Diana and Nicole discuss BanyanDNA, a tool for analyzing complex family relationships in genetic genealogy. Leah Larkin introduced BanyanDNA in December 2023, highlighting its unique ability to identify unknown ancestors and alert users to discrepancies in family trees. Diana shares her experience with her own family tree, where her great-grandparents’ siblings married each other, creating double cousins. She builds a tree using BanyanDNA, adding DNA matches from various test-takers, and finds the horizontal tree orientation helpful for visualizing relationships.
They explain that BanyanDNA allows adding DNA matches from any testing company and evaluates shared DNA to highlight discrepancies in documented relationships. The tool runs statistical simulations to compare expected DNA inheritance with actual data, providing insights into the accuracy of the family tree structure.
They discuss recent updates to BanyanDNA, including new calculation modes: VALIDATION and HYPOTHESES. Validation runs check if DNA matches support the documented tree, while hypotheses runs focus on the person of interest with potential unknown ancestors. These updates improve the speed and accuracy of BanyanDNA results.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 314 Banyan, DNA, 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@locket.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. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com.
Nicole (43s):
Hello everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro,
Diana (46s):
Hi, Nicole. How. are you
Nicole (48s):
Really? Well, I’ve been enjoying reading the DNA study group reports and giving feedback on those.
Diana (53s):
Oh, wonderful. I’ve been doing the same thing but have been discovering.
Nicole (58s):
It’s just been great to see how each person has their own unique style. One thing I loved was when one of the study group members started with one objective, found a cluster of DNA matches, started building a tree of one of the matches, and then found that it actually led to solve a different brick wall than the one she was focusing on, but on the same line. So she kind of switched gears and went ahead and wrote the report about that instead. And it was really, really exciting to see kind of this serendipitous solution to a brick wall.
Diana (1m 29s):
That’s really interesting. It makes me think that when we discover more about our DNA matches, it can help us on lots of our different family lines,
Nicole (1m 40s):
Right? I think we all have our favorite projects that we’re thinking we wanna solve, and then sometimes we don’t realize that we have these matches that could solve other problems in our tree. Right?
Diana (1m 50s):
Oh, that’s great. Well, for announcements today, we have our Airtable guides available for anyone listening who really wants to get started with Airtable and needs a little bit of a quick start. We have Airtable research logs for genealogy, the the second edition and the companion guide tracking DNA matches with Airtable. We are looking forward to our Research Like a Pro webinar series for July, which will be held on July 20th. This is a Saturday at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The title is Who Is Grace Brown’s Mother Indirect Evidence, and the presenter is Mark Thompson. So this lecture is all about confirming Anne Hayes as Grace Brown’s biological mother and it’s a three generation study tracing a matrilineal line back to Grace and Grace’s.
Diana (2m 40s):
Great-great-grandmother Grace was born in England and died in Massachusetts so she wasn’t immigrant. This will be So fun. Mark is a graduate of our research Psycho Pro with DNA NA study group and writes the blog Making Family History. We are looking forward to our next Research Like, a Pro study group, which begins August 28th. And if you’re interested, be sure you register before early bird Registration ends on July 31st. We have our peer group leader application on our website. So if you have been through the Research Like a Pro process and would like to lead a small group of peers, then please apply. And we are also looking forward to our artificial intelligence workshop, which is coming up very soon on July 29th through August 1st.
Diana (3m 26s):
You can still register for that and we are excited to explore AI together and how to use that in our research. And as always, join our newsletter to find out the latest news, what we are doing, what the latest blog posts and videos podcasts are out there and for any coupons that we might have available.
Nicole (3m 48s):
Great Thank you for sharing all those announcements. And now we get to talk about a new DNA tool that came out recently called Banyan DNA. This is really helpful for any instances of multiple relationships such as double cousins or pedigree collapse in your family tree or the test Takers family tree. And that’s kind of the main idea with using this tool. It helps you analyze the amount of DNA that you share with your cousins, especially when you share more than one common ancestor,
Diana (4m 18s):
Right? And this was created in December of 2023. Banyan DNA is unlike any other tool for genetic genealogy. Not only can it help you identify an unknown parent grandparent or great-grandparent, it can alert you to places in your tree where shared DNA does not support the documented relationships. Best of all, it is completely customized to your family whether you have pedigree collapse, double cousins, or in a future release end domy. So we were excited when we saw this come out and those terms may be a little confusing to some of you, but we did a series on those and I wrote a blog post called End Domy Pedigree Collapse and Multiple Relationships.
