Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A few months ago, I decided it would be interesting to investigate my niece’s genealogy.

I entered information about her parents and grandparents into a new tree at MyHeritage and let MyHeritage’s Record Hints and Smart Matches go to work. It wasn’t too long before I had a couple of hundred people representing a lot of her relatives out to about 2nd cousins.

There were a few enticing hints on her mother’s father’s side that attracted me. I started following them and they’d each add another 30 relatives and take me back another generation. In very little time, MyHeritage had 80 source suggestions for me with over 1000 matches and every time I analyzed and confirmed a suggestion, the numbers would continue to grow.

I’m the type of person who likes a clean email in-box, as well as a clean MyHeritage hint list. I saw that I’d soon have thousands or even tens of thousands of people in my niece’s tree, and I really didn’t have the time to build that and resolve the multitude of hints that would result.

So I took a step back and thought about what I was doing. My niece had a few lines that were going back to Southern Ontario in the early 1800’s, and they got there from New Jersey where they were in the 1700’s and previously England. Now I’m in the realms of early America, and I realized these are genealogies that many genealogists connect to. A lot of research has already been done on these individuals and the same people are in the trees of many genealogists.

I had never had this problem with my own genealogy, since all my ancestors arrived in North America between 1900 and 1930 and I’ve never had to deal with early America and English roots. That really looks so interesting.

But I concluded it would be a waste of my time to redo all the research others have done. It’s all out there already. I just needed some way to connect to those people.

Pedigree-Only

I decided what was best was, after allowing inclusion of my niece’s relatives out to her 2nd cousins, would be to only add her direct ancestors to the tree.

At MyHeritage, that ended up being fairly simple to do. I checked the Smart Matches by person and found those that gave additional spouse or parent information for any of the direct ancestors.

Matthew Borden is one of my niece’s lines that traced back to England. I currently have that his wife’s name is Joan, but I don’t have her maiden name. Getting her maiden name, birth date and death date and place might lead to finding her parents.

MyHeritage has 78 Smart Matches for Matthew, and the Smart Match summary indicates that there is new spouse information.

Clicking on the "Review 78 matches” button reveals the 78 matches with other people’s trees at MyHeritage ordered first by the ones that provide the most additional information:

I check to make sure that my birth year and death year and places match, that the wife is listed as a partner, and that the son is listed as among the children. Since I am doing just the pedigree, I only have one child included.

Then I take a look at the partners, and see if the partners listed for the 78 matches all agree.  This is what I found:

• Joan Reeder (51 times)
• Joan Glover Reeder (9 times)
• Joan Mary Reeder (1 time)
• Joan (6 times)
• no partners listed (11 times), but 5 of these listed Joan Reeder as Matthew’s mother (presumably incorrect)

So they all seem to agree that the maiden name is likely Reeder. The Glover was sometimes in parenthesis, so I’m thinking it might the surname of her spouse of a previous or later marriage. With only 1 entry of a middle name of Mary, I’m not going to believe that until I get further evidence.

If I would have had conflicts here, then I would have gone off to our good friend Mr. Google and see if there’s something on her. I could look up “Matthew Borden” “Joan Reeder” and see what pops up. I’d be looking, not for a genealogy containing the two people, because I’ve already got plenty of those from MyHeritage’s Smart Matches, but for some scholarly work detailing the ancestry WITH SOURCES!!  The sources will show that it was detailed first-person research. Another family tree is NOT considered a source.

Here’s what Google gives:

The third link has nice information, specifically that source at the bottom:

So what I’ll now do now is Review the first Smart Match of Matthew Borden, confirm it, and mark the data in my tree I want to update. 

I may want to also update Matthew’s information if it’s better (e.g. birth and death date and place, occupation), and add his parent’s information if I don’t have it.

I was originally going to use Matthew’s parents as the example in this post, showing how conflicting information can be resolved, but this case is more complicated and his mother is still an unknown with several different people possible, so I chose to use Matthew’s wife instead.

