RLP 75: Using DNA in a Polish Research Project – Interview with Alice Childs

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 75: Using DNA in a Polish 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 (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. And welcome to the show. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of The Research Like a Pro Genealogy Podcast. I’m here with accredited genealogist, Diana Elder, and our guest Alice Childs. Hi Diana.

Diana (58s):
Hi Nicole. Hi Alice.

Alice Childs (1m 0s):
Hi, Diana and Nicole.

Nicole (1m 3s):
We’re so glad that you’re here today, Alice. We’ll introduce Alice a little bit later. First we’ll do our listener spotlight for today. And the listener is Deb Spot. She said, “This is exactly what I needed. Couldn’t settle on a research process that I felt worked until I heard these wonderful engaging ladies. So much useful information in such an easy format. Doesn’t matter that I’m in Australia, it’s the process direction I need. So excited. I’m finally making progress. Imagine what I’ll be able to do when the process becomes a habit.” It’s so fun to have a listener spotlight from Australia. Thank you so much for writing that and for listening. And I hope that you are making a lot of progress like you had hoped and making this research process into a habit.

Nicole (1m 48s):
All right, so we had a listener question from the Facebook group about where to find the show notes. So if you have not known where to find those, listen in, here’s how to do it. You need to go to your podcast app and click on the episode that you want to find the episode notes for, or show notes, and then just kind of scroll down on that episode page, and you should see a description and links to the things that we mentioned in the podcast. And that’s what we’re talking about when we say the show notes. And if you don’t listen on a podcast app on your phone, if you just listen on our website, then that blog post, where you’re listening to the episode underneath the player for the podcast episode is a description and the links, and that’s the show notes as well.

Nicole (2m 35s):
So now you know where to find the show notes. All right, well, because we’re doing this episode with Alice, she had the great idea to do a giveaway of an Ancestry DNA kit. So Alice, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the giveaway and I can go over the rules too.

Alice Childs (2m 53s):
Okay. So I just thought that I was so excited about DNA evidence and how valuable it can be in our family history research. So I wanted to give one lucky winner, the chance to win a kit and begin using DNA in your research too.

Nicole (3m 8s):
Great. That was so fun of you to think of that. So here are the rules that we came up with to enter to win. So there’s just four steps to take, number one, subscribe to Alice’s blog@alicechilds.com. And to do that, you just scroll down to the bottom right-hand corner of her homepage. And then second step is to subscribe to the Family Locket Newsletter if you haven’t done that yet, and you can just look for the sign up button on the sidebar of the homepage. And then step three is to share this blog post or the episode on your favorite social media channel with a comment about what research objective you would like to solve using DNA evidence.

Nicole (3m 51s):
And then come back to this episode blog post, or the blog post on Alice’s website and leave a comment, letting us know where you shared that. So you have until the end of the month, we’re going to close this on December 31st at 10:00 PM Mountain Standard Time. We will announce the winners on our Facebook pages on the morning of January 1st. So look for that and feel free to share this contest with your friends so that they can enter to win the DNA kit. So yeah. Any more thoughts on the contest?

Diana (4m 28s):
I think it sounds like a great idea and you’ll have all those steps in the show notes that you just talked about, right? So that our listeners won’t have to remember every step.

Nicole (4m 36s):
Yes, of course,

Diana (4m 40s):
Because if they’re like me, they will think, what was I supposed to do again? So I think that all of you listening will love Alice’s blog. She is a fabulous writer and she puts things into really clear steps and talks all about different research tips. And you may have noticed that she has been a guest blogger on Family Locket for several months and written some really great articles for us. So she’s another great blog writer, and we’re excited to have her with us today. So I wanted to introduce Alice a little bit and let you know about her and how we got acquainted with her. She had been reading Family Locket articles and listening to the podcast and she reached out to me and said, she would love to learn more about becoming a professional genealogist.

Diana (5m 25s):
And she just happened to live a few blocks away from me. How providential is that Alice that we were so close? That was so awesome.

Alice Childs (5m 31s):
It was awesome.

Diana (5m 33s):
So we went to lunch and I told her all about accreditation, because she was interested in that, and told her that she could do an internship with Family Locket and start working on projects and blog posts. And she did the Research Like a Pro Study Group in the spring. And then she decided to do the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group this fall. And for that project, for the DNA Study Group, my sister-in-law has had this long standing brick wall with immigrant grandparents, and she had no idea what to do next. And I suggested to Alice that maybe she’d take on this project and use DNA to try to figure out this immigrant ancestor mystery.

Diana (6m 14s):
And Alice, how did you feel about that when I first suggested that?

Alice Childs (6m 18s):
I was really excited at first, because I, you know, I knew there was an immigration component and I had just finished the immigration track at the BYU Family History conference. So I was excited to apply that. And I had listened to all the Research Like a Pro podcasts and read the articles about DNA, but I hadn’t really applied anything or tried to use it on a project. So I was really excited for hands-on learning. I have to admit, I was a little bit nervous too, because I knew nothing about Polish research. So I kind of wondered how I would be able to do with that. But, you know, I like to dive into difficult projects. So I thought that with my knowledge about the Research Like a Pro process, I would be able to learn what I needed to know and be successful.

