The 2014 Who Do You Think You Are? Live conference took place a couple of weeks ago in London and included DNA presentations. Fortunately for those of us who weren't there, many of these have been uploaded to YouTube. I highly recommend the one by Maurice Gleeson entitled Autosomal DNA – a Step-by-Step Approach to Analysing your atDNA Matches. Unfortunately there's some background noise from the exhibition hall, but don't let that put you off (and you will stop noticing it after a short while).
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Step-by-Step Approach to Analyzing Your atDNA Matches (55:07)
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Maurice outlines 4 "Steps for Success":
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Other DNA lectures from the 2014 WDYTYA? conference are available Here. I've added a new webpage, Presentations on DNA Testing, which includes a range of webinars and podcasts for those who have undergone DNA testing, which I'll keep adding to – previously I included these within a page of links on general genealogy webinars, but I think they deserve a page of their own. If you've been tested at Family Tree DNA, don't miss their excellent, comprehensive series, which has topics of interest for those who have only just received their DNA results through to those with an advanced understanding – their latest webinar covers the "Big Y", as the first results started to come through a few days ago. Maurice Gleeson, Debbie Kennett, and Katherine Borges, who all gave presentations at the 2014 WDYTYA? show, also participated in Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2013, and many of the presentations at this 3-day event are available on YouTube on that link. Additional videos covering more general genetic genealogy topics, rather than specifically dealing with handling and interpretation of DNA results, are available Here.
Recommendations
- Generational Inheritance (DNAeXplained, Roberta Estes, 19 Feb 2014) – an analysis of inheritance of DNA segments through the generations, showing that although we inherit exactly 50% of our DNA from each parent, 85% of the time we inherit all or none of a particular segment from a parent and in only 15% of the time do we inherit only a portion of a segment (with only 0.1% of the time inheriting ~50% of a segment)
- 23andMe Show Close Relatives Button (DNA Footprints, Kasandra Rose, 26 Feb 2014) – 23andMe has several unexpected, frustrating, and silly defaults that many customers (?the majority) aren't aware of, and Show Close Relatives is one such case, in that you have to opt IN to receive matches from close relatives, which they define as first cousins or closer. As Kasandra points out, half first cousins, first cousins once removed, first cousins twice removed, half first cousins once removed, and even high-sharing second cousins may also be hidden. So if your parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts/uncles, and close cousins aren't showing up as a DNA match with you on DNA Relatives (which I'm sure is a cause of consternation, particularly when some parent-child or sibling-sibling combinations have undergone testing at 23andMe), make sure to check that you haven't inadvertently hidden them from showing up by not realizing that you have to opt in.
- Old Scottish's Images of Scotland includes a clickable map of Scotland with push-pins showing the locations where images from that location extracted from 17th, 18th, and 19th century books are available. Over one million Images from the British Library were released on to Flickr Commons last December by the British Library (see Announcement) and are available for anyone to use, remix, and repurpose. I hope that similar push-pin maps are produced for other parts of the UK (and elsewhere in the world), as finding images in locations of interest is much easier using the map on Old Scottish's website than going through the images on Flickr, although there are some amazing images there from all over the world, including illustrations, maps, advertisements, technology, fashions and costume, illustrated alphabet letters, and embellishments, which would be fantastic for family history books and websites. However, only a small fraction of these seem to have been cataloged ("catalogued" for the Brits) and they are looking to launch a crowdsourcing application in the early part of this year, to help describe what the images portray, making it easier for all of us to find what we might be interested in.
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Puzzilla is an amazing new way of looking at descendants available using family trees on FamilySearch. "The Puzzilla.org Descendants Viewer lets you see hundreds of descendants in the FamilyTree database of FamilySearch from an aerial view." Check out the Puzzilla Home Page to get started and for a link to another video. With not being an LDS member myself, I've never bothered to add any of my family to the FamilySearch Family Tree (or correcting some obvious errors of ancestors already there), but maybe this will spur me into doing so. It's free, quick, and web-based – and as well as producing an exquisite chart, it is useful to see which branches may require more research (at about 4 or 5 o'clock on the image here).
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Puzzilla Descendant Viewer
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