RLP 289: Exploring New Tools at Living DNA

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 289 Exploring New Tools at Living DNA NA chromosome browser and Matchbox. 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 family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro Is newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive. Hi, welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (53s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (56s):
Great. How are you? What? have you been doing

Diana (59s):
Well with the new year? I decided that I would really try hard to organize my paper files. I have these three big boxes of file folders and they are organized, but I really need to make sure things are in my digital files as well. And downsize. I feel like I can get everything into one file box because I don’t need to keep all the things that we used to keep in those folders, like census records and other things that are so easily found online now. So I have a goal to go through a few folders at a time, get rid of the folders, find the documents online, make sure they’re on my files, make sure they’re on my tree.

Diana (1m 40s):
So it’s been really fun. The last two days I have gotten rid of at least 10 file folders. Nice. And it’s going to feel so good to get those cleaned up. I spent years putting ’em together and now I want to You know downsize those.

Nicole (1m 55s):
Well, that will be a great thing to do this year.

Diana (1m 58s):
Yeah, in the winter. I always like to do kind of a project like that and especially this idea of getting more organized in January kind of speaks to me, so it’ll be fun. What have you been working on?

Nicole (2m 10s):
I’ve been thinking about my priorities and I’ve finished listening to the book 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and just kind of reevaluating how much time I wanna spend on research, writing, teaching all of the different things that I do, and then of course my family life. So that’s been an interesting read. He talks about how we only have 4,000 weeks in our lives if we have an average lifespan. So we don’t have time to do everything that’s interesting or that we think we might want to do. And one of my biggest takeaways from it was if you make a list of your top 30 priorities or things you want to do, then you should try to focus on the top 10, but then you should stay away from the second 10 because those are the ones that are going to distract you the most from your top 10.

Diana (3m 5s):
I like that. That’s so interesting. I started listening to that too once you made the recommendation, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. So I, I’m really impressed with the idea that in instead of thinking you can do everything to just realize you can’t do everything and just to get over it and relax and enjoy what you can do and not worry about it. So what I’m not gonna visit every country in the world, You know, or I’m probably not going to finish my research. It’s okay.

Nicole (3m 34s):
It’s definitely a little bit of a mindset shift from usual productivity books that talk about how to finish your to-do list and how to get everything done. And I love learning those hacks for how to get everything done. But I like the idea that we do need to have a a mindset shift to being realistic about what you can actually accomplish, right? Recognize that you are immortal and that your time is finite. Once you recognize that, it helps you see what you actually care about doing with your life and then making time to do those things instead of constantly trying to do the things other people want you to do or that you feel like you have on Yourdo List just because it’s there.

Nicole (4m 20s):
It was a good book to read. I liked it.

Diana (4m 22s):
That is a Really good takeaway. And in January I always like to go through my project lists and see what’s still relevant and kind of that same idea. I found several projects that I had given myself through the years and I looked at them, I thought, You know I really don’t feel this anymore. I don’t, I’m not gonna do this project. It’s not important to me. And instead of having it be on my list and stressing me out and thinking, should I ever do that, I just took it off I think it’s really important every so often to reevaluate what we wanna do. So great tips for the beginning of the year.

Nicole (4m 57s):
Well, when this episode airs, we will have already heard our January case study in the Research Like, a Pro Webinar series. So I’m going to share with you about February’s case study. It will be presented by Melanie Witt, who is a qualified genealogist and she is on our research team at FamilyLocket of Genealogist. The description of the Webinar is autosomal and YDNA analysis established Jesse Van as the most likely father of orphan Henry Jacob van, born about 1867 in Arkansas or Missouri. But who was Susan? The mother reported on Henry’s death certificate did the informant merely misremember the name of Jane Davis. Jesse’s known wife autosomal DNA analysis revealed both maternal and paternal genetic networks for Henry’s mother, while the synthesis and mapping of indirect geographic chronological and mastic evidence corroborated the DNA findings and refined her identity.