Diana (7m 1s):
Well, and the funny thing about this was, we didn’t know it was Polish at the beginning.

Alice Childs (7m 5s):
That’s true.

Diana (7m 6s):
If I remember right, candy thought it was Russian because her grandparents had always talked about being white, Russian. And so really it was really up in the air about what their nationality actually was.

Alice Childs (7m 20s):
That’s true. And so I guess maybe even more nerve wracking, not knowing what I was going to be getting myself into

Diana (7m 27s):
Well, and kind of the funny thing was with this project was that Candy had told me that she had had all of these really great family history experts working with her, trying to help her do this case, and nobody had been able to make any progress. And so when Alice made fabulous progress using the Research Like a Pro process, it just really stood out to me how, if you have a process and you follow the steps, you can do so much more than if you’re just kind of clicking around trying to find things which I think was happening before.

Alice Childs (7m 59s):
That is so true. And that is the top thing I’ve learned because I used to be a researcher that would kind of click around and try and find things. So the process is great.

Nicole (8m 8s):
Right. I think sometimes there’s just projects that are a little more difficult that do require more of a, a plan. So cool. Let’s dive in and talk about it. The first step of Research Like a Pro with DNA that we worked on, you know, after you take a DNA test obviously, is to assess your DNA matches and analyze the pedigree. So what was your experience with looking at Candy’s DNA matches? Did she test at Ancestry or where were you looking at?

Alice Childs (8m 36s):
Yeah, she had tested at Ancestry. And so when I started looking at her DNA match list, I noticed that she didn’t have a lot of close cousins. On my own DNA match list I have about 200 2nd and third cousin matches and Candy only had 17. It was pretty easy to tell, but a lot of them were on Candy’s maternal line. And I was working on her paternal line for this project. So I was a little bit worried about what the limitations would be and how we were going to be able to succeed with this. But at Diana’s suggestion, I, I walked Candy through uploading, or downloading her DNA from Ancestry, and then uploading to other sites to try to discover more paternal matches.

Alice Childs (9m 17s):
And then I started contacting her close matches also, and a few more distant matches. And I tried to focus on the ones that had large trees just to see what I would get and what responses people would have. I did get a few responses and nobody really knew who the most recent common ancestor might be, but a couple of matches have done a lot of research in Poland and they gave me some really helpful information for my locality guide, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes.

Nicole (9m 46s):
Oh, wonderful.

Diana (9m 48s):
So you had to help Candy a lot with getting that whole process done of downloading and then uploading. And I believe that you created a little tutorial, put that on your blog. Is that right, Alice?

Alice Childs (10m 1s):
That is true. I did.

Diana (10m 3s):
And I have pointed other people to that because a lot of the clients that I work with have to do those steps and it sounds a little intimidating. So I think it’s really helpful to have all the steps written out because it’s pretty simple and it is absolutely so essential to have your DNA everywhere that you possibly can. So what was your experience working with Candys family tree? Just the actual tree?

Alice Childs (10m 27s):
Well, a lot of work had been done on Candy’s maternal line. She told me that a cousin of hers had been working on that side of the family, but her paternal line ended with her great-grandparents. So the only thing that she knew about them were their names and with her great grandmother, she hadn’t even learned the maiden name. So there was a lot to learn,

Diana (10m 47s):
Right. So when you got going on this project too, you got all the results from all the different testing websites. And then the next step of the process is to get organized, organize those DNA results and create the research objective. So how did that work out? How did you go about organizing her DNA? Because it was across the board with all these different websites.

Alice Childs (11m 8s):
Yeah. I focused at first on the Ancestry DNA matches and I started looking at shared matches with people and trying to identify who might be and what on what side of the family. So used the ancestry DNA color coding. And I think at first I dove in and started color coding and wasn’t really thoughtful about what colors I wanted to assign, but once I got it figured out, it was a lot of fun. It just took me a few tries. So I also created a blog post about that and what system I decided on. And once you get a system, I think it’s a lot easier and it goes a lot faster. The other thing I did was I used Lucid Chart to organize Candy’s DNA matches.

Alice Childs (11m 49s):
So I use that with all, you know, all the matches from the other sites too. And I discovered that she had a, MyHeritage match that was in a second cousin range, and that was one of her closest cousins. And the great thing was that this match had a surname that is in her family tree and Candy’s family tree of Haleczko that’s her grandmother Marie’s surname. So this match had that surname in her direct line. So I thought this would be a great place to start. And by charting her matches, I was able to see a possible common ancestor. I also tried to chart some matches that I thought might be on Candy’s grandfather Michael’s line, but the matches didn’t really have very good trees and I was unsure which matches really belonged on the Kunch line anyway.

Alice Childs (12m 33s):
So I didn’t get very far there, but charting matches, I think was a really helpful step that helped me see and understand who the best matches might be to work with for this project. So I loved Lucid Chart. I’ll keep using that in the future.

