Gedmatch

Day 1 RootsTech 2022

Miss W. Conferences , , , , , , , ,

Any links will take you directly to a recommended website.

My playlist is ready and I have now started checking out some sessions, series and keynotes. Some are of interest to me personally and others might be helpful information for those people I help at the local library doing their family history.

UK Ancestors on a budget by Karen Evans

Three sessions – first one about census

  • Irish census 1901 and 1911 can be found at the National Archives of Ireland.
  • English and Welsh returns for 1841-1911 found at Family Search. Scroll down the page to specify which collection you want to check by typing in England census then choose from the options.
  • England, Wales and Scotland records transcribed by volunteers at FreeCen. Note not all places have been transcribed.

Second session – BMD

Civil registration was different for each country.

  • England 1837 but compulsory only from 1875
  • Ireland from 1864 but non Catholic marriages from 1845
  • Scotland from 1855

Places to find civil and church records:

  • ScotlandsPeople – search for free but pay for documents at reasonable price – incudes both civil and church records
  • IrishGenealogy – has both civil records and church records
  • General Register Office – has index for BMD and you can order certificates here more cheaply than from a large database like Ancestry
  • FreeBMD – shows indexes for BMD – all volunteers
  • UKBMD – again a volunteer based group which shows parishes or counties looking at BMD in their area specifically. Also includes lists of counties with Online Parish Clerk websites (OPC). Also has one place studies and census info – so great site for lots of free information and indexes to use.
  • National Library Ireland – Catholic parish registers
  • Family search – lots of registers for particular counties and parishes. Find them through Records and narrow further with Collections
  • FreeReg – similar to FreeBMD and FreeCen – run by volunteers

Third session – hidden treasures

After having looked at the censuses and BMDs, where else can you look for information while on a budget?

  • Find a grave – often includes images, basic info on the person being searched and maybe family info as well
  • Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) – for those who have died in war – variety of ways to search
  • County councils – some councils have their own archives of things like dog licences, canal boats, gaols
  • GENUKI – great site, breaks down to country then county and parish and what records are available at each level
  • Cyndi’s list – world wide links to thousands of websites
  • Also check out specials and free trials of the big databases. Often family history societies and local libraries have more resources as well.
  • Help online from rootschat, facebook groups and other social media.

Latest DNA Painter releases by Jonny Perl

I love using some of the tools on DNA Painter especially What are the odds (WATO) and the shared cM page. But I have also tried to paint chromosome maps but have found it very tedious adding in one person at a time. But there are now ways to import more than one persons DNA chromosome segments which I might have to start using.

I also learnt about using phased kits at GEDmatch to import just my mum’s data or just my dad’s data. This makes it easier to work out if segments are maternal or paternal on the chromosome map when importing from GEDmatch cluster groups. (Tier 1)

Another new tool was looking at adding dimensions such as birth/death year on your family tree instead of just names. Also colour coding on family trees as well as on WATO.

Main stage events

Many of these sessions are very early in the morning in Australia so I will have to watch them at another time once the recordings are up on the website. But I did listen to Maysoon Zayid and Matthew Modine talking about their family history and how memories make connections through oral history as well as movies and photos.

I did look at some other sessions but will not be writing about them all.

I am disappointed though that I only have 13 relatives at RootsTech – maybe my relatives are not into family history as much as I am.

Readers: What were your takeaways from day 1 at RootsTech?

DNA and Gedmatch

Miss W. Using DNA ,

Following on from my last post, I have raw DNA data from Ancestry stored in a file on my computer and I have now uploaded it to Gedmatch.

Why did I do that?

Gedmatch has a lot more tools for manipulating the data gathered from your DNA. Most of the tools are free but you can also pay a small amount monthly to use some more precise tools.

Once you have registered and uploaded to Gedmatch, take note of your number. If you have tested with Ancestry, your number will start with A. Here are the Gedmatch numbers of the kits I run. Hopefully I might match some of yours.

  • Sue A702006
  • Mum (Phyl) A141289
  • Dad (Bob) A380974
  • Ruby (cousin) A984734
  • Dorothy (hoped was cousin but not) A400283
  • Brother (Phil) A076075
  • Kevin (half uncle) A215065

Tools I have used

The first tool I used was the One-to-many. From this I could see all the people who matched some part of my DNA. It told me about how many generations we were apart and gave me an email address to contact those that were close. It also told me how many cM of DNA I shared and what the largest segment was. The bigger the numbers, the closer the person is in your tree as you can see from my example.

The first five matches are those relatives I asked to test but notice Dorothy is not there from my list. If she was going to be a match, she would have been similar to Ruby at about 3 generations back. Both Ruby and Dorothy are descendants from William Smith (my whaling captain from Samoa) and they match each other. My dad matches Ruby but not Dorothy.

I mainly use the data from the autosomal columns but here is a great post about how X-DNA can help you narrow down which branch of your tree the match might come from. I will need to do this to check the few X-DNA matches I have.

So I now have a list of my autosomal matches. What do I do now?

If I click on the hyperlinked letter A for Lachy’s results (see previous image), it takes me to the one-to-one tool. I don’t make any changes on this form and this is what I then find out about the chromosomes we share.

Lachy and I share DNA on 4 different chromosomes. On one chromosome we share in two different places. The largest segment is 29.8cM and the total is 77.4cM. How can this help me work out the relationship?

I then head to this relationship chart which was updated in August 2017. I actually have this printed and saved so I can refer to it easily. Here it is as a jpeg for printing.

From the chart I can see that Lachy with a total of 77.4cM will fit in the 2C2r area for averages but he could also be closer if you look at the range.

Is Lachy on mum or dad’s side of the family? First take note of Lachy’s gedmatch number. A197294 this means I might be able to find a tree on Ancestry to help me with the match.

To check which side of my tree he is on, I am now going to compare his kit with mum’s kit using another tool. People who match one or both kits. If there are people matching both, then he is on mum’s side of the tree, otherwise he will be on dad’s side.

Wow! I have a huge list of people who match both mum and Lachy.

How am I going to start organizing all this information to make it useful to me? The best bits to use are the actual chromosome numbers and the start and end of the segments of the chromosome locations. I decided to use a spreadsheet where I just copied all mum’s one to many test results – I then added extra columns to include chromosome numbers, start/end locations and SNPs. This is now starting to look workable.

Readers: Which tools on Gedmatch have you found useful and why?

Letter Q challenge

Miss W. Uncategorised , , , , ,

 

Character Question Mark

Creative Commons License One Way Stock via Compfight

This one is easy especially with me having just had DNA tests done on myself and my parents.

Q will be for questions of which I will have many once the results come through.

But to help me answer these questions I have joined a Facebook group on DNA genealogy in Australia and New Zealand. They have lots of links of other places to go to get help. Naturally I also have Mr Google to turn to.

UPDATE UPDATE – Just found the admin of the Facebook group has a list of resources on her blog – they are fantastic.

But firstly, it is recommended to upload the DNA results file to GEDMATCH where you are given a number code so you can see who else you might be matched to with DNA.

Personally, I feel this is going to be extremely interesting and I hope to find out more on my father’s side. I have spent a lot of today on Ancestry and Trove trying to find out about his great grandparents on his mother’s maternal side – SOMERS and O’KEEFE around Georges Bay, Tasmania.

Readers: Have you had your DNA tested? What have you learnt since getting the results?