RLP 308: DNA Features at WikiTree with Emmaline MacBeath

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 308 DNA Tools at WikiTree with Emmaline MacBeath. 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 creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. With Robin Wirthlin, they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Well, hi everybody. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (50s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (52s):
Really well, I’m having just such a great time finishing up my DNA project for the study group and I’ve learned a lot about the different Dyers and the Dyer YDNA surname project, so it’s been wonderful How about you.

Diana (1m 6s):
Oh, I am just working my way through my to-do list and my research plan and looking forward to actually writing up all of my research. I have a lot of thoughts going around in my head and I wanna get ’em down on paper and see if they make sense. That’s why we like reports, right,

Nicole (1m 21s):
Right. It’s so nice to write it all up.

Diana (1m 24s):
Yep, I’m ready to do that. Well for our announcements today, we have our Airtable Guides available on our website, and these come in two varieties. One is Airtable Research logs for genealogy, and it’s the second edition with all the latest updates. And then we have tracking DNA matches with Airtable. So if you’re interested in using Airtable for your research, these are really, really helpful. We have our Research Like a Pro webinar for June coming up and it will be the Oliver case using deductive reasoning with British Parish records with Jessica Morgan, which will be a wonderful case study about using parish records such as the parish chest and different records that we don’t use as often.

Diana (2m 5s):
And then we have our Research Like a Pro Study Group beginning August of 2024. And if you’re interested in being a peer group leader, the application is on our website and we’d invite you to apply. And then we’re excited about our AI workshop July 29th through August 1st. This will be two hours every morning for four days and Nicole and I will be teaching you how to use artificial intelligence to make researching like a pro more efficient. And we’re excited to share with you and we’ll have activities for you to practice and we hope you will join us. So registration is now open and you can find that on our website

Nicole (2m 43s):
Today. We’re delighted to have a guest with us from WikiTree and her name is Emmaline MacBeath. Hi Emmaline.

Emmaline MacBeath (2m 52s):
Hi. Good to be here.

Nicole (2m 54s):
Thank you so much for coming on today. and I will share a little bit about Emma. Emma is a genetic genealogist dedicated to finding birth parents for individuals, searching for them, and reconnecting enslaved ancestors with their descendants. Her goal is to reconnect all 10 plus million enslaved ancestors. Additionally, Emma is an author of young adult and middle grade fiction writing under the pen name Emmaline Rose. Her passion for genealogy began at the age of 12 long before the era of the internet and deepened with the advent of everyday DNA testing. She operates under the business names Emma Rose Books and Missing Link DNA, originally from Northern California.

Nicole (3m 35s):
And having lived in several other locations, Emma now resides in Washington with her two sons. Her spare time is filled with more genealogy and writing alongside reading and spending time with friends and family. Well, we’re just so excited to talk with you today and this is an episode that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time because ever since I stumbled upon some of the DNA features at WikiTree, I’ve really liked them. So thanks for coming to talk with us about this.

Emmaline MacBeath (4m 2s):
And DNA is one of my very, very favorite things to talk about, so I’m very excited to talk about it today.

Diana (4m 8s):
Well, we are going to definitely have some fun then because we love talking about DNA as well. Can you tell us how you got started with family history and this love for genetic genealogy?

Emmaline MacBeath (4m 19s):
It’s funny. I think the, the interest in family history was literally in my DNA. It’s something that both sides of my family have always done and I think it’s partly because I have LDS ancestors on both sides of my family and genealogy is very important to them. So as a kid, I saw family on both sides doing genealogy and it was just natural for me to do it. but it was so hard back then because you know, we didn’t have the internet and I would have to send a letter to a vital records office and ask them if they could do a search and send a check and I might or might not get a result three months later. And now we just go online and boom, we just, we have the record right there.

Emmaline MacBeath (5m 2s):
And it’s funny, I came to WikiTree and DNA about the same time around 2016 and it’s like my world just I was like a kid in a candy store for the first time. That’s when I decided to become a professional because this whole new world of genealogy was just open. It’s so much more enjoyable now than when I was a kid for sure.

Diana (5m 24s):
Oh, that’s so true. and I, remember my parents doing the same thing. They wrote the letters and sent for the documents and whatever, but by the time Nicole and I started, we had a few more things online like censuses, but we still did a fair share of sending off for things. And so now it is really wonderful. So when did you take your first DNA test?