Diana (12m 48s):
I totally agree. Lucid Chart just makes it all so clear. I guess that’s why they call it Lucid Chart, right? Clarity. It’s amazing. Well, I think that’s, what’s really interesting how you are able to kind of hone in on one side. So I am guessing that that played into how you created an objective for this project. One of the things that we see that people really have a challenge with is they’re too broad with their research. They want to discover everything about too many people. And so when we really focus in it helps. So how did you kind of focus in on this project and what did you do for your objective?

Alice Childs (13m 24s):
Just because I had noticed that it seemed like there was a lot more leads and a lot more possible ancestors on the maternal line, Marie Haleczko’s line I thought that that would be a great place to focus on for this project. And so my objective ended up being to use traditional genealogical research and DNA evidence to extend the ancestry of Marie Haleczko, daughter of Basil Haleczko and Anastasia Maria was born in 1899 in Livena, Austria and died the 1st of July, 1966 in Lorraine, Lorraine county, Ohio. Marie married, Michael Kunch the 20th of January, 1917 in Cohoes, New York.

Diana (14m 3s):
So that is such a good objective. And can I just say that I’m really impressed that you know how to pronounce those Polish names? Have you done some research on how to pronounce those or is that just natural?

Alice Childs (14m 12s):
Well, just in the research that I’ve done, I noticed that when people come to the US the spelling it’s changed a lot. And so the CZ and SC end up being the ch, you know, C, H or S H sound. So it was easy to pronounce when you see it spelled in an Americanized way.

Diana (14m 30s):
Interesting. And I think that’s the hurdle that a lot of people have to get over the spelling. And the name changes. In fact, if I remember right, Candy had told me that she didn’t think there was even a possibility of figuring this out because she felt like they had changed their names. So I think it was really fun for you to realize that no, there was a slight name change, but not enough to make it impossible, right?

Alice Childs (14m 51s):
That’s true it was really interesting to see the variations in spelling. And even with her grandfather, I say Basil, but I was just talking to candy the other day and she pronounces it Bas-seal. And on some records, it’s spelled B A S I L other records it’s W A S Y L E. So, you know, I think just depending on, maybe they say V sound Vasile or Basile, and it sounds like a, B you know, I think just the American people might’ve written it the way they heard it.

Diana (15m 21s):
Absolutely something we always have to keep in mind.

Nicole (15m 24s):
I think it’s so interesting that many people have that misconception that names were changed at immigration or at Ellis Island, and it is just a myth. And really what happened is the ships passenger lists were written in Europe or in the place where they left. So those names were brought over to Ellis Island, and those are the names that were used at Ellis Island as well. It’s not like they just showed up at Ellis Island and somebody there changed their name. And it’s so funny how often that myth is perpetuated. So that is so interesting and about the spelling being fluid. And of course it would change to the way that it’s pronounced if people didn’t know how to spell it.

Nicole (16m 4s):
I wanted to go back really quick and make a comment about color-coding on Ancestry DNA. I love Alice, how you created such an organized way to give those colored dots to different people in Candy’s tree. And it really made sense to me how you had chosen. I think you had chosen warm colors for the maternal line and like blues and greens for the paternal. Is that what it was?

Diana (16m 31s):
That’s right. I did blues and greens for the paternal line, and then I wanted to be able to mark paternal versus maternal without denoting a couple or, you know, or person. So for paternal, I did kind of the teal. So it was blue-green and for maternal, I did a color that was more red purple like a magenta, I think. And so then from there, I could do the reds for one side of the maternal line and purples for the other side. It just made sense to me to kind of try and keep it all in the same color family.

Nicole (17m 1s):
I really liked that too. And I actually switched all of my color coding over to your system after you wrote that.

Alice Childs (17m 6s):
Oh, wow.

Nicole (17m 8s):
It’s nice to be able to think about it as far as like each ancestral couple or ancestor has like a color. And so then descendants of that couple would have that colored dots. So anyway, I really liked looking at the pedigree chart with the colored dots, and then that just really helps me when I’m assigning dots.

Alice Childs (17m 28s):
And it’s really nice to just be able to look at your match list and quickly know which part of the family this person belongs to.

Nicole (17m 35s):
Yeah. I love the dots. It was so great when they came out with those. Okay, so let’s go to the next step of the Research Like a Pro with DNA process. So you had your objective then what was the next step with kind of looking at sources you already have, because with Candy’s project, you had never worked on it before. Were there a lot of sources available?

Alice Childs (17m 57s):
Well, there were quite a few sources available, and I think this step is just one of the most helpful steps I’ve learned in the Research Like a Pro process. I did start my timeline and do some analysis and preliminary research before the DNA study groups. So all throughout the Study Group, and when I was writing, it’s hard to keep track of what I did when, so hopefully this all makes sense, but I did do a timeline for both Michael Kunch and Marie Haleczko, even though my, my objective involves Marie. So in the process of doing that, I just discovered a few key pieces of information that we already had. The first one was that I didn’t have any record that listed Michael’s exact birthplace.

Alice Childs (18m 41s):
And it’s really important when you’re trying to trace immigrant ancestors to know what their exact birthplace is and not just the state or the country. And what made it even more interesting is that records that I did have listed his birthplace as either Poland or Austria. And that was confusing at first. So I went through a whole process of trying to discover his birthplace, which I don’t know if we have time to get into now, but I do have a blog post about that, that people could read if they’re interested. So I noted that I didn’t have his exact birth place. So that was part of my traditional research in the preliminary part of the project. But with Marie on the tree, her birthplace wasn’t listed. But as I looked at all the sources, I realized that there was a record there that listed her exact birth place.

