Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about writing a research reports that incorporate DNA evidence. We talk about the elements of a research report, including tables and diagrams, the conclusion, and suggestions for future research. We also discuss tips for making your writing better and how to include document images.
Transcript
Nicole Elder Dyer (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 249 RLP with DNA part 11 research reports. 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 Elder Dyer (40s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is brought to you by FindaGrave.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 memorials for the people buried in those cemeteries. Hi, welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana Elder (1m 0s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?
Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 3s):
I’m doing well. I’ve been really enjoying our research like a pro study group. How about you?
Diana Elder (1m 8s):
Well, I have been enjoying that also and we just started our Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy course on accreditation, so I am co-coordinating that with my colleague Lisa Stokes and we have 21 students who are all looking to become accredited genealogists. So for five weeks we are hitting it hard every Thursday and that’s been so fun. Some of our good friends are in there and I’m making new friends and I just love teaching people about the process, breaking it down so that it becomes something doable instead of this goal out there that you can never achieve, which is what worked for me when I went to those original accreditation classes at the BYU conference I, I sat there and thought I can do that.
Diana Elder (1m 54s):
So that’s what we’re hoping to do with our course.
Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 57s):
Yeah, it really helps to make it seem doable to hear from people who’ve done it and hear some tips and help you really understand what did it’s like and that, that helped me a lot too with certification when I went to Karen Standberry’s course on using DNA evidence in your portfolio, and that’s not the title of it, but that was one of the focuses. It was like an advanced DNA n a evidence class.
Diana Elder (2m 21s):
Right. That’s so great.
Nicole Elder Dyer (2m 24s):
Well, I hope the accreditation course goes well. That’s so fun. So it’s weekly?
Diana Elder (2m 27s):
Weekly for five weeks. Yeah, the first time we did it, it was one of the intense week long institute, so we did it a whole week in January. This time we do all day and Thursday for five weeks and then everyone gets that week to do their assignment because we do have some assignments and then give some time for peer review and to take a breather cuz it’s pretty intense. So we’re hoping that this is a better format, breaking it up.
Nicole Elder Dyer (2m 52s):
Yeah, that sounds nice. Announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference about using Airtable for a genealogy research log and we hope you’ll try that out. The research like a pro webinar series for $60, you can have 12 case studies, one each month featuring the research, like a pro process and the research like a pro with DNA process and you’ll have access to those recordings forever. And then each year we’ll have a new webinar series. This fall we’re having the research like a pro study group that will not include DNA. In the spring we have the DNA study group and that will begin in August and end in November of 2023. If you’d like to receive complimentary registration, please apply to be a peer group leader.
Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 34s):
This is an opportunity to share your skills with others and provide feedback for your group and lead a weekly discussion with your group in our newsletter. Every week we give you updates on our new blog posts and podcast episodes and any sales we have going on, any upcoming conferences that we’re speaking at. So be sure to join our newsletter.
Diana Elder (3m 55s):
All right, so our topic for the day is chapter 11 of our book Research Psycho Pro with dna, and the title of this chapter is Correlating Findings and Finishing the Research Report. So in the last episode we talked all about following your plan and doing your research log as you’re researching and we encouraged you to start writing then as you are researching, and I find that this really helps me. For instance, if I’m writing about a complicated tax search that I did, it’s really nice to get it down while it’s fresh in my brain. And so I just put a little paragraph in my project document. But let’s say now you’re ready to start writing your report.
Diana Elder (4m 35s):
So this is where you bring everything together, DNA and the documentary work. So with DNA we are undertaking a study to discover improve biological relationships, especially those that we can find no other way such as unknown parentage or a brick wall ancestry question. So if we are trying to establish proof, we need to follow the genealogy proof standard. And the final one references written conclusions. So we cannot achieve genealogical proof unless we provide the evidence in writing. Our research report could have some proof statements, some proof summaries, and could lead us to a final proof argument. It lets us make a case by presenting our findings and correlating the evidence to draw conclusions.