Emmaline MacBeath (5m 47s):
I wanna say it was probably 2016. That’s when I came to WikiTree and I know they happened about the same time. And when I got my results back, I automatically understood the power of what I was looking at and what I could do with the DNA and I taught myself how to use it and how to find birth parents. I joined a project on WikiTree called Adoption Angels, where we helped find birth parents for people. And that’s where I got in the trenches practice of using those new skills and it just went from there.

Nicole (6m 18s):
Wow. Cool. Well, tell us what is the mission of WikiTree and how did the DNA features that WikiTree has help with that mission?

Emmaline MacBeath (6m 27s):
I’d say that there’s kind of two overall missions of WikiTree. There’s many missions, but I think there are two. One is to crowdsource genealogy, which basically means everybody working together to help each other achieve their genealogy goals. There’s people from all over the world. I have ancestors from lots of different countries. And so if I need help in Norway for instance, there are people from Norway who have experience with Norwegian records who I can ask for help from and they generously will give me help on how to use those records or reading the records for me and help me grow my tree. And I’d say the other goal is to connect everyone in the world through this shared tree.

Emmaline MacBeath (7m 12s):
WikiTree is what’s called a one world tree, which means there’s only one profile for every person who ever existed. And we share those profiles together and we work on them together. And so because there’s only one profile and, and everybody’s connected like a web, there’s a great feature on there called the Connection Finder where we can click a button and see how we’re related to every person who’s also on WikiTree. It’s my absolute favorite feature of the website.

Nicole (7m 44s):
I love that. That’s so neat. It’s really interesting when you start to find out you’re related to so many people you didn’t know. Like my husband and I are ninth cousins who knew

Emmaline MacBeath (7m 55s):
And I have to tell you a really quick story of how this connection works. A couple years ago we started something called the CC7and that basically means everybody who’s connected to us through marriage or blood within seven degrees of ourselves. And our goal is to go in and grow different spots in our tree within seven degrees, add more people so that we have more connection points. and I was working on that for my own family. One day I was working on my great uncle’s family adding his family, and all of a sudden I came across this familiar name in an obituary. I have a friend who lives in Oregon and I talked to her dad on a regular basis and it was his name. And I was like, no, it can’t be.

Emmaline MacBeath (8m 35s):
So I send him a message and I said, do you know my great uncle? And he’s like, yeah. And we start talking and it turns out he and I are related through marriage through my great uncle. And we grew up going to the same beach house that my uncle owned and we had the same shared childhood stories. We had no clue that we were related all this time, but it was because working on WikiTree and doing the connection that I discovered I was related to him. And now we have this, you know, whole new connection and experience with each other. Wow,

Nicole (9m 9s):
That is really fun.

Diana (9m 11s):
I know,

Emmaline MacBeath (9m 12s):
I’m still in awe.

Diana (9m 15s):
So fun. One of the values of doing DNA and genealogy, right? Yes.

Emmaline MacBeath (9m 20s):
Well

Diana (9m 20s):
Let’s talk a little bit about some of these features on WikiTree for DNA and can you tell us about recording DNA confirmed relationships?

Emmaline MacBeath (9m 29s):
Yes. Two things about DNA on WikiTree that are really important to know before we talk about any of the features. Number one is we don’t upload raw DNA to WikiTree. For instance, if you have an ancestry DNA test, you can go and upload it for free over at My Heritage, we don’t upload the DNA, we actually just list the tests that we take for comparison reasons. So you’re not gonna get DNA matches at WikiTree. The second thing to know is there are seven levels of privacy on WikiTree for each profile. So if you’re brand new to WikiTree and you’re just opening an account, go to the privacy tab on your profile and look at those privacy options.

Emmaline MacBeath (10m 9s):
And the reason I’m mentioning this is there are only two privacy options that allow the DNA features to work. If you choose to have the highest privacy level, which is red, your DNA features won’t work for you. So check that out before you get started.

Diana (10m 23s):
Oh, Thank you. That’s a great tip.

Emmaline MacBeath (10m 26s):
And so we were talking about DNA confirmation, oh one of my favorite of the DNA features. We have what we call radio buttons where you can click confirmed uncertain on all the data on a person’s profile. And so when you add parents you can click confirmed, not certain, or you can click confirmed with DNA up to the second great grandparent generation. If you write DNA confirmation statements and there’s a help page that helps you, there’s a template for it. So all you do is you take the template and fill in the information for your DNA matches that you use to confirm the relationships.