Alice Childs (19m 25s):
And it was a passenger list that stated that she was born in Lipna in Galicia, which Galicia was another unknown place. So I was really excited to dive into the locality research and figure out what in the world was going on with their birth countries. But I did on the passenger list, there were other helpful things that were important for this project. It listed her father, as I talked about before as Basil Haleczko and her destination was listed as Cohoes, New York and there she was going to meet her uncle, John Robshaw. And then she appeared to be traveling with two other 17 year old young women. And I hypothesized that those might be her cousins. They were both from Lipna also.

Diana (20m 6s):
And one of them had the last name of Koletch, which was the maiden name of Marie’s mother. So I thought those were good clues for my research for this project. And I also noticed that there was a marriage index there at Ancestry that showed that Michael and Marie had been married in Cohoes, New York. And, you know, the information that Candy had told me said that they had been married prior to immigrating. So I thought that was really important to note that they actually got married when they were in the United States.

Nicole (20m 35s):
Oh, that is really interesting. And how wonderful that the passenger list that was already attached actually had her birthplace. And I have noticed that before that sometimes all of the information from a record isn’t taken and updated on the profile of a person, especially on these online trees, you know, so really neat, but you had that place and how exciting to dive into locality research next, but before locality research, I believe you looked at Candy’s DNA matches to kind of see what sources of evidence you had in that arena. So what did you find when you looked more at the DNA matches relating to this specific objective?

Alice Childs (21m 19s):
Okay. When I decided to focus on Marie’s side of the family, I looked at her matches and her, MyHeritage second cousin match that I had discovered had a good tree that had the surnames of Haleczko and also one Koptcha. And I thought that maybe if I like did a surname search for those two on Ancestry and MyHeritage, I might be able to find more matches that would relate to this case. So I did find a few with these surnames in their tree. And one had done a lot of extensive research on his family, and it was a great discovery because he had attached records from Poland to every person on his tree. So I thought, you know, with my charts and being able to see where these two matches pedigrees intersected, I would be able to use the records on his tree to verify the second cousin match from my MyHeritage, his tree, and hopefully have some common ancestors for Candy.

Nicole (22m 16s):
Wow. That’s wonderful that you were able to find the tree intersection with those two and hopefully get some clues from that.

Diana (22m 24s):
This is such a great example of how important it was to get that DNA on MyHeritage, because that is where you found the person who done all the research on the Polish family.

Alice Childs (22m 31s):
Yeah. The key players in this project are the ones that I found at MyHeritage.

Diana (22m 36s):
Wow. That’s a great example. Well, let’s go onto the location. You’ve talked a lot about how important it was, figuring out where exactly these people came from and you’d already done a locality guide before. And so what did you find with doing a locality guide for an immigration project? Because this is a little different than what you had done before.

Alice Childs (22m 59s):
It was really helpful to do the locality guide for this project. I knew nothing about the history of the country of Poland and, you know, history wasn’t my best funnest subject in high school. So I didn’t know anything beforehand. So as I was able to read and study and to get information from those DNA matches that have done a lot of research, I was able to get a lot of clues that would help me. One of the things that I learned when I studied the history of the area was that between 1815 and 1918, Poland was actually divided between three countries, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. And then Galicia, which is Maria’s birth place was a kingdom in the Austro-Hungarian empire during that period.

Alice Childs (23m 42s):
So once I found out this information, it really made all of the different birthplaces make sense. You know, sometimes it was Poland. Sometimes it was Austria. Sometimes it was Galicia. And I noticed that depending on when the record was created is when those different names were used. So after Poland became Poland again, after 1918, you know, those later records started saying Poland, where the earlier records talked about Austria or Galicia, which I thought was really interesting. Another thing that I didn’t anticipate before I had did the DNA project, cause I’d never done DNA before, is that some of Candy’s DNA matches where the best sources of information for my locality guide. And they were more than willing to share, which was so fun.

Alice Childs (24m 24s):
I just thought it was so great that people were willing to email me everything they knew about researching in Poland. So I got a lot of information about the history of the area and some websites that would help me learn more about the people there. Someone sent me a link to a village locator that listed the jurisdictions of different villages in Poland. So I would know where to look for the records, which was great. Another one that I thought was helpful was a surname list. There’s a list of villages and the list of surnames that are historically found in those villages and also links to the online archives for Polish records and how to search them. And even one lady said, you scroll down about halfway down the page and you’ll find the church records, you know, really specific instructions on how to find things.

Alice Childs (25m 11s):
And then probably one of the most exciting things I got from a match was that someone had indexed, the records aren’t indexed, but someone had taken the records from Lipna and indexed them and had a spreadsheet. And he sent that to me. So I got a lot of great resources for my locality guide. And as I went along, I thought, okay, I can do this. I know more about the place and the records. And I’m confident now that I can perform the research.

