The shocking and unbelievable news hit my inbox today, and I just couldn’t be more amazed by what has just happened and what the future effects will be. Today it was announced that DeepMind, a company formed in 2010 and purchased by Google in 2014 to investigate the possibilities of using neural networks for ...
One year ago today, I celebrated my 60th birthday and on the same day I retired from my job of 41 years. Since then, it’s been quite a year. I wonder how I ever had time for a day job. I recently got back from my 4th genealogy conference of the year. In February, I was at RootsTech in Salt Lake City, July at ...
Ten days ago, I produced an article: Revisiting Speed and Balding, where I tried to duplicate the results of their Figure 2B. I posted a link to the article on the ISOGG Facebook group, and received a lot of comments, mostly from Andrew Millard and Debbie Kennett. Debbie also provided quite a few comments ...
#FTDNA2017 – What a great conference! So many people I could talk to at a technical level and so many that I learned from. I averaged less than 5 hours of sleep per night just because the day was so full, every morning was an early wakeup, and I had to watch Saturday Night Live. I left Winnipeg with 5 cm (2 ...
#FTDNA2017 - First up, another breakfast sponsored by FTDNA. This was followed at 8 a.m. by an ISOGG (International Society of Genetic Genealogy) chapter meeting, my first. It was led by Katherine Bodger, the Director and co-founder of the society. ISOGG was founded in 2005 after the first Family Tree DNA ...
The day began with Max Blankfeld and Bennett Greenspan greeting the entire group. After honoring the veterans, and there must have been 50 in the room who stood to loud applause, they provided a bit of information about the conference. There are 240 in attendance. About 50 people, including myself, raised their ...
Location: Houston Texas. About 200 genetic genealogists have gathered for 3 days of talks and mingling and discussion about the state of DNA analysis. It’s very exciting for me to be with and talk to so many experts, each with a slightly different viewpoint and their own specialties in this field. The day ...
Today is my Behold Blog’s 15’th blogiversary. My first blog post was on Thursday, November 7, 2002. This blog post commemorating my blogiversary is my 1084th. I’m not as prolific a writer as Randy Seaver or James Tanner, but an average of 72 posts a year, more than one a week, isn’t that bad. ...
Last weekend, I enjoyed two webinars by Tim Janzen that were part of MyHeritage’s One-Day Genealogy Seminar with Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Tim gave an introductory talk and an advanced talk on the use of Autosomal DNA Testing. In both talks, Tim showed the well-known and often referred to Speed and ...
I managed to get registered today for The 13th Annual International Conference on Genetic Genealogy held each year by Family Tree DNA and I’ll be going to Houston from November 10 to 12 to attend. This is a tough one to get into (unless you are a speaker) as registration is only open to FTDNA group ...
#cangensummit2017 – The final day at the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia was a half-day with 6 talks in 2 tracks. We all met for a breakfast together, and then I led off repeating my talk from the day before on intro DNA. I had a few less people than the day before since many had ...
#cangensummit2017 – A couple of great days at the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Friday afternoon the started with Jan Raska from Pier 21, of the Canadian Museum of Immigration providing a very interesting keynote for the almost 60 attendees who arrived in time for his talk. ...
I was thinking about my 1 year old grand-nephew this morning, and how he and I would look to be half-sharing about a quarter of our DNA in a chromosome browser. Well that would make my grand-nephew the quarterback of my DNA Football team. His father, my nephew, would be the halfback. My daughters would be ...
#cangensummit2017 - On Thursday, I’ll be flying 2,600 km (1,600 miles), but still be in Canada, as I travel to Halifax, Nova Scotia for the Great Canadian Genealogy Summit being held from October 13 to 15. I’ll be one of 12 speakers, all of us Canadian, giving 18 talks on various subjects of genealogical ...
In the DMT documentation on the Interpreting Results page, I have a section called Deep Ancestors. It says: If the Triangulated Group is from a common ancestor, then there may be smaller identifiable groups within it that are either from a later crossover down one descendant line (in which case all the ...
When I was first learning about autosomal DNA analysis, just over a year ago, I was under the misconception that if three people triangulate on a segment, then that segment is IBD (Identical by Descent). A segment that is IBD is one that is passed down from a common ancestor. These are the segments you are ...
I’ve returned from Orlando after the week-long #IAJGS2017 (International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies) Conference on Jewish Genealogy. This was my 8th International genealogy conference, my first being RootsTech 2012, but it was my first IAJGS Conference. The venue was The Swan ...
I fixed a few bugs in Double Match Triangulator that I found while preparing for my workshop at the IAJGS Conference on Monday. I also changed DMT to display people ordered by longest segment rather than total segments, and released it as Version 1.5.1. I’m looking forward to giving the workshop. We’re ...
One option I didn’t realize existed at FamilyTreeDNA until Jay Sage alerted me. You can selectively hide or show the people whose matches are deemed “Immediate”, “Close”, “Distant” or “Speculative”. Here’s Jay’s instructions: In the upper-right corner of the home screen, mouse over the ...
It is very true. The English language is full of inconsistencies. And one of these inconsistences is the pronunciation of the letter “G”. There is the hard “G”, as in: great, gallop, flying, guppy and goat. And there is the soft “G”, as in gentle, giraffe, gem or gymnasium. Hard “G”s ...
Is it true genealogists have more fun? Unfortunately I had to miss #genchat on Twitter last night. The questions and answers this week were about DNA testing, starting with MRCAs and then branching out. For those of you who do not know what #genchat is, it is a genealogy based Twitter chat that happens every ...
