RLP 312: Mitochondrial DNA and WikiTree

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 312 Mitochondrial DNA and Wiki tree Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of Research Like, a Pro, a Genealogist, Guide With, Robin 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (40s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, Hi Mom, and hi everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro,

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole. How. are you doing

Nicole (49s):
Really? well, I just You know I had the time of my life last week going to the courthouse and researching in Oklahoma. It was So fun. I can’t wait to write blog posts and talk about it on the podcast.

Diana (1m 1s):
I can’t wait either. It was really fun to see some of your pictures and learn what you were doing as you were there, so, so neat to have that experience. That’s so great.

Nicole (1m 11s):
Yeah, it really was a conscious choice that I had to make that like I’ve been saying for years that I want experience researching in a courthouse on site and I just really finally said, I’m gonna make this happen. And the opportunity arose when my husband was going on a work trip and I just did everything I could to make it happen. So.

Diana (1m 30s):
Well, congratulations. That’s what life is all about, making it happen.

Nicole (1m 35s):
Now I have over a hundred images of things to process So I. Have my work cut out for

Diana (1m 39s):
Me. Yeah, probably for the next few months I would think. That’s a lot. Yep. Oh wow.

Nicole (1m 46s):
What about you? What have you been doing?

Diana (1m 48s):
Well, I finished up my report on Clumsy Klein and it’s always so great to get the research report completely written and I did one version of it, then got some peer review, went back and did edits, and then I printed it out. And I am always amazed when I print out my work, my report, I go through it and I just mark it up like crazy. I see things so differently when it’s on paper and So that really helped to strengthen it. And then here’s a funny thing. I realized I had not even mentioned the mitochondrial DNA test I have for this case and I had one of my cousins take the mitochondrial test specifically for solving Clumsy Klein’s family, and I kind of forgot about it.

Diana (2m 34s):
I was so caught up in the autosomal DNA and all the connections I was finding. So today I went back and added mitochondrial and I think I’m definitely going to have to do some targeted testing because I have so many matches, but they’re all at a genetic distance of one, two or three. And of course that’s not going to tell me You know anything except for I have a Happle group. It’s a broadly European happle group for her and You know. I was just happy that I had that to add in and now I’m going to really work hard to get some other mitochondrial DNA test takers for the other lines that I need to to see how they connect to clumsy.

Nicole (3m 10s):
Great. It’ll be perfect to talk about that some more as far as mitochondrial DNA and tools for that in our topic today a little bit later.

Diana (3m 18s):
Right.

Nicole (3m 19s):
Well for announcements, if you’re trying to learn Airtable and you feel stuck, please check out my Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference guides. There’s one that tells you the overview of Airtable and another that tells you how to track DNA matches their PDF downloads available on our website. Then if you have not signed up for our webinar series for 2024, then you may want to sign up this month. July 20th, we have Mark Thompson presenting who is Grace Brown’s mother. He will be talking about indirect evidence and tracing his matrilineal line back to Grace Brown. Grace was born in England and died in Massachusetts and it should be interesting. Mark is a graduate of the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group and the author of the blog making Family History and he often speaks about artificial intelligence.

Nicole (4m 5s):
So you may have heard him on any of those topics. Okay, well we just opened registration for the Research Like a Pro Study Group. As we’re recording this this fall, very end of August, we will be starting our 10th Research Like a Pro study group. Can you believe it’s 10?

Diana (4m 20s):
That is so cool. That’s amazing.

Nicole (4m 23s):
It’s not the 10th year because the first couple times we did it, we did two of them every year. But it’s been a great run of study groups and it’s always just a wonderful opportunity to make progress on a research question that you maybe need some motivation to work on. Maybe it’s a challenging project or maybe you just enjoy working with others and getting feedback on your work to help you improve your skills as a professional genealogist. Or maybe you’re an intermediate genealogist and you want to get better. Well, if you’d like to be a peer group leader for that, please let us know or apply on our website. We have an application for that and you’ll get free registration. Coming up soon is our artificial intelligence workshop, Research Like, a Pro with AI on July 29th through August 1st and we’d love to have you join us for that.