Diana (5m 2s):
What’s the difference and Why does it matter? And in that blog post I shared the example of multiple relationships and my family tree, my great grandparents Dock Harris and Alice Frazier each had a sibling who also married each other. So descendants of these two couples are double cousins,
Nicole (5m 20s):
Right? I remember realizing that marriage happened and that there were a lot of descendants from those couples and and how it affected the the DNA and sometimes feeling frustrated that I couldn’t isolate those clusters into separate groups,
Diana (5m 36s):
Right? We were sharing or I was sharing more DNA with these descendants than I should have for the predicted relationship because of this double cousin relationship going back. So it’s really neat that with this new tool, Banyan DNA, we can now look at it in a different way and analyze and and get some confirmation,
Nicole (5m 59s):
Right? So that’s exactly what you did. So you used Banyan DNA, you created a free account to help you analyze these type of relationships. So Banyan, DNA allows you to add DNA matches between multiple test takers, which is nice. So you can add in results from your first cousin and yourself and your first cousin once removed. So that’s again like another layer of more advanced analysis than what you could have done with like the what are the odds tool
Diana (6m 29s):
Exactly. And it is easy to use. I love tools that are easy to use. It is oriented horizontally So, it starts with the ancestors on the left and then you build their descendancy out to the right. And so I started with John C. Harris and Melissa Welch who are a set of my second great grandparents. And then I also put in Richard Frazier and Nancy Briscoe, another set of second great grandparents and their children married each other. So we have Dot Harris who married Alice Frazier and Sophia Elmo Harris who married Ellis Millard Frazier. So I was able to put in those relationships and show the parents of these two couples that had married siblings.
Diana (7m 16s):
And then from there I filled out all of their descendants down to the DNA matches and my DNA test takers. And then I was able to enter in how much DNA was shared and then I could see if this was valid by running the calculation.
Nicole (7m 31s):
One thing I like about this is that the lines are colored. That was always a challenge when we would try to draw this out with Lucid chart. And so it’s nice that the descent line from the Harris family is yellow, so you can clearly see, even though it overlaps that Doc Harris was the descendant of John C and Melissa as well as Sophia Mon Harris because they both have the yellow lines, whereas the Frazier’s have the blue line. So even though the Harrises married the Frazier’s twice, so they overlap in the diagram, you can see clearly because of the colored lines.
Diana (8m 4s):
Exactly. And I love the color. I think the color’s fun and I love the ease of creating this. If you spell somebody’s name wrong, you can go edit it. You can, you know, just really easily fix it up if you mess it up at first. Did you mess something up? Well, it was a bit of a learning curve just getting the multiple relationships in. And I did watch the video that gets you started. But you know, anytime you do something for the first time, you’re like, wait, did I do that? Right? So of course I messed it up at first. How can you not
Nicole (8m 41s):
Tea in?
Diana (8m 42s):
Yeah. Well and it was interesting to check the ability of the relationships and I couldn’t figure that out at first. That was kind of tricky. And we’re gonna talk about a change that now makes it much easier from when I was working on this right at the beginning, but I put myself in as a hypothesis and ran that. And what you’ll get is like little green triangle type things that will say if it’s good or if it’s not possible at all, you’ll get a red. And so you know, that helps you to know if you’re on the right track or not. So Banyan, DNA does tell you this about calculations in Banyan DNA calculations are statistical evaluations of the DNA matched data in your project.
Diana (9m 25s):
The tool will simulate the inheritance of DNA from the earliest ancestors in the tree down to the people with DNA matched data. Because DNA inheritance has a random component, Banyan DNA reci simulations hundreds or thousands of times called trials to estimate the expected ranges of shared DNA for each pair of DNA testers. Then it will compare those expected simulated results with the actual shared DNA values to assess how well the DNA data aligns with the tree structure. So you can see it’s all based on statistics.
Nicole (9m 56s):
Yeah, that’s a lot of statistics and it sounds a lot like how Ancestry does simulations as well. Yeah. To get their, you know, estimate of what relationship somebody is when they share DNA,
Diana (10m 6s):
Right So, it was fun. It was really neat to be able to fill out this double cousin tree and test the relationships because I hadn’t been able to do this before. So if you do have any of you listening a case of complicated DNA such as multiple relationships or pedigree collapse, I’d really encourage you to dig into Banyan DNA and see if you can use that to help identify unknown ancestors or to find places in your tree where your shared DNA is either too low or too high for the documented relationship.
