I went to a Genealogy Conference and met a Chef.

My children – well one son – gives me an incredibly hard time because I like to talk about food. Not just that there is food but what makes the food what it is. He says “Mom, you think you are a foodie”. Pshhaww! I also like beer and talk about the crafts brews I find on my travels. He never calls me a fake “beery” when I talk about choicest hops, barley and malt (Barn Owl Malt in Ontario – shameless plug for a friends Ontario Malt). So fun today, in the hotel lobby with all my bags packed waiting to run to the train station, to meet a Chef. I went to a great Genealogy Conference and met a Chef, The Edible Genealogist, Mark Drew, UE. (@ChefMark Drew)

Much more happened at the Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 2018 than my last minute drool over meeting a Genealogist who is a Chef!

Meeting up with old friends all through out and networking rise to the top of the list for things to do at Conferences, but I got to spend 6 hours on Friday talking about my passion, Genetic Genealogy. Two workshops on DNA! I hope the confusion people brought with them to the sessions was lessened after we were done.

Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 2018 Round Up

Jonathon Vance’s opening Plenary Lecture was fabulous, just a fabulous way to start a Conference and then having Amy Johnson Crow weave threads of Jonathon’s lecture and other sessions into her closing lecture – It takes talent to recognize a thread and it takes something of a humble speaker to change her planned lecture, turn the phrase or theme touched on by other speakers and weave it into their own. Amy and Jonathon and all the rest of the speakers and venders and volunteers made the conference comfortable and consistent- it was very nice to have the theme carried through and tied with a bow.

The Conference was held on the sprawling campus of Guleph University in Guelph, ON. Beautiful setting with the architecture of the school marrying modern and historic buildings and green spaces into perfect symmetry. BUT. The Sprawling campus offered a unique challenge to the Conference co-chairs and committee. Getting all of us from our various hotels or campus residence rooms into the heart of the conference buildings. They had golf carts! A fleet of Golf Carts supplied by Family Search kept the attendees moving on time to our respective activities and sessions.

Take Away? Golf Carts Rock!

Well, the whole conference rocked really. Sessions on building a nation – Canada. Sessions on preserving our records. Sessions on how to care for our precious research once we have passed – What!? you haven’t included your genealogical research in your will? Or talked with the Genetic Genealogists about working to preserve your DNA for future researchers? I was talking about that and work Blaine Bettinger is doing with his Committee for the Preservation of DNA Records in my sessions.

I am headed home now.

I have a huge list of “to-dos” on the go from meetings and discussions had this weekend. Two of them promised while traveling on this very train back to my home. Promises made and promises kept and a sense of loss as I leave all the wonderful friends <appendage> I have and the new ones made and… the Chef? He is in the seat right in front of me.

A Chef who talks about the foods of our ancestors is sitting right in front of me. He is probably praying that I don’t lean over the chair and ask him questions again about the food that sustained Champlain on his initial forays into the Canadian shield – Sun Choke/Jerusalem Artichoke…and what about…

Genetic Genealogy is the Ultimate Crowd Source Project

It’s nothing near a stretch to say that Genetic Genealogy is the Ultimate Crowd Source Project. Genetic Genealogists are often called citizen scientists. To say someone is a citizen scientist means, in my book, that they, them, you and me, us are not associated with multi million dollar corporations in any financial way.

We work to share our work. It’s the new paradigm in Genealogy – collaboration.

Since we are working to share our work and further our research together, we have worked out ways to do that. Many of us have our own blogs. Many of us have Facebook pages or even Facebook groups to share. One great case in point is Blaine Bettinger’s Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques group which has over 40,000 members. 40 thousand people sharing and posting and discussing Genetic Genealogy – crowd sourcing.

GEDmatch stands out as one of the greatest crowd sourced tools in the Genealogy community, offering a database of autosomal and X DNA test results and tools to do analysis and matching. It’s growing rapidly. This growth in new members has occurred since the release of information that the GEDmatch database was used to help identify a man who turned out to be California’s most prolific and elusive serial rapist and murderer. The case has caused an uproar in the Genealogy community with people publicly stating that they will remove their data from this important database because of it’s use in a criminal investigation. But still there is that growth. I certainly have noticed it in the higher count of people on GEDmatch when I login. Good.

Family Search is crowd sourced. Geni is, for the most part, crowd sourced- if you can work around the the many annoying paywalls. We Relate is Crowd sourced. Then there is the ultimate crowd sourced Global Family Tree, WikiTree, with it’s…well with it’s everything.

Recent Crowd Source Losses

Three significant crowd sourced projects closed their shutters this week. Which speaks to growing concerns for privacy and the GDPR (if you have been under the proverbial rock – it’s the General Data Protection Regulations for the EU and UK. Google it. I am so disgusted with it’s fall out I don’t even want to link to it). I know this new regulation will eventually make crowd sourcing better, but it’s a huge hit to lose Y-Search, mitoSearch and World Families.