Diana Elder (5m 19s):
I find this so often that it is in the midst of writing that I discover something that is wrong that needs correcting or I notice a fact that I need to shore up with some more evidence. It really is such a beneficial thing to write. And genealogy standards provides a roadmap for what to include in our research reports and isn’t important reference if you’re wondering what you should put in your report. Now what about adding DNA to our reports? And if we’re trying to meet genealogy standards for writing about dna, there are several questions about how to organize and illustrate our material, how to successfully integrate DNA test results with documentary research findings and how to do the analysis for all of this.
Diana Elder (6m 7s):
So we’re going to talk about how to get that DNA information into a format that anyone reading it will be able to understand what in the world you’re talking about and how it proves your conclusion.
Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 19s):
Yeah, it’s important to have that goal in mind. We don’t wanna do all of this work and then find that we have fallen short in one of the areas of our genealogy proof. So it’s good to have that in mind and to set that as a goal to be able to share your proven conclusion. Well, before you get started with the report, consider your audience. Will this be for a client? Is it for your own files? Is it for your family? Are you someday hoping to submit a final proof argument to a genealogical journal? Each scenario might mean that you take a different approach to the tone and the voice of the writing. And because it’s a little bit complex to correlate DNA and documentary evidence, a formal report will be the most useful in conveying the information.
Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 1s):
And this is a technical document that includes tables and figures and explanations. And so you may have other types of writing that you do, like a letter report, a less formal email to a friend or a client who you’ve helped discover an unknown parent. But when you’re writing a formal technical report, you may want to consider having a more formal tone and voice. So for example, like a first or second person voice could be used for emailing a friend, family member or a researcher that you’re collaborating with, describing what you did to discover the genetic relationship. For example, I found your unknown biological grandfather to be John Smith.
Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 41s):
You had two particularly good DNA matches that helped me narrow down the pool of candidates, but then for a more formal report, you would want to use the third person voice. This could then be uploaded to an online family tree. It could provide the basis for a journal article or a family history book. An example of this type of voice is using both documentary and genetic genealogy. The unknown biological father of Emma Jones was discovered to be John Smith, born two December, 1910 in Chicago, Illinois. So it’s good to think about that when you start so that you’re gonna know how to write your report. But the biggest challenge is sometimes just getting started and it’s important to have an outline or a basic structure to help you organize your findings to help you get started.
Nicole Elder Dyer (8m 26s):
And once you’ve kind of thought about how you wanna do that, then writing is more logical and flows better because you kind of know what you’re gonna say and where to put things and you don’t even have to write it in the order that you’ve outlined it, but you could jump around to different parts of your outline and work on whatever floats your boat at that time.
Diana Elder (8m 44s):
Right. And there are several elements of a research report to help you get started. So we’ll talk about each one of these in turn, but the basic elements are the research objective limitations, results, summary, background information, body of the report, conclusion, and future research suggestions. I have a template for all of this and it’s so helpful just to know, okay, this is what I’m supposed to do here and this is what I’m supposed to do there and it can take a lot of the guess work out of how to write this report. So for the research objective, we already formulated that way back at the beginning of our project, so we just copy and paste that right in. And then anybody reading the report will understand what the focus for this specific report is all about.
Diana Elder (9m 28s):
Now, one of the things to think about would be how you write names in the report. And we all know that there are so many variations of surnames and even first names if people went by nicknames or middle names or first names, you know, depending on the record. So what I like to do is just decide on the spelling, whatever it’s going to be and then make a note at the beginning saying these are the different variations and I will often just list those out. And then I’ll say, for the purpose of this report, we’ll be using this specific spelling unless quoting a record. And then of course in the citation and when quoting a record, we use the spelling or the name variation that was used.
Diana Elder (10m 8s):
Then also when we’re writing our dates, we should use the genealogical format of day month here so we don’t have any confusion and we spell out place names. Instead of using abbreviations such as an abbreviation for a state instead of k y, we put out right out Kentucky. And generally we use city, county, state and put any appropriate commas. And if the place name has changed, then we use the name at the time of the event. And so we wanna make sure we’re really clear. This report should be very clear on dates, places, and names.
