Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History

Jingle 0:04
The Genealogy Guy Podcast, demystifying technology and exploring family tree research. Please remember to subscribe and share the podcast with family and friends.

Genealogy Guy 0:17
Welcome to another episode of armchair genealogy with me, the Genealogy Guy, following on from last month's recap episode when we replayed from earlier in the series, the episode when I spoke with Donna Rutherford about getting started with DNA, which I have to say, was the right thing to do, because re running it again, it attracted even more new listeners and more subscribers, which, by the way, if you haven't already subscribed, then I do highly recommend it, as it means you're automatically notified by the system you use to listen to podcasts when a new episode is posted. It also means that you don't have to rely on spotting when I post on social media there's a new episode available anyway. Let's crack on with this episode. So joining me now is Johnny Pearl, and Johnny Pearl is, well, instead of me trying to explain what it's all about, let's just go straight over to Johnny. Johnny. So give me the elevator pitch, if who you are and what is it that you do?

Jonny Perl 1:19
Ok, well, I mean, I'm just like you, am I not Mell?, we're both, We're both genealogists. We're both family history enthusiasts. The only way I'm different from every other family history enthusiast is that I happen to be a web developer, and about seven years ago now, during a period when I was working as a freelancer, I became very interested in DNA, and I had a bit of time to make a website for people who are interested in DNA, and that's called DNA painter. And the website, I guess, aims to help people interpret their results, understand their matches, visualize them, and essentially obsess about their family tree in the way that we as genealogists like to do.

Genealogy Guy 1:59
So what inspired you to create DNA painter? What was the moment in your genealogical journey that sparked the idea?

Jonny Perl 2:07
To be honest, it happened reasonably quickly. I'd been doing genealogy, kind of day and night for about 10 or 15 years before I finally stumped up the money for a DNA test, which is kind of crazy. I waited so long because it wasn't that much money, but I waited until the end of 2016 and then when I got the results, it was that slightly funny time where DNA testing was really big, but it hadn't reached that super tipping point it did maybe a year or two later. So there it was a bit kind of dry. When I got the results, it was hard to really understand what I had. I knew that there was there was life beyond this kind of pie chart of nationalities. So there's this tantalizing glimpse of what the matches might offer, but it wasn't super clear. And like everyone you know, when you come to it, first of all, it's incredibly confusing, isn't it? You've got all these weird terms you've never heard before, etc, etc. So as I battled my way through those, I thought I could do something here that might help other people. So it happened, I think early 2017 I thought, Well, I must pull my socks up and actually build something.

Genealogy Guy 3:09
So what was the process like turning the idea into a functioning tool? It was,

Jonny Perl 1 3:13
It was, it was a weird one Mell. I knew that I had to do it. I kind of decided, and had a little kind of abortive attempt where I just made a WordPress site on my computer, and I thought, no, no, no, I need to do more than this. And so it was already all about this thing called chromosome mapping that I can talk to you a bit more about in a second. But it's realising that if, say, Me and you Mell found that we were matches to each other, we'd share a number of segments of DNA. And so it's a process of understanding what that means. Because at the moment, the way, certainly, when I went to ged match, the way it worked was it just said, Okay, these are this these are the segments you share with this guy. The first, first DNA match I had where I knew where we were connected. All I really knew is we share these little chunks of DNA on these two chromosomes. And it was so abstract, I thought, I need to visualize this, because I need to understand what that means relative to the other matches, and I need to do something with it, more than just a table of data on a screen. So the process of actually building it, to be honest, was a bit of a learning curve. Because I was a I was a web developer, but I wasn't a particularly good one. I was very rusty. For many years, I'd kind of hired other people to do stuff for me, so I had to kind of pull my socks up and get up to speed a little bit. But then, I don't know, I think I was very lucky. It happened to coincide with social media. Previously, I'd just done genealogy in my computer late at night on my own. I might have occasionally met a researcher at a library or something, but I didn't interact with the kind of community, if you like. But then just around 2015 2016 I started to do that. And so I was able to find a bunch of people to test it out for me and make good suggestions and improve it. And then, yeah, I don't know. I just was quite lucky, really. It seemed to be quite popular quite quickly. So that was good.

