Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

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Genealogy Guy 0:17
Welcome along to another edition of armchair genealogy, following on from last month's episode, when I spoke to Laura house from ancestry, and we talked about genealogy and DNA, I thought I'd like to sort of revisit that and look at it from a more technical aspect, and maybe some of the terminology that's used. What's interesting when you're actually making podcasts is once they're posted, you get to see all the available data and the analytics, as they call them. And what I found fascinating, the one episode that created the most amount of feedback via email to myself had the lowest number of listeners, which I found quite fascinating. That just means that there's a lot of people that have missed this earlier podcast from when I first started making them, and I thought I would dig it out of the archives. So this is the interview with Donna Rutherford, who's going to explain everything you need to know about the basics of genealogy and DNA, or as I call it, DNA 101, with Donna Rutherford. So to start us off, Donna, how did you get into genealogy?

Donna Rutherford 1:22
Started looking at genealogy and looking at my family history way back when I was a teenager, so many years ago now, and used to talk a lot to some of my aunts, great aunts and uncles, who would tell me all about the family history. So I got involved with genealogy really early on. And then in New Zealand, I used to do a lot of work in the weekends looking for records back in the day, before the internet. And then slowly the internet came along, and I continued with my love of genealogy, and, of course, my love of technology. And so I started doing online family trees, which I loved. And then roll forward to 2015, and ancestry, DNA, or ancestry, announced their DNA tests, and I thought, well, this will be interesting. Why don't I give this a go, something I don't know anything about. I literally knew nothing about the science of it, and did an Ancestry DNA test, and was absolutely fascinated. I didn't have very many matches back in 2015 I was one of the early adopters of the DNA test, but it was just absolutely fascinating. And I threw myself into learning all about genetic genealogy, and I just been working on and trying to learn all the time. Every day is a school day, and every day, you know, there's new things coming along to learn about, and new tools and so on. So I love it, and I love then imparting that knowledge to other people and presentations and blog posts and a Facebook group as well.

Genealogy Guy 2:50
Okay, then, so, right? I've sent for my results. I've got them back. What? What do I do now?

Donna Rutherford 2:59
It's always the question. I think some people think they're going to get a result where it just gives them a whole new family tree, and they can just tick it off and say, Yep, that looks right and good to go. Of course, that's not what happens. They get a they get an ethnicity estimate, which they look at and then wonder why they've got region percentages for regions of the world. They know they've got no ancestors in from their research, and then they just see a load of matches, which are just names to them and probably not even anyone they recognize. So it can be very confusing to start with. It is nice to have a look at the ethnicity estimate the that can actually pose some interesting issues. If you do see you're from a region of the world you really weren't expecting. But otherwise, the best place is to then start moving on and looking at your your DNA match list. Those are your DNA cousins, people you share DNA with. And that's when it takes a bit of learning. And it is quite an uphill learning path, and it can take some time, but learning how to use those DNA matches to actually then confirm whether your known tree that you've already built is as expected, or whether you might have some interesting mysteries to solve.

Genealogy Guy 4:17
The other big question that everyone asks is, I've tested on another company. I'm uploading my DNA to another company. Why are the results different?

Donna Rutherford 4:28
They're different because when they do the ethnicity estimates, they're measuring you against their own Reference panel. And a Reference panel is a group of living people, modern people, they had. They're not comparing you to ancient remains or anything like that. They are comparing you to other people. It's not everyone else in the database who's tested. It's a very select group of people those reference panels now, some of the companies are growing to, you know, 1000s upon 1000s of people in this Reference panel. Those people were selected because they have known Ancestor in specific regions of the world, and they've got all the documentation that backs that up. And then they compare your DNA to that to those people the companies. So every company has a completely different set of reference people that they use. And then, along with that, they have different computer algorithms to try and work out what your ethnicity is by after these comparisons with those reference people.

Genealogy Guy 5:26
So basically, you should take your DNA and definitely upload it to as many other databases that you can possibly get your hands on,

Donna Rutherford 5:35
absolutely and not just to have a look at the ethnicity estimate differences, but also you'll get a different pool of DNA matches. So, for example, I might have 400 4th cousins and closer at ancestry. If I upload my file from there to Myheritage or Family Tree DNA and some of the other companies, then I will get, I will get some people that have also tested at ancestry, but I'll get a load of people that have only tested at, for example, Myheritage. So now I'm growing my pool of DNA cousins to do my genealogy research.

