RLP 63: Locality Research in a DNA Research Project

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro Episode 63: Locality Research in a DNA Research Project. 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, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome to the show today. I’m Nicole Dyer and I’m here with Diana Elder and Robin Wirthlin. Hi.

Robin Wirthlin (54s):
Hello.

Diana (55s):
Hello everyone.

Nicole (56s):
We are excited today to talk more about doing a DNA research project and the next part is the locality research. So we’ll talk about how that relates as far as including DNA and what to do in that step. But first let’s do our listener spotlight. Our review today is from Red Flies and she titled the Review one of the best podcasts ever. She says, “I have been fortunate to have been at RootsTech and hear Diana. Kept meaning to listen to the podcast right after RootsTech but got busy. Now I’m cramming your podcast because of all the excellent information I have heard. Will be re-listening to all of them at least twice. It has really made me realize that I need to change my research habits and set up a locality guide.

Nicole (1m 38s):
I’m going to take your class as soon as it comes around again. The information that you give is so outstanding. Thank you so much for the many invaluable tips. If you are new to genealogy research or have been researching for a while, you’ll find this podcast informative beyond measure. Thanks again Diana and Nicole, you guys are awesome.” That’s great. And you know what, when I picked this review for today, I did not even notice that it has that part about the locality guide in it, which is perfect because that’s what we’re talking about today is setting up a locality guide. And she’s right that when you do create locality guides, it opens up a new world of research because you understand where to look for more records and you really understand what records were available in that place.

Nicole (2m 18s):
So we’ll be talking today about how that applies to looking up the family tree of your DNA matches and finding the records available in the time and place that their ancestors lived in as well as your own. So let’s talk about today’s subject.

Diana (2m 34s):
Okay, so like you said, today is all about locality and DNA and I think locality is one of my favorite parts of the Research Like a Pro process because diving into our ancestors places and their time just illuminates so many things in our research. Just a fun thought is that even if you don’t like to travel, your DNA has been places. I know that in my research I have so many ancestors that are from the south and I really need a research trip to the south. So I have to rely on my locality guides and maps and learning to understand the area there. And so you may have ancestors that you’ve received DNA from that have been all over the place and I can guarantee it’s probably not where you are living right now.

Diana (3m 21s):
So it’s really, really important that we look at our ancestors and we go to their localities, whether it’s physically or virtually, and we try to learn everything we can about where they came from and how can we use this in DNA. Well, we’re going to share that with you today because locality is actually a really important part of our DNA research when we add that into our traditional research. So Robin, why don’t you give us like a recap of the steps we’ve been following with Research Like a Pro with DNA.

Robin Wirthlin (3m 57s):
I’d love to, thank you. So the first thing to do is take a DNA test and then consider transferring the results to other companies and to GEDMatch.com. Then number two, look at your DNA matches. Do you know them? If you don’t write to them to learn about who they are and how they fit into your family tree. Number three is begin to chart your matches, put them in a Lucidchart, write their names on sticky notes and put them on your wall in a, in a pedigree chart fashion. And then number four is to examine your family tree and decide which brick wall could be overcome with DNA evidence. We all have research that’s at the end of the line.

Robin Wirthlin (4m 39s):
So figure out which line of your family you’d like to work on and see if DNA can help you overcome and move on to the next generation. And once you’ve decided which, which line of your family you wanna work on, then choose a research objective and write it out. Then number six is analyze your sources. Do the amounts of DNA in centimorgans or percentages of shared DNA match the relationship probabilities and the expected family relationships? Then you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Nicole (5m 12s):
And the next step is to use your DNA results to help you do locality research. How can we do that? You need to determine the location and the time where the ancestors of your DNA matches and your own ancestors lived, which is finding the most recent common ancestor or MRCA. So as you compare your family tree with your DNA matches’ family trees, the goal is to find an ancestor that both you and your DNA match have in common. And often your match won’t have a very big tree so you’re having to build their tree back and see if you can find any surnames that are in common with your own family tree. And you may even find that you share more than one ancestor with a DNA match.

Nicole (5m 53s):
And that has happened to me a lot as I’ve been researching on various family lines in my own tree and my husband’s tree because sometimes, you know, we have siblings that will marry siblings in another family. So then you have that little pedigree collapse there and you have the same ancestral couple for two lines of your tree. You may find that happening, but the goal in your locality research for DNA results is to focus on the common ancestor who lived at a time closest to today. And like I mentioned before, this is called the most recent common ancestor or MRCA. So after you’ve identified that most recent common ancestor, then what you can do is take a, take a look at the locations and the historical timeline and look at the specific dates and places where that ancestor lived and once you pinpoint where they lived and when you can start finding genealogical records that establish his or her unique identity.