Nicole (5m 49s):
This case study features analysis of DNA network graphs created in GFE using ancestry DNA match data. So in this lecture, Melanie will talk about identifying unknown females, orphans burned counties, the states of Arkansas and Missouri, genetic genealogy, DNA network, graphs, gfe, multiple relationships, McGuire charts, indirect evidence, census matrices, land records, tax records, probate records mapping, and Google My Maps. So if you heard Melanie’s lecture in last year’s Webinar series, you’ll definitely want to come to this one. She is very detail oriented and has a lot of experience doing difficult research projects. So I’m excited to hear from her.

Nicole (6m 30s):
And this case has a really interesting conclusion, so I encourage you to come. So if you haven’t signed up for that, this is the Research Like, a Pro Webinar series for 2024. You can sign up for $60 on our website. The recordings are posted the day after, and if you miss one, you can always watch the recording and you’ll have lifetime access to the recordings for the year with your registration. Well, the next Research Like, a Pro with DNA study group begins February 7th. If you’re still on the fence about registering, you have until February 1st to decide. So we hope that you’ll join us. We have a weekly newsletter that comes out every Monday. So if you’d like to receive that, go to our website and sign up. And also we hope we’ll see many of you at our next conference, which is Roots Tech.

Nicole (7m 13s):
So we’ll see you at the Roots Tech Conference in Salt Lake City. That’s going to be February 29th through the second. I’m giving two in-person workshops about Airtable and Diana will also be presenting several lectures including some in the advanced track. So we hope that we’ll see you there and we’ll see you at our booth. We’ll have some new things to share at our booth, so that will be fun.

Diana (7m 32s):
I am looking forward to Roots Tech. That’s always such a fun conference and it’s fun just being in person with everyone and with you and our genealogy friends. Well, let’s get to our topic for the day, which is Exploring New Tools at Living DNA NA. So if you have tested your DNA at LivingDNA NA or uploaded a kit there, you may have wondered how best to use this site. You have a much smaller pool of DNA test takers that living date DNA, and you probably don’t have very many close matches. They also don’t have family trees. So for me it’s been difficult to identify common family lines, but they released some new tools last year and those give us so many more options for discovering and grouping our matches.

Diana (8m 21s):
They released a chromosome browser and the Matchbox, which is similar to Ancestry, DNA’s colored dot system. So when those were released, I did some experimentation. So used in conjunction with my chromosome map on DNA Painter. I finally have made some progress in organizing my DNA match list on living DNA.

Nicole (8m 43s):
Great while we first learned about LivingDNA NA at Roots Tech several years ago. It was really exciting. They were sponsoring part of the Roots Tech conference. So they had a bunch of those fun appearances up on the main stage and they showed some of the cool things they were working on. We also got to meet and interview some of the founders of LivingDNA NA, and we were really impressed with their goal of focusing on British Isles ancestry. So that’s something that makes them really unique and one of the great things they do is they give a breakdown of your biogeographical makeup ethnicity based on specific locations in Great Britain and Ireland. So not just you’re from Great Britain, it gives you like you’re from Lincolnshire or different counties within Great Britain and Ireland.

Nicole (9m 28s):
So with my mom, Diana’s side, largely mid 19th century English immigrants, we have many known localities in England. And her estimates shown in the biogeographical makeup verify what we know about her maternal line, which is 75% English and 25% Danish. And then Diana’s paternal lines are colonial US from southern states and come from a wide variety of locations, Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Scandinavia. And these immigrants arrived earlier than we have been able to really trace. Some of them we’ve traced, like we know our first German immigrant on the Schultz line, but many of them arrived before 1750, and so we only have a few of the lines traced back to Europe.