Diana (25m 37s):
Oh my goodness. I cannot believe someone had indexed those records and shared the spreadsheet. That is amazing. I bet you were doing a happy dance with that one when that came in.

Alice Childs (25m 47s):
It was so exciting because I just pictured having to sit for hours, you know, paging through and reading records in a different language is not easy. So I just, it saved me so much time.

Diana (25m 56s):
Yeah. That is so great. I love it. That’s such a good example of family history serendipity, because honestly we get going on these things and good things happen. Yeah. So what about ethnicity? Because we put locality research and ethnicity together in the Research Like a Pro with DNA process because those two seem to really go together. So what happened when you studied Candy’s ethnicity results?

Alice Childs (26m 20s):
Yeah, It wasn’t really a surprise when I looked at them because all of her grandparents are from Eastern Europe. So the estimates were reported a little bit differently on Ancestry and MyHeritage. But you know, when you add up the different areas and notice that the way they report them actually ends up being all Eastern European for these certain states and countries that they report her ethnicity reports basically showed that her ancestors are 97% Eastern European. And with her grandparents all being from Eastern Europe, that just makes total sense.

Diana (26m 54s):
Yeah. So it really just confirmed what the pedigree and the family lore was saying. And that, and that’s good. That’s important to know that you’re on the right track. So that was probably kind of fun to look at her ethnicity.

Alice Childs (27m 6s):
It was fun. And it’s fun to see that DNA does collaborate with what, you know, what you really know is true. So it’s fun to see that.

Nicole (27m 12s):
Okay, well, let’s talk next about exploring DNA tools and methodology. So because this was a Study Group about DNA and combining it with traditional records, we had a hard time knowing how everyone’s experience would be. So we put in this lesson where we just would talk about the different tools and then everyone would go try them out. So tell us about your experience with exploring the tools and, and how that went.

Alice Childs (27m 40s):
I have to admit that after that lecture, I, my head was just spinning. I just thought, oh my goodness, what am I doing? I don’t even know it was a lot of information, but it’s so helpful. And I loved that. I could go back and watch the lecture again. So I decided that I would start to understand all the tools better if I just went back through the lecture recording and just test it out each tool and played with it as I was watching and I would press pause and try to apply what I was learning and see how each tool might help in my project. And so that was really helpful and helped me just understand everything better. At that point, I was still kind of fuzzy on which tool would be best to use in my research objective or which ones might help me the most.

Alice Childs (28m 22s):
But one tool that I did love that I experimented with was the Leeds Method. And so I went ahead and did the Leeds Method with Candy’s Ancestry DNA matches. And since you only had 17, second and third cousins, it was really quick, but it was really interesting because I did get four distinct grandparent groups. And before I did the Leeds Method I didn’t really have any idea about which DNA matches were on the Kunch line, but being able to separate these matches into the foreground parent groups made me wish that I had done that from the beginning, because then I could have color coded it a lot easier to, I think I was really able to see, oh, here’s this match that is on the Kunch line. And all his shared matches should be on the Kunch line too.

Diana (29m 3s):
So that was a really helpful tool that I loved.

Nicole (29m 6s):
It’s wonderful. I think it’s a good idea to start with those clustering tools right away in a project, because it really helps you hone in on the family group that you need information about. That’s a really good takeaway that starting with the Leeds Method or, you know, clustering can really help you focus in what was your experience with exploring DNA methodology?

Alice Childs (29m 30s):
So I was thinking about the different methods to use and one of them’s pedigree triangulation, but it was going to be impossible to discover most recent common ancestors using her tree because she didn’t have very many ancestors on her tree yet. So that made me a little bit nervous. And I wondered how this was all going to go down, but I could see that if I used her matches’ trees and built quick trees for matches who didn’t have trees, then I might be able to see where the pedigrees triangulated and discover common ancestors. And I was excited about segment triangulation too. I thought that would be really helpful. And I was able to explore that using the tools at MyHeritage. It was really fun to be able to see the segments that Candy shared with some of her matches.

Nicole (30m 12s):
That’s great. It’s wonderful to see all the different tools that you were able to use on your first project. So good job.

Diana (30m 20s):
I think it’s really fun to be listening to you talk about this process because I don’t know, it’s interesting after having done a lot of work with DNA, just to watch someone who’s just brand new. And I think that’s so fun that you started off with not knowing anything about using DNA and how fast you came up to speed. And I love that you used the lecture recording to go through and really practice using each tool. I think so often we may be watching a webinar or we read about something in an article, but we don’t really go try it. And that is what makes all the difference is really trying these tools to see what’s going to work.

Diana (31m 2s):
So you have done all this practice with the tools and you knew that your next step was research planning and you had to create a plan using some of those tools and methodology. So how’d that work, because you’ve done research planning with traditional research? What did you do now with having to figure out what to do with the DNA?

Alice Childs (31m 20s):
Well, like I said before, when I was just practicing with the tools, I was kind of fuzzy about what I was going to use, but we had a lecture in the Study Group on research planning. And that really helped me make connections because I think it was Nicole that did this lecture, but she talked about the different DNA tools and which ones to use for different types of objectives. And so that really helped me kind of determine, okay, this is my objective, and these are the tools that might help me. So it was fun to think about all the possibilities for research and DNA tools and decide on a plan. It was kind of hard to narrow things down, but in the end I just decided that since I was new to genetic genealogy and because I would only have a week to do the research, I thought I might just keep things simple.

