RLP 259: The Coverage Estimator

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 259 The Coverage Estimator tool Welcome to research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket dot 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 (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com breakdown Genealogy Brick Walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hello everybody. Welcome to research Like a Pro

Diana (52s):
Hi Nicole How. are you today?

Nicole (54s):
Doing well, how are you?

Diana (56s):
I am doing great. Enjoying warmer temperatures. It’s wonderful. So exciting.

Nicole (1m 1s):
Yes, that is nice. Obviously we’re recording this a bit earlier than when it’s coming out or else it seems obvious that we view warm in June, right?

Diana (1m 9s):
Yeah. Yes. So

Nicole (1m 11s):
Tell us about your article that was just published this quarter in the National Genealogical Society magazine.

Diana (1m 19s):
All right, well this was a really fun process and a fun experience. I was contacted to see if I would turn my syllabus from last year’s ngs, national Genealogy Society conference into an article for the magazine, and the title is research planning for the Win Next Steps for Breaking Down a Brick Wall. So I took my syllabus material and added narrative and wrote that up and it was fun to go through the editing process and make a few changes here and there, add some images, go back and forth with reviewing things. I loved it. It was really a fun process.

Diana (1m 60s):
And you know, there’s nothing like seeing in a magazine your article that actually is all put together. It’s super fun. Good job. I used the case of Georgia Dawson as an example, and I love using the research on her for a lot of my presentations because it’s, it’s just kind of a fascinating story. But then I also, I have some examples in there from my Clumsy Klein project that I did last fall. And so two of my Brick Wall women ancestors that I am working on through the Research Like, a Pro process, So, it was fun, very fun to have an article in the NGS magazine. It’s April, June, 2023, Volume 49, number two.

Nicole (2m 39s):
Great. So tell everyone what the difference between the NGS q, the quarterly and the magazine.

Diana (2m 46s):
The magazine is all about articles teaching you how to research and sometimes they will be focused on a specific ethnicity or a specific location or technology tools. This magazine had the topic of methodology and so besides my article, there was one on overcoming record loss, one on finding new evidence strategies to improve cluster research and hidden stories exploring the unexpected in family history. And it was really fun to see this come out because Julie Stoddard, who is also an accredited Genealogist, she and I worked together to become accredited and she wrote the one on cluster research.

Diana (3m 28s):
So we were both published in the same magazine, which was really fun to open that up and see her name there as well.

Nicole (3m 34s):
Your study buddy? Yep.

Diana (3m 36s):
Oh, and one more. We have Debbie Gertler, who’s also an accredited Genealogist, has an article in here researched on the island of Enchantment. So that’s fun. It’s one of the perks of becoming a member of the National Genealogical Society. You get to have the quarterly, which is case studies, and then you get the magazine, which just teaches you really great research skills. So there’s a lot of value to joining the National Genealogical Society and I would recommend it to anyone who really wants to learn and once you join, you get access to their online archives for all the past issues. So that’s awesome as well.

Nicole (4m 17s):
Yes, it’s a huge benefit and I’ve gone back and found articles that other people have referenced in syllabuses and things that I wanted to read. So it’s a great resource.

Diana (4m 26s):
It is one of the new sections that is there now every month is DNA discovery by our friend and colleague Paul Woodbury. And he has an article in every copy that comes out or every magazine that comes out on DNA N with DNA tips. So that’s a fun addition.

Nicole (4m 45s):
Yeah, he’s such a good writer. I like how he explains things. Yeah. Well it’s neat to see your name in the magazine. Good job mom.

Diana (4m 54s):
Thank you. Thank you. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference guide available on the website and we have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series for 2023 ongoing. We hope you will join us if you haven’t yet for the monthly case studies, which feature research psycho APRO and research psycho Pro with DNA process. I think people are really enjoying this because you get to see how we actually do the research and set it up and you get examples. So fun. And then we have our next research Psycho Pro study group this fall August to November, 2023. This will be the one without DNA A. It’s a wonderful opportunity to prepare for a DNA study group because you can really work through the documentary evidence you accumulated on your ancestor and set the foundation for further D work.

Diana (5m 43s):
Or you can just do pure documentary work even if you don’t wanna add dna. And we do have our peer group leader application on our website and as always join our newsletter for coupons and deals.