Genealogy Guy 3:15
Can you give us an overview of The main features?

Jonny Perl 5:01
Well, I guess one of the unique things about it is because it's driven by just one person who's very, very, very into genealogy. It changes quite a lot, and new things come along quite a lot. And if people ask me about something that interests me, I quite often add new things in. So the first thing that I did was this chromosome mapping application. So if you match someone on a site where they'll give you the segments that you share with that person. Unfortunately, that's not every website. It's a site dwindling list of websites. So the list is currently family tree DNA, living DNA, My Heritage and GED match. Unfortunately, you can't get those segments from Ancestry, and you can't anymore get them from 23andme so that's a bit annoying, since those are quite big databases, but there you go. If you do have those segments, you can start to build this kind ofwhat I call it a colorful tapestry of yourself, yeah.So effectively, if you imagine that we were second cousins, you know, as far as I know, we're not, but imagine we were second cousins, we would have common ancestors, which would be a set of great grandparents, yeah. And soif we share bits of DNA, we can kind of assume that those, the DNA that we share came from our common ancestor. That's the reason why we share DNA.And so what you do is assign a color to that set of common ancestors. As I say, we've got some great grandparents called Bob and Mary. We'd say, Okay, well, these green segments here, they came from Bob and Mary. And if you imagine repeating that process with lots of other matches, you end up with this kind of bizarre tapestry, yes, sort of carpet of yourself. And it's fun to do. It helps you understand what inheritance is and how DNA is passed down. Obviously, we have two copies of each chromosome. We've got one from our mother and one from our father. That kind of thing. I was told all that before I started this, and I was like, yeah, yeah, just show me the results that actually,when you do it with your own stuff, that's when you start to understand it properly. So chromosome mapping is the main thing that you can do there. Except it changed. More things kept happening. So there's a there's a there's an American genealogist who does this amazing survey where he asks genealogists if you found a match and you know how you're related to them, tell me how much DNA you share with them. So if we take the second cousin example, say we were second cousins, we shared 320 Centimorgans of DNA. Say we'd send it off to him. He adds it as a data point. I think he's got 60,000 100,000 data points, something crazy. And he made this thing called the shared cm project, which serves as a kind of guide. So if you feel like, Oh, I've got this match, and it's 180 Centimorgans, could it be my sister? Well, no, you can look at this chart, and it tells you the possible things it could be. And he launched a version of this just when I'd start a DNA painter. And I thought, Oh, hello, I can do something with this. I could make this interactive, so you add in a number, and it'll filter this chart and just show you the possible relationships. So that was quite fun. I didn't think much of it at the time. I just did it for myself, and then I put it out there. And that was probably the thing that got everyone to use DNA painter, because it was very easy. You didn't have to have any specialized knowledge or any data to do it, you just put a number in. So if you go to your match list, then you just take someone and say you share 56 centimorgans DNA. What could that mean? You put that number in and it kind of filters this chart and it shows you what the possible relationships are. So that is probably the most used feature on the website, to be honest. But then there are variations of that. There's lots of extra data in that. There's all kinds of geeky histograms and standard deviations. But the most useful bit of it probably is you can add a second amount. So if you imagine Mell that you've tested, and maybe you've got a sibling who's tested as well, and you both match this mysterious person, and maybe you share 100 Centimorgans with them, and your sister shares 243, Centimorgans. You can actually put both of those amounts in, and it will show you only the relationships that could work for both of those amounts, for example, all kind of geeky stuff, but made a little bit more accessible by a sort of usable web interface. And then to finish the question, because you were saying, what are the most what the key features? Taking that a bit further, if we imagine a typical problem we might face. As a genealogist, you might have a whole group of matches where you can see that you must be related to them, but you don't know how exactly. So you share, say, 100 centimorgans with person one, and then you share 210 with their aunt. Who are they? How do you connect to them? What you can do with a tool called What are the odds? Is you can make a tree for these people. So, so you have to do the hard work. You have to do all the genealogy to figure out how they fit together. Then you enter in the amounts that you share with all the people. And then you can try out positions in the tree. You might be thinking, Okay, well, maybe my,maybe my great grandmother was the sister of this person. Let's try that, and it will give you a ranking, basically just using maths to figure out how likely it is based on the amounts you share that you fit into different places. So that is another popular feature.