Emmaline MacBeath (11m 7s):
You put that DNA confirmation statement on the page and you click the radio button that says Confirmed with DNA. And once you do that, your tree will have a DNA confirmed flag for each of those relationships going up your tree. And it’s very exciting to see your tree with these DNA confirmation flags.

Diana (11m 26s):
Oh wow. That is so neat. And it sounds like it is pretty easy. You’ve made it user friendly.

Emmaline MacBeath (11m 32s):
Yes.

Nicole (11m 33s):
Wow. So let me see if I got this understood correctly. You can click the confirmed with DNA and you have to add the matches that you used.

Emmaline MacBeath (11m 41s):
So there’s a template of the statement that you need to place on the profile before you click the confirmed with DNA button. And you don’t name the actual DNA match because you know that’s private information. We write it in an anonymized way, so we might say Emma and her third cousin instead of the name of the exact match. Nice. So once you place that confirmation statement on the profile in the sources section, you can click that confirm with DNA radio button and then click save and that flag will appear.

Nicole (12m 13s):
Okay, I like that. So the next feature I wanna ask about in the list of DNA features is the one about DNA tests, recording tests. So how does that work?

Emmaline MacBeath (12m 25s):
Yes, and so this is what I mentioned that we don’t upload the DNA, we actually record the tests instead. And so when you’re on your own personal profile, it’s under your Wiki ID in the menu and you just click the word DNA and it will take you to the place where you input all the DNA tests that you’ve taken. And this will then show up on your personal profile as a list over onto the side. And so anybody who comes along your profile, maybe they see a familiar last name or they see that you share an ancestor in the tree, then they can see which tests you’ve taken and they can go check out their tests. Like if you’ve both taken ancestry and they can see if you’re a DNA match.

Nicole (13m 5s):
I love that. So basically you can come into your own personal profile and add the DNA test you’ve taken, but you can’t add that for other people. Right? Like if I test my brother?

Emmaline MacBeath (13m 17s):
Yes. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s important to know. For living people, the only people who can add DNA test information is themselves if they are a WikiTree member, you can’t add information for any other living people. If they’re deceased, like my father’s deceased, I was able to add his DNA information on his deceased profile.

Nicole (13m 39s):
Yeah, I need to go and do that for my grandparents that I’ve tested and two of them have passed away now. So I could add the DNA test that they’ve taken to their profiles.

Emmaline MacBeath (13m 49s):
Yes, I don’t think I mentioned this, but once you’ve added that test information, it will then filter in through eight degrees of your related family in the tree. So if you don’t have a tree on WikiTree, if you haven’t added any family, your DNA isn’t going to do anything for you. It’s really important to add as much family as you can so that that DNA can filter as far as it possibly can go through your tree. And so for example, if I go to my second great-grandfather’s profile right now, I will see my DNA test information listed up in the upper right hand corner. and I will see any other people within eight degrees who have also listed their test information in that same list.

Emmaline MacBeath (14m 33s):
So it’s really cool because I can go to his profile and see all the people within eight degrees who should be related to him genetically, who have taken a DNA test.

Nicole (14m 46s):
That is so amazing. So that kind of goes into the next feature that I think Diana was gonna ask you about next.

Diana (14m 54s):
Yes. I I was just thinking that I have taken a mitochondrial DNA test and so can we put our haplogroups out there? What, how do we deal with YDNA and mitochondrial DNA? Yes.

Emmaline MacBeath (15m 6s):
And it works the same-ish for Y and mitochondrial. You list the DNA test the same way when you input it, it knows that it’s a Y or a mitochondrial. And so if it’s a YDNA test, instead of filtering through just eight generations, it’s gonna go up the Y line of the tree So, it goes paternal, paternal, paternal up all the way as far as your tree goes. And then the mitochondrial will do the same on the, the mother’s side all the way up mom to mom to mom to mom as far as the tree goes.

Diana (15m 38s):
So the really neat thing is we could look at any of the ancestors that we share with other people and maybe we don’t have anyone that could do a YDNA or a mitochondrial DNA test, but we could see that there was someone coming down through the appropriate line that has taken it.

Emmaline MacBeath (15m 53s):
Yes, absolutely. And we,

Diana (15m 54s):
We could connect with them. Oh, that would be wonderful.