Nicole (5m 5s):
It’s gonna be four days of a lot of fun and interesting things and we’ll be having little homework assignments each day and then a class in the morning that’s recorded. And if you can’t come live, you can watch the recordings afterward, just register like everyone else and then watch the recordings whenever you get to it. They’ll be available for three months to get all this news in our newsletter. Just sign up for our newsletter and sometimes we send out coupon codes,

Diana (5m 28s):
Thank you. Well, we have a listener spotlight today and this is Terry and the title of this review is Getting Organized. Terry says, I wanted to reach out and Thank you for your informative podcast. Your teaching style is clear and a pleasure to follow. I always listen during my Monday morning walks. It’s been so long now that it feels like you’re my Monday Walking Buddies. I’ve inherited a large amount of unorganized genealogy documents and I’m planning to start organizing it properly. I listened to a couple of your 2019 podcast episodes for guidance, which were helpful. However, I have a couple of questions. So question one, do you still use Evernote for organization? I haven’t heard you mention it recently and I’m curious about your current tools.

Diana (6m 13s):
So. I can answer that. I do still use Evernote, but I use it to organize my syllabi blog posts, basically my research into context or historical information. I don’t put my genealogy in Evernote. I started doing that a little bit years ago, but then decided I was just going to use my trees and my Google Drive to organize that. But Evernote is still where I put all of that extra information that I will need for reference. So my reference material. And then number two, question, what is your file naming protocol?

Diana (6m 54s):
And I just have something simple when I download a file, I have the date, the type of record, the person and the place. So 1850 census, John C. Klein, Fulton County, Arkansas. So that’s what I do. It’s pretty simple. I have it in my head, So, I. Don’t have to think about it, I just do it really quickly. And then her final comment, any insight you have to share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and your sharing your expertise with the community. Thank you so much, Terry. We always love getting questions and thoughts from our listeners.

Nicole (7m 29s):
Well, that was nice and it’s fun to hear questions about organization and I feel like in Research, Like a Pro, a lot of the time people are wondering how to take all of their genealogy materials and get them organized and following a process definitely helps you to do it along the way. But if you’re taking care of years of backup, then it’s nice to have some system and plan where you can organize those things and then going forward do better. So that’s good to hear about Evernote and how you’re still using it and some advice on that.

Diana (7m 58s):
Right? It’s really helpful, especially when I am researching a topic and I remember that I heard a talk on that a long time ago and I can just go put in the keywords and it will pull up all my information. So it’s for me just really fast and fun to use it for my reference material.

Nicole (8m 16s):
Great. Today we are talking about mitochondrial DNA, like we mentioned, but not just mitochondrial DNA. We’re talking about using mitochondrial DNA with wiki tree. So let’s get started on that topic. We all inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, but only females can pass it on. So males and females inherit it from their moms, but the males do not pass it on. This unique inheritance path is interesting to explore and it can be really useful in our genealogy, especially if we understand its limitations. Unlike autosomal DNA where we receive it from all of our close ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA we carry is very old and was passed on to us from a grandmother many generations in the past.

Nicole (9m 4s):
When you take a mitochondrial DNA test, you receive a haplo group. The ISO wiki defines a haplo group as a genetic population group of people who share a common ancestor on the patcher line or Maline top level HAP blue groups are assigned letters of the alphabet and deeper refinements consist of additional number and letter combinations. So you may have seen those hap blue group designations and thought, okay, there’s a bunch of letters and numbers. What does that mean? Well, family tree DNA gives this statement about mitochondrial DNA haplo groups. A haplo group represents a shared maternal line ancestor that lived thousands of years ago. Everyone in a common haplo group shares a common distant ancestor.