Nicole Elder Dyer (10m 45s):
Next, you’ll want to address the limitations on the research. And if it’s a client project, usually there’s a set number of hours for the project, like 30 hours for your personal research. You may want to also determine a stopping point, like I will stop after 30 hours or I’ll stop after one month of research and write the report. And another limitation is the availability of the records. Maybe there’s closures of repositories that will affect it, travel limitations, anything like that that you need to discuss.
Diana Elder (11m 15s):
Right? And then once we’ve done the limitations, we can do a summary of the results. And this is at the beginning, but I always write this at the end after I have all of my ideas in the report, then I can go back and do the summary. I like to use action verbs such as search created, studied, verified. To keep this section brief and informative, one of the things you can do is have two screens open. And so on one screen you’ve got your report, and on the other screen you can have, I use the project document where I just go through and basically do my summary of results straight from the report.
Diana Elder (11m 55s):
One of the things that I’ve started doing and that we started doing for our client, for our professional research team is trying to not have too many of these items. In a result summary, like not having something like a list of 20, but instead having maybe four or five strong bullet points with each one being a little bit of a paragraph explaining what was going or summarizing a specific part of the the report. So there’s variations that you can do on this. People have different ideas, but we wanna have some kind of a summary so that whoever’s reading it can quickly get an idea of what they’re going to be learning about in the report.
Nicole Elder Dyer (12m 37s):
Yeah, it’s like telling the reader what they’re gonna read about and then they can read about it. Next you have the background information and this is a place where you set the stage for the findings, what was known at the beginning of the project, what did the client provide, what did you already know in past research. Basically the starting point for the project. And it can be known family relationships, you know, the known relationships between your three test takers, oral history, there’s all kinds of things that can be included in the background. Sometimes the background information can be quite long and when you’re working with previous research that’s been done over several years, it’s helpful to write this background information section towards the beginning of the project and not wait until you’ve already done the research because then at that point you might get confused about what you knew at the start of what you knew at the end.
Nicole Elder Dyer (13m 27s):
So we kind of recommend that you write this when you do your timeline
Diana Elder (13m 31s):
Right and what if you don’t write it and it’s when you’re writing it that you find an important clue that you missed doing the research. So if you write the background right as you’re starting the project, that will help you have such a good foundation for going forward. Well, we have the body of the report and this is where we put all of our analysis of the DNA evidence integrated with the documentary research so we could explain the DNA test results and the records searched and then we correlate. We’re always weaving back and forth between the genetic and documentary evidence and correlation is simply the process of comparing the information found in the sources.
Diana Elder (14m 12s):
So you may want to show all the variations for birth years in the censuses for your research subject and then highlight the complex and then discuss which one is the most accurate based on who you think the informant could have been or how old the person was at the time. You do need to resolve conflicts. We can’t sweep them under the rug, we have to discuss them and do some resolution. So the other thing you may need to write about besides the records is dna. And if your reader is someone who does not know much about genetic genealogy, you will probably need to do some education on DNA inheritance patterns and methodology as well in the body of the report.
Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 56s):
So when you get started, we mentioned making an outline and it’s important to think about how you will organize all this information, the D N A information, the educational information about DNA N a inheritance, the findings in documents, the findings in D, how will you present that? And because you’re going to have to explain both DNA evidence and documentary evidence. One method is to present the documentary evidence first, drawing some conclusions, then present the DNA test results after that and include any correlation with the documentary and then have the conclusion. So maybe two big sections, but in other cases like an unknown parentage case like adoption.
Nicole Elder Dyer (15m 38s):
Then DNA will sometimes be the starting point and is discussed first and then kind of goes back and forth between the documents and the DNA evidence kind of interweaving the documents and DNA evidence together is another method of organizing that. So think about what would work best for your case and create an outline to organize your thoughts. Use headings and subheadings for both the DNA findings and documentary findings. For the documentary findings. You can organize chronologically geographically by records. And then for DNA findings, you might wanna talk first about understanding DNA inheritance patterns to set a foundation for the reader and then discuss the test taker’s path of the common ancestor, the family trees of matches and analysis of shared center Morgans among the test takers in the matches.