Genealogy Guy 9:55
It is for any genealogist, it's not for someone that's really techie or someone that's. Well, down the line, it could be just for someone that's just starting out and got their DNA and goes, right? I want to get as much as I can out of the data.

Jonny Perl 10:08
I know that a lot of people come to it. They they hear on the grapevine, oh, here, this site is quite good, and it's easy. And then when they don't immediately understand all of it, they send me an email. So well, I thought you said this was easy. I do get a bit of that. I'm not saying. I magically make the complex easy, but we're all in the same boat, aren't we? We all, we all findit a bit confusing. You've got this strange dichotomy where you hear, okay, we've got this amazing scientist here, and that will confirm everything, and it will be really neat and clean cut, and it isn't. It's kind of messy for various reasons, and we're all having to grapple with this. And so it just gives you, it gives you a sort of guide and a place to work.

Genealogy Guy 10:44
As a piece of software. It's a technical marvel, but how do you balance the complexity of DNA research and keep the platform user friendly? Because that leads on from your last answer.

Jonny Perl 10:54
It's certainly a challenge. Yeah, I guess the main way I do it is some what in the software industry, then they call dog fooding Mell, which is where you use your own stuff, so you're not just building it and putting out there, you're actually using it. So I do make sure that I put time into my own research, so that if I can find bugs myself without people finding them for me, if you know I mean, but no, it's a massive challenge, and it means that I maybe I move a bit slower than I would otherwise like to, because I can't release. I've got quite a lot of users now I can't release something that is completely incomprehensible. It has to, has to have a certain usability to it. I can't really put it out there.

Genealogy Guy 11:33
Now the real big question everyone talks about is privacy and ethics. So DNA and the privacy are hot topics. So how do you approach these concerns with the DNA painter?

Jonny Perl 11:42
it's a massive issue, isn't it? And I guess the main problem for me is that, really, in an ideal world, if you wanted to do loads of complicated stuff with your matches, you don't really want to do that on the internet. Do you want to do it on your computer? There's a minor problem for me, which is, I'm a web developer. I've never made a piece of desktop software in my life. If I could, honestly, I would, and maybe in future, I'll be able to, but in the meantime, yeah, I've just had to adapt. Really. You can import your segments and your matches in, you know, in bulk, if you want to, but actually a lot of the companies have stopped releasing that information. 23and me now, don't give you a big file of all your segments the way they used to, MyHeritage, don't give you a big file of all your segments like they used to, strangely, just around the same time as there was an issue with 23 and me, they stopped doing that. So the focus is more on let's try and solve the problem with the data we've got. And I, to be honest, I always said to people, if you want to map your matches, probably you should map the known matches that you have, and then have a look at who overlaps with them and see if you can solve some of those problems. Just piling all of your data into my website probably isn't, isn't going to be the most fruitful approach anyway. So yeah, what I do is try and encourage people to work through things slowly. A lot of the tools on my website don't really involve you having to put anyone's name in. Really, you're just putting in the amount that you share with that you share with them. If you think of websites and DNA, it does make you shiver, doesn't it? You know what, if I lose my DNA? Now a key thing to say is, you don't upload any DNA to my website. I have met people who said, you should, you should let people upload their raw DNA to your website. And I immediately said, I don't want to be responsible for that. And trust me, I'm quite glad that I didn't.

Genealogy Guy 13:21
Let's grab a short break talking with Johnny Perl from DNA painter, giving methe chance to mention that if you're feeling overwhelmed by some of the unwarranted posts you're getting on some platforms on the social media circuit, I can recommend joining Blue Sky (https://bsky.app/). It has a far better control method of what you want to see and what you want to read. Added to that, there are a fantastic group of genealogists all connecting up, many of them moving across to explore alternative ways of connecting. So if you do set up on Blue Sky, do add me to your followers list, and you just look for me under Genealogy Guy,

Jingle 14:00
Armchairgenealogy.com for generations of all ages.

Genealogy Guy 14:06
So let's now get back to chatting with Johnny pearl from DNA painter, hot offthe press. So is there any new features or updates on the horizon?