Emmaline MacBeath (15m 57s):
Another way of looking at this, I was on my grandfather’s profile and I noticed a mitochondrial DNA test was listed on there. And I’m like, wait, what? Who’s that? Because it, it wasn’t mine. And so I looked at the person who, who took the maternal DNA test and I went and looked at his tree up his maternal line and sure enough he shared a, a maternal ancestor with my grandfather and I was able to compare how those two gentlemen were related to each other.

Diana (16m 24s):
That is awesome.

Nicole (16m 25s):
With the Y going up from the test taker, does it then also go back down from the most distant y ancestor down the patrilineal lines going forward in time?

Emmaline MacBeath (16m 36s):
So for instance, let’s take my grandfather for example. If I had taken a YDNA test, it would go from dad to my grandfather and I think what you mean is my grandfather to a different son? No, it does not go backwards that way. It goes only upwards from the test taker

Nicole (16m 53s):
Thank you. That’s so helpful. So another feature listed on our lovely DNA features at WikiTree article is DNA test connections for surnames. So what is that?

Emmaline MacBeath (17m 7s):
So this feature is helpful if you have an unusual surname. It’s funny because on the help page they list the surname of Smith. I would say that’s the least helpful surname to go to go to to see, oh, let’s see all the people who have the last name of Smith who have tested. Yeah, that’s not gonna help you a whole lot. But I run two surname studies on WikiTree. One is Zornes, Z-O-R-N-E-S, and one is Van Orden. and I know that every single person who comes to WikiTree with that last name is related to me through those two surnames because everybody in America with those last names are related to each other.

Emmaline MacBeath (17m 50s):
So that’s a case where I can click, I’m trying to open this right now, but because it’s Smith, it’s taking a long time to load. There’s like hundreds of thousands of Smiths on WikiTree. ’cause I wanted to talk you through it as I was actually looking at it, but basically what it does is it gives you a list of everybody with that last name who’s a WikiTree member. Yeah, it’s timed out. That is too funny. They, I, I need to mention to them to pick a different surname,

Diana (18m 20s):
Something not as common as Smith.

Emmaline MacBeath (18m 23s):
It will give you a list of all the, oh, oh, here we go. Okay. It came up. Yay. 359,000 DNA test connections for people with the last name of Smith. And so it lists not just the people who have taken the test, but any profiles on WikiTree with the last name of Smith that has DNA test information on there. So again, if you’re using an a more unusual last name like Zornes and I can change that in the URL. When I go to this to Zornes, it will show me all the profiles with potential cousins who have tested with that last name in their tree.

Emmaline MacBeath (19m 3s):
Awesome.

Nicole (19m 4s):
That’s really good to know that you can go look up a list of all the people with a surname who have taken a DNA test and I just became a project administrator, a co-admin for the Dyer YDNA surname project. And this would just be a great way to find people to take additional tests for a surname project like that.

Emmaline MacBeath (19m 25s):
And if you like my Zornes family, I have a mystery farther back we have two sets of parents that we can’t decide which are the correct ancestors. So this would be a great chance to talk to all the people who have taken DNA tests and and ask them, Hey, could we compare notes? Can we compare our DNA and see if we can solve this mystery using DNA?

Diana (19m 45s):
Okay, lots of potential here. So can you explain to us what the section illustrations of DNA inheritance means?

Emmaline MacBeath (19m 54s):
This is basically just a snapshot of what we talked about the DNA filtering through eight degrees and it just basically, it’s a snapshot of what that looks like. It’s all on one page for you.

Nicole (20m 9s):
Nice. So I can go see every person that has the DNA from my test out to all my ancestors.

Emmaline MacBeath (20m 17s):
Yes. It also lists the mitochondrial and the Y if you’ve added those tests. And it also has an X chromosome section. So if you’re interested in looking at the pattern of X chromosome in in your tree, it has that listed out and who that would be, I really

Diana (20m 35s):
Like that because that is way more difficult to figure out, you know, mitochondrial inheritance isn’t as difficult or YDNA but X inheritance gets really tricky. And so that’s a great feature

Emmaline MacBeath (20m 48s):
And, and one thing to note is on this list it, it has percentages for each of these people and it’s important to know that those percentages is expected amount of shared DNA with this person. So for instance, your sibling, you know, it’ll show 50% shared DNA. Well that doesn’t mean you share 50% with them. It means that’s what’s expected to share with them. Right. Just it gives us a ballpark.

Nicole (21m 13s):
Great. While we were talking about this, I was just checking some things I thought I had remembered seeing that mitochondrial and Y tests were came down the line and so on the, am

Emmaline MacBeath (21m 28s):
I wrong?

