Newsletter - 4th March
2020
Online genealogy - a
safe haven in these troubled times
Victoria BDMs reduced
for March
Save 25% on Ancestry
DNA UK only
MASTERCLASS: How to
make the most of your DNA test
Would you consider
cloning your pet?
Secret door
discovered at Westminster
Discovering family
Bibles - at eBay!
Reading Early
Handwriting: follow up
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 23rd February) click here; to find
earlier articles use the customised Google search between this paragraph and
the next (it searches ALL of the newsletters since February 2009, so you don't
need to keep copies):
To go to the main LostCousins
website click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a
member, do join - it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you whenever
there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
There
are extra prizes on offer for entrants in my New Year Competition - just log-in
to your LostCousins account over the next week to see whether you've won a prize!
Tip:
anyone who made an entry on their My Ancestors page during the period of the
competition could be a winner - best of luck!
Online
genealogy - a safe haven in these troubled times
Every
day brings worrying news about the spread and impact of the new coronavirus,
but there's one thing that comforts me - I'm definitely not going to catch a
cold, let alone flu or the new coronavirus, as a result of researching my tree
online.
Indeed,
if you’re looking for a safe and productivity activity that will help to take
your mind of what's happening (and what might happen in the future), online genealogy
seems like a pretty good solution!
Note:
don’t spend too long sitting down - make sure you get some exercise now and
again, and if you're fortunate enough to have a breakfast bar (or some other piece
of furniture that is taller than a desk), try standing up to use your computer
for at least some of the time.
Victoria BDMs reduced for March
Uncertified
images of birth, death, and marriage register entries for the Australia state
of Victoria are discounted for the month of March, from $24.50 to $20.
You
can find out more here.
Save 25% on Ancestry DNA UK only
If
you’re a regular reader of this newsletter you'll know that when it comes to genealogical
DNA tests, Ancestry are so far ahead of their competitors that you simply can’t
ignore them. There may be circumstances in which it might make sense to take a
second test with another provider, but if you’re only going to test once, it
should be with Ancestry - no ifs, no buts.
So
when there is a sale on, the only question is how many test kits to buy!
Why
would you want to buy more than one test? For a start you might be researching
on behalf of someone else - your spouse, perhaps. But the primary reason is to
home in on the parts of your tree where you have your most annoying 'brick
walls' - remember that DNA isn’t marked to indicate which ancestor each segment
came from, so often the only way to identify which of your genetic cousins
share which ancestors is to look at who else they match with.
For
example, I arranged for my two surviving 1st cousins to test. They're both on
my mother's side of my tree, so I can be pretty certain that any genetic
cousins of mine that also match either Ruth or David are on that side of my
tree. It's a lot of money to spend, of course, but I see it more as an
investment - let's face it, a DNA test is as much a labour-saving device as a
vacuum cleaner or washing machine!
Note:
you don’t need an Ancestry subscription to contact your DNA matches or see the
first 5 generations of their tree, but if you’re offered a discounted Ancestry
subscription after buying your test (as many others have been), it’s well worth
thinking about.
Please
use the link below when you make your purchase so that LostCousins can benefit -
and this newsletter can remain independent:
Ancestry.co.uk
(UK only) REDUCED FROM £79 TO £59 (plus shipping) - ENDS 17TH MARCH
You
may find that you need to log-out from Ancestry first, if so please click the
link again before continuing.
Masterclass: How to make the most of your DNA
test
Note: I've updated this Masterclass since
it was published in August 2019
We
can’t all be experts on DNA - I've written this Masterclass so that even if you
don’t understand the first thing about DNA you can still get amazing results.
Here's
all you really need to know about how DNA works:
If
you like you can skip the next section, which is a bit technical, and start reading
again from The Reward
Introduction to
autosomal DNA
If
you’re male and you've previously tested your Y-DNA you might be expecting a
set of numbers, For example, I tested 111 markers on my Y-DNA and I can see
from my results how many repeats I have at each of those 111 sites - comparing
my Y-DNA with that of other males who have tested is easy, and when I do the number
of differences provides a rough guide to how closely related we are.
Autosomal
DNA is very different - your DNA is sampled at around 650,000 to 700,000 sites
across your chromosomes using a specially designed chip - a sort of miniature
laboratory - and there are two readings for each site (because the autosomal
chromosomes come in pairs). Although it sounds like a very large number, there
are more than 3 billion base pairs in our entire genome, so the test is looking
at fewer than one base in 4000. The bases are chosen because they are known to
vary in the general population: however the majority don’t have have any known medical significance.