Nicole (9m 45s):
So we don’t know the name of that woman, but we can think of that haplo group, the letters and numbers as a unique name for her

Diana (9m 53s):
Thank you for that explanation. It’s always so good to review the inheritance of these different types of DNA. Well, you might be wondering about where you can receive a happle group. So if you do the autosomal DNA test at 23 andMe, you’ll receive a high level maternal happle group. And if you do the autosomal DNA test at living DNA, you will also receive the high level haplo group plus a more refined haplotype. And finally, if you do the mitochondrial DNA full sequence test at family tree DNA, you’ll receive your haplo group and a report showing matches. Unfortunately, because mitochondrial DNA is passed down relatively unchanged for generations, it will be very difficult to determine that common female ancestor between you and those matches.

Diana (10m 41s):
So the best use for genealogy is to target test descendants of a hypothesized female ancestor and that can help you to rule in or rule out that proposed ancestor So I tested at 23 andMe and family tree DNA with the full sequence mitochondrial test. And I had my son test at living DNA. So at living DNA, you also get the YDNA happle group as well as mitochondrial So I thought it would be fun to have him test there. now I passed on my mitochondrial DNA to all of my children. So my son has the same happle group as me. And here are our results. So you can get an idea of what this looks like.

Diana (11m 23s):
From 23 andMe, we had the higher level, which was U five B one C, and then family tree DNA and Living DNA NA both gave me a more specific, which means it’s longer So, it was U five B one C and then the added two B. So it’s always fun to look at these HAP groups and try to understand a little bit more about them and look at the company’s explanation. So family tree DNA gave me self-reported countries of origin for other people with this haplo group who were exact matches with me. And they were all over Europe, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, the UK and the us.

Diana (12m 3s):
So you could see this was a broadly northern European group. And then because both family tree, DNA and Living DNA NA reported a more specific haplo group than 23 andMe, I was able to get a little bit more information from living DNA and they said that this haplo group is commonly found in the Saami people, S-A-A-M-I. I am not sure if I pronounced that correctly, but they are of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland So. that made perfect sense the Scandinavian connection because my matrilineal line goes straight back to Denmark.

Nicole (12m 36s):
That does make sense and it’s nice to see the paper trail lining up with the DNA results. Well, our connection to Denmark is very close. So your great-grandmother and your great-grandmother’s mother and her grandmother were fully Danish. And so it’s great to have images of them and information about them On family search, there’s several relatives who have uploaded photos, stories and documents about them. So we know a little bit about each one, which is pretty neat. Well, starting with my grandmother, here is a small snippet about each of these women. So Diana’s mother, my grandmother is Anna Ma Kelsey.

Nicole (13m 18s):
She was born in 1928 and she was born in Burleigh, Idaho and married her high school sweetheart born pace in 1949, and he died of cancer just four years later. And this is sad because they had an 18 month old son and I just can’t imagine that circumstance. Well, she moved forward with her life and eventually married my grandpa Bobby Jean Schultz in 1956. She taught the values of hard work, being organized, caring about others, and much more.

Diana (13m 50s):
All right, so now let’s go to Florence Matilda career. This was my grandmother. She was born in 1892 in Spanish for Utah, and she gave up her life of relative luxury to marry my grandfather Edward Raymond Kelsie. In 1917, they started Mary life in a one room shack home setting in Idaho. She lost much of her hearing early in life, but she never complained and always thought of others before herself. Her mother was Mary Margaret Peterson, born 1871 and she was the first of this matrilineal line to be born in the United States. She married Charles Kenon Kreer in 1892 and started married life in grand style.

Diana (14m 30s):
In the two story home he built in Spanish Fork. Sadly, she suffered an accident 15 years after marriage that rendered her an invalid for the rest of her life. Her talents in music, storytelling and sewing brought joy to her family and neighbors. Mary’s mother was Margaret Matilda rig Tripp. She was born in 1848 in Rand or Denmark, and she immigrated with her parents to Utah territory as a 7-year-old In 1855, she worked hard to help her widowed mother. Her father had died upon arriving in the US and she married another Danish immigrant, sorn Peterson in 1867. In 1880, she lost three of her children to diptheria and died herself in 1886 after the birth of her 10th child after Margaret, we have Johanna Elizabeth KGuard, and she was born in 1813 in five Borg, Denmark, and married Peter Rick Tripp.