Alice Childs (32m 5s):
So I just decided on building quick trees for matches that didn’t have them and then charting those matches with Lucid Chart and then doing some pedigree triangulation, and trying to identify where the trees intersected with each other’s trees and try to identify where Candy’s pedigree might intersect with theirs. So I did the charts and that, or I planned to do the charts. And then I was going to maybe hypothesize where Candy’s family might fit into those charts. And then my last thing I was going to do is to use the Shared Centimorgan Project to verify the relationships with Candy and her DNA matches.

Diana (32m 38s):
I think that was such a great plan. I have noticed that writing down the steps for the DNA methodology makes such a difference because if I don’t do that, I tend to start going back to the clicking around method of just kind of trying to make connections without following a real process. And so I think you probably found that too, that writing those down, you didn’t get off track. You just kind of followed each step. And we’ll, we’ll talk about the research in a minute, but I think that was such a good plan. And I assume that you had to do a plan for traditional research also because you had discovered in your locality guide, so many different things you could do, and you had so many questions I’m sure.

Diana (33m 23s):
So what was your traditional records research plan?

Alice Childs (33m 28s):
Yeah, I created probably kind of an ambitious plan, now that I look back on it, but the most important part of my plan was to examine the Polish records that were attached on the DNA match history that had attached Polish records. So that part of the plan was I wanted to look at the trees of the other matches and find the records in that match’s tree and verify their undocumented trees. I also thought that because marriage records list birth places and parent names I wanted to get the original marriage certificate for the marriage of Michael and Marie. I had found a marriage in an index, but it wasn’t the original record in Cohoes, New York, and so I knew that ordering vital records from the New York department of health takes a long time.

Alice Childs (34m 12s):
It can take up to eight months, but when I was doing locality research on Cohoes city, I found out that they also have vital records there. And so they said that their records would take about a month to get here. So before this project started, I had ordered the certificate so that I could get that back. So I wanted to get that and look at that. And then the last piece of my plan was to build quick trees, not only for DNA matches, but also for some of the FANs of Marie, like the girls that traveled to the United States with her, and her uncle John Robshaw that she was going to meet. I also had discovered that Marie was living with a man named Theodore Grakin in his household on the 1915 New York state census.

Alice Childs (34m 56s):
And I thought he might be a possible relative. So I wanted to discover who he was. And so with all of those things that I wanted to do, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go really deep, but I wanted to focus on finding records that would list parents and hopefully connect back in to the family tree somewhere.

Diana (35m 14s):
Right, with a project like this, where so much was unknown, you could have probably created a research plan for 20 items, but I think it’s really important to focus in and just do five. We always teach just to do five items in your research plan because the discoveries you make within those five items will guide you for the next portion of the research. And you don’t want to spend too much time, you know, doing this huge research plan and then have it be completely changed with your discoveries. So I think you were really wise to just focus on what you did.

Nicole (35m 50s):
Great research plan. I like the plan to build the trees for the friends, associates and neighbors to have the FANs. What a good idea.

Alice Childs (36m 1s):
Thanks.

Nicole (36m 1s):
Well, the next step of the process was to practice writing source citations for DNA matches and traditional sources. So tell us about your experience with that and how it helped you.

Alice Childs (36m 13s):
I had started creating my citation templates when I was in the spring Study Group and I’ve been adding to them ever since. And so since I had those as a resource, I had already created my traditionals source citations during the timeline analysis. So that was there and ready to go, which was so great to be able to just create them as I went and not have to go back and do it, but it was really fun to learn how to cite DNA sources. You know, obviously I’d never done that before and you provided templates as part of the Study Group materials, and those are really helpful. So I had fun creating my citations and then I added those to my templates too, so that they’ll just be ready for future projects.

Diana (36m 53s):
That’s a great idea. I think a lot of us are a little bit leery of DNA source citations, but when you break them down, they’re not really any more difficult than a regular source citation. And it’s just a matter of learning how to do it and starting that template so you always have them handy. So good job. Now, the next part of the process was to actually follow that research plan you’d created and to log your research and to start writing. So how did that work?

Alice Childs (37m 24s):
Like we said before, I love having a plan and following it, it just helps me stay focused. Cause you do tend to think, oh, I just found this. Maybe I should go here. Maybe I should go there. So when you have your research plan, you can just be focused and efficient and work through the process. So a couple of things I did that I learned from the Study Group in the spring is to create the citations as I went. And that makes your report writing go a lot faster. I also really wrote specific notes in the notes field, on my research log. I think that’s been one of the most helpful things to do for me is to just write notes and then I can just copy and paste those into my report later. And I often, you know, reword things, but you just have that there as a starting point so you can remember exactly what you found and what you were thinking.

