RLP 252: How Accurate are Thrulines?

Nicole Elder Dyer (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 252, how Accurate are Through Lines? Welcome to research like a Pro, a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogist professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of research like a pro, a genealogist guide with Robin Wertland. 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. Let’s go.

Nicole Elder Dyer (42s):
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 memorials for the people buried in those cemeteries. Hello and welcome to research like a Pro.

Diana Elder (1m 0s):
Hi Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 2s):
I’m great, mom. How are you?

Diana Elder (1m 4s):
I’m doing well. The sun is shining, the snow has melted and we are into spring, so it feels fabulous.

Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 11s):
How have you been going with your Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy class?

Diana Elder (1m 16s):
Well, I am doing part of two Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy courses. I’m coordinating with my colleague, the one on an accreditation, and I’m an instructor in Angela McGee’s course, which is titled The Art of Client Reports. So let me just explain a little bit to our listeners what these institutes are. You typically have to register months in advance, then you get to be part of the class. They cap the number of people and so the classes can be anywhere from say 20 up to 60, just depending on how many people the instructor wants to have in the class. The one for our accreditation course, we have 21 people who are attending that.

Diana Elder (1m 58s):
And then for Angela McGee’s course, the out of client reports there are maybe up to 45, 50 I, I’m not sure. So I have been attending that as an instructor. I get to attend and and watch the different classes and because I do a lot with client reports, I’m very interested in seeing all the different ways people approach that. It’s really been interesting. But I did teach my class on writing from the research log and tips from an editor, so that was really fun to show how I do the writing. And you know, I think you do it the same way where we put everything into the research log that we do on Airtable and with Airtable, you know, you can expand that cell and really write quite a bit that later you could copy and paste that from the report.

Diana Elder (2m 46s):
And I showed how I would take data from say a run of tax lists and then just copy and paste that right into a table in the report. So I just showed a lot of examples on how I had done a report and I shared that report with the class so they could go read the full thing if they wanted. So that was a fun class to prepare and then teach.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 7s):
Yeah, that sounds really great. And the whole course sounds interesting. So for those who aren’t familiar with the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, they have several different offerings and this one is part of the Academy for Professionals, right?

Diana Elder (3m 21s):
Yes.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 22s):
So Academy at sl, which is the acronym, S L I G SL for Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, the academy at Slag is usually once a week for a few weeks, right? Yes,

Diana Elder (3m 36s):
It’s five weeks and you meet all day. So we do our accreditation course on Thursdays all day, and then the writing reports is all day and Friday. So I can attend both.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 46s):
This used to be in person, but since covid, they’ve been virtual,

Diana Elder (3m 51s):
Right? Used to be just a week after the regular institute week. Things have changed quite a bit with Covid and this has been a good change for both of these courses. There’s a significant amount of homework because you learn so much more if you’re actually putting into practice what you’re learning in class. And so breaking that up by a week let’s you have a lot of time to do your assignment, get some peer review, you’ll let things soak in. So I think it’s been a great change.

Nicole Elder Dyer (4m 18s):
Right. And then the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy has a regular session is usually in January, right?

Diana Elder (4m 25s):
Yeah, it’s in January and that one is just an intensive week, so you get it all done in one week, Monday through Friday. But it is pretty intense. Those classes don’t often have as much homework or if they do have homework, it’s more optional. It’s just a chance to go try out some of the websites or some of the methodologies you’re learning. And so I found that that intense week works really well. For instance, I did a course in January that was coordinated by Josh Taylor and it was all about the migration from New England to the Midwest, so out to Ohio, Indiana, that type of area. And we had just like some fun homework, nothing that took very much time.

Diana Elder (5m 5s):
So that was great. I like having the different options,

Nicole Elder Dyer (5m 8s):
Right? And they also have the fall virtual option, which is similar to academy where you meet once a week for several weeks. And I have been helping teach a course in that for the last couple of years, and I’m doing it again this year about using D N A evidence to prove your pedigree. And I, I teach a class about tracking new matches with Airtable. So these are typically intermediate level or advanced level classes and they fill up quickly. So if you’re interested in someday taking an institute course, then we recommend finding out when registration begins and putting that date on your calendar and then planning in advance.

Nicole Elder Dyer (5m 51s):
You know, your first and second choice is for what course you want to do so that when you go on the data register online, you’ll be ready to sign up right away.

Diana Elder (6m 1s):
Some of the classes sell out literally in three minutes. And I have gotten into some of those because I was ready and waiting and was so excited when I got in.