Nicole Elder Dyer (16m 29s):
And there’s no absolute right way to do it, but it is good to really help the reader understand what DNA is and how it’s used as evidence in genealogy research before you dive in.
Diana Elder (16m 41s):
Right? It’s so good to get a feeling for how you want to organize and that’s one of the things that often we change around as we get into the the meat of the report. But with experience, you often can just sit down and think about how you wanna outline this report and the organization. Well, when it comes to presenting and correlating the documentary research, you really need to provide some context about each source to age your reader. They may not be genealogists and they may not know about the sources. So I like to include why we eOne thought of searching a source and what information we were hoping to discover. And some of the things that you can discuss if it applies to your case are things like the laws, history, geography, social settings, and economics of the area where the ancestor lived.
Diana Elder (17m 29s):
And one of the benefits of writing a research report is discovering a deficiency in our own understanding of a records context. For example, we might be attempting to provide background information about the tax lists we’re citing and realizing we need to research the laws and history of taxation and then that in turn deepens our our understanding of that tax list and gives us even more insight to our research. This is one of the things that I mentioned at the beginning that often it’s in the writing that we make more conclusions and we’re able to connect the dots better. And it’s this whole process of understanding more about what was happening. So a discussion of the documentary research really helps the reader understand the reasonings behind your conclusions.
Diana Elder (18m 16s):
So whether the reader is a client, a fellow researcher, your family, your future self, if you can give that person that reader an accurate picture of why the source was created, that will go a long ways in your report. So as we mentioned already, you have to discuss any conflicts and resolve them if possible. And sometimes you just can’t resolve it because it’s not the scope of this research project. And so you just put a statement like future research could resolve this conflict in dates of marriage or a second spouse. And then if we are researching in anything that’s not super easy, we are going to have indirect evidence.
Diana Elder (18m 56s):
Most of our research projects have indirect evidence, and so we have got to form some preliminary conclusions and then maybe DNA could confirm that we always use negative citations and include negative searches to show we’ve done thorough research. Negative searches may eventually help us form a conclusion using those negative searches as negative evidence. So for instance, if we have done a study of all the tax lists in a county, we could use that as negative evidence that a man who disappears from the tax list either died or moved or became too old to pay the poll tax.
Diana Elder (19m 37s):
So these types of things can all come together with other evidence to prove our case. We want to present our information in a lot of ways to break up the narrative. Nobody wants to just read 20 pages of narratives, so we need to use things like tables, bullet points, abstracts, transcriptions, maps, and little snippets of images to keep the reader’s attention and to illustrate the findings. And so we have all sorts of ideas in our work samples. Often it’s just in reading someone else’s report that you get the idea of how to put this together. So we invite you to check those
Nicole Elder Dyer (20m 12s):
Out when you’re working on adding the DNA research into your report, there are a few different challenges you’ll probably notice. One is that if you’re trying to share your report, then you’ll need to protect the privacy of living individuals and that can be a challenge. But one thing to do is to write the report without privatizing anyone’s names and then save a copy and then add in their pseudonyms after that with a little key in a separate document for yourself. Another challenge is explaining DNA evidence and how it works. Another challenge is clearly showing the analysis and correlation of the test results so that people understand what you did and what the evidence shows.
Nicole Elder Dyer (20m 54s):
So to help be clear and help people understand, we can start our discussion of DNA evidence with a summary of how that type of DNA that you used is inherited. And you can quote an expert from an article or a book just explaining how, why DNA or autosomal DNA is inherited can help them make connections to the evidence you’re going to show. If you use ethnicity estimates, you can give an explanation of how those are derived and their limitations and how they provided clues to the research. You’ll also want to discuss the evidence from the DNA matches that were used and possible relationships expected for specific amounts of shared dna and how this can lead to hypotheses that are then tested against documentary evidence.