Nicole (21m 29s):
Yeah. On the page DNA test connections. It does, it does say that. So I was really excited because I thought that that was a feature and it was really cool. So I was hoping that you were wrong.

Emmaline MacBeath (21m 41s):
So now I’m gonna have to go check that out because I’m like, wait, what?

Nicole (21m 45s):
Yeah, so lemme just read it then. There’s a, a help page called DNA test connection that goes over that feature and it talks about how if you’ve done the autosomal test, it connects it to all of your blood relatives out to eight degrees of separation, which is up to sixth great grandparents and out to third cousins. And then for Y chromosome it says if a male on WikiTree has taken a Y chromosome DNA test, we go all the way up the direct paternal line father to father to find the test taker’s earliest known paternal grandfather. Then starting with this earliest known paternal grandfather, we go down all the direct male lines, not just the test taker’s own line and the system includes all sons and then skips all daughters and profiles without a specified sex at birth.

Emmaline MacBeath (22m 33s):
Okay. That makes sense.

Nicole (22m 35s):
Yeah. So

Emmaline MacBeath (22m 36s):
That’s how it ended up on my grandfather’s profile. Okay. Right. The mitochondrial makes sense.

Nicole (22m 42s):
Yeah. Yeah, because that makes more sense too. ’cause I was wondering like, oh well how did he get mitochondrial the and I tested if he was probably already deceased.

Emmaline MacBeath (22m 50s):
Yeah. So you just taught me something new. That’s fabulous.

Nicole (22m 53s):
Well this was like the only thing that I knew about the features that we, I just think it’s really, really helpful for finding those haplo roups of our relatives. Like you said, that we don’t necessarily know all of the cousins who could have taken that test. Especially those really distant ones that are like, you know, eight cousins. But Right. We trace our Y lines back that far and connect up.

Emmaline MacBeath (23m 20s):
Now one thing to to really stress here is this is based on tree. So if you, the tree is inaccurate, the DNA is inaccurate. So it’s really important to weigh that. Okay, I see this Y goes all the way out to the this person and has filtered down. That’s definitely my Y ancestor. Well you need to make sure the paper trail is correct as well in the tree.

Nicole (23m 44s):
Yeah. Such a good point that if we don’t understand how these connections work on WikiTree, we might come to a flawed conclusion like that. So it’s good to go to the original test taker and which is such a great part of WikiTree is that you can yes, you know, see the name of the tester and see the test they took and then see their line going back.

Emmaline MacBeath (24m 2s):
Yeah. And go see if your DNA matches with each other on the same test.

Nicole (24m 8s):
Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that I very first did when I learned about WikiTree DNA tools is I had a hypothesized Dyer ancestor that I wondered if he was the father of our brick wall on the Dyer line and he, there were like eight people who said they descended from this guy. I think it was like James Monroe Dyer or something like that. And he had a lot of descendants who had tested and they had their GEDMatch kit numbers. Well I had three, my father-in-Law and his two brothers who are on GEDMatch. So I just compared the brothers with all the descendants of this James Monroe Dyer. None of them matched each other at all. So I thought, okay, maybe I’ll move on to another hypothesis for now.

Emmaline MacBeath (24m 47s):
And that’s the beauty of having DNA on WikiTree is you have the ability to do that.

Nicole (24m 53s):
Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. All right, what is this DNA inheritance widget thing?

Emmaline MacBeath (24m 58s):
I looked at this and I’m like, I don’t know what this is. I believe it’s a widget you can put on your own website that gives you that snapshot of your DNA and your tree. And this is, this is a great time to talk about the fact that WikiTree has a zillion features and there’s really no way to get to know all the features unless you just go and you play with all of them. When you’re brand new to WikiTree, click on every single link, see where it goes, see what it does for you. You cannot break WikiTree. And so this is one of those features where you can just click on it and see what code it gives you for a widget and see if you wanna insert that somewhere on your website and just play with it and see if it gives you what you need.

Nicole (25m 39s):
Thank you, that’s cool.

Diana (25m 41s):
I love it that you have the whole code right there to put right into your blog post or whatever you have on your, on your website. So many fun features and I think that you are so right in saying you just have to click and you have to try everything to see what you can do there. Well there’s another feature called list of potential test takers and DNA descendants pages of my cousins that I’m curious about.

