies, to women’s struggles, to safeguard farms and stay alive in an atmosphere of constant danger.

Diana (1m 49s):
So I am already thoroughly enjoying this book. It is so interesting and so illuminating. You know, we think of the Civil War more in terms of what was happening up in Virginia and you know, all sorts of different areas of the, of the United States, and I really didn’t know anything about what it was like in the Ozarks, which is where a couple branches of our family were. And I especially thought of the ancestor project that I did on Nancy Briscoe and found that she was right there in the heart of all this during the Civil War and her husband was not fighting for the Confederates and just reading this book, I keep thinking of her as a young woman and being right in the midst of all this conflict.

Diana (2m 31s):
So it’s kind of a hard book, but also a really fascinating book.

Nicole (2m 35s):
That’s what I was thinking of too, was Nancy Briscoe and how she was one of those women who was safeguard in the farm at home, right?

Diana (2m 43s):
Yes. And she gets married 1863, so right in the middle of the conflict, and we only know that from the pension record where she is applying for widow’s pension for her husband Richard Frazier’s service. And what happened happened was they were married in, I believe it was McDonald County, Missouri now that I’m trying to remember back the southwestern corner of Missouri, which is in the Ozarks down close to the border of Arkansas. But the courthouse burned in I think 1865 as part of this war, these struggles. And so the marriage record was actually lost, so somehow they were able to get married in the middle of all of that.

Diana (3m 24s):
The contextual history really does help us to understand what our ancestors were going through, even when they didn’t leave us a diary or their own personal story of that time. And maybe she just wanted to forget about it and didn’t wanna talk about it with their family. You know, they moved on to Texas, started a new life, put that behind them.

Nicole (3m 41s):
From what I remember, she wasn’t super literate, is that correct? I mean she could write but not very well.

Diana (3m 48s):
I don’t know.

Nicole (3m 48s):
She’s thinking about the letters she wrote about her husband’s pension

Diana (3m 53s):
That is a different ancestor. That was Isabelle Weatherford.

Nicole (3m 58s):
Yeah, I remember just being surprised reading that and thinking the level of literacy most people have now is so much higher than it was in that time period in place I

Diana (4m 7s):
Think. Yeah, depending on what educational opportunities they had. And even my great-grandfather, doc Caris in one of his records says that his education only went to the fourth grade. So I think a lot of these ancestors were needed to help on the farm. They couldn’t keep going to school for whatever reason.

Nicole (4m 27s):
Right. Okay, well thanks for sharing what you’ve been reading. That’s always fun to hear updates on that. We have recently launched our Airtable quick reference, and so if you wanted to have a four page guide to using Airtable for genealogy research, you can get that on our website for $10. The research like a pro webinar series for this year is going well. We really enjoyed our last webinar with Alice Childs an accredited genealogist who works with us on our research team, and she shared all about finding DNA n evidence to confirm a hypothesis about an ancestor born in 1806 in Saratoga County, New York, and was able to trace his mother’s line back several generations and finding DNA matches to it that helped confirm the hypothesis.

Nicole (5m 16s):
So that was a great one, and if you sign up for our webinar series anytime throughout the year, you can watch the previous month’s recordings and then you can attend the future months zoom meetings or watch all the recordings whenever you want to. So we hope you’ll join us there and we’ve gotten some feedback that it’s been really helpful to see the research like a pro process applied to real life cases. So if that’s something that intrigues you, we hope you’ll join us. Just to get you thinking, if you are wondering what it’s like to do a research, like a pro study group, maybe consider joining us this fall in August. We will go from August through November meeting roughly weekly with a couple breaks, and if anyone feels like they would like to help out as a peer group leader in that study group, you would be hosting weekly peer group meetings and giving a lot of feedback to the people in your group.

Nicole (6m 8s):
So if you’re interested in that, then please let us know or apply on our website. We just need to see like one of your reports that you’ve written in the past and be sure that you’re on our newsletter mailing list so that you can get our Monday weekly newsletter with new blog post podcast episodes and sometimes when we have coupons or deals you’ll get notified.

Diana (6m 31s):
Well, let’s get to our topic for the day, which is research planning with D N a. And this is covered in chapter nine of our book Research Like a Pro With dna, A Genealogist Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence. Research Planning is one of my favorite parts of the research process. So to this point, we’ve talked about a lot of foundational things to get us ready to plan our research. We have done a good analysis of the timeline and the DNA and we’ve done some work with the tools. Our previous two episodes were all about looking at different kinds of tools both for clustering tools and creating genetic networks and for analyzing segments.