Nicole (10m 11s):
So can these specific identified regions in England give us clues to Diana’s DNA matches? That’s the hope with testing with LivingDNA NA, right,

Diana (10m 21s):
Right. And live DNA offers family matching. So they will show you all the people you match with and it lists a little bit differently than the other DNA testing websites. They use the term degrees. So I have tested my mother and then I also have my son and then Uni Nicole on there. So I have those close matches which show up as parent and child. And then I have a first cousin who is shown as a third degree match. And then after that I go way down to six degree matches, which would be second to third cousins. And so this next closest mystery match only matches me at 88.81 centimorgans.

Diana (11m 7s):
But because he was that close, I figured I should be able to figure out who this is. And the rest of my matches range from 10 to 60 centimorgans. So you can see these matches are not close enough for me to do a leads chart for grouping them. But the new tool, which is called the Matchbox, gives me a way to start grouping my matches and perhaps identify more of these mystery matches. So the first step in doing this is to add a new match group. And living DNA does not tell you whether a match is maternal or paternal. So I created a match group for maternal lines and one for paternal lines.

Diana (11m 48s):
And my plan is to use blue-green for paternal ancestral couples and pink orange for maternal ancestral couples. Now, I do have the benefit of having my mother’s kit on LivingDNA NA, so that makes it so much easier for me to determine maternal versus paternal. And if you don’t have that, you’ll have to use known cousins to start doing some groupings. But with my mother as a maternal group, now all I need to do is to look at our shared matches so the matches between my mother and I now get to have a red or pink dot. And so it was really great when I was able to finally start organizing and see who was who on this match list.

Diana (12m 35s):
You can add as many groups as you want, and you do have a limited number of colored dots, but you can give as many dots to a person as you want. So you can start out with maternal or paternal and then start refining those groups as you learn who your matches are. Now one thing that is also beneficial for my ancestry is that my maternal and paternal lines have virtually no overlap, and I’ve only found one instance where distant relatives married from their lines. So I’m fairly confident that the matches with my mother will be maternal and they are my English lines. And so these are relatively recent English lines. These English Ancestors immigrated in the mid 18 hundreds, about 18 50, 18 60.

Diana (13m 20s):
And I’m really hoping that I might have some cousins who are still living in England that I could connect with. And so I just kept adding these shared matches between my mother and I all the way down to about 25 centimorgans. And each one of these shared two to four segments with me. And so I feel like these are probably decent matches, and I’m hoping that with this higher number of shared centimorgans of 25, there’s less match of the less chance of the match being a false positive. It was really interesting that I discovered, just like on the other DNA testing websites that I have more paternal Ancestors than maternal ones.

Diana (13m 60s):
And like you said, Nicole, my paternal line is all colonial Southern US and they just had a lot more descendants it seems like, coming through these lines. But now I can easily group them and I can focus a little bit more easily on my English maternal matches, which is why I uploaded my DNA to LivingDNA NA in the first place. So for my colonial southern Ancestors, I work more in ancestry because that’s where I have most of the matches, and I can figure things out a little bit easier there. But in the blog post I wrote about this, I have some screenshots about what it looks like on LivingDNA NA and you can see where the Dodge shows up and you can see just how it looks.

Diana (14m 46s):
It’s arranged just a little bit differently. It’s got its own way of showing the DNA matches. But you can see that I have got this mystery match and he was a maternal match. So he is through my English lines. He shares 80 D eight Center Morgans across 10 segments. And I am hoping that by using the Chromosome Browser and the biogeographical estimate, which is more precise with those counties in England, that I can Discover our most recent common ancestral couple.

Nicole (15m 21s):
Nice. So when you say you have many more paternal Ancestors than maternal ones, do you just mean Ancestors where you discovered the common Ancestors number of dots you have?

Diana (15m 34s):
I just had more matches. Yeah, I noticed that I had many more matches through my paternal lines than my maternal lines.