Jonny Perl 14:13
What I'll do is I'll tell you about the latest thing that I released, and then what I might be doing in the future. So about a month ago, I released some features to the ancestral trees area. So I've got an area of the website where you don't even have to have taken a DNA test if you don't want to. It's a place for you to store your direct line. And the idea for this is that if a DNA match says to you, please tell me who your ancestors were, because you haven't provided a tree, and I'd like to know you can actually get it to them inone kind of clear, searchable page. So what you do with ancestral trees is you, you import your GEDCOM com, you select it, and it just extracts you, your parents, your parents, parents, etc, going as far back as you want, and it also you have the. dates, and you have where they were born and what their occupation was. So if you've got, like, an ancestral town there, that might be quite obscure, like the one behind my head, Kiefer stakel, that's where a lot ofmy Perl ancestors were from. Hardly anyone was from this town. If I meet anyone else who's got ancestors from that town, I'm in there, you know that's that's exciting news. So if someone searches, if someone happened to have that, they could search my ancestral tree and find it there. So a couple of developments to that. Recently I added a new brick walls report, so that is really getting it in the form in it right at the front of your head, where are yourbrick walls? You probably know anyway. You don't need to be reminded. But there's a little report that says, okay, the closest brick wall is this. It's the, you know, the parents of your second, well, in my case, yes, second great grandparents, or even great grandparents, in one case, and they're from this town in this place. So you've got a little concise list. And you can also upload photos. So you can actually curate a set of kind of circular photos of your ancestors. It's quite dramatic to see them all next to each other on one screenthat you can kind of zoom into. So that is the latest thing that I released. And the idea is that hopefully that will be able to be integrated with the chromosome map. So you might be able to have a chromosome map where not only can you say, well, this chunk on chromosome one came from this ancestor, but actually have a little picture of that ancestor bringing a dry scientific thing to life.

Genealogy Guy 16:25
Without giving any names away. Can you share any success stories where DNA painters help someone solve a big family mystery?

Jonny Perl 16:33
Yes but probably, I guess, in a general way, a lot of people use the site at this point. Mell, I've got somewhere between 100 and 150,000 registered users. So I guess the tension with DNA painter in general is some people are like, well, this is lovely that you can make this pretty looking map thing, but what's it really for? The question always confuses me, because as soon as I did it, I waslike, Wow, I can't believe I can do this. It doesn't have to be for anything. I justwant to do it. I wanted to build it, and that's fun. And obviously that's a bit ridiculous, isn't it, because we're only alive for a certain amount of time, and we should be focusing our efforts in a productive way. So as aside, aside fromthe navel gazing aspect of chromosome mapping, the most practical bit on the site is this tool I mentioned called What are the odds? And a lot of peopleuse that for, you know, discovering missing ancestors, discovering unknown parentage, you know, discovering who the father was or who the mother was,for example. And so that, I think, is the primary, big breakthrough that peopleuse DNA painter from. I've had dozens of messages from people saying, Thank you so much. I couldn't have done it without it, and I should, I should probably add at this point that the website is not entirely coming from me. I've collaborated with a lot of other people to make some of these things happen. So I mentioned the shared centimorgan project is actually a project done by this guy called Blaine Bettinger, and what he did was not only pull all this data together, but he released it in a creative commons license, so I didn't have to call him before I did my little experiment chart. I just did it. Andthen he, of course, said, Oh, that's really cool. Thanks very much. As for the what are the odds tool? Again, that wasn't actually my idea. There's a another American genealogist called Leah Larkin who came up with the idea.She I guess she realized that it must be possible to do something like this. And she had collaborated with an English guy called Andrew Millard, who I've met a few times, great guy. And they had done this kind of difficult bit, the kind of the maths bit, and they'd done it in Excel, and that's great, but it was incredibly arduous to use, because you had to write in every relationship by hand. So my job there was really to, yeah, to fold it into a web interface. So, yeah, it's a collaboration. I can't take the credit really. I'm just, I'm doing what I love, and luckily, some other people like it.

Genealogy Guy 18:49
You mentioned earlier about dog fooding and using your own sort of data, yeah. But I mean, so have you uncovered anything surprising about your own ancestry through it.