Diana (7m 16s):
And the whole purpose of these tools is to use them in our research and we don’t have to use every tool. We need to choose the best tool, and that’s what is really great about research planning. So with our research plan, with the DNA project for looking for documentary sources, but then we’re also going to think of some DNA tools that we can use. Something to think about is each DNA project is unique and we’ll have a different objective, but there are these same guiding principles that we use for creating any effective research plan. This might seem like a burdensome extra step when you want to just get going, but actually the difference between an expert and a novice or just beginning researchers is how well we do that.

Diana (8m 10s):
Problem analysis and planning. When an expert solves a problem is because they’ve come up with superior solutions that take minimal effort, and the reason they know how to do that is because they have spent a long time understanding the problem and recognizing patterns, and then they can develop new theories and see a place to go. On the other hand, like we have all done at the beginning, we look really quickly and then we just jump in and start searching. And that often doesn’t give us a very efficient way to do the research, and we may spend a lot more time working on the problem.

Diana (8m 51s):
So research planning will help you become more like a problem solving expert, and especially as we work with dna, we need to make sure we are choosing the best tools, the best methodologies to get to the place where we have made some progress. Remember that the goal of our research is to achieve genealogical proof, and that really does require careful planning to make sure we’re using the best sources and the best kind of information. We want to ensure we’re doing reasonably exhaustive research and that we’re doing an analysis of enough dna, of enough test takers coming down through those independent lines from an ancestor.

Diana (9m 32s):
We’ve talked a lot about the importance of finding good coverage and our research planning can help us see what we need to do and give us a specific list of things to achieve those types of genealogical proof. So planning for genealogical proof from the very beginning of our DNA research projects helps us gather an enough data to prove our conclusions,

Nicole (9m 56s):
Right? That’s a great goal to set. You know, we want to eventually be able to prove this and that includes writing a conclusion, so we need to be planning for that. But are we going to achieve genealogical proof in our first phase of research? Usually not. And most D N A projects especially require research in multiple phases. They just are a little more work. So it’s important to sometimes think about this at the start of a project so that you don’t get overwhelmed. So when you’re working on a client project, we usually have limitations on the time spent, but sometimes a project for yourself, you don’t set a limitation. And sometimes that can be more helpful if you would do that because then you’ll know how much time you’re going to spend or I’ll spend this month working on this phase of the research and then you can know when you’re done to be able to write a report.

Nicole (10m 46s):
And writing is such an important part of research. If you’re not writing as you’re going along through each phase, then it’s hard to build on what you’ve found because you kind of forget and you don’t really correlate the information and come up with new hypotheses to test. So one thing you can do is look at your schedule for the next month and see what do I have? Like a natural deadline. Maybe you’re going on a research trip, a family reunion, you’re doing a house remodel, and so maybe you’d like to finish the phase of research before that. If you don’t have natural deadlines though, you can just give yourself a time limit and then see what you have at that point after 30 or 40 hours. The reason to do this is just to help you feel more productive and when you research on and off for a month here and then take six months off and come back to it, you lose track of what you’re doing and you feel unproductive.

Nicole (11m 37s):
So it’s nice to just set a time limit and then write a report when you’re done and then next time when you come back to the project, even if it is in six months, you’ll know where you left off. So one way to break your research into phases is to set a number of hours, like I said, 20, 30, 40 hours or a length of time, like two weeks. And when you finished that initial phase, you may have a hypothesis to test and then the next phase or the next month of your life could be working on researching that hypothesis,

Diana (12m 9s):
Right? It really is nice to be able to finish a project and not feel like you’re doing this on and on and on and on. And so one of the things that you want to identify is your principle research question. And with DNA it is usually a biological research question, is this ancestor the biological father of you know, the next line down or who is the biological father of a brick wall? But we usually cannot break down a brick wall with just one face. And a great example of that is my case of Cynthia Dillard Royston. I have done several phases on determining her father and I’m getting closer and closer, but I haven’t solved that yet.

Diana (12m 52s):
And so my overarching research question is who is the biological father of Cynthia Dillard Royston? And I put in biological because I am using dna. And so sub objectives are those smaller objectives that are going to get us a little bit closer, and each one has something very specific. So for instance, a sub objective that I had for the case of Cynthia was eliminating all the Dillard men in Georgia who could have been her father or researching each of them to see who I could eliminate. So that was one entire project. And then another sub objective I have was turning to the DNA in a network graph and identifying the small cluster that led to an Elijah Dillard and I hypothesized he was her brother.