Nicole (15m 41s):
Got it. So you have more matches through paternal Ancestors, right? Not more paternal Ancestors. No,

Diana (15m 46s):
No. If I said that incorrectly, good thing you corrected me. So I meant matches. I just ended up with a lot more blue than than I thought I was going to have. Let’s have a word from our sponsors, newspapers.com. newspapers.com is your ultimate resource for discovering your family’s history. Explore more than 800 million newspaper pages in their vast collections spanning three centuries. newspapers.com is your gateway to exploring the past with papers from the us, uk, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Trace your family’s journey and uncover the extraordinary tales of your Ancestors through newspaper stories, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, photos, and much more.

Diana (16m 29s):
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Nicole (16m 44s):
Well, that’s so great that you have that mystery match. So tell us more about what happened with that and also the LivingDNA NA Chromosome browser.

Diana (16m 53s):
Well, with the LivingDNA NA Chromosome browser, you click on a DNA match and you click the shared DNA tab, and then you get to decide how large of segments you want to show. The default view shows all 10 detective segments, but I wanted to find the segments that were longer than seven centimorgans. I wanted to, to get rid of the really small ones and disregard those in the filtered common areas. So when I did that with this mystery match from 10, I went down to just four segments, but those were pretty decent sizes. They ranged from seven centimorgans to 19 centimorgans, and then I could hover over each segment to see the length and the start and end points, and then I could easily copy that segment data and import it into my chromosome map on DNA Painter.

Diana (17m 47s):
so that was fun because I’ve been working on this chromosome map and DNA Painter for a few years, and I’ve only been able to use the chromosome browsers at family tree DNA, my Heritage and GEDMatch and I believe 23. And me, I have used some there. So I have painted 208 segments, but DNA pager tells me that still only 40%, 46% of my genome is painted. And I wasn’t sure if this would help me with my mystery match or not. So I imported that maternal mystery match into my chromosome map, and I identified it as maternal, and I named it unknown Kelsey Reer.

Diana (18m 30s):
Those are my mother’s parents’ surnames. So I knew it was one or the other, but when I put it in to DNA Painter, it didn’t match with any of my known maternal matches. Oh no. So I still could not identify it as a Kelsie on my grand grandfather’s side or a career on my grandmother’s side. But I think it might be on the Kelsie line because the red and dark pink segments all around it are for career cousins and there’s no overlap with the careers. So I hypothesized that perhaps this was a Kelsie segment ’cause it was all by itself. And I do have several career cousins who I have painted their DNA.

Diana (19m 15s):
So I did have quite a few of them, but not nearly as many of my Kelsey’s. So

Nicole (19m 19s):
Maybe there was a crossover there,

Diana (19m 22s):
Maybe. I don’t know. So So since

Nicole (19m 25s):
There was Kelsey on the left, Kelsey on the right in the middle, nothing left. So maybe there, there was a crossover and it was from the career side.

Diana (19m 33s):
Yeah, it was just the opposite careers on either side, but here in the middle it looked like it was probably a Kelsey.

Nicole (19m 39s):
Got it.

Diana (19m 41s):
Just the opposite. But I gave it a label and I just was gonna call him John, and I gave him the label of John Living DNA. And then I decided to look at our bio geographical regions to help narrow down his identity. And I do know my English identity, all of those regions from my mom’s side. And I saw with John that we share some specific regions in Europe and Britain. Now the South Germanic region that we share, that would be from my paternal, not my maternal lines. So I eliminated that as the origin of our shared segments. And then we also don’t share any Danish ancestry.

Diana (20m 21s):
so that eliminates half of the career line since my great-grandmother, Mary Margaret Peterson career was fully Danish. So

Nicole (20m 29s):
So is that because John didn’t have any Danish?

Diana (20m 33s):
Correct. Now I’m very interested in the highlighted Southeast England region. And this is one of the wonderful things about living DNA is that they specifically call out those regions. And I knew that I had a Really good segment or a good portion of that English ancestry coming from Southeast England. So I had my Ancestors, William Henry Kelpie and Harriet Hugget, we’ve talked about Harriet a bit on the podcast. They came from Southeast England, the Dover Kent County region. And so I mapped the locations of my three remaining second great grandparents, and John and I didn’t share DNA in any of those other locations.