Alice Childs (38m 10s):
And so that was really great. For my findings as I was researching with the DNA, I was able to verify the common ancestors with the, some of the matches that I had charted, which was really exciting to see that, you know, these trees really do have records to support them. And so I made a hypothesis about where Candy fit into the tree. One of her, one of the people that was in this family tree was a man named Basileus Haleczko. And I thought that that might be Candy’s grandfather or Marie Haleczko’s father. And so I was able to put Candy in her family, into the tree based on that. And then I use the Shared cM Project to verify that the predicted relationships between Candy and those DNA matches, if Candy’s in, that spot on the tree were right.

Alice Childs (38m 59s):
And it was exciting to see that they did fit within the parameters. So it was really fun to use DNA and see that you can extend someone’s ancestry using DNA. So with the traditional records, I, I did receive the marriage certificate from the city clerk in time to use it for the project. And I learned that both Michael and Marie were working as mill hands in the cotton mills in Cohoes New York, which was really fun. There were big cotton mills there, and lots of Eastern European immigrants came and worked there. So that’s what they were doing that was fun to learn. And then there was just other information that kind of verified what I already knew, but the certificate also gave me the maiden name of Michael’s mother.

Alice Childs (39m 40s):
It was hard to read though. So that was kind of tricky. So I, I thought I knew what it was, but I just got a message from Candy, not too long ago, saying that someone on her DNA match list had given her a birth certificate for her grandfather, which is so amazing. And so now we really know what the maiden name is, but as far as my FAN research, I wasn’t able to learn too much about Marie’s traveling companions or her uncle John Robshaw during the time that I had for the research. But I did see that Theodore Gretchin the guy that she was living with in 1915, his wife Tekla was from Lipna, where Maria is from.

Diana (40m 20s):
So I think maybe they’re related, but I just haven’t been able to make a connection yet. So that will be for another phase of this project. Great. And I’m sure you put that in your future research suggestions, all of those great ideas.

Alice Childs (40m 31s):
I did

Diana (40m 32s):
To go forward. Well, I had a quick question about that marriage certificate. So did that name, the parents?

Alice Childs (40m 41s):
Yes. It named both Michael and Marie’s parents. And it was interesting. Cause again, there were name changes, so Michael’s parents are Theodore Kunch and Pelagia, and we didn’t know her maiden name, but on the marriage certificate, it says that his parents are Frank and Bessie Cluda is what it looks like it says to me. So that was interesting, but I’ve noticed that Theodore and Frank are two names that go together a lot in this family tree, either somebody has a middle name of Frank with Theodore. I don’t know if it’s a, you know, a nickname or a, some kind of a name, but then it listed Marie’s parents as Wazyle W A Z Y L E.

Alice Childs (41m 23s):
And then it said her mom was Nasta Polesh. So I thought I Nasta would be Anastasia, you know, a nickname. So they matched. That was good. It didn’t show exact birthplaces. It said they were both born in Austria.

Diana (41m 36s):
So back to the Austria, Poland Galicia, the different localities. Oh wow. So exciting. You made such good progress on this project.

Nicole (41m 48s):
So your findings where you found that made a name of Michael’s mother, which you weren’t really even looking for. Cool. And that the DNA matches had helped you verify that Marie’s father Wazyle was correct. Is that right?

Alice Childs (42m 10s):
Yes. Yes. And with that, you know, and the DNA match’s tree that I was working with, this Wazyle, they had parents listed for him and grandparents, you know, it extends her ancestry by several generations.

Nicole (42m 24s):
Wow. So that DNA match that already had done the research, being able to fit Marie’s father into that tree is really what blasted opened that line for you.

Alice Childs (42m 35s):
Yeah, it was awesome. It was so exciting.

Nicole (42m 38s):
That’s amazing. So you really did meet your objective 100% because you extended the ancestry of Marie and you even found some bonus things like Michael’s mother’s maiden name. That’s amazing.

Alice Childs (42m 50s):
It was fun. It was a fun project.

Nicole (42m 54s):
So after you did the research, you needed to write up your report, correlate all these findings. How was your experience writing this? It was it difficult to include the DNA evidence that you had found?

Alice Childs (43m 7s):
It wasn’t difficult to include the DNA evidence. It was difficult because I had done a lot of research before I started the DNA project. And then with my objective for Marie, I had evidence there with that objective. And so I, I was trying to incorporate all of that into my report. And so it took me a long time to figure out how to do that. But even though it took me a long time, it’s just always so exciting to organize everything and correlate the evidence and just kind of get solidified in your mind. How did I make this conclusion? Does it really work? And then also I was just able to see that there were a lot of new avenues for, for the research. It was just fun to record all my ideas and suggestions for future research section.

Nicole (43m 54s):
Wonderful. That’s great. I agree that when you write it up, it can be time-consuming but you do really see things so clearly and having to write out how you came to the conclusion helps you solidify the conclusion in your mind and make, and really make sure that it’s accurate.

Diana (44m 12s):
Well, Alice I’ve just decided that you are a true kindred spirit after listening to you on this podcast. I knew you were, but now I really know you are because you like writing and you like doing source citations and you get so excited about these discoveries. And so, you know, that’s, that’s what we’re all about. We love that too. So one of the things that we ask you to do at the very end of a Research Like a Pro study group is to do an evaluation, you know, to go back and think through what you would do differently. And I think this is an important for all of us, whether it’s part of a study group, but every time we finish a project, we should evaluate and think, what did I do that maybe it was unnecessary? What could I have done differently?