Genealogy Guy 6:12
The next one is, what does my match list mean? How do I use this information when it starts telling you, oh, we've got a match list. What is it actually saying?

Donna Rutherford 6:23
And it can be confusing to people, because they look at their matches and go, I don't recognize that name. How can this person be connected to me? Well, everyone in your match list is your DNA cousin. It means they share DNA with you and you you can only get your DNA from your parents. You get 50% of your biological father and 50% of your biological mother's DNA. For the type of DNA tests we're doing, the autosomal DNA. And their DNA is made up of all their ancestors before them as well. And every generation it's that 50% is handed down to a child. So you've got DNA from all your ancestors going back with the type of DNA we're working with, autosomal DNA, we're looking probably about five to six generations back as when we can really research using this type of DNA. So your or your great, great great great grandparents, you've got parts of their DNA, and so do loads of other people, because those four times great grandparents have had children who have had children, who have had children, who have had children, and those are people who are also DNA testing. So you won't know all those people, which is why your match list is usually made up of a whole lot of people you've never heard of what you're looking for on your DNA match list. All the companies sort it by size. So DNA matches are measured by Centimorgans. It's a scientific term, and you Nobody needs to understand the complex calculation behind the centimorgan it's always written with a little c and a capital M, but you're looking for the centimorgan amount on your match, the more Centimorgans you share with someone, the closer they are to you in relationship. So you'll share around about 3500 Centimorgans with a parent and around about 1500 Centimorgans, maybe about 1700 Centimorgans with an aunt or an uncle or a niece and a nephew. Now the companies can't tell you who this person is or what their relationship is with you. They can just tell you how much DNA you share with them, and as you saw that in that example, around 1700 centi Morgans could be an aunt, uncle or a niece, nephew. You can't tell the sites. Can't tell you which way round that is. You need to work that out by doing genealogy. And always say to people, genetic genealogy is really all about the genealogy and not about the genetics, because the only way you can work out someone's actual relationship to you is to compare family trees. And when you compare family trees, you can then place that match into your family tree based on the common ancestor you have with them. So you're always looking for your matches common ancestor with with you and with them. And you know how far to go back based on how many Centimorgans you share. So once you get down to about 35, 40 Centimorgans, you could be sharing that with a four times somebody who shares a four times great grandparent with you, for example. So it could be a lot of tree building required to get you back to your common ancestor with the match.

Genealogy Guy 9:31
What's on Centimorgans? When it saves shared Centimorgans, what's the lowest common ancestor that I should go chasing for? What number should I go anything below that? It's going to be really hard.

Donna Rutherford 9:43
So I usually set myself a limit, around about 30 Centimorgans. And anyone listening to this, I can hear them already say, but I've got confirmed 20 centimorgan matches, and that is quite possible, but at the 30 centimorgan level is where science tells. Us, we're likely to have a common ancestor with that match back about five to six generations most of the time. Once we start getting under 30 Centimorgans, that common ancestor could be 10 generations back, 20 generations back, and we're never going to be able to find them by doing all the research, because there is no availability of records back that far to do that research. So we're kind of stuck. We know we see DNA with someone at maybe 25 Centimorgans, but we don't know whether that common ancestor could be 10 generations ago. Now, it could be somebody who is a fourth cousin or a fifth cousin, and they have a nicely documented tree, you have a really good documented tree, and you're able to clearly see your connection to give to where your common ancestor is. So that's great. But normally, with those matches under 30 Centimorgans, unless I can see a clear connection on the genealogy, I don't go chasing them at all because, well, I did once, and I spent her entire weekend building a beautiful tree for a family from the Isle of Wight, only to find there just wasn't enough records to connect this huge, distant tree to the closer match, because they were the matches were just too small, and there was obviously some generations there with the paperwork just wasn't available. So it can waste your precious research time doing that. Once we get down to about 10 centimorgans, and we're really in the realm of we, we might find a genealogical link, but we can't guarantee that the DNA came by that route, because someone we share only 10 Centimorgans with it could, in fact, be a false positive. And unfortunately, that can happen. We just coincidentally the the the matching algorithm, the DNA matches, but it doesn't match because you have a common ancestor. So anything under 10 centimorgans, we're looking at what we call small segments, or small matches, and those matches, even if you find a genealogical connection, you cannot be sure that the DNA came to you via that root of the genealogical connection you found,.