Nicole Elder Dyer (21m 36s):
Usually at this point you’re going to cite the shared Santa Morgan project to help your reader understand where these relationship predictions come from and you’ll probably reference the family trees of DNA matches and cite their tree. You can also talk about some of the limitations of different testing. Companies like Ancestry doesn’t provide a chromosome browser, but you’re able to still use shared matching to figure things out. And then when you’re reporting all these different connections, sometimes it’s hard to visualize. So it’s really important to then include diagrams and descendancy charts that explain how these matches descend from the people you’re talking about and how they connect to your test takers and showing how the cousin relationship is inferred from that.
Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 22s):
So discussing the diagram in the narrative, you can refer to the figures. So in figure 1.2 you can see the dissent from the common ancestor, something like that. And then you’ll also want to include a variety of tables that can show how much DNA is shared between different matches and different test takers. And this is a succinct way to help people quickly see the amount of shared DNA and the range and average from the Shared Sin Morgan project.
Diana Elder (22m 52s):
We also have to be aware of how to use source citations in our report and we need to have everything fully cited because this gives our report credibility and it lets an independent genealogists follow our research path and come to the same conclusions that we did. Should be really easy to use these because if we have created our source citation when we did the research, it should be right there in the research log, which is why I love my research log. There’s nothing more annoying that writing your report and realizing you didn’t do citations for all those searches in the tax list. So much better to have them done and then have them ready to go to put right into your report. So what do you need to cite?
Diana Elder (23m 33s):
Well, you use a citation to back up each fact that is not widely known. For example, stating the birthdate of an ancestor requires a citation, but stating 1861 as the beginning of a, the Civil War does not. So we cite specific records we used and we might also want to have citations for references to information about the background, history, geography, laws, et cetera. If we’re using any kind of a map, we would cite that and we want to make sure that we are also using citations for any DNA informational items such as charts or tables that perhaps we’re using from the is OG wiki.
Diana Elder (24m 15s):
If we have negative results, we also create a citation. And a really simple way to do this is just the cite, the generate information for the source. Then include a statement like negative search for John Smith. And if it’s appropriate, we could also discuss some search parameters and reasons. The search might have had no results, and that would be down in the footnote of your report. Generally you do your citations for DNA sources as you write the report. And this is what we discussed earlier in the podcast, because you might have so many matches and you don’t need to do a full citation for each match until you decide which ones will go into the report.
Diana Elder (24m 56s):
Often we are analyzing, you know, maybe 20 matches, but then we’ll only select the top five to go in the report. So that’s when we could create citations for them. And we also need to be careful that we’ve either gained permission to use their full names or to anonymize their name in the citation if the report will be published or distributed publicly. So as you’re doing these citations, consider having a citation template for both your documentary research and then some samples for your DNA source citations. And this can help a lot if you just can copy and paste in your template into your research log and then fill in the appropriate information.
Diana Elder (25m 36s):
Now you can use shortened citations for a subsequent citation of a source, but make sure you don’t do that until you have your complete report written because you may be changing things around. The first citation should be full. And then after that you could use shortened citations. And then if you are referencing document numbers that go along with your report and you can add document numbers to the citations as well.
Nicole Elder Dyer (26m 2s):
Next is the conclusion, and this is where you remind the reader of the research in a quick paragraph or set of paragraphs. So because you’re not presenting any new information in the conclusion and you’re just kind of summarizing some of the main points of the body of the report, you don’t need citations in the conclusion. Your conclusion should contain your opinion of whether or not the research objective was met. And if the objective was not met, then you will have suggestions for future research to help meet the objective in the next section. So it’s important in your conclusion to both summarize what was done and then talk about whether or not more research is needed or if the research objective was met.
Nicole Elder Dyer (26m 48s):
You can state kind of some bullet points of why you feel that it was meant and why no more research is needed.