Nicole (10m 37s):
Right. I think practicing with a known situation is such a good idea where we already know the ancestors and the matches involved in this double cousin situation. So it’s just a good way to get familiar with it. And then when we have another case or question where we think people could be sharing an elevated amount of DNA and we’re not sure who the ancestors are for sure, then we kind of have experience using the tool and we know how it works and we’ll make it easier. So that was such a great idea to try it out. Well
Diana (11m 4s):
I always like trying out something with my own family because I understand the relationships and I’ve done the research and I know that it’s correct documentary wise and I think that helps.
Nicole (11m 16s):
Right? And we’ve had a few client cases where we’ve needed a tool like this, so it’ll be nice to have it available for the future.
Diana (11m 23s):
Exactly.
Nicole (11m 25s):
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Nicole (12m 7s):
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Diana (12m 16s):
All right, well I was excited to see in my inbox a newsletter from Banyan DNA that just came out a bit ago, 19 May, 2024. And in this newsletter it said that Banyan DNA had an update. And I was excited to see this because now you can do your calculations for either validation or hypotheses. So you get to decide which type of calculation to run from performing a new analysis. And I’m so glad they did this because when I first did my Harris Double cousin tree, I really just wanted confirmation because I knew where all these people fit and I wanted to see if it made sense statistically with the DNA, that there was no way I could run just a confirmation or a validation.
Diana (13m 3s):
And so I just had to create a hypothesis and then run that. But now you can choose, so that’s really nice.
Nicole (13m 10s):
Oh, okay. So just thinking of what I know with what are the odds where you don’t really always know where the person goes. So you put in a few different places for hypothesis and then compare. Right? So that’s how Banyan DNA was where you have to put in a hypothesis
Diana (13m 26s):
Yeah.
Nicole (13m 27s):
And see if that’s possible or not, or multiple hypotheses and see which hypothesis gets the highest score.
Diana (13m 34s):
Right. So I had done that. I’ve been playing around a little bit with it now since the new update. I had my original hypothesis, which is where I knew it fit, but then I created another hypothesis that I knew wasn’t correct, just to compare and round that and got the red for the one I that wasn’t right and the green for the one I knew was right. So, you know, it’s always fun to do something like that, but I like this option of just running validation. And so this is what the update says. It says anyone can do a validation run to check that the DNA matches support the biological tree. You don’t need to have a family mystery or to configure any hypotheses. If you do set up hypotheses, the validation run will ignore them and only analyze the other matches.
Diana (14m 17s):
So I thought that was interesting that you know, just have to know what you’re doing. Do you wanna have a hypothesis or you just wanna put in what you think is right and have it, see what it thinks gives you validation. So it’s fun to try it out and see what’s going on with this new update. But also says you can include pairwise match data between any two people in the tree. So if you manage multiple autosomal DNA kits, you can analyze them all at once, which is great because I think a lot of us have extra test takers and and have extra kits we can work with.
Nicole (14m 49s):
Yeah, that’s exciting because that will be useful in all kinds of cases, not just for cases where you have multiple relationships or pedigree collapse. It’s just a tool that anyone can use to analyze their DNA matches.
Diana (15m 3s):
Exactly. Something else that they wrote in the newsletter was that these hypotheses calculations only consider matches to the person of interest whom you’re trying to place in a validated tree. And the person of interest might have an unknown parent or might be descended from someone with an unknown parent. We recommend validating every tree when possible before doing a hypothesis run. So that’s really interesting. We have had a lot of projects where it’s, oh my goodness, sometimes multiple unknown parents or grandparents. So this would be so nice. I remember one project we had that had pedigree collapse on both sides and like two or three cases of unknown parentage that was really crazy to work out.
Diana (15m 49s):
so it is going to be super helpful for those types of cases
Nicole (15m 53s):
That will, I think that’s gonna be great. And it seems like a small tweak that will make it that much easier for new users to be able to use it.
Diana (16m 3s):
Right. We should probably also mention just a few basics about Banyan DNA. You can have one tree for free and if you want to have multiple trees then you’ll need to purchase a subscription to it. So it’s really up to you how much work you’re always doing with your DNA and if you want to be saving your trees and working in in multiple trees. And I would also mention that they do a Zoom call open office hours twice a month where you can just go on and see people asking questions or Leia and her team demonstrating the tool. So that’s also really neat. Yeah, they’re really committed to helping people.
Nicole (16m 46s):
Yeah, that’s a good thing to do. I think it would be good to just try it out and then attend the office hours after you’ve already tried it. ’cause then you’ll have questions and you’ll have a framework, you know, to start with for understanding it because you’ve attempted to use it yourself. Yeah.