Nicole (6m 46s):
So, like we talked about in the last podcast episode about Research Like a Pro with DNA, and Robin gave us the analogy of a triangle, we form a triangle with our match and with our common ancestor. And once we learn who that common ancestor is, then we can start doing genealogical research about them including learning about the place where they lived.

Robin Wirthlin (7m 4s):
I’m gonna talk about the ethnicity or the admixture estimates and how they might guide you to guesstimate the unknown ancestors. A lot of people are drawn to the idea of taking a DNA test because of the media advertisements that claim to be able to tell you what percentage you are of a certain background, if you’re 3% from South America, or 10% from Ireland. And it’s pretty compelling to think that a person’s DNA can say so much about where their ancestors lives. But what happens if the DNA companies give you conflicting information about the amount of DNA you have from different countries? It’s pretty confusing.

Robin Wirthlin (7m 45s):
So what happens in the testing is that the DNA companies compare your DNA to the DNA of other test takers, and some of those test takers told the testing companies where their ancestors came from. So then those people were included in the reference population for the countries where the ancestors lived. So each testing company has its own reference population, meaning those are the people that other people’s DNA is compared with to say okay, these people came from Sweden or these people came from China. Those estimates that the companies give you are only as good as the information given by the people in that reference population.

Robin Wirthlin (8m 24s):
And the ethnicity estimates have changed over time because more and more people are included in the reference population and the science has become more advanced. Years ago when DNA testing was new, I remember one population only had four people in its reference population, which didn’t give me any confidence that that ethnicity was actually being represented well. So another thing that we need to consider is that we don’t know when our DNA changed. At what point in time are we looking at these ancestral origins? Was it a hundred years ago, 500 years, a thousand, 6,000 or more years ago? We don’t really know when those mutations happen that show us where these populations came from.

Robin Wirthlin (9m 10s):
So sometimes we know the migrations of our ancestors and sometimes we don’t. And all those points play a part in ethnicity estimates. So my own ethnicity or admixture results are different at each company and they’ve changed over the past few years. And so I’ve often heard that ethnicity estimates are accurate at the continental level but not necessarily at the country level. So I could say with confidence that some of my ancestors came from Europe, but I may not with confidence be able to say 25% of them came from Switzerland.

Diana (9m 47s):
Well I know that my ethnicity has been so interesting to watch, and as they have had updates, it has changed. Like I used to have 1% Sub-Saharan African and I and so I’m thinking, okay, my southern ancestors, I’ve got, you know, some African American there. But then the next ethnicity, that disappeared and it became something like the area that includes Portugal and Spain, and then another company doesn’t have any of that. And so, you know, I know I’ve got a little bit of something somewhere, but I have no idea what it is because it changes. I think as things get better and better maybe we’ll be able to hone in on more specific locations. But I do have a really great example of how ethnicity helped me to solve my sister finding her biological father.

Diana (10m 30s):
So we’d already found her mother and her DNA matches had, I think it was a niece on her mother’s side, which was fabulous ’cause then I could take out all the matches and eliminate them that were on her mother’s side, and I was just left with her paternal side, and those matches separated out so beautifully because my sister’s ethnicity was 21% Finnish. And so that is significant, and it told me that her, and because I knew it was not her mother’s side, I knew that her father had to be half Finnish, 50% Finnish and looking at the matches, it just separated them out beautifully. I could see so clearly, you know, those are very, the names were very definitely Finnish and I could tell exactly which ones were, I didn’t know if it was the grandmother or grandfather at that point, but I was able to say, okay, these people all go together and then all the people without the Finnish names go in this other group.

Diana (11m 25s):
So ethnicity in that case really was beneficial and helpful. Now for people like me, where our ancestors have been, you know like my dad’s side, they’ve been in the United States forever and ever. And so that’s not as helpful because they all came from Europe and England and who knows where else. But sometimes you have ethnicity that actually really, really helps you in your research. So just a fun little example there.

Nicole (11m 50s):
I love that. And it’s cool to think about how Aunt Nancy and her family are so Finnish ’cause they all have blonde hair.

Diana (11m 58s):
Oh yeah. And big blue eyes.

Nicole (11m 59s):
I think that’s part of the fun of the DNA test and why the companies focus so much on them in the commercials is that it’s a really visible and tangible way to connect to a certain place in the world, right? You could say, I look like people that are from Finland, I’m Finnish, it’s so cool. But when it comes down to it nowadays, most people are just a mix of so many different countries. It’s pretty rare to have like only one or two countries that your ancestors come from. I mean in our family we have Denmark, Germany, Ireland, England, United States going back to colonial times. So we don’t even know where they came from originally and so many different places. So it’s interesting how that just varies from person to person I guess.