Diana (13m 40s):
So I did a whole project with the sub objective of who was Elijah Dillard and how is he connected to Cynthia. And so that’s just an example of two sub-objectives of complete projects that I did towards this overarching question of who is Cynthia’s biological father? So that is just something that you need to think about with DNA especially that typically you are going to be working this with phases and these sub objectives.

Nicole (14m 9s):
That’s a great example and it kind of highlights how we have to use documentary and DNA sources together because you find a hypothesis like Elijah Dillard and then you have to work with documentary sources to figure out who he was and see if there’s any connection in documents to Cynthia Dillard. So when we choose a research question and we’re planning on applying genetic evidence, it’s important to start with a person you’ve already thoroughly researched in the documents. So that’s kind of how it was with Cynthia Dillard,

Diana (14m 41s):
Right? I’d already done so much research on her life with Thomas Beverly Reson and as a mother and as a wife, and really had gathered every single clue that I could possibly find from the records. And that’s actually how I found her maiden name. Dillard was tracing down her children, each of her 14 children I thoroughly researched, and three of them left death certificates that named her as a Dillard. And I’ve never been able to find a marriage record. I’m guessing it was one of those county courthouses that burned, I’m hypothesizing perhaps Muskogee County because that seems to be a possible location for both her and Thomas.

Diana (15m 21s):
So those were previous phases that I didn’t even have to work on with my DNA project because I’d already done so much work. So when I started putting DNA together, I already had that good foundation. But that’s absolutely right that we have to do the documentary and DNA together. So the first part of your research plan is a summary of known facts, and this is where you can just go back and get everything listed. I like to do it in a table because that helps me just see it very clearly and it gives you a starting point for the research. It also guides you to the records and locations from your research subject’s life, which is going to help you know where the research needs to take you next.

Diana (16m 6s):
So this is a really important step. You’re starting this research plan because it’s going to help prepare you for making your hypothesis. So you can do this a couple of different ways. Like I said, I often like to do this in a table, but you could also do it in a bulletin list or sometimes it’s really helpful to write it all out in a narrative and that will give you a good idea of what you have as your starting point information. So I actually highly recommend this if maybe it’s a project you haven’t worked on for a while and you’re trying to get everything kind of solid in your head to go ahead and write out a narrative. And I like to have this be fully cited.

Diana (16m 46s):
So I will do citations for each piece of information and then I really know what I’m starting with. You also have DNA that you need to do a starting point with that is a whole different topic.

Nicole (17m 1s):
Yeah. So it’s important at the beginning of a project to review your test takers and to show that they are related to each other in the expected amount of dna. And this helps you set a strong foundation for the project. And so that’s something you can do in the summary of known facts for DNA sources. One thing you may want to include in this section of your research plan is a simple diagram showing the dissent from the common ancestor of each of your test takers or some of the really important matches that maybe you’re using to help you with your hypothesis. For this phase, in the beginning of a project though, you may not have a lot of starting point DNA information. Maybe you just have one test taker and you can just discuss that one person.

Nicole (17m 45s):
You may want to include a table that shows how much DNA your test takers share with each other. You could also include a summary of past DNA research from previous phases, like if you have found a cluster of matches that are relevant to the project, you can discuss that. You might also want to include information about shared matches, ethnicity, the ethnicity of the matches segment information. Let’s do an example of what you could include. Let’s say you have an unknown ancestor objective, and this is the initial phase. And so maybe the research question is who was one of the biological parents of Jame’s second great-grandfather, Moses Roberts?

Nicole (18m 33s):
The known DNA facts would include, for example, first that Jamil, his sister and his brother share the expected amount of DNA N for full siblings, and they are the base testers. Then 12 DNA matches to the base testers descend from Moses Roberts and are shown in a diagram a table shows that they share the expected amounts of DNA for the traced relationship. So here we have just a very beginning set of information that tells us that the test takers are related as siblings and that there’s several matches descending from the research subject that are kind of helping us know that we have established that relationship to Moses Roberts and we’re ready to continue finding more matches that are more distant that could be related through his siblings and his parents.