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 10s):
Well, I hope that helps for some of you who had questions about these institutes that we’re always talking about. Right?

Diana Elder (6m 15s):
We didn’t know anything about institutes when we first started doing our genealogy. We hope all of you’ll go try one out. So besides the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, there’s Grip, the Genealogy

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 28s):
Research Institute of Pittsburgh.

Diana Elder (6m 30s):
Thank you. I never can remember how that one was. And then there’s I G H R, which is the one in Georgia,

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 35s):
The Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research.

Diana Elder (6m 38s):
Oh, very good. With your acronyms.

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 40s):
I know. And

Diana Elder (6m 41s):
Then there are a couple other, there’s Gen Fed, which takes place in Washington DC and they visit the National Archives and learn all about that.

Nicole Elder Dyer (6m 50s):
Yeah, that one stands for something about genealogical federal records.

Diana Elder (6m 54s):
Right. And there’s others. I think there are others out there, but those are the three main ones. I’ve never yet been to GenEd, but I have done the other three all online.

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 3s):
There’s also the Texas Institute.

Diana Elder (7m 6s):
Oh yeah, I did that one too.

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 8s):
That one’s pretty good too. Yeah,

Diana Elder (7m 9s):
It’s such a great opportunity. This online learning is just amazing. I know that the one in Pittsburgh is doing an in-person session this summer, one online and one in person I believe. Great. All right, well let’s do our announcements. We have our air table quick reference guide available for you in PDF form on our website. If you’re learning about air table and just wanna have something in front of you to help you remember all the different things you can do with it and how to do them, that would be great for you. We also have our Research Psycho Pro webinar series for 2023 ongoing, and we are just loving these webinars. In fact, one of the questions that I had during that class in the Art of client reports was we would just like to see how you had did a complete project all the way through.

Diana Elder (7m 54s):
And I thought to myself, well that’s what we are doing in our webinar series because that’s what we’re showing all the way from getting in an objective nailed down to writing the report. So we have in May, the topic is who are the parents of Katherine a e sayer and it’s a DNA case study by Barb Growth. Barb is a research like a pro DNA study group member, and we’re excited to see that every project is so different and interesting and I pick up little tips from everybody. I love it. Our next research, like a pro study group is this fall, starting the end of August, going through November, and our peer group leader application is on our website. So if you’d like to be a part of that and you get to have complimentary registration and work with a small group of people.

Diana Elder (8m 38s):
We’ve had peer groups from the past who are still meeting every month to be accountable and talk about their research. So it’s a really fun way to make some connections with other researchers and then join our newsletter for coupons coming up pretty quick, the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference in person in Richmond, Virginia. And there is a live at home option, so you can participate if you don’t wanna travel as well.

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 5s):
And that’s how I’ll be participating. So I’m looking forward to that live at home option.

Diana Elder (9m 9s):
Yeah, it’s great.

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 11s):
Well, today we have a listener spotlight and it’s from listener who is called Dragon Wings 1 21. This listener says, I appreciate what you all do and I love getting help each week. And then she says, question, how accurate are through lines? And I think I understand how it works If one person in my group of matches is wrong, could it lead everyone down the wrong path? So this is such a great question. I think so many of us have questions about our through lines hypotheses on Ancestry D n A. We have talked about this in the past, but I thought it would be fun to just do another podcast episode on it and to touch again on through lines and how we can kind of figure out if a Through lines hypothesis is correct or not.

Diana Elder (9m 57s):
Oh, I think this is a great topic. This is such an important thing because through lines makes it really easy for us to find some matches to an ancestor, but there are so many errors just because of the way it works. So this will be fun to go back through. Well, we have an article in Family Locket that Nicole wrote titled How to Evaluate A Through Lines Hypothesis. And then we also did a podcast episode based on that and that is episode one 30. So you could go back and listen to that. But since then we have had some updates and changes to Ancestry and those are wonderful changes. So a big one that came into play just a few months ago was the new side view technology and this is where Ancestry splits up your matches by parent.

Diana Elder (10m 42s):
And there’s a really good article written really well for the beginner in genealogy so that you can see exactly how this is happening. It is through ancestry support. It’s titled How Side View Technology Splits Your DNA Results by Parent. So I just wanted to read a couple things from that because it’s good for us to understand. We don’t of course understand all the science and the algorithms that go into this, but we can get an overview and have a basic understanding. And so what they say at the very beginning is when we first read your dna, we don’t know which parts of your DNA came from each parent ancestry developed a technology called side view to sort this out using DNA matches because a match is usually related to you through only one parent.