Diana (16m 59s):
You always learn better. If you’ve already experimented with it, then it will make sense. So I would recommend that anyone listening who’s interested in this, just go put in a tree, put in one of your basic trees and your DNA matches, you know, multiple test takers if you have them. And then run the validation and see if you were right. Does it all make sense So, it basically helps us check our work. We can think of it as a fact checker, right? With our DNA analysis.
Nicole (17m 29s):
I like what you had said earlier when you were reading that update from their newsletter about they recommend validating every tree before doing hypothesis run. And that is so smart because so often the DNA matches trees have a missing generation or they just have incorrect more distant ancestors. You know, once people get past ancestors, they knew sometimes they just link up to the wrong people because of inexperience. And so it’s just really great to check the sources to validate the parent child links in their tree before doing your banyan DNA analysis.
Diana (18m 2s):
Right. And I can see this could be really helpful if say you have someone who shows up in your match list, you don’t know how they’re connected, but they’re a fairly large match, like a few hundred center Morgans, and you maybe have several of you who have taken tests and, and those cousins have shared their results with you. You can put everybody in and see if you can get some ideas about where this mystery match could actually fit into the family tree. So that’s going to happen to all of us. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will, you’ll have somebody show up and you’ll have to try to figure out who this person is.
Nicole (18m 37s):
Yeah. Well in the newsletter that came out May 19th, there was an example of how the new changes will improve the speed and the accuracy of Bain DNA results. So here’s kind of an example of how a validation run can help you find some problems in your tree. So here’s the example that they gave. Louise shares much less DNA than you would expect for an Aunt niece relationship, which affects the quality of your overall tree. You can now try to correct her placement in the tree or her shared DNA amount with Gloria before you add hypotheses for your person of interest whose position in this tree you’re trying to determine. So that’s great to try to correct that error and improve the quality of your tree.
Diana (19m 20s):
Absolutely. Well, there is another feature that they introduced, and this is where all the relationships between two peoples are now shown in the relationships column and they have an example of that and it’s a beta feature, which you can use if you’re in the premium version. So I think we can look forward to new updates and getting this product even better. So I think it’s exciting to be part of something from the very beginning and seeing how it’s improved and how we can use it with our DNA.
Nicole (19m 55s):
Great. So they’re just taking some of the information from one place and showing it in a different location, it sounds like, to make it more obvious, I guess.
Diana (20m 5s):
Right.
Nicole (20m 6s):
Well, yeah, this is gonna be great. I think using Banyan DNA can really help us analyze our matches and take some of the complicated math analysis out of it for us. And doing those analysis automatically can really speed things up. You know, we worked in our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group a lot with putting in the amount of shared DNA into the shared Sun Working project and just looking at the histograms and you know, putting in two amounts of DNA for people in the same generation level and looking at the standard deviation and all these different metrics to see if the amount of shared DNA is working for the relationship. So being in DNA can really help streamline that whole process by taking all of the DNA matches with multiple test takers and putting it all in one place and validating it.
Nicole (20m 52s):
So that’s exciting.
Diana (20m 54s):
It is exciting. DNA is So fun. There’s always something new and exciting to learn, which is why we enjoy it and we enjoy teaching it. We enjoy learning and we hope everyone listening is starting on a journey of DNA. Whether you have really dived into your results or not, you know, just know there’s a grand adventure waiting for you when you start working with your DNA.
Nicole (21m 16s):
Alright, well thanks for sharing your experience with using Banyan DNA and to everyone out there. Have a great week and we will talk to you again next week. Alright,
Diana (21m 23s):
Bye-Bye everyone.
Nicole (21m 24s):
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 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 family locket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter 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.
Links
Evaluating Double Cousin Relationships with Banyan DNA – https://familylocket.com/evaluating-double-cousin-relationships-with-banyan-dna/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_XQNEFgtjiE9B5n7lf6Pq4bdJaIMfujUFEdk0dnfsyY/edit
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Research Like a Pro Resources
Airtable Universe – Nicole’s Airtable Templates – https://www.airtable.com/universe/creator/usrsBSDhwHyLNnP4O/nicole-dyer
Airtable Research Logs Quick Reference – by Nicole Dyer – https://familylocket.com/product-tag/airtable/
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge Workbook – digital – https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-digital-only/ and spiral bound – https://familylocket.com/product/14-day-research-like-a-pro-challenge-workbook-spiral-bound/
Research Like a Pro Webinar Series 2024 – monthly case study webinars including documentary evidence and many with DNA evidence – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-webinar-series-2024/
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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