Diana (44m 53s):
So I’m just curious, what did you decide as you did your evaluation and looked back on this project?

Alice Childs (44m 58s):
There were a few things that I thought, oh, if I would’ve done this from the beginning, it would’ve really helped me. One of them was keeping a DNA correspondence log. You know, I started contacting matches before the project really started. And so I was just contacting quite a few matches and I didn’t really record it. You know, you can still see your messages in Ancestry, but I wasn’t recording anything anywhere. So when I started the study group, that was one of the things that we were supposed to do as a correspondence log. And it took me quite a while to go back and fill that in. So I would do that right from the beginning. I think it’s so helpful to just have it all in a spreadsheet and be able to look and see who you’ve heard back from and what their response was. So you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of messages.

Alice Childs (45m 40s):
So that’s one thing. Like I talked about before, I think really deciding on a strategy for color coding from the start would have been helpful and saved me a lot of time. The other thing is I didn’t use the Leeds Method until quite a ways into the project. So I think I would use the Leeds Method right at the beginning or some kind of clustering, just so that you can see which side of the family you want to work with, or which matches belong to the side of the family that you want to work with. And that would also help with the color coding process. So that’s an important one. I think also I should have not tried to include both phases of this project. You know, I did the preliminary research and then my DNA project, and I wish I would have just written a report about the preliminary stuff first and then kept it to what I did for the Study Group project separately.

Alice Childs (46m 25s):
So I think it’s just a good lesson for me to not try to include too much in one project, you know, just kind of break it up and do separate projects for separate parts of it. But I’m just really excited to explore and use new tools in future projects to I, you know, I kept it really simple this time, but with that new revelation from Candy’s DNA match and the, and the birth record of her grandfather, I’m really excited to maybe use some of those new tools as I keep working on this project for Candy. So I’m just really excited to do another project using DNA.

Diana (47m 1s):
That is wonderful. I am so excited too, for Candy and for you, and I’m excited to learn what, what more you’re going to figure out. So one of the other things that we ask our study group members to do is to make a plan for continuing education. And so what do you have some ideas about how you’re going to continue your DNA learning?

Alice Childs (47m 22s):
Yeah, I’m planning on attending roots tech in February. And so I want to do some DNA classes there. I love listening to podcasts and webinars. So I just, I’m always on the lookout for, you know, podcasts and webinars having to do with DNA and I’ll keep listening to those. And in the Study Group, we had some great book suggestions. So I have a few of those on my reading list. And so I want to read some more books about using DNA. I just got an idea with this project of all the possibilities for using DNA in my research. So I just want to keep learning as much as I can and using DNA whenever it’s applicable to my objective.

Diana (47m 60s):
That’s wonderful. It’s interesting. After you’ve done a project like this, you don’t look at any project without thinking, oh, I could use DNA for this, right?

Alice Childs (48m 8s):
That’s true. I keep thinking of all the different things I could do with DNA now. So it’s been really exciting.

Diana (48m 14s):
Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you so much, Alice, for being on the podcast today, it’s been so fun to hear your whole experience and give us so many ideas. And I think our listeners are going to love this episode, especially if they maybe have a tricky immigration DNA project like this, to realize that you can do this. You were not an expert at this and you just went for it and look at what you did. So thank you so much for sharing.

Alice Childs (48m 41s):
Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

Nicole (48m 44s):
I just have one final question. Did you share the results with Candy as you were going along? Or did you have like one phone call or something with her? Did you email it? How did it go with the reveal?

Alice Childs (48m 56s):
I had shared a few things with her when I was first getting started, especially, you know, when I learned that her grandparents didn’t actually get married before they came to the US, I talked to her about that. And we talked about ordering the record, the birth record. So I did talk to her then, but then I didn’t talk to her too much. I just sent her the report at the end. And then we had a phone call just a few days ago to talk about everything. And it was great. She was so excited. You know, she’s excited to keep learning and discovering more. So it’s been really fun.

Nicole (49m 25s):
I can only imagine how exciting that would be after her thinking it was such a brick wall that it can never be solved. I mean, she told us that it just was too hard and that nobody could figure it out. So we took that as a challenge. Like I bet we could, we were at a family reunion. Let’s see, let’s see if Alice can do this one. She would be great at that.

Alice Childs (49m 44s):
Well, it was fun. I I’m happy that you thought of me cause it was really fun to work on it. I, I learned a lot and it was just fun.

Nicole (49m 52s):
Wonderful. Thanks for coming and talking to us today and thanks to all of our listeners for listening. We hope you guys have a great week and we will talk to you guys again next week. And don’t forget that we are doing our Ancestry DNA Kit Giveaway with Alice. So make sure you go and subscribe to her blog and to ours and share this post with the episode and let us know that you did in a comment so that we can enter you into the drawing. And we will announce the winner on January 1st. All right, everybody. We’ll talk to you later. Bye bye.

Alice Childs (50m 25s):
Bye.

Diana (50m 29s):
Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (50m 60s):
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.