The only people I will accept information for is Matthew, his wife, his parents and possibly his son Richard who is the direct line ancestor we are interested in. I will not select information about Matthew’s other children or siblings. By not selecting that information for inclusion, those other people will not be added to my niece’s MyHeritage tree and it will remain pedigree-only at this generational level.

I’ll then go down to the bottom of the Smart Match. I’ll be sure NOT to press the “Extract all info” button, but just click “Save to tree”.

Now I’ll go back to Matthew Borden’s Smart Matches. I’ll check the next few to see if they might have useful additional information. Once I’ve got most of the information I want, I’ll go up to the “More actions” dropdown and tell MyHeritage to confirm all the remaining matches.

However, I will not save any of the confirmed information to my tree. The confirmation simply makes them available in my profile of Matthew Borden, and removes them from my list of Smart Matches so that I can now concentrate on the next person.

I then simply continue this same procedure for each of the Smart Matches until I’ve exhausted them.

I’ll report on the results of this in an upcoming post.

Two weeks ago, I was interviewed on Zoom by Ditsa Keren for an article that was published on DNAweekly today.

DNAweekly publishes an interesting blog with a wide range of articles about consumer-based DNA tests that extend into their use by genealogists. They reach out and look for third-party software that might be of interest to DNA testers and found me and asked me if I was willing to be interviewed.

On their Blog page, they give an example of some of the recent DNAweekly blog posts:

The website’s primary focus is comparing, reviewing and rating DNA tests and include some FamilyTree based sites in their reviews. I currently count 58 different services in their review list.

They classify companies into these categories:  Ancestry, Family Tree, Health & Wellness, Diet and Nutrition, STD, Pets.  They give each company a rating from 1 to 10, provide for each a User Score of 1 to 5 stars, and then link each to a complete review of that product.

The product reviews are quite detailed and seem to be done very objectively. The company is obviously making money from affiliate links by you clicking and then purchasing the product, but that does not seem to be biasing their reviews in my opinion. They have some coupons available for some products towards the end of their review. Finally, at the bottom of their review, they allow you the user to write your own review on the product and give your star rating. The author of each review is shown with a brief biography.

All in all, a very nice review site for DNA, family tree and health testing services.

Ancestry has recently made changes to its display of the amount of DNA you match with someone. The amount is shown in cM (centimorgans). Most DNA testers using their DNA for genealogy purposes know what cM are and what they represent.

Your DNA match list shows the Shared DNA you have with each of your matches.

The change Ancestry made that I’d like to talk about is the addition of “Unweighted shared DNA”. When you click on the “Shared DNA” link, you’ll be shown information containing this unweighted segment value:

Here you’ll see a “Shared DNA” value of 91 cM and an “Unweighted shared DNA’” value also of 91 cM.  When the shared DNA value is 90 cM or more, the unshared value is always the same.

But when the shared DNA value is less than 90 cM, then the unweighted value can be more, and usually is.  The unweighted value can be as high as 89 cM.

Ancestry uses what they call their Timber algorithm to filter out pieces of DNA that it figures should not be considered when deciding if two people are related.

A lot of people, including myself, have been critical of Timber believing it removes segments that it shouldn’t and they were very happy with the new information that now shows the pre-Timber amount. You can’t easily get this amount for all your matches. You do have to click through each match one by one to get that match’s unweighted value. You cannot see them all on your DNA Matches page like you can the post-Timber values.

Comparing Average Shared Values

The research work I’m currently doing on one branch of my wife’s family with her cousin Terry Lasky includes some lines where we do not know if the ancestors are brother, half-brothers or first cousins. We have descendants of two ancestors who DNA tested that we can compare.  Those who are 3 generations down would be 3rd cousins if the ancestors are brothers, half 3rd cousins if they are half-brothers, and 4th cousins if the ancestors are 1st cousins. 