Emmaline MacBeath (26m 4s):
So the first one, it gives you a descendants view and obviously you’re gonna know all your descendants so you really don’t need the descendants so much.

Nicole (26m 13s):
Is that actually for like an ancestor, a list of all of their descendants?

Emmaline MacBeath (26m 18s):
Everyone has a descendants page. So the first example they show you here is Thomas Roberts, I’m guessing he was born around 1820 and there’s a button when you go to any profile you can click on it, it says it’s a green button, it says descendants. And when you click on that it shows you all the way down as far as WikiTree takes you of all the descendants for that person. So that’s a potential way of finding descendants who could test, especially like this first one I clicked on, they’re showing you the Y line. Oh nice. If you’re looking for someone to take a YDNA test, this is an a great way. Yeah. To find someone who could potentially test this example they gave, there’s several people here who are living and so I can go click over to their profile and talk to them and see if, you know, they’d be willing to test.

Emmaline MacBeath (27m 9s):
The My Cousins is a different page and I believe this gives you your CC7en that I talked about and that’s within seven degrees. But this gives it to just your cousins through common ancestors. So it’s not through marriage. And so you just look through this list and you find people who are living members of WikiTree, you know, maybe you want to talk to them about taking a DNA test if they’re related to you through a specific ancestor that you wanna work on.

Diana (27m 42s):
I think descendancy views are so helpful and I often go over to Family search, family tree to look at descendancy, but this is really fast and easy and it gives us the added value of showing people who’ve actually tested Yes and being able to click on their profile, see where they’ve tested and connect with them. So,

Emmaline MacBeath (28m 2s):
And just being able to see it with a click of a button. Uh, it was so nice and

Diana (28m 6s):
Easy. It really is.

Nicole (28m 9s):
Yeah, I clicked on that example, Thomas Roberts descendants and then scrolling down, it’s got the X chromosome descendants. So that’s really cool too that if you really want to compare XDNA, this could help find a potential test taker for that.

Emmaline MacBeath (28m 25s):
Yeah. Like you mentioned, X chromosome is tricky the way that it’s inherited and so it’s great that it lists it out for you here. Yeah,

Nicole (28m 33s):
This is awesome. Well this episode is brought to you by Newspapers.com Discover your mom in the newspaper when you search Newspapers.com. Find the stories that made her who she is today by searching the largest online newspaper. Archive Newspapers.com.com makes it easy to find your mom, grandma, and others in the papers. Search more than 945 million pages from major news titles to small town papers, uncover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries photos, and much, much more. Explore papers dating back to 1690 or as recent as last month. Newspapers.com is used by millions of people every month For genealogy historical research and more, find something you like with Newspapers.com.

Nicole (29m 14s):
It’s a snap to save and share articles with family and friends or attach them directly to your ancestry tree. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s code FamilyLocket and celebrate the stories of a lifetime with Newspapers.com. Okay, well our next DNA feature to discuss is called privacy controlled Trees and lists to share with DNA Matches. So tell us what that can do.

Emmaline MacBeath (29m 42s):
So that’s the beauty of having DNA features on WikiTree. It’s standardized and, and privacy controlled. you know when you go in and you list your information so it’s easy to share your tree with strangers and not be afraid that you’re sharing something you shouldn’t be sharing as far as DNA test information. So my second great-grandfather, again I can share his profile with him. It has the DNA testers listed over to the side, but that’s controlled information. It’s, it’s what they’ve chosen to share and it’s not giving anything private away. I don’t know if you guys know this, but on GEDmatch you can connect your WikiTree tree on your GEDmatch account and it’ll have a link.

Emmaline MacBeath (30m 25s):
So when someone goes and searches for all their matches on GEDmatch, if you have a WikiTree tree that’s linked, they can just click over to your tree and easily see that, which is so, so nice.

Nicole (30m 38s):
Yeah, I really like the fact that it makes it easier to handle the privacy issues at WikiTree

Diana (30m 46s):
And that it’s easy to share with people. That’s really

Emmaline MacBeath (30m 49s):
Nice. Very easy to share. I, as a matter of fact, WikiTree is my public tree. It, anytime I wanna talk to someone about my tree, I send them to my WikiTee. If I wanna do speculative work on my tree, I do that in a private Ancestry tree that nobody can see because I don’t want anybody copying information that might not be correct.

Diana (31m 7s):
Right. It’s good to have those two defined clearly in your mind so you know what you’re doing. Well there’s another feature here that I’m really interested in. It’s called the enhanced Relationship Finder for matches including triangulation.