Diana (19m 21s):
I think that’s something we often don’t even think about putting together our known facts of the D N A. And it’s really helpful. I love it in reports when I’m reviewing them. If the researcher has said right up front, this is exactly who our base test takers are and here’s a diagram of how they descend from the research subject and here are basic matches, it’s just so good to get that foundation and it’s really good for us as researchers to get that as well. Now what if you are doing a mitochondrial DNA project? So the known facts will be a little bit different than the known facts from an autosomal DNA project. And so we will again include the name of our test taker and we’ll want to talk about the type of sequencing mutations, haplogroup names of the matches, the genetic distance of the match and a matches most distant matrilineal ancestor.

Diana (20m 13s):
So here’s an example of what that might look like. Mitochondrial full sequencing was done for Barbara at Family Tree dna. She has 228 matches. None of the matches are genetic distance of zero, but 98 matches are genetic distance of one. Her group is H three B G 6 1 2 98. The H branch is found mainly in Western Europe. So you can see how that just gives you a nice little succinct paragraph setting the stage four, what was going on with this mitochondrial dna. Now, as we’ve talked about before on the podcast, mitochondrial DNA is most effective when comparing two descendants who share a common matrilineal ancestor.

Diana (20m 57s):
And so if we had that type of a project where we have done a targeted test, then perhaps our background information could say mitochondrial full sequencing was ordered at Family Tree DNA for Deanna, a matrilineal descendant of Barba Tharp. The results have not been returned yet. Barba Tharp’s hypothesized mother is Judy Vernon one matrilineal descendant of Judy Vernon has already refused DNA testing. Judy Vernon had several daughters who could have living matrilineal descendants. So that lets us know where we are with the DNA testing with the mitochondrial hypothesized descendant, right?

Nicole (21m 38s):
And it kind of helps you set up your research plan because clearly we need to find some new test takers from Judy Vernon probably be doing some descendency research for why dna. We would do a similar type of paragraph where at the beginning of the research plan we would talk about the known information from Y D N A tests. This could include information about the Y D N A test taker, which test he took. Haplo group names of matches, genetic distant most distant patrilineal ancestor of the matches, other tested individuals who also descend from that most distant proposed ancestor surname, project groupings and so forth. For example, Y 37 test results for Robert Dyer include no matches with the surname dyer.

Nicole (22m 21s):
The closest matches are a genetic distance of two with the surnames are young Kennedy and Mina. The predicted haplo group for Robert is RM 2 69. Robert is participating in the dire surname project and his results are in the ungrouped section. They hired 288 total members in the dire surname project in 18 Y D N A subgroups. Robert is also participating in the r L 513 and sub cades project and is grouped with several Nicholsons who are all estimated to be in the RM 2 69 haplo group. So this was written when he had only taken Y 37 later he took the big Y 700 and then later he got an exact dire match.

Nicole (23m 1s):
So in the project I’m currently doing, I would write about those new developments and that would lead to a new research plan to focus on researching that exact matches patrilineal line to see if we can find how they connect. So really the purpose of writing this starting point in DNA is to help us really see what we currently know so that we can get a clear path forward of what we need to do next.

Diana (23m 26s):
Right now, I was just thinking how helpful that will be if you look back at that past project and realize what you had to work with with that project. And because c a is involving, we’re getting more and more matches, we’re uploading to new websites, it’s really good to know what we had at a certain time and what we found. So great explanation of that Y dna. Well, let’s have a word from our sponsor, newspapers.com. Did your ancestor disappear from vital records? Maybe they moved or got married. newspapers.com can help you find them and tell their stories, or have you ever had trouble figuring out how people tie into your family tree? Newspapers are filled with birth notices, marriage announcements, and obituaries.

Diana (24m 6s):
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Diana (24m 51s):
Well, now let’s talk about creating a working hypothesis. After we have created that list of known facts, we are going to try to come up with a theory that will help us decide which sources to examine. This is an important step, and it’s actually one of my favorites because you get to be creative and you are not just pulling this out of the air, you’re basing this on all of the current work that you have done. As we are trying to develop a hypothesis, we have to remember that we may not have specific hypotheses with names of people to test just a theoretical profile. So for instance, we may want to write something like the mother of John was probably born 1762 to 1800 in North Carolina and married about 1812 to a dyer in Tennessee.

Diana (25m 41s):
Often people will say, I can’t write a hypothesis because I don’t know the answer, that’s why I’m doing this project. But what we do is we try to estimate from the things that we do know once people would’ve been born, when people would’ve been married, and in a later phase of research, we may have come up with a name of a couple who we are testing, whether they could be the parents. And in that case, the hypothesis would be more specific because we would know more about them and we could have their dates in places of migration, places where the child might have been born, and circumstances that could explain the conflicts in either the information or situation.