Genealogy Guy 12:08
You get the thing, we found somebody connect either A/ you can find, I've got no tree at all. And you think, Well, that was a waste of time. And the other one is, it's completely private, and they're not responding. You send them messages, they never respond. How can you work with a match when, when you know it's really high, but you're going but I can't make the connection here.

Donna Rutherford 12:25
These are my favorite matches, because that means I can put my deer stalker on and go sleuthing to figure out who that matches. And I love that detective work. It's really surprising how many hints and clues are on that person's profile. In some of my talks, I spend a bit of time talking about the tips and tricks of sleuthing. A match that doesn't have a tree, or is not replying to messages or has a private tree, the ones that really have nothing. Sometimes, when you click through to their actual profile on the site, you might find that they've registered a location or an age that might give you some details. But also Facebook is and any social media is fantastic for trying to sleuth out and match. If they have a very common name, it is. It is often a lot more difficult, but if they've got a name that you can recognize as probably not being that common. You could just tap that into Facebook and look through sometimes their Facebook profile has the same picture they use on the site as their profile picture for their DNA kit. So there's lots of ways to do that, and it takes some time to get used to using those sleuthing techniques rather than just saying, That's a lovely match, but they're not communicating with me. I'll bypass it. There's bit of a trick for looking into private trees. If you're on ancestry, at Ancestry DNA, there's some lovely search features at the top of the match list. And if you type a surname, and for example, if I type Rutherford in, what will come back to me as a list of all the people in my match list that have Rutherford in their tree, in their connected DNA tree, whether it's private or public. And I will see that match come back with their private tree under Rutherford. And I now know that in that private tree they have the Rutherford surname. It doesn't mean to say I'm connected to them, but by the Rutherford surname, but I now know that Rutherford is in that private tree. So it's a really nice tip when you've got matches that have private trees,

Genealogy Guy 14:31
so you've uploaded to Ged match, and then what does it all mean?

Donna Rutherford 14:37
Ged match is a very confusing site for people who go to it directly after just working with their first DNA test. And it used to be that people would immediately say, Oh, you've done your DNA test. Quick. Get it into gedmatch. Those days are starting to go one of the reasons is gedmatch has had some security problems. Which you can read about on the on the internet and some of the Facebook groups. But gedmatch is a public DNA database, so when you're uploading to this database, it was just started by a couple of guys actually wanted somewhere to put these DNA kits that since changed when you go in there, you have to learn how to use all the different reports. It doesn't have a nice user interface like some of the other companies do, and in most instances. Now, genetic genealogists are saying, if you've tested ancestry, then the next place to upload is probably MyHeritage, because it has a very nice user interface. It has a growing pool of people. It is bigger than it has a bigger pool than Gedmatch. And it also uses the colour. If you're using the coloured dot feature, ancestry, MyHeritage have that as well. They also have some really good built in hints, their theory of family, relativity and so on. So it's much like using the ancestry interface if you started with ancestry. So gedmatch is now not really the next go to upload site. It is used by law enforcement. You cannot opt out of being matched for human remains testing with law enforcement and but you can opt out of the murder cases and the ongoing law enforcement activity around murder cases and cold cases, that's all being done in a in the USA. But of course, GED match is one big database, like they all are. They're worldwide databases. You can't siphon off part of a database just to be for one country.

Genealogy Guy 16:42
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Genealogy Guy 17:17
Returning back to the chat with Donna Rutherford here on armchair genealogy. I asked her about x DNA, and what is it?