Diana (15m 27s):
On May 1st, 1840, they went against tradition and joined the newly formed church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. When missionaries visited their village with her husband, she packed up her family of four children in 1855 and crossed the Atlantic. They settled in Iowa and St. Louis working to earn funds for the trip West. But before they could begin this trek in 1857, her husband and son died of smallpox, determined to make it to Utah territory. In 1859, Joanna and her surviving three children walked all the way. As a widow, Johanna worked hard to support her family and outlived all but one of her six children.

Diana (16m 7s):
Her faith and persistence are inspiring. So as I was looking through the biographies of these women, I was just so struck with how each one had pretty significant challenges, widows and health issues, and losing children, and they overcame their challenges and seem to really have a lot of opportunities to still give and serve others. So they’re great role models. Well, let’s have a word from our Sponsor newspapers.com. This episode is brought to you by newspapers.com. Discover your mom in the paper when you search newspapers.com. Find the stories that made her who she is today by searching the largest online newspaper.

Diana (16m 51s):
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Diana (17m 34s):
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Nicole (17m 40s):
Well, after taking a mitochondrial DNA test and reviewing the matches and the haplo group at family tree DNA, you might wonder, well, what else can I do with this? Maybe you took the mitochondrial DNA test to compare with the descendant of a hypothesized ancestor, or you might’ve taken it just to see your haplo group or fishing for matches. But by adding your matrilineal line to the collaborative wiki tree, you can also add your haplo group for mitochondrial DNA, which will then populate the profile of every female ancestor who is related along that unique DNA inheritance. That haplo group will also populate any descendants of each ancestor who could have received that mitochondrial DNA.

Nicole (18m 22s):
This is powerful and it really helps us to share the DNA information that we have with other family members. Well, what is wiki tree? Wiki tree.com is a free website for building a family tree. And it’s one family tree so everyone contributes to the same tree. It does require that you have a login to be able to contribute to it. The homepage explains that this is a single family tree where users work together carefully evaluate sources and incorporate DNA. Any modern family history or living people are private. Wiki Tree has been in the genealogy world for 15 years and it now has over a million members.

Nicole (19m 2s):
Alright,

Diana (19m 3s):
Well you can participate in Wiki tree without signing the Wiki genealogist honor code. But if you’re serious at using Wiki tree at a higher level, you’ll need to read and sign it. And the honor code is great. It discusses collaboration, respecting privacy and copyrights, giving credit and citing sources. And those are all things that we want to do anyway with our genealogy. Wiki Tree has six levels of privacy for a profile that you can edit at any time. It can be unlisted, private, private with public biography, private with public family tree, private with public biography and family tree public and open. The public and open.

Diana (19m 44s):
Privacy options are not available for living people, so they’ll always be private. Wiki Tree encourages collaboration and open profiles. Anyone can go and wiki tree and search for an ancestor, and I thought I would try some of mine. I found the profile of my ancestor Martin s Schultz. He lived between 1793 and 1854, and I did not create his profile. Someone else did So. I was able to look at it, and there was a little open lock in the upper right corner that lets me know this. This profile can be edited. If the lock is closed, you can’t edit it, you’d have to contact the profile manager.

Diana (20m 26s):
But I can go ahead and add descendants and connect to my Schultz line. I can add sources, images, and stories. And then once I’ve connected to Martin, my name will be listed under the DNA connections on the right. So each profile over on the right has DNA connections and any person who has added DNA to their personal profile, their ancestors will all show that DNA information. So it’s really, really neat. It’s completely optional to add any DNA information, but in my opinion, it’s the key reason why I want to be on Wiki Tree.