Nicole (5m 54s):
Well, today we get to talk about a new DNA tool that has come out this year. It’s called The Coverage Estimator Tool. And that is Hosted at the D N A Painter website and it was created by Johnny Perl, along with Paul Woodbury and Leah Larkin can learn how to use it by reading their blog posts. Each of these three wrote blog posts about The Coverage Estimator tool and some ideas for how to use it. And Johnny Pearls is more specifically about how to use it. Paul Woodbury gives five ways that you could use it and Le Larkin goes into some of the more math and technical parts of it. So read those three blog posts, which we will link into the show notes for you.

Nicole (6m 36s):
But what the tool is is very similar to the what are the Odds tool at DNA Painter, the Wado tool and So, it has the same tree structure where you’re building a descendancy tree. It just has a different color scheme and some different purposes and things you can do with it. So the purpose of The Coverage Estimator tool is really to help you know how much Autosomal DNA of an ancestor or research subject is covered in a testing database by their tested descendants. So if you and your aunt and your first cousin and your second cousin who all descend from your second great-grandfather have taken DNA tests in ancestry D N A and you put them all into the descendancy tree descending from your second great-grandfather, you can find out about how much D n A the four of you collectively inherited from that ancestor.

Nicole (7m 29s):
And it helps you to understand the likelihood that you’ll be able to find relevant D N A matches and help you find out more about, you know, your research objective, which is usually to find the parents or the mother or father of one of your research subjects or ancestors So. It kind of is a tool for you to see where you might need to get more Coverage. If you put your descendants who have tested into The Coverage Estimator tool and you realize you only have 3% of an ancestors’ D N A covered, you will then think to yourself, oh no, that’s not enough. I need to collaborate with or target test more descendants of my research subject to increase the Coverage, to make it likelier that I’ll be able to solve any research question I have.

Nicole (8m 13s):
And this really becomes important as you work on research questions that are more generations removed from your test takers. So this is kind of the main use for The Coverage Estimator tool and it can be used for other things as well. Like I said, it can be used to help you find the next best test taker to help increase the Coverage, you know, after you figure out the Coverage, then what to do next kind of thing. And then there’s some more advanced usages that Paul Woodbury talks about in his article. His article is called Five Ways to Use, the New DNA Coverage Estimator Tool at DNA Painter, and you can find this@legacytree.com on their blog.

Nicole (8m 54s):
That’s where Paul works. So this article has five ways to use the tool and the last two focus on this more advanced usage, kind of the idea of reconstructing your ancestors genome and kind of combining the Coverage estimates with some segment data and kind of helping you estimate how much D N A A person might have shared with your research subject who hasn’t tested maybe like a deceased relative or somebody closer to the research subject that you’re trying to compare. So you can read his blog post to get some more details about that use case, but we’ll talk more about The Coverage Estimator tool as far as just figuring out how much D n A is covered by the test takers and and how that can kinda help you figure out and plan the next steps for increasing the Coverage to help you solve your research question.

Diana (9m 45s):
Great. Well Thank you for introducing us to Coverage. Estimator and I was so excited when I learned about this because It is a fun tool. It’s easy to use and it just does the magic for you because before this there was a formula and I was thinking, oh man, I don’t wanna have to to do all of that. and I was so excited when they put it into DNA Painter so wonderful. So let’s go through an example of how to actually do this. I am gonna use the example of my ancestor Hickman Monroe Schultz and I have several test takers, people who have shared their ancestry d n a with me.

Diana (10m 25s):
So I will put them in where they go in the descendancy to see how much Coverage I have of Hickman, Monroe Schultz and Rachel Cox. First of all, you can do two things to start your treat. You can just type in the names of your ancestor, which is what I did. I put in Hickman Monroe Schultz, and then I put in his son William Henderson Schultz and all of my test takers, people who’ve shared DNA with me come through William Henderson Schultz. There are about nine other children that I need to reach out to their descendants to try to get more Coverage of Hickman’s D n a, but right now I just have everybody coming through my ancestor, William Henderson Schultz.

Diana (11m 8s):
So I typed in all the names the descendants, see just by hand, it was pretty fast, it didn’t take me very long. But if you want to, you can import a Jed Con file and then choose the name of the person who’s descendants you want to view. So if you’re going to be doing this for all your ancestors, this would probably be the easiest way to do it, to do that simple j com then be able to have it automatically filled for you. But I just did it manually. And then once you have got in your descendancy lines, so for instance we’ll do, we’ve got William Henderson Schultz and I typed in William Houston Schultz, then my grandfather Charles Leslie, and then his three children, my uncle Ch, my dad Bobby Jean, and my Aunt Helen and I have a test taker coming through each one of their lines.