Diana Elder (26m 56s):
And then we finish up our report with future research suggestions. This is such an important part of the process. So even if we have achieved our objective, we always have more ideas for research as we’re doing a project. So this can widen the horizons of what we might research next. It could be we discovered a second spouse, we want to go research or maybe we discovered a previous location we want to research or just some holes that we want to shore up with the next project. Often when we have a DNA project, we’ve discovered we need to do some targeted testing so we can verify a hypothesis. So we may be needing to seek out a Y DNA test taker or mitochondrial DNA test taker.
Diana Elder (27m 40s):
We also can discuss avenues for future research, such as adding additional documentary evidence or researching those new lines. And the really wonderful thing about future research suggestions is when we come back to this project after a month to a year or so, we can quickly read the report, we can scan the suggestions, and we can then go forward with whatever was listed there. So very helpful to do these future research suggestions. And as I’m writing the report and I have sections where I say something like future research could find the spouse’s family, I will often just skip right to future research and put that suggestion in that part of the report right then.
Diana Elder (28m 27s):
So it correlates with the body of the report.
Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 30s):
Yeah, I think it’s pretty important to mention the ideas for future research in the body of the report briefly and then flesh them out in the future research suggestions section kind of with like, okay, we need to define more about the spouse, here’s what we would do to find more about them with specific citations to collections we would search and that kind of thing.
Diana Elder (28m 52s):
Exactly. And it sort of makes a future research plan. Yeah, to refer to.
Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 56s):
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Nicole Elder Dyer (29m 36s):
So start your search today. Let’s talk now about adding the documents to your report. So after you’ve finished writing your whole report, that’s a good time to go ahead and add numbers to each of the documents in the order that you reference them in the report. Then you can also add the citations to the same page as the document image so that the document page has the number of the document, the image and the citation. And then readers can view that while they read the report and see exactly what you’re talking about. Now, there’s different ways to do this. You can combine them at the end of the report as an appendix, just in the same word document, or you can put them in a digital folder.
Nicole Elder Dyer (30m 21s):
You can also create a separate document that’s just for the record images and you put those in the order that they’re mentioned in the report. We have talked about using Canva in the past to help create those images if you’re doing a digital file folder, but if you’re doing it in Word, you can just add the citation underneath the screenshot or the image of the document.
Diana Elder (30m 41s):
That’s one of my favorite ways to do it because it’s so fast and easy. Well, let’s talk a little bit about formatting. We really want to make sure our report is pleasing to the eye. And remember that this information that we are writing is not necessarily easy reading. This is not a novel. And so we wanna make sure that we have line spacing of one and a half and a font that’s easy to read, like aerial times New Roman or Collibra. And then use a footer to track the page numbers and be sure you do the total number of pages. For instance, one of 28. Two of 28. And this is because we want to make sure that if there’s page separation, someone reading just one page will realize there are 28 total pages.
Diana Elder (31m 28s):
We also want to have the name of the project and your name and date in the footer. And then if you’re using images, add a caption below for clarity, add a title to each table and check to make sure the headings and information items are readable. Footnotes just for the table can be added using superscript capabilities of the word processing program and letters ABC after each entry. I love doing this. You just add another row at the bottom of the table and you merge all of the cells horizontally. And then you use this row to add each citation. So if you have a lot of citations, that will end up being a large merged cell underneath your table.
Diana Elder (32m 11s):
But it’s so nice to have that table sourced within itself rather than having the footnotes be with all the other footnotes at the bottom of the page. So as I said, instead of using the regular footnote, you would just manually put an A, B, C, and then you use the superscript little function looks like a X with a little two super scripted. And so it’s just a simple, neat way to have your citations be within a table,
Nicole Elder Dyer (32m 38s):
Right? And that’s important to do. Let’s talk about some tips for excellent writing, and one of those is editing. And we should always edit our report when it’s done and make sure that it makes sense and check for any grammatical errors or missing words and things like that. One way to do this is to print out the first draft and then edit it with pen and paper. Sometimes you can see different things this way than if you’re editing on a computer. And then while you’re editing, ask yourself, does the order make sense? You know the organization and the order of the information is presented. Do you need to add some additional sections or more explanations?