Thank you and goodbye to you three. I have often been in your data working to solve adoption cases or help a family find their true surname or build a clients sense of family or connect my family to the rest of my family tree through DNA.

Moving “onward and upward”

The “onward and upward” quote is something I see often in Chris Whitten’s (WikiTree’s, WikiTreer-In-Chief) emails and posts to WikiTree. We as a community will move on. Moving on means that we need to do some things to protect our databases from extinction. And we will.

Crowd Sourcing

Crowd sourcing will be better with tighter controls on privacy and a mind to even more openness. Yes I said it, privacy and openness. I will say it again and I will follow that advice as I work on my family and friends and clients families on my favorite crowd sourced project (which has taken incredible steps to protect itself and it’s community of crowd sourcing and enthusiastic genealogists) WikiTree.

I will also continue to use and support and lecture about other crowd sourced ventures like GEDmatch.

I love being in this incredible crowd sourced community.

New International Gen. Conference

Great news from Kirsty Gray and Sylvie Valentine this morning. There is a new international genealogy conference to fill the void left by the demise of Who Do You Think You Are?

THE Genealogy Show

From one of the show directors, Kirsty Gray, “I am delighted to announce that Sylvia Valentine and I are Ministers of Magic aka Show Directors for THE Genealogy Show 2019 which is being held at the NEC in Birmingham, England. We already have an international board in place including genealogy stars such as Jill Ball, Ruth Blair, John Boeren, Liv Birgit Christensen, Mags Gaulden, Pat Richley-Erickson (Dear Myrtle) and DM Walsh.”

Our main aim is to create a terrific new show which becomes an annual highlight on the genealogy calendar. Attracting family history societies (in some cases, back) to the event, as well as providing outstanding educational workshops and networking opportunities, are at the core of the planning.

What’s not to like? NEC has 16,500 parking spaces, a raft of hotels and easy access by road, rail and plane. See you there? Check out the website www.thegenealogyshow.uk, like our Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/THEGenShow, and follow us on Twitter @THEGenShow2019.

Oh, and did you say you wanted to be an exhibitor, sponsor or speaker? Details on the website!”

Thanks very much and I will see you in Birmingham in June of 2019!

And In My Spare Time?

Incredibly honored and pleased to announce that I will be a part of, the Genetic Genealogist for, the Canadian Casualty Identification Team for the Directorate of History and Heritage within the Department of National Defense Canada. The Team will be working to recover, identify and reunite the remains of formerly missing Canadian Service men prior to 1970 with their families for burial.

Here is a link to a Video about this important work:

Video about the CCIT

If you would prefer to read about it here is a link to an article:

DND looking to contract DNA and burial experts to help ID Canada’s missing war dead

Off to Kitchener

I am off to Kitchener in the morning and I have been looking forward to this trip for so many reasons that I thought you might like me to outline a few of them.

The Kitchener Public Library Fair isn’t your regular old run of the mill Library Genealogy thing. This library system serves a densely populated part of Ontario and their Genealogy Fair garners crowds with varying degrees of Genealogy knowledge, from beginner to expert and top-notch speakers from the Genealogy field. I get to be a part of it and that is just so cool!
Sharing my passion, Genetic Genealogy, as the Keynote speaker. The Power of DNA is the message. This message will wrap itself nicely around the DNA theme of this years fair. There will be a small guest appearance by my Grandfather during the presentation too. All the way from the hills and foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina. I kid you not.
Riding a train for the first time in my life to Kitchener. Yes. I know. Of course I have ridden the subway in major cities and yes I have ridden the Monorail at Disney, but never a train. My poor spousal unit is getting peppered with all sorts of questions from me, “How will I know which car is car #4?”, What do I do with my luggage?”, “Where are the bathrooms?”, “How do I find lunch?” and “Do they have footrests?” I will be a wide-eyed Harry Potter on his first ride to Hogwarts (thanks to Sheila at KPL for making my travel arrangements!).

Everything always happens at the same time for me!

If traveling by train for the first time in my life and speaking at such a great event weren’t enough? The WikiTree Clean-A-Thon is this weekend. Not only do I get to speak, share my granddad and ride a train, I get to help clean-up Wikitree Profiles and do Video Hangouts with fellow WikiTreers while traveling and when I get home.

Another amazingly busy Weekend in the offing! Come see me, or watch for me hanging my head out the train window like a very happy puppy, tongue flapping, ears blowing back and wearing the biggest grin on earth. You can also see me hanging out with other WikiTreers every four hours starting at midnight on Friday and running through Midnight on Tuesday morning during the Clean-A-Thon (NO! Not at 4am and not during the KPL Genealogy Fair).

New GEDmatch X-chromosome comparison links at WikiTree

From WikiTreer-in-Chief, Chris Whitten comes this great announcement about new GEDmatch X-chromosome comparison links at WikiTree.