Looking
at the raw data isn't going to tell you anything - it takes a clever computer program
to compare your results with those of millions of others who have tested,
identifying common segments of DNA. But even when those segments have been
identified, there's nothing to say which ancestral line they came from - there
are no names attached, nor any dates. Indeed there's nothing to say which half
came from your mother or your father.
No
matter how much experience you might have as a family historian, it would be
understandable if, when the results of your DNA test came through, you were completely
flummoxed about what to do next. There's a simple reason for this - we're used
to working backwards from what we already know, so there's a clearly defined
path, ie: find our ancestor's baptism in order to
discover (or confirm) who their parents were, then find the parents' marriage,
then find the baptisms of the parents and so on, working back a generation at a
time.
The challenge
But
when we're matched with a genetic cousin, someone who appears to have inherited
an identical segment of DNA, we're faced with a very different challenge - we
usually don’t know which of our ancestors we inherited that segment from, and
the chances are the person we're matched with won't know either. It's rather
like trying to do a complex jigsaw without first seeing the picture on the box.
Most
of the matches we make with DNA cousins will be many generations back, since we
have many more distant cousins than we do close cousins. The final column of
the table below indicates roughly how many cousins you might expect to find if
you and they all took the Ancestry DNA test:
Based
on Table 2 from: Henn BM, Hon L, Macpherson JM, Eriksson N, Saxonov
S, Pe'er I, et al. (2012) Cryptic Distant Relatives Are Common in Both Isolated and Cosmopolitan
Genetic Samples. PLoS ONE 7(4): e34267.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034267
Revised
using Ancestry DNA estimates for the chances of detecting cousins and the
expected number of 1st to 6th cousins for those of British ancestry; the
numbers for 7th to 10th cousins are my own guesstimates
Of
course, in practice only a small fraction of your cousins will have tested - even
Ancestry, by far the biggest providers of autosomal tests, have only sold about
15 million tests - but you can nevertheless reckon that the cousins you're matched
with will be distributed roughly in proportion to the figures shown above. In
other words, over 99% of your matches will be with relatives who are at best
5th cousins, and could well be 8th cousins or even more distant. This won't
necessarily be apparent when you look at your list of matches because there's a
tendency for matches to appear closer or more distant than they really are.
Tip: Ancestry won't
show any of your DNA matches as more distant than '5th to 8th cousin', but it's
very likely that amongst them there are many who are more distant - possibly up
to half of them. Once you get beyond 3rd cousins the length of the shared
segment(s) is only a very rough guide to how closely you are related - you
could share a 20cM segment with a 10th cousin, but no detectable DNA with a 3rd
cousin. The same limitations apply at other sites too, of course.
This
amazing chart from Blaine Bettinger's blog shows how variable the
amounts can be, and how this affects the amount of DNA shared by more distant
relatives:
In
each box there are three figures: the lowest and highest amounts shared between
relatives of each order, together with the average. However the average only takes
into account matches - if there was no detectable shared DNA it isn’t taken
into account in the averages (but does show in the range).
What
you will notice is that the average stabilises at around 12 or 13cM even for
the most distant relationships in the chart. For example, you can see from the first
table that the average DNA shared between 8th cousins is just 0.055cM, but the
average in this chart is over 200 times greater. How can this happen? It's
because unless there's a matching segment of at least 6 to 10cM most companies
won't report a match at all - and because the chart only includes matches which
were actually detected, it bumps up the average quite considerably.
Very
interesting, you might think - but what does it actually mean in practice? What
it tells us is that neither you, nor I, nor any of the DNA companies can reliably
predict how closely we are related to our more distant cousins. So don’t rely
on the testing company's estimate of how closely you’re related to a cousin, look
at the chart and figure out what's possible, then consider what's likely (this
means, for example, taking into account your age and that of your cousin).
Even
if your DNA match is with a 5th cousin, someone who shares your great-great-great-great
grandparents, it probably won’t be obvious how the two of you are related. I
don't know about you, but I certainly can't say who all of my 4G grandparents
were - indeed, I don't even know for sure who all my 3G grandparents were. I've
got several 'brick walls' in the last 6 generations (though fewer than before I
tested my DNA) - and most researchers, including my DNA cousins, are probably
in the same situation. Go back another generation and there are even more gaps
- and it just gets worse from then on.
In
practice most of the ancestors that link us to our DNA cousins are on the other
side of a 'brick wall' - and this could be a 'brick wall' in your own tree, in
your cousin's tree, or both trees. What a fascinating challenge!
At
this stage it's important to remind ourselves why we took a DNA test! If you're a regular reader of this newsletter
it's very likely that the primary reason you tested was the same as mine - to
knock down 'brick walls' that conventional research couldn't breach. If our
'brick walls' have resisted our efforts for years (or even decades), the
opportunity to knock them down using DNA is well worth grasping, even though it
will mean that we have to adopt a new and unfamiliar strategy, and utilise
somewhat different techniques.