Nicole Elder Dyer (33m 19s):
Did you explain the D N A findings? Clearly? Will your readers understand? You can also do an edit for wording and look for instances where you switched between first, second, and third person. Also, try to get rid of trite phrases and passive verbs where possible and replace with action verbs. Sometimes when you’ve done a lot of writing, you can keep a list of words and phrases that work well with explaining genealogy and DNA findings so that you can remember what you like to say. Also important is to use qualifying words to discuss conclusions. Often we’re talking about preliminary conclusions and we’re not able to give a final proof or say for certain what happened.
Nicole Elder Dyer (34m 4s):
So we can use qualifiers and that can help us be more accurate on our reporting. So we can say, perhaps this happened, it’s probable that this happened, it’s likely that this was the father, but more evidence is needed. So we don’t want to overstate the evidence and use stronger conclusion words than we really have evidence for. So if you have several pieces of indirect evidence that are then supported by more indirect evidence from the DNA findings, maybe we can conclude that our hypothesized relationship is likely even with best research practices and new pieces of evidence could overturn our conclusions.
Nicole Elder Dyer (34m 47s):
So you can say something like, based on the evidence reviewed in this research session, it can be concluded. And then whatever you feel like you can conclude, then a future research turns up new evidence that requires a revision of your conclusion. You can still say that it was accurate based on formerly available evidence. How do you know if you’ve achieved genealogical proof using dna? Well, that’s a very good question that we all struggle with sometimes, but our next episode, we’ll discuss that as we talk about proof, arguments and meeting standards. So for now, when you’re writing your report, just be sure to use qualifiers and consider whether you’ve done reasonably exhaustive research.
Nicole Elder Dyer (35m 29s):
And if not, you can add those new research items to your future research suggestions. Another tip for writing is to be consistent with using DNA terms likes Morgans percent and how you write that. Are you going to write out the word Santa Morgans? Are you gonna write cm? And so think about a style guide for yourself to help you remember how you’re going to do it so you can stay consistent. The last edit you do will probably be for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It’s good to have a style guide handy, like the Chicago Manual of Style. You may also want to use other programs like Spell Check or Grammar Lead to help you. A lot of word processing programs have helpful spell checks and grammar checks. You can also ask a friend or a relative to help you, and this is really helpful because sometimes they’ll think of things or see things that you didn’t and maybe give you some ideas for how to make things more clear.
Diana Elder (36m 20s):
Well, after that discussion about writing a report, hopefully everyone’s ready to go and start writing. So your task for this chapter is to write a report detailing both the documentary research and the DNA analysis, whether or not you met the objective. You will have a record of the steps you followed and the reasoning behind your conclusions. This phase of the research will be well documented and you will be able to start a new project using the suggestions for future research. All right, well good luck everyone on your writing. We encourage you to write something. Just give it a shot, see how it works. I think you’ll discover that it’s easier and easier as you write more and more about your genealogy, and it has so many benefits that we hope you’ll try it out.
Diana Elder (37m 3s):
So have a great week everyone, and we’ll talk to you next time.
Nicole Elder Dyer (37m 5s):
Alright, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, research Like a Pro and Research like a pro@dnaonamazon.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.
Links
DNA Research Reports – the Ultimate Finish – by Robin Wirthlin https://familylocket.com/dna-research-reports-the-ultimate-finish/
Privatizing DNA Research Reports for Publication – by Nicole Dyer https://familylocket.com/privatizing-dna-research-reports-for-publication/
How to Prepare DNA Research Reports for Sharing – by Nicole Dyer https://familylocket.com/how-to-prepare-dna-research-reports-for-sharing/
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Research Like a Pro Resources
Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference – by Nicole Dyer – https://familylocket.com/product/airtable-research-logs-for-genealogy-quick-reference/
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro Webinar Series 2023 – monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2023/
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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