Some of the least reliable information provided by DNA tests are the ethnicity percentages, also called admixtures. After getting my and my uncle’s DNA test results, I posted my ethnicity results. Our Ashkenazi Jewish percentages came in at 79% and 89% at FamilyTreeDNA and my result came in at 83.8% at ...
I just happened to come across a post by Patricia Greber which showed the back of her T-shirt that she made to wears at genealogy conferences. Her shirt shows her family names and GEDmatch kit number and asks: “Are we related?” Patricia obviously wants other genealogists to see this, so I checked with her ...
I had a wonderful two week vacation with my family at Disney World in Florida. I don’t know if I’d call it relaxing, because it was non-stop go-go-go. Here’s one of the many amusing items from the Haunted Mansion for my genealogy friends: So it’s back to try again to finish version 1.3 of Behold and ...
I’ve noticed it’s been almost 2 months since my last blog post, and that’s too long. I kept delaying my posts with the hope and expectation that my next one would be announcing the release of Behold 1.3. However, the changes to Behold have been taking longer than I hoped. With Spring bringing ...
Before I leave DNA and get back to Behold for a few weeks, I had one more set of results I wanted to report on. A couple of weeks ago, I compared my MyHeritage DNA ethnicity results to my FamilyTreeDNA results, and also compared my match results. There was one other comparison I had wanted to do. It’s to ...
What a few months! Finished up RootsTech and left with 3rd place in the Innovator Showdown. Took a much needed one-week vacation with my wife. Finally got out of my boot and started driving again. And I finished DMT’s new website at www.doublematchtriangulator.com and last week released version 1.5 of DMT. ...
First off, that didn’t take very long! At RootsTech, just over one month ago, I took a DNA test at the MyHeritage booth. I didn’t have to mail it back. Instead the MyHeritage people delivered all the samples they collected at RootsTech directly to the lab in Texas. A couple of weeks before RootsTech, I was ...
I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I scheduled yesterday, March 10, to be the launch date for a website for my Double Match Triangulator program. The new website is here: doublematchtriangulator.com There’s a lot involved in preparing a new website, even if you’ve done a few before. To be honest, I ...
Just back from RootsTech and what a week it was! As one of the ten semi-finalists in the Innovator Showdown, and the ultimate third place winner, I had some extra special experiences that I’ll always remember. Pre Roots-Tech Even before I entered the contest, I was planning to go to this year’s ...
Several others have already written about the items and the Tech that they’re taking to #RootsTech. Nichole Dyer wrote about 8 Tech Tools to Bring to RootsTech. Alona Tester gives a big list of her general stuff and techy stuff in RootsTech 2017 – Counting Down. Christine Woodcock gave her list in ...
Roberta Estes did the first analysis of this and asked someone to do the same thing for an endogamous population. I had that data and I felt I wanted to know as well. I did a blog post about it a few days ago that I titled Double Match Phasing for an Endogamous Population, but using the term “Double Match ...
I finalized my schedule for RootsTech about a week ago (have you finalized yours yet?) of what I plan to do. I’ve put it on my online RootsTech App as well as on OneNote on my Phone in case the wifi at the Conference is spotty. If you want to track me down, this is where I’ll be: Monday, Feb ...
It seems like my last post was a bit confusing to many people. I expect that the way I drew the boxes (to be segments) and the way I connected them with lines (indicating matching) was not intuitive, and it did not allow people to see that Double Matching with two people actually triangulates. I’m going to ...
Important Note: After this article was written, I found many people had trouble understanding the concepts, as the diagrams were confusing them more than helping them. This article has been completely rewritten (just two days later) and uses a different diagramming that is akin to ...
A few days ago, Roberta Estes posted: Concepts – Segment Size, Legitimate and False Matches where she compared a child’s matches against those of her parents. She downloaded the Chromosome Browser Results (CBR) file from FamilyTreeDNA for a set of parents and a child, and then explained how she did the ...
DMT is a semi-finalist in the #InnovatorShowdown at #RootsTech 2017. This is a new version of the program with several improvements. You can get the new version on my DMT page. It is freeware to help you do autosomal DNA segment analysis. Now Works with Older CBR files My own FamilyTreeDNA results ...
I found out about this On December 29, when Martin Geldmacher of Germany requested a trial key for Behold on the Behold Download page. He wrote in the “Please let me know how you found out about Behold” box the following: I am trying to find a way to read/convert an old Gedcom 1.0 file (created by FHS). ...
It’s always an exciting day when your DNA results come back. After analyzing my uncle’s results ad infinitum for the past six months, I finally bit the bullet and sent away for my own test. The FamilyTreeDNA Holiday Season sale with coupons for extra dollars off was quite motivating. I ordered my own test ...
Update: January 16, 2017. Contest Winner Chosen. My daughter did the random stuff and pulled the name out of the hat (actually it was a plastic bag) The lucky winner was: Carole Steers Congratulations, Carole If you don’t have your pass already to RootsTech, Feb 8-11, 2017 in Salt Lake City, then ...
Yesterday was 20 years from the day I put up my first official web pages in 1997. (Rats. I missed it. I should have had my web-iversary in my appointment calendar.) I started webhosting using the services of Concentric.net who in 2000 were acquired by XO. My original web address was: ...
When I was reviewing the #RootsTech 2017 Schedule several months ago to see what sessions I would be interested in attending, I was particularly attracted to the talk by Janine Adams and Brooks Duncan on “Go Paperless: Digitize & Streamline Your Research”, on Friday at 11:00 a.m., described as: ...
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