Diana (11m 56s):
And so then I typed in myself and then my two first cousins, and then you hover over the box of your test takers and then you get to mark them as tested and that turns their little box black. And then you can see really easily who your test takers are. And of course it’s just like the what are the odds tool. If you make a mistake, you can go back and fix it up. If you missed a generation, you can go add them. You know, you can always edit the whole thing, you can edit the names and you can delete somebody if you put them in a wrong place. So that gives you your Coverage. So as well as myself and my three cousins, I have someone coming down through two other lines and my total Coverage with these test takers is 19.9% of the genome of Hickman Mono, Monroe, Schultz, and Rachel Cox, which is not bad.

Diana (12m 52s):
That’s pretty decent. And so you can experiment and see where you could get some more test takers to increase that. So I could go and add all of William Henderson’s children and then build their lines out and see if I could get that number up quite a bit. So it’s a fun tool and I think it’s really, really helpful for us to see what we’re working with when we’re working with our dna. Let me just help you visualize this a bit. So you’ve got your tree and just picture it as a pedigree. You know you with your starting ancestor and then moving to the right, but every time you add a test taker, the Coverage number will go up. And so up in the top left you’ll see your number.

Diana (13m 33s):
Mine says 19.9. Now something to note, I could add Nicole as my child and I could add her as a test taker, but it would not add anything to that because she would’ve inherited all of her Schultz DNA from me. And so she’s not relevant. Sorry, Nicole,

Nicole (13m 53s):
As Karen Stanbury would say, I am a redundant test effort to you.

Diana (13m 57s):
I like that. And so don’t worry when you are working with people about getting their children to test or share results with you because it won’t really help you,

Nicole (14m 7s):
Right? So if you add a child of a current test taker that you’ve marked as tested, don’t be alarmed when the Coverage doesn’t increase. But It is fun as you mark different people as tested to see the Coverage increase and to see the increased chance that you’ll have to find relevant matches. I will share a little bit now about how to save your Coverage Estimator tree. So if you have a D N A Painter subscription and you pay for that, you can save more than one tree to your account. So once you’ve saved that to your account, then you can go to the tools in DNA Painter and you can see the what are the odds trees and the Coverage trees as two different tabs and you can toggle between them and select which tree you want to view.

Nicole (14m 54s):
If you don’t have a subscription, you can still use the tool. That’s one of the great things about the D N A Painter website is that you can use all of the tools for free. Then if you wanna do more with the tools or save multiple profiles for a D N Painter chromosome map or a Wato Tree or a Coverage Estimator tree and you wanna save them on his website, then you can Subscribe to have that increased capability. But if you don’t have a subscription, you can go ahead and save the text file for The Coverage Estimator Tree that you built to your own computer and then you can load it into the tool the next time you want to see it. So you can create multiple Coverage Estimator trees that way if you don’t want to pay for a subscription,

Diana (15m 37s):
That’s a great idea. I did go ahead and pay for a subscription because partly I just wanted to support the great work that Johnny Perl does on D N a Painter and I wanted to be able to save everything easily, so I went that way. Well, let’s hear a word from our sponsors, 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. Items like these are a great resource for determining family relationships. On newspapers.com.

Diana (16m 17s):
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Nicole (16m 53s):
I’m gonna share an example of how I’ve used The Coverage Estimator tool. So I shared this case at Roots Tech this last year and it was really fun to kind of show screenshots of The Coverage Estimator as like a brand new tool. Well, the objective for my research project was to determine if Joanna West was the biological mother of bars. Sheba Tharp and I know I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, so it’ll probably be familiar. So bars, Sheba Tharp was the wife of John Robert Dyer and they resided in Hawkins County, Tennessee from 1830 till 1880. And Barba was born about 1813 to 1818. Her birth is kind of unknown, but the records conflict. And she was born in Hawkins County, Tennessee and was the daughter of Louis Tharp and he was born in 1786 in Fayer County, Virginia.