Nicole (12m 41s):
So let’s talk now about when we do the locality guide of genealogical records. That is an important step in the Research Like a Pro process. So let’s just review how to do that and and why. In your Research Like a Pro project using DNA, we’ve already talked about how you found your recent common ancestor with your match and now you’re asking where did this common ancestor live? And once you know that, then you can create a locality guide about that place. And when you create a locality guide, it’s just a resource for you to identify record collections and understand the context of the place and time where those ancestors lived. And so it’s just a really important part of genealogical research.

Nicole (13m 24s):
If you don’t know the context of where people lived and what records were available, it’ll make it a lot more difficult for you to learn about the ancestor. And so what you do is you just ask the three questions, what happened? where did it happen and why did it happen? So let’s talk about each of those three things.

Robin Wirthlin (13m 45s):
Well, in DNA research, when you ask what happened, it’s that there was a relationship between two people that produced a child and those two people needed to be in the same location at the same time for conception to occur. Sometimes the people were married, sometimes they weren’t. So as we look for records, then that’s something that we need to consider. Then when we figure out where, where did this conception happen, then you can use the following key actions to help you to create a locality guide. And these are highlighted in chapter three of Research Like a Pro, A Genealogist’s Guide by Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer.

Robin Wirthlin (14m 30s):
And they are to, look at a map of the area, use a Gazetteer to track down place names, discover the migration routes that led to the area, examine where the jurisdictions where records were kept and learn about boundary changes that might have affected the records, and then research the history of the location. Then we’re wondering why did it happen? What what brought these people together? You can learn about the laws and the history of the area and that’ll help you understand why did people take certain actions or why were they even in this area at the same time and what made them make decisions that they did.

Robin Wirthlin (15m 11s):
And then once you’ve become familiar with the steps about learning who your most recent common ancestor is, then you put that into action by creating your very own locality guide. And that will be a really valuable tool to help you identify information that will help you solve your research objective.

Diana (15m 30s):
I love doing the locality research. I think it’s so interesting. Before we started doing this, we just didn’t realize Nicole and I, the importance of really learning about the location and it’s opened up our research so much. So I’ve been talking all along about my Rachel Cox and Benjamin Cox research project trying to connect them as father daughter. And when I was looking, doing my original timeline analysis, you know I put the localities in there and I thought that the, the dates and places were really lining up appropriately because I had Benjamin Cox for this migration, Ohio to Indiana, to Arkansas to Texas starting in 1791.

Diana (16m 15s):
And then I also saw that Rachel had a birthplace of Indiana and she was in Texas. And so that kind of helped me see that this was very much a possibility that she could have been a daughter of Benjamin Cox because she had a birthplace of Indiana, he was in Indiana at the same time she could have been born. So that idea of locality, putting people together in the right places. And when I did my chart of cousin matches on Lucidchart, I also saw that these same localities kept popping up in the trees of the cousin matches: Indiana and Arkansas and Texas.

Diana (16m 56s):
And that was really helpful because if my cousin matches had family trees with very different localities, that would’ve been a huge red flag and I would’ve had to go back and and revisit what I had come to a conclusion about. So what if you’ve got an ancestor who’s migrated like my Benjamin Cox, I’ve got him in Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, and Texas. You know, where do you do your locality guide? So one thing that you can do is to choose the place where you wanna really focus in on your research project. So for my project, I’ve already done a bunch of work in Texas and Arkansas. The places I have not researched as much are Indiana and Ohio.

Diana (17m 37s):
So that is where I am doing a locality guide for those counties there because I wanna pinpoint Benjamin Moore in those early records. And these are the harder dates, right? 1791 to 1845 is when he was in those localities. So I’m really going to need good locality guides to give me some ideas of the records. I’ll be using things like tax records and county histories, looking at the censuses. So I’m excited to go and do that because these are new areas and new counties that I haven’t researched before and I know I’ll need my guide because I’m not as familiar with them as my Texas and Arkansas localities that I’ve already worked on so much.

Diana (18m 18s):
So kind of exciting to get going on that part of the process. Now there was one other little part of this process that I had to consider and that was the fact that I was matching all my cousins on small segments and I had just listened to a presentation by Blaine Bettinger where he is talking about the danger of those small matches because you know, they’re not necessarily accurate. And I was lucky because I’ve had my mother tested and I was able to phase a parent kit on GEDMatch and to essentially get a kit that was just my dad’s that took out all my mother’s and because this was on my dad’s line, now I have a better kit to use.

Diana (19m 0s):
So I’m excited because with this DNA project on the Cox line, I’ve got some real strategies and things that I am working on.

Nicole (19m 8s):
That’s great that you learned about when Benjamin probably moved to Indiana.

Diana (19m 12s):
It’s really interesting because he was always moving like when the new land opened up.

Nicole (19m 17s):
Yeah, and that’s a good thing to include in the locality guide are the migration routes of the time. Because often we need to see that they were following a certain route to be able to look in all the places along that route for the records.