Emmaline MacBeath (31m 22s):
So this takes us to my very, very, very favorite feature on WikiTree, which is the Relationship Finder I mentioned. If you go to the bottom of any profile, there’s a button you can click that says tell me how I’m related to this person. I’m just gonna compare to Abraham Lincoln ’cause I know I’m related to him somehow. And if I go to the bottom of his profile, I’m gonna click the link that says your genealogical relationship. There’s two different links. One is my connection, which is could be through marriage and what is my genealogical relationship? and I want that because it’ll show me through blood how I’m related to him.

Emmaline MacBeath (32m 2s):
Usually you’re connected to someone in multiple ways and if I go to Abraham Lincoln for example, and there’s a dropdown over on the left and it’ll show me all the different ways that I’m potentially related to him,

Nicole (32m 16s):
It sounds like if you find out that you share a segment of autosomal DNA with two or more other people who also match each other on that segment, then you can triangulate. But if the Relationship Finder finds more than one common ancestor for two people, you can filter the common ancestors by adding a third, fourth, or fifth person. So it’s trying to help you with that triangulation process.

Emmaline MacBeath (32m 39s):
There’s an advanced filtering feature over on the right. I can add another person in.

Nicole (32m 44s):
So you can take three people and say find our common ancestor.

Emmaline MacBeath (32m 49s):
Yes. Three people on,

Nicole (32m 51s):
Well I had never heard of this. This is gonna be interesting. So let’s say we have three people who all just on paper descend from the same ancestor and we find we do share a segment of DNA, then boom, we triangulate. But sometimes we see, we share a segment of DNA with people but we don’t know the common ancestor yet. So then we can put them in here as if they’re all on WikiTree and then we can use the Relationship Finder to find the common ancestors

Emmaline MacBeath (33m 18s):
It’s something to play around with and see what that can I, I’m gonna play with it today and see what that does for me because I know I have lots of cousins on WikiTree so I can put them in there and see what that shows for us.

Diana (33m 32s):
This might also be a way to test your tree completeness and see if you are sharing in more than one way with someone. Because you know, if you have your lines going back to a similar location and you maybe think you’ve got two or three shared ancestors way back, maybe this would help to to find those. I wonder if it would bring up both of them or all three of them or however many you share.

Emmaline MacBeath (33m 56s):
In some populations, like we have a very large population of Quebecois members on WikiTree and we’re all related. We’re at least ninth cousins to each other. So when we do the Relationship Finder and it says over, there’s that dropdown over on the left that shows all the different ways we could be related. The list is long.

Nicole (34m 15s):
Oh

Emmaline MacBeath (34m 16s):
Of all our potential ancestors with each other. So, it is great to see, okay, you know you’re related to them this way, but there’s these 10 other ways you’re also related to them. So when it comes to DNA, that’s really important to know that that DNA that you’re sharing may not be through the ancestry you think.

Diana (34m 36s):
Right.

Nicole (34m 36s):
Wow. That could be really helpful for people who live in communities with a lot of pedigree collapse to really understand, okay, here’s how I’m related to this person in four different ways.

Emmaline MacBeath (34m 46s):
Yes.

Nicole (34m 47s):
Let’s talk about this next feature, DNA ancestor confirmation aid.

Emmaline MacBeath (34m 53s):
I at the beginning talked about those DNA flags that are created when we click confirmed with DNA. And this is a snapshot of all the people in your tree that you have confirmed with DNA and it shows you the ones that are not yet confirmed with DNA. So it’s really kind of a visual, another way of looking at it than from a tree view.

Nicole (35m 14s):
Nice. That’s fun. I like the check marks. It really gives you the motivation to go through and check off some more people. I

Emmaline MacBeath (35m 22s):
Have one second-great grandparent. Not yet confirmed with DNA and it’s just killing me.

Nicole (35m 28s):
Yeah, So, it looks like it goes up to third great grandparents and then you can expand up with more using the arrows.

Emmaline MacBeath (35m 34s):
Yes. And it’s important to know that once you get past the second great grandparents, there’s a different kind of DNA confirmation statement that you need to write and this is where triangulation and shared segments comes into play and you need to know DNA at a a higher level in order to to make those kind of confirmations.