Donna Rutherford 17:26
X DNA comes on chromosome 23 so when we talk about autosomal DNA that I mentioned before, that we use for these types of direct to consumer DNA tests, we don't include the DNA or what we call the sex chromosomes. So autosomal DNA is on chromosome one to 22 but we all have 46 chromosomes, 23 pairs. So every it's pairs, because one one of the peer comes from your mother and one one comes from your father. When we get to chromosome 23 we call those the sex chromosomes. Because if you're a born female, you will have 2x chromosomes. You get x DNA from your mother and X DNA from your father. Your father actually only has 1x chromosome. His other chromosome is is a Y chromosome. So chromosome 23 for a man, is a y and an x, so the man actually determines the sex of the child. The child either has a Y chromosome, meaning they're born male, or an X chromosome from the Father, which means they're born female. So x DNA can be quite useful to because it has an inheritance pattern. For example, two males who match you have some X chromosome matching. It can't have come from their fathers, because their fathers only gave them a Y chromosome. It must have come from their maternal side. It's really useful for people who have unknown parentage and are looking to kind of prove that they're a particular man is their biological father. If there's two half siblings that are female, and they look at their x DNA, they know they don't match through their mother, but their x DNA will be the same because they've got it from the same father, because the father only has 1x DNA to pass on. So they will share a full X chromosome if they share a father.

Genealogy Guy 19:23
I'll give you a scenario if, if I'm working with my match and we, and we, I found somebody, and we both have solid trees, and we find there's a common ancestor, but we can't find the common surname. What? What can you do there?

Donna Rutherford 19:40
It could be that. It could be several things. It could be your, you, you or your match. Could have a wrong tree. You've just gone wrong with the paper trail. You found the wrong family. If you're like me, you've got Smith's in your tree. I have an Elizabeth Smith born in Lincolnshire in the middle of the 1800s I can. Not tell you how many of those Elizabeth Smiths there are. So it could have been quite easy to go wrong and pick the wrong Elizabeth Smith and follow the wrong paper trail. So if your match has followed a correct paper trail, then you're not going to be able to see your connection if it's back on say that Smith line, for example. It could be the other way around. It could be you've got the right paper trail, but your match has followed a wrong paper trail, so their tree doesn't show that common ancestor because they've gone off with the wrong family somewhere along the line, in their in their research. It could be that you've both done fantastic trees and and they are correct for the paper trail, but unfortunately, one of you have what we call an NPE, or a non parental event, not parent expected. Sometimes it's called and more often these days, it's called misattributed parentage. What this means is that a father somewhere in your tree, usually it's the father somewhere in the tree. The biological father is not the man who's on the birth certificate. I actually have this in my own tree where I had a cluster of mysterious matches, who I found out lived next their family lived next door to my family in Yorkshire. And as it turns out, it appears the man next door was actually the father of my great, great grandfather, and not not the man named on his birth certificate. So that happens throughout the ages, really, that unfortunately, somebody is going to find that in their tree that the man named on the birth certificate is, is not the biological father of the child. And so when you find that in a tree, you can find it by doing a DNA test, because you'll have a cluster of matches that all go back to a family you've never you've never heard of, you don't know about, and you have no matches to a particular branch in your tree. And then you need to do some sleuthing, some detective work, to figure out how, you know, how the other family slots into your tree. And in my case, when I was sleuthing, looking at all the records I've, I noticed an address that was the same, and realized it was the address of the people next door. And so I could see that this unknown group of people that I could see they were close matches to me, but we just couldn't find a connection in our trees. And then I found that their family lived next door to mine, and they had more and more matches that all went back to the next door neighbors, and I had no matches back to the man named on the birth certificate. So that can be one of the problems when you've got a match, and you're comparing trees, and you you cannot find a link that that will happen as you get smaller matches. You know when I was talking about going down to 20, 25, Centimorgans, and it just could be your common ancestor is too far back. You're not going to be able to find it. But if you've got a close match, kind of above that 30 centimorgan range, you would expect to to find a connection, but there could also be an error in a tree or an NPE.

Genealogy Guy 23:07
One of your great tips was talking about a dirty tree. If someone is just starting out, why is it a good idea to set up a dirty tree?