Nicole (17m 40s):
Now Louis was married twice, and this is where I had my question, which one of Louis’s wives was the mother of bars? Sheva, was it? Yeah, Louis was married twice, first to Joanna West in 1805, then to Judy Vernon in 1817 in Hawkins County, Tennessee. Luckily the first wife Joanna West, her parents and grandparents had already been documented by a fellow researcher. So I had her line back to grandparent level in Focker County, Virginia. So I figured if Joanna West was bars Shea’s mother, then I could find shared D n A between Joanna’s descendants, but also her parents and her grandparents’ descendants, which had been documented. So Joanna’s father was John West and John West’s wife, Beth Sheba Arnold was the daughter of Humphrey, Arnold and Anne.

Nicole (18m 26s):
And so those two other ancestral couples I thought would be really awesome and helpful for proving that Joanna West was the mother, if I could find matches to the their descendants. But finding d n a matches for common ancestors so far back in time can be challenging. And the amounts of D n A are gonna be small if any D N A shared at all. So when I first started working on my husband’s lines, the Dyer line and Barsi be Tharp and so forth, I only had the D n A of his father-in-law and then I expanded to his two brothers. So I had basically three brothers who all a son from one line of Barsi be Tharp, her son John James Dyer. And so when I put those three, my father-in-law and his two brothers into The, Coverage Estimator, the estimated Coverage that I had was 11% bars.

Nicole (19m 13s):
Sheba Tharp is the second great-grandmother of these three Dire brothers. So just imagine like you and two siblings take a D N A test and then you can cover your ancestors’ genome at about 11% at the second great-grandparent level. Then I started increasing the Coverage by collaborating with additional test takers who are descendants of Vashi bharp through different children. Vashi Betar had 10 or 11 children, not all of them had descendants, but I was able to find additional test takers through six of her children instead of just one. So when I added in all of those descendants into The Coverage Estimator tool, I was able to achieve about 38% Coverage of bars, Sheba Tharp in the testing company that I was using, which was Ancestry.

Nicole (20m 1s):
So that was exciting to be able to increase the Coverage so much and to be able to find more relevant matches that would help me determine who bars Sheba Tharp’s mother was.

Diana (20m 13s):
Well that’s a wonderful example and I love it that it’s so far back and it’s about a woman. You know, our female ancestors are difficult. So being able to find the parents of bars, Sheba, who was born 1813 to 1818, that is great. And being able to determine which of the wives was her mother. That’s often really tricky when you know that there’s more than one white. Yeah,

Nicole (20m 40s):
So I had pretty good Coverage of bars, Sheba, but then like I said, I was trying to go further back like three more generations to Joanna West, her parents and her grandparents. So what I ended up doing to get better Coverage for Joanna West level, which would be the third great grandparent of the Dyer Brothers, was to add in two more test takers who were descendants of Joanna West. So what I did, and you can do this in The Coverage Estimator tool is originally my Coverage Estimator tool, the starting ancestor was bars Sheba Tharp. So I had a tree of all of her descendants. Well, I went ahead and added a parent to her and added the parent as Joanna West.

Nicole (21m 22s):
So now the starting ancestor is one more generation back and that decreased the Coverage obviously. So bars, Sheba Tharp was 38 and then Joanna West then was about half of that. So to increase Joanna West’s Coverage, I asked two other people to collaborate at Ancestry and they shared their match list with me and they were descendants of Joanna West through Bathsheba’s sister Elizabeth Tharp. Part of the challenge though, with these two test takers is that Elizabeth Tharp was older than bars Sheba, and so her descendants were a generation further away than the Dire brothers. So having them tested helped a little bit, but didn’t increase the Coverage by that much.

Nicole (22m 4s):
Just a few percentage points. So I had a Coverage of Elizabeth Arp of only 6% and bars, Sheba had a Coverage of 38%, but when I did add the Coverage from Elizabeth Tharp side, it did increase the Coverage from Joanna West. And so Joanna West Coverage is now 21.5%, whereas before I think it was like 19% Coverage. And what’s interesting about this is that in actuality it helped quite a bit when I started gathering all the matches that I could find to Joanna West Descendants and John West and Bathsheba Arnold Descendants and Humphrey Arnold’s descendants. A lot of the matches that I found came from Bathsheba’s sister’s descendants matching them and So, it was really important that I had added them and collaborated with them and was able to view their match list and fine matches in their match list that were descendants of Humphrey Arnold and John West and Bathsheba Arnold.