Diana (26m 24s):
So for instance, if Sarah Taylor had a child after her husband died, there may be a guardianship record in the court showing that her brother was appointed guardian. So it’s important to remember we don’t have to know everything to create a working hypothesis.

Nicole (26m 40s):
The hypothesis step is something that was pretty new to me as a beginning genealogist who is working on the research like a pro process. And it was definitely not that intuitive the first time I did it, but after you practice several times, it really becomes such a key element of research planning because testing a hypothesis is really how you make huge strides forward in your research. So if you don’t have an actual person named in your hypothesis, you can use deduction and logic to create a rough hypothesis. So for example, you might say, who were Jacob Huff Master’s parents? He was born in 1812 in North Carolina.

Nicole (27m 21s):
He stated in a pension application that he was born in Craven County and he gave several children the middle name of Miller, which isn’t discerning from his wife’s side of the family. So search for a Miller Huff master marriage before 1812 in Craven County, North Carolina. So this is just a rough hypothesis with some guesses of surnames that helps you know where to look in certain places where you have clues leading to that place. So you don’t need to know exactly what happened or even need to know full names. But an educated guest can help you get to a more concrete hypothesis. I you can do the same thing with incorporating D n A into your hypothesis using deduction and logic.

Nicole (28m 3s):
And if you start with one of your DNA known facts, then you can make an inference based on those clues and the shared SMO project data. So if you’re searching for the parents of your second great-grandfather, you could write something like this, DNA N matches who descend from my known second great-grandfather are third cousins and share between zero and 234 cents. DNA N matches who descend from his unknown parents will be fourth cousins and share between zero and 1 39 Santa Morgans. If the unknown parents had additional spouses, cousins descending from them could be half fourth cousins sharing between zero and 74. Santa Morgans other matches who descend from the unknown parents better. One generation closer could be third cousins once removed, sharing between zero and 1 92 or one generation further.

Nicole (28m 48s):
Fourth cousins once removed, sharing between zero and 126. So now after writing this hypothesis, I know I should look for matches in the range of zero to 1 92 to find the unknown parents of my second great-grandfather. Another way to create d n A hypotheses is based on a method. So you might imagine what you could discover by doing certain tasks like analyzing a certain cluster in a network graph or looking at an inherited segment of d n on a chromosome that you have found to be relevant or with mitochondrial dna, N maybe thinking about looking for a specific match at a genetic distance of zero.

Nicole (29m 30s):
And this person has a long matrilineal line and you think maybe researching descendants of this more distant ancestor on the matches line will help you find hypotheses for the mother of your

Diana (29m 42s):
Ancestor. We also have some really great theory generators that can help us to find an objective or a hypothesis to test. My heritage DNA has a tool called the theory of family relative, and it suggests ways you could be related to DNA matches. And then ancestry has through lanes, which creates a similar suggestion. You receive a group of DNA matches who may be descended from the common ancestor. Some ancestors will have dotted lines around them, meaning they’re a proposed ancestor who’s not yet in your family tree. And these are all hypotheses that you could use in your research plan. So your research will then focus on either accepting or rejecting the hypothesis.

Diana (30m 24s):
And I did this with another one of my projects for Cynthia Dillard that I probably have talked about before, where a through lines hypothesis for her father was a hopson milner. And that kept popping up and I decided to do a whole project to either approve or reject that hypothesis, and I was able to confirm that he definitely was not her father, but I did a whole project on that using DNA and the documentary evidence. And so that can be a great project and it gives you a very good hypothesis right there and through lines, or the same thing with the area family relativity. So we do have to be aware of confirmation bias.

Diana (31m 4s):
Our brains naturally like to look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. So for example, you might have a hypothesis that your fourth great-grandparent, Emmanuel Powell was the son of Hezeki Powell. And you search your DNA match list for the surname Powell and find a DNA match to descends from Hezekiah Powell. You decide your hypothesis is right and add hezeki to your tree. Instead of analyzing the match with clustering, performing pedigree analysis, reviewing documentary research and comparing additional test takers, you’ve allowed one piece of evidence to confirm your bias. I see this a lot with potential clients or people that we work with who have searched their match list and they find the surname and it seems to back up the fact that this is their paternal line or maternal line.