Diana (21m 21s):
So it really looked like our shared Ancestors were on the Kelsey Hugget line, which were in that southeast England area. So what I did was I created a map of the England counties and just to help me remember where everything was, put stars in for my different ancestral lines. So I was able to kind of narrow it down. That was very likely along this Kelsey Hugget line in those southeast England counties, because that’s where we had something in common.

Nicole (21m 59s):
Cool. That’s great that you were able to get closer to a hypothesis for where the shared DNA came from.

Diana (22m 4s):
Right. Which I think is the real value of LivingDNA NA, showing you those more specific regions within England.

Nicole (22m 11s):
Yeah, that’s really valuable and it’s really unique. It sets them apart from the other testing companies. Right.

Diana (22m 17s):
So You know now the thing to do is to identify this mystery match. And I really wanted to try to figure out who this could be. So we have tools that we use all the time. The Shared Center Morgan Project on DNA Painter, our diagramming tool, and I use Lucidchart and then my ancestry tree. And I wanted to explore some possibilities to create some hypotheses. So first I check the amount of DNA that both myself and my mother share with John on the Shared Center Morgan Project to see possibilities. And then I diagram the Kelsie family and where the match could fit in. Then I check my tree for descendants of my great-grandparents, William Henry Kelsie and Selena Betos.

Diana (23m 3s):
And combining those three tools together and doing a little searching under my tree, I found John under just his initials and the tree showed our exact connection. So when I put him into my Lucidchart, I saw that the amount of centimorgans matched with my mother, what it should be, and with myself for what it should be. It turned out he was a second cousin to me and a first cousin once removed to my mother. So it was fun to finally nail him down and see exactly who this mystery match was.

Nicole (23m 39s):
Nice. So you were able to map out the hypothesized relationship based on who you thought he was from your tree. Then you checked the amount of shared centimorgans against that relationship and it was within the expected range. So then you confirmed the hypothesis. Yeah. So in your personal tree, you already had this guy in there?

Diana (23m 60s):
No, I didn’t. Not yet. I did some searching though, and when I was looking for my great-grandparents, I used the search tool to see who else had trees. Oh. With them included in it. Nice. And I found a tree created by him and it just popped out at me. You know, sometimes we have serendipitous moments, right. And when

Nicole (24m 25s):
Somebody is in their own tree, you don’t see their name, but you can see the name of the person who owns the tree. And you can see like the home view. Yes. Like to go to the home person.

Diana (24m 35s):
Yes, exactly. And just

Nicole (24m 36s):
Kind of guess that that could be the person making the tree. Right. It isn’t always the case, but it often is.

Diana (24m 44s):
Yeah. I found that looking at those trees can really help you when you’re working. And then I found him over on Ancestry DNA. He was in my match list there too, but just kind of buried.

Nicole (24m 54s):
Oh, that’s interesting. Because you had found him, ’cause you were trying to use the tools that LivingDNA NA, and then probably on Ancestry where his tree was, it was easier to figure out the common ancestor.

Diana (25m 5s):
Yeah, it absolutely was. And it’s fun because his grandmother and my grandfather are brother sister, so I have pictures of his grandmother and I have You know stories about her. So it was fun to see this connection.

Nicole (25m 25s):
So both your grandfather and his sister were born in the us right?

Diana (25m 29s):
Right. Right. So

Nicole (25m 30s):
Finally, this wasn’t a cousin in England.

Diana (25m 31s):
Correct? Correct. Even though I was hoping to find an English cousin, they were through the Ancestors that came over and had a family in Utah. They settled in Springville, Utah and had their children there. Then the children kind of scattered from there. Their descendants scattered from there all over the country.

Nicole (25m 52s):
One thing I like about living DNA I think it has little flag symbols to show you if the test taker is from England or the US or where they’re from. Right?