Jonny Perl 18:58
Peripherally, yeah, and what I've mostly done, it's interesting. This question loops back with what you're saying about ethics, because ethics and privacy and what should be we tell people, I've definitely discovered collateral, collateral ancestors of mine, or rather collateral relatives of mine, who have fathered children who are not documented. Put it that way. And to be very, very clear on public I have not reached out to the ancestors, so to the descendants of these people, and said, Oh, by the way, your grandmother was actually the child of this person. I have not done that, because that's not my right to do that. But I've done a bit of that. I guess the main thing I've done is I've I've found people who are DNA matches to me or to to people who I've tested, and they've reached out to me and said, Look, I need some help here. And I've solved the case for them. I've figured out who their unknown parent was in one case, certainly two cases. Actually, I've had to gently say before we start, when you take a DNA test, you can uncover thingsyou might necessarily not want to uncover. And I've had. To tread very gently and eventually arrive at the conclusion that probably won't surprise you, which is that their father was actually not the person who they thought was their father, but instead someone who's genetically related to to the test. So that's happened a couple of times, and that's an old story I guess.

Genealogy Guy 20:16
The ethics side of thing is incredible. I mean that the story you're telling aboutyourself is you've identified some things, and basically you've just got to sit back and wait for those people to reach out to you

Jonny Perl 20:25
Oh, yeah, I waited a couple of years for one person to contact me, and actually I didn't reply the first time because I didn't want to deal with it. But then she was persistent, and I thought, Okay, well, she does really want to know. And I was very I was very careful, and yeah, it's a massive tight rope Mell to be honest.

Genealogy Guy 20:43
How did you get into genealogy?

Jonny Perl 20:45
I think I was always temperamentally suited to it. But it was actually surprisingly late that I did get into it. I was growing up. I was really into, if you again, if you look at the picture behind me. So this is a picture of what this town looked like in, I guess, the 1910s or 20s or something, I was obsessed with the books like that about the town I grew up in. I grew I grew up in Bedford, about 60 miles north of London. I used to love all the books that showed where the buildings used to be that had been torn down and the street had been widened, and the little tiny bits of the old buildings you could still see. I was obsessed with that. And then one day, my mum came over and started talking about her Irish ancestors and both her parents had died before I was born. I'd actually never been back there since the 70s at that point, and that really piqued my interest. And it's as if all of my interest in those buildings just kind of went across onto people and didn't really look back from there. So it's weird. I find it really strange. I didn't get it into it earlier, but it just didn't really come up.

Genealogy Guy 21:40
If someone is listening and is becoming very curious about DNA painter, but hasn't tried it yet. What's the best way to get started?

Jonny Perl 21:48
That's a good question. If you go to dnapainter.com One thing I've done is I've put webinars on there, so unless you're bored of hearing my voice already, there are, I think, five or six webinars on there, and one of them I did about five or six years ago, but it's probably still quite a good introduction to DNA painter. And then I've got another one that's more recent, called beginning with DNA painter. And those kind of very gently introduced I guess,the latter particularly gently introduced the different features that are there. And if you'd rather read rather than watch things, I've got a blog, DNA painter.com, forward slash blog, and that that's got quite love instruct your articles in it, too. So that's probably a good start.

Genealogy Guy 22:33
What advice would you give to someone looking to use DNA to break through a brick wall in in their genealogical research?

Jonny Perl 22:40
Don't be disheartened, I guess is the first thing I would say, because it is always more difficult than you hope, isn't it? When, before you've taken that test, if you're anything like me, you've got this naive hope. You think, Wow, all this work I've done, and I'm so tantalizingly close, and I know I know my existing line so well, you know? What if you know when I get the results, what if I can suddenly, immediately find this and generally, generally, you're not. I mean, the most, the majority of things I've discovered are, oh, this person must have had a sibling called this. You know, it's not earth shattering stuff. The rest of it is such a slow burn. I guess the main thing I'd say is, yeah, be patient. But also remember that it's not going to give you the results on its own. It's, it's always, you're all it's really going to do is it's going to uncover, uncover more avenues of research for you that you might not thought of before. And then when you do that research, that's the thing that's going to break the brick walls. You know, the DNA. We've all seen it, you know, potentially Ancestry would say we think we found an ancestor for you. Unless you've, you've only done a limited amount of research on your own tree, it probably something magic. Isn't good. Is going to fall off like that. You know, it's, I don't know. It really depends on how much work you've done. For me, I'dworked for so many years on my stuff that I knew that I'd uncovered pretty much every immediate stone. But it's hugely exciting at the same time. And if you're interested in history, you know, you can learn so much along the way, can't you? Just I find out, for example, my second great grandfather had a sister called Mary Ann, and she didn't stay in Ireland. She went over to Liverpool, so she's actually in the census. And what was her life like, and who did you know? It's all it's all very absorbing. If you're, if you're a passionate genealogist.