Donna Rutherford 23:15
We usually call these quick and dirty trees, or research trees, and we kind of use that term quick and dirty, like we might use in the corporate world, or you might use at home yourself, if you trying to spec something out of budget, or something like that, you might just write on the back of an envelope and a quick and dirty calculation. And that same term is being used for these types of trees that we create, which we then name as quick and dirty trees. Doing a quick and dirty tree is a great way of doing research. The quick and dirty tree has one thing that's really important. It cannot be found by anybody else, so we need to make sure it is not indexed in any of the databases that the companies have. And the reason we want to do that is because it is so quick and dirty. We could have errors. We could we could be just testing things out. We don't want anyone else to just copy it. We know in the genealogy world there's a lot of really bad online trees. We don't want to be somebody adding into that pool of really bad trees out there. So we keep all this research private. And now, if we're doing a quick and dirty tree ancestry, there's a great way to do it to keep it private. Not only can we make the tree private, but we can also make that tree unsearchable. And it's a different there's two little toggles when you create a tree that's to make it public or private, but if you make it private, there's another switch that says, Do you want to make it searchable? And there you have to switch it off and say, I do not want to make it searchable. At that point, it won't enter the ancestry database of trees, and no one will even know that you've created it. So you know you've got match lists where you've got private trees. And I gave you that little tip of how to find if a private tree has a certain name in it by searching your quick and dirty tree, even if you. You link your DNA to, it is never going to show on a match list. There is absolutely no reason to link your DNA to a quick and dirty tree anyway, because you're keeping it out of any places that where it can it can be compared to any other DNA match, but it will attract hints. So if you're using an ancestry, you'll get potential ancestor hint, so you can build a tree really, really quickly. This is really useful. If you've got a DNA match, you don't know where they fit with you, and they've got a partial tree, it's only got about three people in it, but in your quick and dirty tree, you can go and add that person in, and then you can put in the information they've got and then start building it up yourself. We are genealogists. We know how to do that research, so we can do that research and then create these trees ourselves, and that will lead us to the common ancestor of our match. And it will that is a lot easier than trying to, sometimes than even trying to message them if they don't want to, don't want to message with you, or just bypass them, because their tree only has three people in it. If you build it out further, you might come to the common ancestor. So you do all that tree building in your private and unsearchable quick and dirty research tree. No one can see what you're doing, and sometimes I put screenshots. If I've been doing some sleuthing on social media, I might put some screenshots into that quick and dirty tree as well, but they never find their way to my public tree. And once I've established how I connect with a match, I just take that line where I'm connected. I'm happy that they share the rights Cenitmorgans for the relationship I've found, and I will go and put that whole connection through in my public tree, but my quick and dirty tree will never be seen by anybody, so we just use it to do the research, to keep it out of keep it out of that whole database of trees that do include some quite bad, wrong trees. We just do it. We no one can see it. Some people might just do it on a piece of paper. Do a quick and dirty tree on a piece of paper, but that's why we use a quick and dirty tree to do all that research where it can't be found. And then when we establish who somebody is, we can put that into our proper tree that is properly sourced.

Genealogy Guy 27:10
Well, Donna Rutherford, once again, you've proven to me that you have a phenomenal database in your head of bits of information. If people want to find out more about what you do and what you can help with, and what you can advise with, and links and all that sort of stuff. Is there a place they can go to?

Donna Rutherford 27:27
They can find me on the web at www.donnarutherford.com but if they're on Facebook, they can find my Facebook group where people come in with exactly these types of questions. Mell they come in they're asking these sorts of things. Every day, they get replies from all the other people in the group who are also very knowledgeable and have been researching for a long time. We help a lot of newbies. We help a lot of people with advanced things. And my DNA group is set up for the UK because we have different ways of we have a different types of matches. And perhaps, if we're in America, we they have hundreds of first and second cousins. We typically don't have such good matches. So we do try and specialize for the UK and but we have lots of Australians, New Zealanders and Americans in the group as well. So that group, group is called DNA help for genealogy (UK.) So it's got UK and bracket so DNA help for genealogy (UK). And you can find me there. I answer, I come in and answer most of the threads that are on there. And we keep a close eye on I have some fantastic admins helping in that group as well. You can find me on Twitter @DonnaSr, that's s for Sally, R for Rutherford @DonnaSr, I'm usually on the social media as much as time permits.

Genealogy Guy 28:50
Well, Thank you very much for your time and your expert knowledge on everything that you've gained over the years of surfing around and doing your detective and sleuthing work.

Donna Rutherford 29:00
I love it. I love it a lot.

Genealogy Guy 29:03
And my thanks there to Donna Rutherford for her time and expertise on genealogical matters. And I can highly recommend checking out donnarutherford.com and reading her blog posts and on the site, you'll find one of them called DNA. What, when, how, why? FAQ for beginners, 2023 edition, where you will find many of the links that we've discussed in this episode,

Jingle 29:28
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