But
unless you follow the advice in this Masterclass you’re likely to get in to a
muddle. There are dozens of DNA bloggers and experts out there who promote
techniques and apps that are wonderful in theory, but in practice are more likely
to befuddle you and waste your time - in short, you could end up wishing you
hadn't taken the test! Just because something is free and produces pretty
pictures doesn’t make it useful.
Before
you even get your results.....
Make
sure that you've done all the conventional, records-based, research you
possibly can. Remember, DNA testing isn't a substitute for records-based research
- you need to do both to have a reasonable chance of success. Each builds on
the other - if you only do one you're almost certainly going to fail.
Complete
your My Ancestors page at the LostCousins
site, ensuring that you have entered ALL of the cousins (no matter how distant)
that you can find on the 1881 Census. Yes, it might take you an hour or two, but
skipping this important step could cost you hundreds of hours in wasted time.
Tip: start in 1841
with all the relatives you can identify, whether or not you can find them on
that census, then trace each of your branches (sometimes referred to as
collateral lines) through to 1881. Remember, ALL of your living cousins are
descended from the branches of your tree!
When
you have completed your My Ancestors page click Search, then take
a look at your My Cousins page to see
which of your cousins have already tested. The next step is to contact them,
and find out who they tested with. If they tested with a different company, ask
if they have uploaded their results to GEDmatch, and if so, what their kit
number is. Shared matches are the easiest way to figure out how you’re related
to your DNA cousins, so knowing which of your documented cousins have already tested
is crucially important.
How to
process your DNA matches
I'm
going to assume for the purpose of this article that you tested with Ancestry -
but don't stop reading if you tested elsewhere because I'll be covering
techniques you can use, though not as effectively, at other sites.
At
Ancestry you'll typically have over 20000 matches with genetic cousins, and of
those all but about 1% will be with 'distant' cousins, ie
where the estimated relationship is 5th cousin or more distant. So you might
think that the best strategy might be to focus on the 1% on the basis that if
you can't make head or tail of those matches, your chance of resolving the more
distant matches is negligible. Wrong, totally wrong - that approach will lead
to frustration, disappointment, and disillusionment!
Here's
how to get the best results and avoid all that wasted time and frustration:
Strategy
1: search by surname
My
experience has shown that a much better approach is to search the trees of your
matches by surname, in the hope of identifying cousins who have the same surname
in their tree as one of your 'brick wall' ancestors. Here's how to go about it:
Strategy
2: search by birthplace
As
you will have discovered when working through your list of surnames, most of
the time the surname of the ancestors you share with a DNA cousin doesn't
appear in both trees - indeed, it's quite possible that the surname of your
common ancestor doesn't appear in either tree!
The
problem is, when your female ancestors married they generally took their
husband's surname. This makes it more difficult to research female ancestors
whose children were born before the commencement of civil registration, since
baptism registers don't usually give the mother's maiden surname - usually the
only solution is to find the marriage. By contrast you can continue researching
your male ancestors even if you can't find their marriage.
Of
course, this problem doesn't simply affect you and your research - it affects
your cousins too; most researchers' trees become increasingly sparse with each
generation. If you've only identified 10% of your 256 6G grandparents and your
cousins have only identified 10% of theirs, the odds of finding out how you're
related to a 7th cousin simply by comparing the names in your trees are pretty
remote (a little more than 1% in this example, not great odds).
Another
way to figure out how you are related to your DNA cousins is to look for
geographical overlaps - and here's how to go about it:
Strategy
3: look for overlaps with the more unusual components of your ethnicity
Most
readers of this newsletter have mostly British, Irish, or western European
ancestry. But some of you will have Jewish ancestors, or ancestors from outside
Europe, and whilst ethnicity estimates can be quite misleading, they do provide
another way of analysing your matches.
Here's
what Ancestry show for one of my DNA cousins:
If
Ancestry had detected a Jewish component of my own ethnicity this would be one
of the matches I'd be looking at very closely.
Strategy
4: look for the 'elephant in the room'
Because
we all have 'brick walls' in our trees there are parts of our ancestry that are
a closed book - yet there will inevitably be clues amongst our matches, if only
we look for them. For example, if - like me - you don't know of any Irish
ancestors, but have lots of matches with cousins who do, you might begin to
wonder whether one of your 'brick walls' is concealing a connection to Ireland.
I can't provide you with a step-by-step guide - it's all about awareness (Louis
Pasteur said that "chance favours the prepared mind").