Genealogy Guy 24:22
What's next for you personally? Johnny, any projects or goals, or you something you're working towards?

Jonny Perl 24:29
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I have, I don't feel like I'm done with the site at all. There's lots of things I've wanted to do from the start that I kind of haven't because I've been diverted on different paths. And that's fine. It's not the journey, it's not the destination, it's the journey. I'm going to getting there. What I would like DNA painter to eventually be is a bit more integrated. At the moment, there's lots of tools that are very separate from each other, and I'd like to be able to link some of them up with each other, definitely. Yeah, I guess trying to stay on top of technology and developments, in case there's. Anything I can do, or I can really make a difference, because I continue to usethis stuff myself. I continue to look out for new DNA matches, and, you know, do interesting things with them.

Genealogy Guy 25:10
So, that, that leads me on to one of the final questions. Now, you've got aI going on there. You're looking at how you can integrate AI into DNA. Painter,

Jonny Perl 25:19
I would love to again, to loop back to what we were previously discussing, that privacy is kind of a big thing, isn't it, so I need to understand exactly what's possible in the abstract. I can see that a lot of our work trying to, you know, mine for gold and find the DNA matches that might actually be useful and give us actionable research goals, is really difficult, and it's surely AI can help with that. Surely we can give it a bunch of data and say, Find me the good stuff in here, if we can train it on how to find the good stuff. But can we do that, given that the data we give it would contain lots of people's personaldetails, is it possible to do that in a little silo where it's not connected to anything else. I don't know. I'd love to, I'd love it to be possible, and whether I do or someone else does it, I don't mind. I just, I just would like it to happen. Anything that can make it easier.

Genealogy Guy 26:11
You've got to figure out a way of being able to anonymize the data completely so it's just data, and only the person that has loaded up there, can access that research.

Jonny Perl 26:22
I've tried to kind of keep my hand in the AI bit a lot of people, because I'm a programmer, just assume that I must know all about it. And I've had to ask me to speak at events, and I have to say, well, actually, I did actually compare an AI event as a non expert deliberately in Canada last year, which is really fun. I learned a lot from the from the people there. So no, I'll be keeping my ear to the ground really, to be honest. Yeah.

Genealogy Guy 26:49
Excellent. And social network wise, can people get hold of you and follow you?

Jonny Perl 26:53
I guess the dominant social network for for my audience so far has been Facebook, although that could change. So on Facebook, there's a there's a page for DNA painter, and there's a user group that's quite popular. And I'm also on Twitter. I'm on blue sky, I'm on Instagram. I'm not going to tell you I'm really, really dynamic on these platforms, but I'm on them, and I do have a YouTube channel, and it's possible that this year, over the year, I actually postsome stuff on there. At the moment, there's only about five or six things on there, but on there, but I'd like to do more videos, particularly short videos, because I think those could help a lot.

Genealogy Guy 27:27
Ok well thanks very much, Johnny. It's been fascinating. I knew I was going to enjoy the interview. It's even better, because you get to find out the story behind the software.

Jonny Perl 27:34
Well, thanks again for inviting me. I appreciate it,

Genealogy Guy 27:35
And I look forward to seeing it develop even further.

Jonny Perl 27:40
I'll do my best.

Genealogy Guy 27:41
And thanks there to Johnny Perl from DNA painter, which, if you need another tool to help with DNA genealogy, I can highly recommend until the next time, happy and productive research,

Jingle 27:54
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