Diana (31m 53s):
Instead of testing that hypothesis with a lot of different analysis tools, they just clinging onto that. And that’s what we call confirmation bias. And it is difficult to get around that. But there are several things that we can do. You can combat it by trying to disprove the hypothesis that the common ancestor between you and the matches has a Kai Powell by just doing pedigree analysis. And that might show that the MAs tree is missing 50% of the possible ancestors at the fourth great grandparent level due to missing maternal grandparents. And so it could be that you are matching that person on a completely different line and not on the pal line at all.

Diana (32m 35s):
We have to remember, we have a lot of ancestors out on the fourth great grandparent level, and so there are a lot of good methodologies and tools that we use to test these hypotheses, but always be aware that you might be having confirmation by us.

Nicole (32m 50s):
Such a good reminder. So now that you have a hypothesis to test whether you founded in through lines or from clues in the documentary research, what sources can provide data to confirm or reject that hypothesis? This is the step in the research planning where you get to brainstorm a list of sources and methods that you might wanna try to see if you can find out if that hypothesis is true or not. You might need to try a new strategy that you don’t have much experience with, or you might be looking in your locality guide to look at new documentary sources that you haven’t examined before. Just brainstorming a list of possible sources helps get the juices flowing and takes the pressure off deciding what will be the most efficient.

Nicole (33m 33s):
And then you can decide that part later because this step is all about listing the possibilities. Then later you will come and prioritize the list,

Diana (33m 41s):
Right? So you first wanna consider all the documentary sources and methods that you could use and all phases of a research and a DNA project will use documentary sources. We can’t do DNA without the documents, but the clues gained from DNA test results will lead us to people that need to be identified in their specific time and place. And so we return to things like the census, birth records, cemetery records, and you can incorporate previously reviewed sources that you’d like to examine. Again, perhaps in your timeline you notice that you are just using a derivative record. And so you want to go get the original will or the complete probate packet or look for more tax records around the one that you previously found.

Diana (34m 28s):
So this is a chance to dive deeper into your research subject’s life. We typically think of research plans as a list of new sources to consult. However, it might be that you are reviewing sources that you already have gathered. For example, you might have found an abstractive, a deed, and now you want to transcribe the entire thing. Or perhaps you were using a source of a family history and now you want to go verify the source citations in that. And so a lot of times we will be using what we had previously, but then of course we are going to want to consult new sources. And so if we have created that locality guide that we’ve talked about previously, we should have some really great ideas of new things to tackle in our locality.

Diana (35m 18s):
And often this is the reason why we haven’t found our ancestor yet, because we haven’t thought outside the box. We’re just using, you know, two or three types of records. And our locality guide can point out a whole slew of other things that we should consult. For instance, if we’re searching for the children of Robert Doherty, who was married in 1784 in Craven County, North Carolina and died in 1844 in Warren County, Kentucky, you’ll want to list sources that address both of those localities from the years 1784 to 1844. And we want to have specific record collections that might name his children. We’re always trying to think of how we’re going to answer our objective and stay focused on the objective for this phase of the research.

Diana (36m 4s):
And so some things that we could look at would be a list of marriages in Warren County, Kentucky, or we could look at deed abstracts of Warren County, Kentucky. We could look at probate of Warren County, Kentucky. And under each of those headings of land probate and marriages, we could have several different sources, whether they are published sources like a book with abstracts or a specific collection on family search or ancestry or another website to go and search. And we want to be very specific in this, not just the search marriage records. Instead we want to list Warren County, Kentucky marriage records, 17 97, 18 97 family search, and then the specific URL to that record on family search or that collection of family search.

Diana (36m 57s):
So having the links, having the complete information written out is so helpful. In my locality guide when I’m putting in a published source like a county history or a marriage book abstract, I like to create it just as I would use for my citation. And so then I have it already to go when I am putting it to my research log. And you can also just do links, but it’s nice to be as complete as you can so you know exactly what you’re talking about. Now, you might have some methodology that you want to use. It could be that you put into your list of identified sources, something like do an analysis of the fan club, the friends, family, associates and neighbors, or do a census study and discover everyone between the 1830 censuses in the county.