All of our family includes endogamy. Terry and I have been worried about the effect of endogamy on our cM shared values, and on the effect that the Ancestry Timber algorithm would have on our cM values.

Terry has 32 DNA testers from this branch who tested at Ancestry. Among the testers he had 138 pairs of them where he knew for sure how they were related and did not know of a second way they might be related, other than through endogamy.

Parent/child are 1 generation apart. At Ancestry DNA, parent/child pairs match with 3476 cM. Children are two generations apart (up to parent, down to other child). Their average match at Ancestry DNA should be 3/4 of a parent/child match or 2607 cM.  An uncle/aunt/nephew/niece is 3 generations apart, and an average match at Ancestry DNA in theory should average half of a parent/child match and be 1738 cM. From there on, every extra generation halves the cM matching. What we are doing is counting meiosis which is the number of times the cells recombine. Meiosis 6 for example can be 2nd cousins, 1st cousins twice removed, half 1st cousins once removed, or great-great-great-great grandparent/child and many other relationships. But they all should have the same theoretical average cM at Ancestry DNA and that should be 217 cM.

So what I did is averaged Terry’s known pairs by meiosis and compared them to what the theoretical average cM should be at Ancestry. It resulted in this table:

This very much surprised me when I first saw it. I had thought that Terry’s Ancestry numbers would be considerably higher than the theoretical averages due to endogamy. But Terry’s pairs averaged only 5 cM higher than the theoretical values. That is extremely close.

I scratched my head wondering why. These are the post-Timber values which had some segments removed by TImber. I decided to separate out the Timber affected numbers from those unaffected and divided the above table into >= 90 cM and < 90 cM.

Again I was surprised. The meiosis 7 and 8 have average differences of +29 and +76 for >= 90 cM.  They have average differences of -70 and -26 for < 90 cM.

It seems Ancestry optimized their 90 cM cutoff for Timber to get the averages in the meiosis levels to be close to the theoretical. What this seems to show is that it is not a good idea to separate out the two or to try to correct for their Timber algorithm.  Their numbers with Timber seem to be best.

Just to check, I averaged out the Ancestry unweighted values for Terry’s pairs:

Meiosis 8 corrected is okay, but meiosis 7 has and average difference of -51.  Compare that to an average difference of 7 in the original raw values with Timber.  So I wouldn’t want to use these unweighted. Using Ancestry’s values with Timber seems best.

It seems that the Ancestry genetic scientists knew what they were doing with Timber. They seemed to have optimized it so that each meiosis level will average out very close to it’s theoretical value.

Blaine’s Shared cM Version 4.0

Well that was really good to know. Now I wanted to know how much Blaine Bettinger’s Shared cM Project v4 varied from the Ancestry theoretical averages. Surely Blaine’s would be different. His numbers were based on submissions of people who got cM values not just from Ancestry, but also from 23andMe, Family Tree DNA, GEDmatch, MyHeritage and others. Not all companies report exactly the same way. Family Tree DNA includes small segments down to 1 cM and will usually report higher shared cMs for the same two people. 

So here was a second surprise:

Blaine’s values are actually very close to the Ancestry theoretical value for the closer relationships.  Even meiosis 6 to 9 isn’t that far away. I attribute the slightly larger differences for the more distant relationships being due to some reported pairs being related an additional way that is adding to the amount. It isn’t much, just 12 to 21 cM,

None-the-less, Blaine’s numbers match up well with the Ancestry theoretical and that’s good to know.

Conclusion

Ancestry did Timber for a reason. It seems to me that they may have calibrated TImber so that the average cM for a given relationship would be the same as the theoretical average. Even if they didn’t do that calibration on purpose, it sure worked out well.

My recommendation is to use the Timber-based numbers, especially when comparing to Blaine’s shared cM project.

Don’t worry about the new unweighted Shared DNA values, and stop complaining so much about Timber.