Diana Elder (11m 29s):
Your matches can help us organize the DNA you shared with them. So of course this is how they also work with the ethnicities and the ethnicity inheritance so they can split that up as well. But it is a good thing for us to use so that when we see these through lines, we can use side view to see if we have got that DNA match actually on the right side of the family. It gives us just another tool in our tool bucket. So one of the things that you need to know is that they are using your closest cousins to figure this out. And you need a lot of shared DNA segments on both sides of your family because our DNA is just made up of letters.

Diana Elder (12m 14s):
And so this is what Ancestry says, how side view works. When we first read your dna, it’s all just a long line of those famous DNA letters, A for adenine, G for guanine, C for cyto, CIN and T for thymine. Those are the building blocks of dna. So then they show, you know, like a little diagram showing that you get, for instance an A from your mom or a G from your dad or vice versa, but they don’t know which is which. And so they have to compare a sequence of letters with a sequence of letters from one of your matches and they like to use the closer matches, you know, like first cousin, second cousin, so that it, it’s just more clear about which side of the family it’s on maternal or paternal.

Diana Elder (12m 58s):
And then they don’t actually say maternal or paternal. When you first look at side view, you see parent one and parent two, and then you have to look at all the surnames that are in trees and your closest matches and you get to assign yourself whether it’s maternal or paternal. And if we know our ancestry, that can be pretty easy. And if we’ve had enough matches, that can be pretty easy. If it’s an adoptee case, then you’re not gonna know it first, which one is maternal and which is paternal if you have no idea who all these people are that you match. And then you have to do more work and and try to figure that out. And you can always go back and change if you have designated one maternal, one paternal and you have to change it, you can always change that up.

Diana Elder (13m 42s):
And then they also have a lot of people who are unassigned and that’s because they’re either new matches since they did you know, the initial split. And it sounds like they’ll kind of be updating that every so often or they’re just so small and the really small matches they can’t tell. And so anyway, it’s an exciting new technology and I think it’s really helpful in a lot of things, not only the ethnicity, which is great, but also this idea of evaluating through lines and some of the matches we see there.

Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 12s):
That was a great overview of side view. Now let’s do an overview of through lines because we can use side view to help us evaluate through lines hypotheses. There is a ancestry support article about through lines and it gives you kind of some background information on how they’re created and how they work. And the first thing that it says in the article is that the through lines are based on information from family trees. And it actually says if there’s inaccurate information in your tree, you may receive inaccurate through lines. The tree that is used for your through lines hypothesis is the family tree that is linked to your DNA test and the through lines algorithm finds ancestors that are in your tree and also in your matches trees.

Nicole Elder Dyer (14m 56s):
But they also give you hints for potential ancestors that are not in your tree yet, just in your matches. Trees to make through lines work for you. You need to make sure your tree is either public or private and searchable, but if you have marked it private and unsearchable, then through lines cannot work. Also through lines are only for your ancestors that are through your fifth Great Grandparents. So seven generations. It won’t give you any through lines for sixth Great Grandparents or beyond. And then to make through lines work, you need to have at least four generations. So yourself, parent, grandparent, and great grandparents. Once you have that and you’ve linked your test to the tree, then three lines should appear in 48 hours.

Diana Elder (15m 41s):
Well, let’s just talk a little bit about how to explore them. One of the things you may have done is just looked at it through relationship view. That is the default view. That’s where you see the little box of each ancestor and you get to see the relationship and their dates. If you have a picture, their picture will show up and it’s basically kind of an a pedigree chart in a certain format. But you can also use the list view and this shows your matches, but it doesn’t illustrate their line of dissent and it will be organized by the largest matches showing up first. So that’s really helpful to find those that share more DNA with you. And then you can also see as you’re scrolling down through the relationship view, potential ancestors and these are highlighted in green and these are people you don’t have in your tree, but other people have connected them to their tree.

Diana Elder (16m 33s):
And so through lines has found some way going back and forth between your tree and the other trees to connect you to that ancestor. And you can use the filters. Filters are great, they’re up at the top and you can filter for ancestors with new D N A matches your ancestors just in your actual tree, paternal maternal ancestors or these potential ancestors.