Diana (19m 30s):
Yes, because your person may only be in an area for maybe 10 years, but there could be key records there that if you didn’t research each locality you’d miss.

Robin Wirthlin (19m 38s):
One thing I love about locality guides is that it opens up a new world of records that you can look at. You may know the standard records like census records and probate records, but as you dig into the locality and you’re making a list of records that are available in that area, it gives you new avenues to search and maybe even a checklist to say, have I checked this? Have I checked that? To make sure that you’re being thorough and doing reasonably exhaustive research.

Diana (20m 10s):
Absolutely. And when we are trying to connect our DNA research to locality research, you know, we just have to know as much as we can about our people. It’s just super important to make sure we know everything we can because our DNA matches their ancestors may have come through a line, for instance with Benjamin Cox. Some of my matches have a daughter of his that looks like she stayed in Indiana. And so if she didn’t come out to Texas, I need to learn more about Indiana and his time there and kind of shore up that connection between that supposed daughter that a, a lot of my matches are coming through.

Nicole (20m 51s):
Right. Wow, that’s such a good example. And you know, a lot of people ask during the Research, Like a Pro process, which location should I make my locality guide for? And this is an interesting case because you had two states that you needed to learn about and do a locality guide for. So sometimes we just need to do a simpler one for both places so that you can really get a handle on what records were available in those two places.

Diana (21m 17s):
Yes, people ask me that all the time, should I do this county or this county or this state? And my advice really is to do a locality guide for the time and place. So for Benjamin Cox, he’s there in Indiana in 1820. Do I need to include in like a state guide on Indiana a bunch of records in the 19 hundreds? No, not at this point in time because that’s not gonna be beneficial for this research. So I could focus more in on the records about that time period. And then in the future if I return to Indiana, maybe have a project in the 1920s, then I can add to that guide. So I really like the idea that our guides are fluid and we can add the things we need right now to save our time and then we can keep adding to them as we need them.

Diana (22m 3s):
So I think that might help anyone listening when they’re kind of overwhelmed with the thought of doing a locality guide, just focus in on the time and place where your ancestor is

Nicole (22m 13s):
Right. And then in the case of trying to find a connection to your DNA matches, I like how you said that you know that one daughter stayed behind in Indiana and that’s really a connection you want to focus on and prove. Because if you can prove that she really was the daughter of Benjamin Cox, like so many people, people have claimed in their ancestry trees, then you can use all of that DNA match information from that woman to add additional evidence that she was the daughter of Benjamin. And then Benjamin therefore is the father of your Rachel Cox.

Diana (22m 49s):
Exactly.

Nicole (22m 49s):
Well great. Do you guys have any other thoughts about DNA and locality research?

Robin Wirthlin (22m 54s):
Well, I was thinking about the concept of collateral lines and using brothers and sisters of your target ancestor and seeing who was descended from them and who, who do you share DNA with that’s on your DNA match list that also shares DNA with those collateral lines. And you may come across someone who knows a lot more about that family line than you do. I mean maybe like for example, maybe Rachel’s sister, Rachel Cox’s sister, actually inherited the family bible and so that’s passed down through that family and if you connect with those DNA matches that are living today, that can give you more genealogical evidence as well as having that DNA evidence that confirms that connection.

Diana (23m 46s):
Yeah, that’s a great point that connecting with these cousins that we discovered through DNA matching can help open up the lines because the more research that they have or more sources that they have, so yeah, DNA is great. It’s, it’s really opening up so many things in our research and it’s exciting. It’s really a fun, fun time to be doing this.

Nicole (24m 8s):
Another fun thing that I’ve had happen with connecting with our DNA matches that are living is that sometimes they live in the place where I need records looked up. So I found a cousin who lives in South Carolina because she, her family line stayed there while our family line migrated away. And so I was saying, oh, it’s so great that we are related through this same common ancestor and have fun to find this connection. And she said, oh, and if you need any lookups in South Carolina, I live right here where our ancestors lived so I can go look up the records you need.

Robin Wirthlin (24m 47s):
Wow. It’s amazing the connections that we can make through and friendships that we can build through DNA people that we’ve never met before or descended from different branches of the family. I mean, it’s, it’s amazing. We just visited my cousin in Hawaii this summer who I found through DNA research and we had a fabulous time and it was wonderful to get to know him and and make that family connection that had been lost.

Nicole (25m 16s):
Thank you for this great episode today, ladies, and thanks to all our listeners for joining us. As we talked about this particular step in the Research Like a Pro with DNA process and the locality guides. We hope that you’ll try making a locality guide about your most recent common ancestor as you connect with your matches and learn about the place and time that they live so that you can find more records about them. Good luck to you and we hope you have a great week and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (25m 44s):
All right, bye-bye everyone.

Robin Wirthlin (25m 49s):
Goodbye.

Nicole (25m 48s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.