But
beware of the common situation in which you share a single DNA segment with
lots of people who all match each other. This suggests that the people you’re
matched with come from an endogamous population, one in which people generally
marry within the same community - in this case you would probably do well to
ignore the matches altogether as any connection is likely to be a long way back.
More
tips
.
Would you consider cloning your pet?
A
couple in California were so devastated by the passing of their dog that they
had him cloned using the same techniques that created Dolly the sheep. Some
people consider it's unethical, and I suspect most people thinks it's
unaffordable - and at $50,000 it’s certainly beyond my reach!
But
why not read the story
and make up your own mind?
Secret door discovered at Westminster
Historians
working on the renovation of the House of Commons found a lost 360 year-old
passageway, hidden in a secret chamber. It had been discovered before, in 1950
- during repairs to bomb damage - but it was sealed up and forgotten about.
See
this BBC article
for more information, including a photo.
Discovering family Bibles - at eBay!
In
the last issue I mentioned that the prospect of discovering a family Bible was
just one of the many reasons for us to connect with 'lost cousins' - and it
prompted Kim to tell me about her experience:
"A few years ago, whilst touring the
Hebrides, I picked up a message via Ancestry. A member collected family bibles,
she had seen one on eBay for the Prescott family. She then searched on Ancestry
and came up with my tree, it was actually the 4 x grandfather of my husband. I
went onto eBay and the auction had ended, but the bible hadn’t sold. I
contacted the seller who relisted it and I bought it for £13 plus £10 p&p
Worth every penny. The families listed dated back to 1774. I will always be
grateful to the lady who took the time to contact me."
I
had a quick look on eBay
while writing this article, and discovered numerous family Bibles for sale -
could one of them belong to your family?
Reading Early Handwriting: follow up
In
the last issue I published
a review of Reading Early Handwriting 1500-1700 by Dr Mark Forrest - for
a non-fiction work it created a great deal of interest, but that's not really
surprising given that it's a problem that we're all faced with sooner or later.
This
email from LostCousins member Bob underlines how important it is to be able to
read documents ourselves, rather than rely on others:
I am pleased to see you drawing attention to
the new book on Reading Early Handwriting 1500-1700 and I would like to see yet
more encouragement for family historians to master this skill. So many of my
genealogical contacts shy away from attempting to read even pre-1750 parish
registers where the entries are largely predictable and they are cutting themselves
off from so much, especially if, instead, they rely on transcriptions on
Ancestry. Of course, the real treasure is in early wills and other documents
and that seems to be a world that they absolutely refuse to enter.
An ability to decipher early handwriting
opens up the possibility of genealogical skills complementing those of the
conventional historian and making significant contributions in their
discipline. I will give you two examples from my own experience.
1. Several
years ago I made contact with someone who had made corrections to gross errors
in Ancestry transcriptions for a Northamptonshire parish register in which I
had an interest. I thought they might be related to me. Although this proved
not to be the case, we exchanged information on other parishes in which we had
a shared interest and found that we were connected in a quite different way.
This led in turn to a contact with a third
party who had discovered that an ancestor we all shared had been involved in
the Newton Riot of 1607. 142 men and 2 women had subsequently received the
King’s pardon for their involvement in the Midland Uprising and the pardon
document with their names (some having actually signed) is preserved at
Northants Record Office.
I was able to transcribe this document in full and reveal that the only
previous attempt at a transcription, on which academic historians have all
relied, had only 75 of the names correct. One name had been omitted completely,
and two of those named were women, not just one as previously believed.
The main reason why I had so much greater
success than the previous transcriber was that I had access to online images of
the registers for the villages from which they came and could match surnames
with those found in the register in spite of the terrible handwriting. In some
cases I could identify the specific individual and trace his or her life story
(also making use of their wills) to see how the events of 1607 impinged on the
family.
Coincidentally I discovered a second ancestor
among the 144 signatories, which seems astonishing. I wrote all this up for “Northamptonshire
Past and Present”:
http://www.northamptonshirerecordsociety.org.uk/eNpp/NppNo71.pdf
Pages
17-35 are the relevant ones, but you may well find it rewarding to look through
the rest of the journal. Bob's second example is much longer and has yet to be
published, so I'm unable to reproduce it here, but I hope to be able to include
a link in a future newsletter.
If
you missed my review of Reading Early Handwriting you'll find it here.
This is where any major updates and corrections will be
highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error first reload the newsletter
(press Ctrl-F5) then
check again before writing to me, in case someone else has beaten you to
it......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2020 Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or republish any part of this newsletter
without permission - which is only granted in the most exceptional
circumstances. However, you
MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for permission
- though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins instead,
since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?