Diana (26m 2s):
It does. And so this DNA match did have the US flag, and so You know I figured that out and living DNA also has the ability to put in notes. So I wrote myself a note exactly how we match up. It doesn’t show up on the main page, so you have to click into the match to see your note. I wish it would just show right there. You know on Ancestry you hover and you can see your notes, but at least it has a place for you to mark on the website exactly who it is. So You know now that I have got this gentleman figured out, I do have some other matches that we share. We have 13 shared matches, so that at least gives me a clue about who these others are.

Diana (26m 48s):
And some of them are in England. Yay. So it might be fun.

Nicole (26m 53s):
And now that you’ve figured out who the segment belongs to, you can add that to your DNA Painter map. Yay.

Diana (26m 58s):
Right, right. And that’s so fun. I love getting that DNA Painter map figured out a little bit better. It was really a fun lesson in You know, just trying to see which of your family lines it could be and realizing that this Kelsey segment was just nestled there between the careers with no overlap. And so that gave me that clue that it was on the Kelsey line and not the career line. Anyway, it was a fun process. I learned a lot as I was working with it about not only just about how to work with LivingDNA NA, but how to work with your chromosome mapping as well.

Nicole (27m 31s):
Yeah. You know it’s such a good idea to check in your other match list to see if the particular person you’re searching for has tested another company. You know ancestry is the most popular place to test along with 23. And me and some of these smaller companies like My Heritage, LivingDNA, NA family tree, DNA, if people are there, they’re probably also in another database. I mean, I think it’s a 50 50 chance, but maybe less. But it’s just interesting to see that you can find them in another database and and that can help you figure out how you’re related. Because in Ancestry, that’s where they keep their tree sometimes you’re also getting different information about the match at LivingDNA NA, like You know shared matches who’ve only tested at living DDNA because they are from England or the triangulation or the the Chromosome Browser information.

Nicole (28m 16s):
So there’s just so much to be said for testing in all the databases and comparing notes across them.

Diana (28m 21s):
It really is because we don’t have the chromosome data from Ancestry. So all these matches that maybe would be on Ancestry as well. I can’t paint them in my DNA Painter profile yet. So it’s fun to be able to paint more.

Nicole (28m 37s):
Right. But if you look at shared matches with John on Ancestry and they only share one segment, like maybe you could hypothesize, they all share that segment with you.

Diana (28m 46s):
Right.

Nicole (28m 47s):
Or they share just a different segment, but they’re still related through the same ancestor. It’s so hard to know. You know segment data isn’t always that predictable, I guess.

Diana (28m 54s):
Right.

Nicole (28m 56s):
But it is fun to be able to use a site that has segment data and it’s great that LivingDNA NA is providing these tools and there’s more coming I think so that’ll be nice when they get even more tools for us to use there. Right.

Diana (29m 8s):
I hope so. Hope we continue to get new tools and Discover more about our ancestry. And You know the, the value is if you can connect with your DNA matches, perhaps they have more stories or more pictures that came down through their lines. And it helps us to put together pieces of our puzzle of this big ancestry. Especially if you have a family line that nobody has stories about, nobody has pictures about. You know in my family, we were able to inherit quite a few stories and pictures because my parents did a lot of work and my husband’s parents also had a lot of things handed down. But some of our clients come to us and they know absolutely nothing about their grandparents because the family was estranged and they don’t know anything.

Diana (29m 56s):
And so connecting with some of these DNA matches could help them to really figure out where they came from, learn more about their Ancestors.

Nicole (30m 5s):
Oh, great. Thank you for sharing your exploration of the tools at Living DNA. And we look forward to talking more about DNA tools as we go through the Research. Like a Pro with DNA study group this February, March, April and May. So hopefully we will be able to share some more tips about that as time goes on this year.

Diana (30m 26s):
All right. Well everybody have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye

Nicole (30m 31s):
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 at DA 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 inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at family Locket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.