Nicole Elder Dyer (16m 57s):
So now that we have kind of a basis of what through lines is, how do we know if they’re accurate or not? So the support article from Ancestry about through lines doesn’t state that they are definitely accurate. It actually talks about how if there’s inaccurate information in your tree, you may receive inaccurate through lines. And so it says in the article on your through lines page, click on an ancestor to see which DNA matches may be related to you through that person. And I like that the article uses that qualifier because it does take some work and some evaluation and analysis on our part to see if that DNA n a match is related to us through the ancestor through line suggests.

Nicole Elder Dyer (17m 42s):
And we have to do this with all of our matches that we want to use as DNA evidence in a genealogical proof argument. So this is just something that we need to practice and start doing and we’ll talk about some different ways to do that. In the through line support article, they actually have a whole section about accuracy. And I’ll read to you a couple of the quotes from that. It says, since through lines are based on the family trees of you and other members on Ancestry, they’re as accurate as the trees. They’re based on mistakes in family trees can cause inaccurate through lines. It goes on to say, because they’re based on trees through lines, don’t prove your specific connection to a DNA match.

Nicole Elder Dyer (18m 24s):
And I thought that was really important. So I’ll repeat it because they’re based on trees through lines. Don’t prove your specific connection to a DNA match. For example, if you have someone listed in your tree as a second cousin and that person appears as a DNA match and a in a through line as your second cousin, they could still actually be a first cousin once removed, a half first cousin or a number of other relationships to you. So just because we’re seeing it in through lines and that’s what we add in our tree, doesn’t mean that it’s really true. We need to do analysis. And one of the ways we can do analysis is by clicking on the amount of DNA that you share with the match in ancestry and it opens up a chart showing different relationship possibilities and how likely they are based on Ancestry’s algorithm and their probabilities that they’ve calculated.

Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 15s):
Sometimes you’ll see like, oh, there’s a 50% chance of this relationship and a 40% chance of this one and and when the probabilities are close like that, we need to do additional work to figure out which one is most likely. And we can do this by looking at shared matches, by looking at the documentary evidence, by looking at trees and figuring everything out. But what it comes down to is a body of evidence that we combine all the different clues together to come to a conclusion. And that’s such an important concept for using D N A evidence that we need to gather kind of a whole court case of evidence as if we were going to present it to a jury and tell them all the reasons why this is true and accurate.

Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 59s):
And once we have gathered all of that evidence and we have a good body of evidence, then we can feel more confident in our conclusions.

Diana Elder (20m 6s):
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Diana Elder (20m 47s):
Find a grape.com is completely free to you. So start your search today@findagra.com. Alright, so you gave us a lot of thoughts about checking the accuracy of through lines, but let me just add a couple things to that discussion. We can use the Shared Center Morgan project or ancestry probabilities to check the relationship that through lines is giving us, and then we can check to see if the matches are all grouped to the same parent. So parent one, parent two, or if we have assigned labels, maternal or paternal. It’s okay if some of them are unassigned because through lines will pick up those really small matches of say 10 cent Morgans or so, but they should mostly all be on the right side.

Diana Elder (21m 29s):
And so if not, it could be that both parents are related to that ancestor due to pedigree collapse, which means your parents are related or some of the matches are simply incorrect.

Nicole Elder Dyer (21m 40s):
Right? And I think that happens more often than we think that some of the matches are false matches or just don’t belong in that through line hypothesis. It’s possible that we do have some matches that are correct in the through line hypothesis that they really do descend from that ancestor and then there could be some incorrect ones that aren’t sharing due to that common ancestor. So what’s so great about the parent one, parent two maternal paternal labels is that now it makes it so much easier to analyze our through lines hypotheses to see if they are all grouped to the same parent. In the article I wrote about evaluating your through lines hypothesis, I was using an example where the test taker’s mother had tested.

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 23s):
So we could see that information easily with that example, but unless you’ve had a parent test, you wouldn’t have that until now. Now that they have introduced the side view technology at Ancestry, everyone can use this method to check their through lines hypothesis to see if the matches are all on the mother’s side or all on the father’s side or all on parent one side or all on parent two’s side. And so it’s exciting to have this new ability to check our through line hypotheses. And so let’s do an example. I’m going to use the same test taker that I had used in my past article about evaluating through line hypotheses and I’ll call her Deanna. So the first through lines that I opened for Deanna was a through line hypothesis for the parents of her ancestor, Lucinda Jones.

Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 7s):
And Lucinda is on Deanna’s mother’s side and Lucinda was born in the early 18 hundreds in Tennessee. And if you know a lot about researching in Tennessee, you’ll know that there are some challenges with record loss and not a lot of good record keeping. So it’s challenging to find the parents of those ancestors in the early 18 hundreds in Tennessee. Well, Lucinda maiden name is Jones. She married a Harris, but the through line hypothesis gives us her father’s name as John early Harris, which is actually her husband’s last name. So right away that was a red flag to me that this was just based on someone’s incorrect tree that has her married name as her name instead of her maiden name.

Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 51s):
Then I looked at all the different matches and there were 17 D n A matches descending from John early Harris. I noticed right away that only three of those matches shared more than 15 cent Morgans. So that’s a red flag. You know, we are looking back at an ancestor probably born in the 17 hundreds, but there should be more matches over 15 cent Morgans. I think. I just feel that if most of the matches are sharing eight, nine or 10 11 cent Morgans, that there’s just such a higher chance that some of those matches are false matches and maybe they’re not and it’s possible that they’re all true matches. But when you have small segment matches like that where they’re just sharing one single segment of 8 cent Morgans, it increases the possibility that those matches are sharing with you because of a very distant ancestor born in the 16 hundreds or before.

Nicole Elder Dyer (24m 43s):
And you don’t know the common ancestor because it’s so far back. So it could be like a population segment, it could be a really distant ancestor, it could be a false match. So those are some of the concerns with using those small matches. And since in this hypothesis, I already had a clue from the documentary evidence that it was wrong and the matches were small. That was two red flags against it. So then I did my next test to evaluate it, which was all of the matches should be on the mother’s side because this ancestor was on Deanna’s mother’s side of her tree. So if the matches are correct and they truly do descend from this John early Harris and he is a maternal ancestor of Deanna, then all the matches should be labeled either maternal or unassigned.

Nicole Elder Dyer (25m 28s):
However, although most of those 17 matches were maternal, five of them were labeled as paternal matches. So that was another red flag. So we’ve got three strikes against this through line hypothesis so far. What I did to analyze the matches was I just put all 17 of them in a quick spreadsheet and Google sheets and I created a column for whether they were maternal or paternal and a column for if they were shared matches with each other. So that was kind of my next test. And I looked at each of the shared matches for all of the 17 matches and I kind of did a mini leads method. It wasn’t a true leads method, but I just kind of did a color for anyone who was a shared match with each other.

Nicole Elder Dyer (26m 12s):
And then I was going to do another color if you know, any of the other matches were shared matches with each other, but they weren’t. There were only five matches who were shared matches with each other. Most of them were shared matches with the highest match that shared over 20 cent Morgans. I think she shared 25. And so there were four other matches who had this woman listed as the shared match with them. So I gave them all pink color and they were all maternal. So there were five that seemed like they were in the same maternal genetic network and then seven more that were not in that same genetic network. They were maternal matches, but as far as I could tell, they weren’t shared matches with each other. One caveat with that is that ancestry only shows shared matches over 20 cent Morgan.

Nicole Elder Dyer (26m 54s):
So they could have been shared matches with each other, just maybe they were sharing less than 20 and most of them were sharing less than 20 with a test taker. So that was the challenge there. So that was interesting to me to see that, you know, this through-line hypothesis failed all my tests, didn’t really have a lot of good things going for it. The documentary evidence seemed incorrect. It had common names, it was from a early time period. The matches were all small. They didn’t all group to the same side, maternal or paternal, and only some of them were shared matches with each other.

Diana Elder (27m 27s):
Hmm, that’s a great example of really having to go through a lot of analysis and I love the idea about the spreadsheet. That was a great idea. Well, hopefully all of our listeners are learning a few tools to use when you’re evaluating a through lines hypothesis. And one thing that we really didn’t mention that makes it so easy when you click on one of your matches there and through lines and it brings up their match page right at the top, it will tell you under the two names, you know, you and your match. It’ll tell you maternal side or paternal side. So it’s really easy to check that and see. It’s not like you have to do anything special. It’s right on your match page. So have some fun, go check out your through lines and see if you can determine some that are accurate and maybe you can find some that are inaccurate that you’d been believing.

Diana Elder (28m 13s):
And so it’s, it’s good that we always look at our DNA with an eye to prove or disprove it, realizing we have to do some work. The company can’t tell us everything even though they’re giving us a lot of information.

Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 26s):
Alright, thanks for listening everyone. We hope you have a great day and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana Elder (28m 32s):
Bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole Elder Dyer (28m 34s):
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 locket.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@familylocke.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.