Nicole (20m 60s):
Awesome. It’s just such a great way to collaborate. Wiki Tree has a lot going on, but you can get started with Wiki Tree without knowing everything about it. There is a little video you can start with called What is Wiki Tree? And another great video is called Welcome to Wiki Tree by Leanne Cooper. Basically, you’ll just start by creating your account, your login and your profile, which you can edit at any time. Then you’ll start by adding your parents and grandparents and ancestors. Wiki Tree does allow you to upload a GED com, but you do need to verify each profile and make sure there’s not a duplicate or a person already in the tree with the same information.

Nicole (21m 40s):
So many people choose to build their tree from the ground up. This is very similar to the Family Search family tree if you’ve ever used that, where you want to kind of add unique people only and not add a whole bunch of duplicates. One thing that’s unique is that no profile can be added without a source. So you need to at least say You know you have personal information about your parents being your own parents and that kind of thing. And then going further back, hopefully you have sources while adding DNA information is a very unique, awesome thing about Wiki Tree, but you don’t upload your raw DNA. You do add your GEDMatch kit number, your YDNA and your mitochondrial DNA haplo groups, and you can note where you have tested your DNA such as ancestry, DNA, my Heritage or family tree DNA.

Nicole (22m 27s):
And this can help other people find you on those websites.

Diana (22m 32s):
So you can add information or you can add that you have tested at these different testing companies. And you can also add that you have tested at living DNA and mittal, YDNA. mital YDNA is where you can upload your YDNA test results or your mitochondrial DNA test results. So you can also note that you are there on mittal YDNA and you can get all of that information in there and then it will show up on each of your ancestors. So I added all of those tests. And remember, we don’t upload DNA, you just have a screen and you will just mark that you’ve taken the test and then it will appear on your profile and your ancestors.

Diana (23m 18s):
So because I taken the mitochondrial DNA test, I went ahead and added my haplo group and then it populated through all of those female lines that I had as far back as I went. And then it was fun to see that it also populated on my children’s profiles and So I need to go and add more of the descendants of those women and then it will populate on those descendants as well. So that’s really neat to have that opportunity to look through Wiki Tree and see who has taken A-Y-D-N-A or a mitochondrial DNA test. It can be kind of difficult to find people who have taken those tests.

Diana (23m 59s):
So if you have taken a test, I would invite you to go to Wiki tree and create an account and a profile and put that out there So that other people can collaborate and can contact you and You know, be able to make more in progress on our family tree, which is what this is all about. So Wiki Tree has a lot of features. You can click around on it and look at so many different things. But one of the neat features is A DNA ancestors view, and it shows which ancestor you inherited different types of DNA from. It also shows the X chromosome, which can be kind of tricky to figure out who gave you the X chromosome So I like that.

Diana (24m 41s):
It shows your wide line if you’re male and your mitochondrial line for everyone, and then your autosomal DNA as well as the X. So that’s kind of a neat feature and I’m excited to keep exploring Wiki tree and seeing what else I can find to do with it. So You know, you might wonder why should I get involved with another family tree? But I think the DNA makes it really worthwhile

Nicole (25m 3s):
For sure. It’s really fun to see in your blog post about the mitochondrial DNA and wiki tree that now looking at your pedigree, we can see the little red MT symbol next to your mother and grandma and the different XDNA inheritance path. It’s just great. I love that. And the little au symbol for autosomal. So it’s definitely a very visual, awesome reminder of the testing that you’ve done and how it helps us understand your ancestors better.

Diana (25m 32s):
Right? And I think it’s so neat that if you have it on GEDMatch, you can add your kit number there, So that you can go through and find different DNA, hopefully cousins You know that you can see if you’re connected to them over on GEDMatch if you all have your kit numbers out there. So it’s just really a great way to see what you can do with your DNA.

Nicole (25m 54s):
Well Thank you for sharing that about your experience with Wiki Tree. I hope everyone listening who’s considering using Wiki Tree will give it a shot and try out in your DNA there.

Diana (26m 5s):
All right. Thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicole (26m 8s):
Bye

Diana (26m 9s):
Bye-Bye

Nicole (26m 10s):
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 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 FamilyLocket 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.