Nicole (35m 53s):
Yeah, I like these examples. It’s so helpful to see examples of these confirmation statements on this example page. So everyone listening, go to the show notes and click on the link to the DNA features page and then you can click on the DNA ancestor confirmation aid for Peter Roberts to see an example of this.

Diana (36m 11s):
Well and I really like that. It helps you understand which confirmation you should be using. So. it says do you have a match? Do you know your relationship? What type of test are you using? you know, it gives you some help to figure out what you’re doing here. So this definitely is got a little bit of a learning curve, but I can see that whoever developed it has really tried hard to make it pretty user friendly.

Emmaline MacBeath (36m 36s):
There’s also an app and I, wish I could quickly tell you where to find it. I can find it for you later that will write the confirmation statement for you if you just fill in the information. This is kind of a newer WikiTree app that’s available.

Nicole (36m 51s):
Oh

Emmaline MacBeath (36m 52s):
Fun.

Diana (36m 52s):
It sounds like it has to do with AI helping us with that.

Emmaline MacBeath (36m 55s):
Well we, in the last two years we have users who are great app creators and they’ve created zillions of apps for us on WikiTree to do many, many, many different things. It’s just trying to figure out where they are.

Diana (37m 12s):
Interesting. Interesting challenge. Alright, so we are getting to the end of this list. We’ve talked about so many fun things, but there is something here called DNA categorization for projects. So what does that mean?

Emmaline MacBeath (37m 25s):
Categorization on WikiTree is a little bit like tags, but they’re linked tags and you can put these on all the profiles and when you click on the link it takes you to a page that has all the profiles listed with that category on there. And so this is a potential thing that could be used for your DNA project. You could create a category specific to your needs and put it on all the profiles. So all the profiles you’re working on are linked together in this category. We also have space pages that’s a unique feature of WikiTree. It’s a workspace where you could also work on your DNA project on WikiTree.

Emmaline MacBeath (38m 7s):
And so this is just something to explore. Not a lot of people use it because you know the space pages might be a better way to go where you can just put a lot of information on there.

Nicole (38m 18s):
We talked about those in our previous episode with Betsy Ko and we were like so excited to hear about these space profiles where you can just kind of do anything you want. Yes. And you can put in like I’m looking for test takers for this and, and then just send that link out to people and then have a bunch of different links to things within WikiTree that are supporting the project that you’re doing.

Emmaline MacBeath (38m 41s):
And the number of space pages is unlimited so you can just keep creating them as you need them.

Nicole (38m 46s):
Pretty awesome.

Diana (38m 47s):
Perfect.

Nicole (38m 49s):
Alright, well that was a great list of DNA features. Tell us for our last discussion, tell us about this G2G Forum and how we can discuss questions and learn more about DNA at WikiTree there.

Emmaline MacBeath (39m 4s):
So the beauty of of WikiTree is we are a community and we work together to help each other on our genealogy, our DNA projects, whatever it is we’re working on. So we have a form called G2G, which stands for Genealogist to genealogist. And we can go on there and we can ask for help with absolutely anything you can imagine for genealogy. So if you have a DNA question, you’re not under understanding something or you’re trying to compare some family, whatever it is, you can go on there and you can ask, just make sure to tag at DNA so that the people who follow that tag and are more knowledgeable in DNA will be the ones to come by and answer your question.

Emmaline MacBeath (39m 45s):
When it comes to DNA, you just need to be careful because it’s against the terms of service on WikiTree to talk about living people. So make sure that your questions are not mentioning DNA matches by name, et cetera. But lots and lots of people who are knowledgeable about how to use DNA will help you with your questions.

Nicole (40m 5s):
That’s awesome. It’s really cool to see that that WikiTree has these wonderful collaboration and community features to help us learn from each other and also to grow the family tree and grow the one big tree bigger and more accurately. So I love it

Emmaline MacBeath (40m 24s):
And that is the end goal is to have the most accurate tree. And of course, how do you get the most accurate tree by using DNA? Yeah.

Diana (40m 32s):
Oh, that’s so fun. Well Thank you so much for being on the podcast and walking us through and being willing to just jump in with us to discover some things that are a little bit hidden there with the DNA tools. So. it has been so fun.

Emmaline MacBeath (40m 49s):
It’s been my pleasure.

Diana (40m 50s):
Well Thank you again and thanks everyone for listening and we hope you go check out some of these DNA features on WikiTree and see what you can do with that. So thanks again and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye.

Nicole (41m 2s):
All right. 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.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 at FamilyLocket.com/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.