Diana (37m 44s):
Or maybe you’re going to trace the land ownership or survey the tax records. And it could be that your project calls for a whole surname survey looking for all the people with the surname in the census or, or in the county, or maybe you’re going to correlate military records and pensions. So there’s a lot of different things to think about that you might wanna put in for your documentary sources and methods as you’re making this list. And it can be as long as you want because you will prioritize. But I often come back to my list for a subsequent phase of the research things that I haven’t gotten to yet. I will sometimes put in the next phase of research,

Nicole (38m 24s):
Right? Such a good point. And you can also add ideas from DNA sources and methods to your list of brainstormed ideas. And maybe you would want to review matches from a previous test taker and just look a little deeper than you had in the past, or look at a different cluster. Maybe you’re gonna ask people to transfer to Jed match planning in advance to help you to meet standard 54, which requires sufficient verifiable data. And then when we write a proof argument, we’ll have some data on JED match that people can go see for themselves. And this could be an important part of our plan. Maybe we just wanna ask our matches to transfer to my heritage or family tree DNA to look at chromosome browsers and triangulation.

Nicole (39m 6s):
Another thing in your plan, you could brainstorm the idea to add new test takers, especially if you’re not finding enough relevant matches to answer your research question. You’re going to probably need to do this. Maybe you’re in your targeted testing plan. You’ll include the idea to ask people who’ve already tested to share their results with you and so that you can then analyze their matches. And as we’re doing this, we can consider selecting test takers who descend from unique child lines of the research subject and also consider possible XD n a inheritance paths as well as mitochondrial and Y D N so that we can possibly test people who would be helping in us with those types of dna.

Nicole (39m 46s):
We can also try to test people who would help us rule out an irrelevant lines, and we need to think about an adequate number of test takers. You know, if we’re going to try to gather a significant body of evidence to help us come to a conclusion, then we probably will need some additional test takers at some point. And how do you know if you have enough test takers? We can determine the coverage of an ancestor’s d n A in a particular database and that can help us know if we need to continue testing additional relatives or not. And Paul Woodbury says, if the, if the test taker that you’re considering testing is only going to add, you know, less than 1% of coverage to the research subject, then it’s probably not needed to add them.

Nicole (40m 29s):
However, sometimes that one or two extra percent can be really helpful. So we just need to weigh the options. And if somebody’s already tested and they’re just, it’s not a a cost to us, then it can definitely be useful to add that additional 2% of coverage. Since we wrote research like Apri with D N a, Paul Woodbury and Leah Larkin and Johnny Pearl collaborated and came up with a wonderful tool to help us with estimating the coverage of a research subject. And I’ve used the tool and love it. So I highly recommend that you go to DNA painter and use the coverage estimator tool. It’s a lot like what are the odds as far as putting in descendants of an ancestor? Some methods that you might want to plan on doing with your research plan are ethnicity analysis, comparing multiple DNA kits, collaborating with matches and asking them to do things like share family information or transfer to additional databases, working on creating genetic networks and reviewing statistics and probabilities like the Shared Center Morgan Project.

Nicole (41m 29s):
And what are the odds comparing segment data and why D N A analysis, studying the haplo group, evaluating genetic distance, looking at mutation rates and S N P analysis, joining Y D N A project. And then with mitochondrial D N A analyzing mutations and hypoplasia and joining mitochondrial D N A projects, doing advanced matching where you compare autosomal family finder tests with mitochondrial results. There’s some methods that combine D N A in traditional sources. So building pedigrees for matches, verifying their pedigrees, pedigree triangulation, descendency research to locate new test takers, pedigree, evaluation of matches and evaluating through lines.

Nicole (42m 16s):
So there’s so many more things here. Those are just a few ideas. And as you’re brainstorming, you’ll make a list of all of these and then the next step will be to prioritize them.

Diana (42m 27s):
Well, great, thanks for taking us through that. Perhaps you never even thought of some of those ideas to do in your DNA research. So definitely check out all the lists in the book for all of those different ideas. I know as you were talking through that, Nicole, I’m thinking, oh, I have so many different things I wanna do with my ancestral DNA work. But our final step in this entire research planning is to prioritize. We have created a big list of both documentary sources and methods and DNA sources and methods, and we can’t do all of them. We wanna be efficient. And this goes back to my beginning statement about the difference between an expert and a novice.

Diana (43m 10s):
So as a novice, you might just start with something that sounds fun to you and just start clicking away. But taking a few minutes to really prioritize can help you become an expert at this. So one of the things that you want to think about is how efficient a task will be. We want to generally search things that are more available and easier to use. And so instead of browsing an unindexed set of deeds, I would perhaps prioritize using a book of deed abstracts that it has an index in it. And you know, we can really think through the types of things that we would want to do.