Nicole (23m 2s):
So it’s probably all just a jumble of names to you guys, but the takeaway is that having additional test takers increased my ability to solve my question and and come to a higher level of certainty that I had found the correct mother for bars, Sheba Tharp.

Diana (23m 22s):
Wow, that’s such a great example. I think we can all learn a lot for how we can use DNA improving our ancestors. I know a lot of people will say, can I really use it to prove an ancestor who live that far away? And the answer is yes, but it really does involve getting more Coverage and the randomness of DNA inheritance that those other test takers just inherited more DNA from, you know, the ancestors. So great example. Well, let me share a little bit about how I am using this Autosomal DNA Coverage tool. I have talked before on the podcast and wrote a couple blog posts about my ancestral table on Airtable where I am recording my direct line ancestors.

Diana (24m 7s):
I have one for paternal and one for maternal, and then I put in there my status of research on them, both with DNA and with just the documentary research. And then I have Links to, you know, my research Log or their Google Drive folder. I have some notes about what I need to do. They’re Links to family search their tree there and my tree on ancestry. But for dna, I added a field for Autosomal, dna, Coverage and I have all my test takers for each ancestor entered in. And then I’m using the Coverage tool to estimate the Coverage, which is really great.

Diana (24m 47s):
It’s really, really helpful. So you know, back to my first example of Hickman Monroe Schultz on his row, I have got information about him and then I have the different test takers I have for him than the Coverage that I have now. Some of my test takers are on different websites, and so I have been entering those specifically for just the people who are on Ancestry because I can compare the shared matches there. But I do have a couple who are on family tree dna and so I have done a separate line, you know, I have this be a text field where I can add as many lines as I want.

Diana (25m 31s):
Then I have also put in numbers from other companies as well. So most of my people are at Ancestry, but I do have a few at other places. That’s just my personal preference how I did it. But I love looking at my numbers and seeing, wow, I have got a good amount of DNA for that ancestor. It’s great. And then I also have a field there for Y dna, mitochondrial dna, who my test takers are there, and then some notes, you know, I need to get some people maybe on this line would be a Really good line to get a test taker. Just a way to track what you’re doing with all your ancestors and their D N A.

Nicole (26m 8s):
Yeah, it’s great that you’ve put that all into your Airtable base so that you can quickly kind of see what you have and where you might need to increase your test takers,

Diana (26m 16s):
Right? It’s a fun tool and it’s kind of addicting once I get started. I wanna just keep going. But if you are using the option where you can create as many of these as you want, you know, after you’ve created your tree, you can do the option to copy that tree, then you can add the parent and keep going back generation by generation. So there’s some good things you can do with it.

Nicole (26m 41s):
That’s such a great tip that if you’re gonna gonna estimate the Coverage for all of your ancestors, then you can just duplicate your tree and then save it as a new name.

Diana (26m 51s):
Yeah, and I just noticed something that I haven’t even noticed before here where up in settings you can mark the testing database Right now I’ve got it a mixture or unspecified, but then you can go ahead and mark that. This is Ancestry, D n A, this is where all these people are at. So that’s helpful. And then it puts it right into your title, Hickman, Monroe Schultz, and Rachel Cox at Ancestry d a. So how nice is that?

Nicole (27m 17s):
Yeah, I like all these settings. I can pin the Coverage estimation box as I scroll so that if my tree is really huge, I can still see the Coverage.

Diana (27m 25s):
It’s always good to click on the buttons and see what else you can do.

Nicole (27m 30s):
Yeah, so what we had mentioned earlier, the setting where you want to duplicate a tree and add a parent that’s under save. So click the button save and then click duplicate Coverage tree, and then you’ll be taken to a new copy of it and then you can add a parent and see the Coverage of that ancestor and add in more test takers if you have more. Yeah,

Diana (27m 49s):
You can also save an image, you can download your Coverage tree. Lots of things you can do

Nicole (27m 55s):
Well. I hope that you guys will try out The Coverage Estimator tool and see if it’s useful for you and helps you get some ideas of what you might need to do to increase your chances of solving your research questions and increasing Coverage by collaborating with additional test takers and that database. So good luck to you and have a great week.

Diana (28m 17s):
All right, talk to you next time. Bye-bye

Nicole (28m 19s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email and box each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.