Diana (43m 51s):
And we also wouldn’t want to jump straight to more time consuming and expensive options, such as having someone do the big Y 700, which is several hundred dollars before just having them test at the Y 37 level, which is much less expensive. So we have to think of some priorities as we’re working with both our documents and our dna. The DNA bell curve that we’ve talked about and that you can find on our website or in chapter eight, it will really help you to determine what tools and strategies that you could use next. And so on the left side are the easier tools, starting with ethnicity. And then we have have cluster work dividing our matches into clusters, and then working on pedigree triangulation all on the left.

Diana (44m 38s):
And that’s, that’s where we start. But if we have exhausted that, then perhaps our research planning will be that we need to start doing some chromosome mapping and working with segments, which is on the right part of the bell curve. And that can help us to decide what to prioritize. Now, we don’t want to have a really long list of possible sources and methods because you might find a great clue or even the answer in your first two or three sources that you check, or perhaps you get submit information that leads you down a completely different path. And if you had planned 10 sources to search, now, all that time spent in planning, you know, prioritizing that perfect list of 10 sources was really unnecessary.

Diana (45m 23s):
So you may want to separate your prioritized research strategy into two sections. And I do this, I have one section for documentary sources and one for DNA sources and methods. One of the things that you can do is get those all written out and then really think through those before you start your research. So here’s just an example for the objective of finding the parents of Shiba Tharp, who was born 1813 to 1818. First one would be to look for a death record for Shiba in Cohos County Colorado. Second would be to search Tennessee early tax lists. Third would be to search marriages on family search for Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Diana (46m 7s):
Fourth would be the 1850 census for Lewis Thorpe, find his children’s names. And fifth would be Washington County, Arkansas Probate Records. So you’ll notice that was a lot of different locations because you know, that’s what our research does. It takes us to lots of different places, but that’s a very specific list. And if we find in the very first search, if we actually find a death record for her, perhaps that gives us some information that sends us off on a little bit different path. So five is a good number. Now for DNA methods, I usually just try to do at the most three. Now I love that in this prioritized list, there’s also some details besides the actual link to the record giving some ideas.

Diana (46m 53s):
So for instance, that Washington County, Arkansas probate also says, look for the probate for Louis Tharp. It’s probably not extent Washington County has record laws from a courthouse fire. So sometimes we put on there a source that we know may not have the record, but how are we gonna know for sure unless we check it? And so we put it in our list, we check it, we put it in our research log, Nope. And then that search is done and we move on, which is such a great thing of the research process. We don’t keep wondering. And then for DNA methods, we can do a network graph analysis using the Guffy network graph or whatever you’re using for network graphs to identify some common ancestors for clusters surrounding cluster 12 to see if any of them are Tharp clusters.

Diana (47m 36s):
And this type of analysis is time consuming, and that’s why we recommend not doing a lot of different DNA methods. And then a second method would be pedigree triangulation, finding the most recent common ancestor of matches and relevant clusters through researching the published family trees to extend the match of small trees. And this would be for matches who share over 50 cent Morgans build their tree in the dire ancestry tree as a floating branch. So I like that further explanation, how to prioritize a bit there. What happens to the list of identified sources and methods if you’re only prioritizing a few? Well, as I said earlier, if your prioritized searches don’t pan out, then you return to those.

Diana (48m 18s):
And often I will do my first five documentary sources really fast and I do return and add two or three more because I have more time left in the project. So it’s just a roadmap and we realize that sometimes it takes us on a little bit of a winding road.

Nicole (48m 34s):
In genetic genealogy, new tools and methods are being developed all the time. The more we try these tools and understand how they might apply to our research, the better we can use them to our advantage. Our research plans will help us advance only when we can think of new methods beyond what we’ve always done in the past. So we need to consider how we could use a new tool, but we also should remember that tools are a means to an end, and the goal is to use the tool to help us solve our family history question. And we don’t need to use the tool just for the sake of using the tool, and we should always try to use tools that help us achieve our goals and not feel obligated to use a tool that doesn’t fit with our case. The same could be said for documentary research.

Nicole (49m 16s):
We need to prioritize the use of sources that are going to be helpful for us and not feel obligated to search every possible source. When we can’t find the answer to our research question, those other sources might become necessary to search. So that’s why it’s important to prioritize. Okay, it’s time for you to make your own research plan. Use our research project document template to set up your own summary of known facts in documentary and DNA sources. Then create a working hypothesis, a list of sources and methods, and to prioritize strategy. Consider whether targeted testing should be used, and then choose sources and methods that will for sure help you answer your research question. Good luck and we will talk to you again next week.

Nicole (49m 58s):
Bye-bye.

Diana (49m 59s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (50m 0s):
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.