“Hi WikiTreers,

We just took another small step forward in our collaboration with GEDmatch.com.

As most of you know, you can click directly to view one-to-one autosomal test comparisons on GEDmatch from WikiTree profile pages and DNA Ancestor Confirmation Aid pages. You can also do Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA comparisons through Ysearch and MitoSearch “[compare]” links on WikiTree.

One thing we haven’t had until now is easy X-chromosome comparison links. X comparisons can be especially powerful for genealogy because there is a more limited inheritance pattern on the X than the autosome and almost everyone who has taken an autosomal DNA test (all 10 or 12 million of us!) has X chromosome test results too. There is a lot of untapped potential for DNA confirmation using X matches.

Here’s an example of how you might use this. Look on your DNA Ancestors page — this is the “DNA” link on the pull-down menu that starts with your WikiTree ID — and scroll to the X Chromosome section. These are the ancestors from whom you inherited your X DNA. Choose one of the distant ones and click the DNA Descendants icon next to their name.

On your ancestor’s DNA Descendants page scroll to the X Chromosome section. These are the descendants — yourself and your cousins — who are likely to match each other on the X. If more than one of you are on GEDmatch you can click the “[compare]” links to see whether you match as you would expect.

Here are a couple examples of DNA Descendants pages where you can see the new GEDmatch comparison links:

Maybe a more informed genetic genealogist will follow up here with advice on doing the actual DNA confirmations, or with other ideas for using this new feature.

Onward and upward,

Chris

P.S. A big thank you to John Olson, Curtis Rogers, and our other friends at GEDmatch for enabling us to create these links. Thank you to Blaine Bettinger for his early and ongoing evangelism for X chromosome usage. (We used Blaine’s charts to create our XDNA ancestor and descendant pages.) And thank you to Mags Gaulden, Kay Wilson and the other DNA Project members for their leadership on these subjects, most especially — especially — thank you to Peter Roberts, who suggested this feature and helped it all come together, as he has with many of our DNA features.”

This is just great Chris (and Peter),

X-DNA is often overlooked, but can be a powerful tool because it’s inheritance is very specific. Click on your DNA link as Chris suggested and look at how this sex chromosome is inherited.

For a female:

From your Dad and his Mother.
From your Mother and her parents

For a Male:

From your Mother and her parents

It’s so specific. The Confirmation Citation is really informative too:

* Maternal relationship is confirmed by a 108.0 cM X chromosome match between John Kingman GEDmatch T782948 and his second cousin once removed Kelly Miller GEDmatch A721343. Their MCRA is Charles Cyrus Babst.

Take some time to look at some of those X-Matches WikiTree has posted for you. You might get a pleasant surprise.

My Dad and I from this new feature:

Chr	Start Location	End Location	Centimorgans (cM)	SNPs
X	2,710,157	154,551,755	190.1	16,903

Chr 23

Mags

Blew-up someones world this weekend…

I work methodically, how on earth did I just blow up someones world? Truly, it’s the way I work, slow and methodical. Find each piece and put into place.

When I say blow-up someones world I mean it in a good way. This time. Let’s take a step back and methodically go thorough this so at least you understand what I am talking about.

She is adopted

Of course she is. I could describe her in so many other ways too, but to know she is adopted is the only way to describe her today. I don’t think she frames her life to people she meets this way normally, but she framed her life this way to me, because when we met we talked about what we each did for a living. Of course when I told her what I did, she kind of looked at me sideways and from a distance. It’s something adoptees do when presented with something that might blow-up their life..

She briefly told me her story; she found her mother through the Adoption Disclosure Register of 1993 and had no idea who her father was…I did tell her that she would find her answers in her DNA.

A few months later she asked me for help.

She knew her mother, but the information she was given about who her father was, was incorrect. How did she discover it was incorrect? Because she paid a company to do a paternity test on a family member of the first person her Mother told her (paternity tests run into many hundreds of dollars). Then a family member of the second person her mother named (with a tiny bit of influence from me) had an FTDNA test (much less expensive).

The second test proved no DNA match to the second man named. Seems the more “no answers” she got the more her drive was ignited to know the truth.

Driven to Know

I talked with someone once who helps Adoptees. She told me a horror story about a client who, when given a bit of information on where the researcher thought the clients father/mother might live, spent an evening knocking on doors and being incredibly confrontational with the families she encountered.

Imagine opening the door to a wild-eyed woman who thinks the world has lied to her for 45 years and sees a crack of light peering through a darkened tunnel. I can’t imagine how utterly terrifying it would be to have a child you didn’t know about, or one you had hidden from your family, or that you had tried to hide from, just appear, demanding you talk openly and frankly about her. Your secret.

She was shown a crack of light.

Back to today, to this client, who is fast becoming a good friend. I opened a crack in her dark tunnel. I was working methodically. But I did ask her if she would take on some of the research since I know she was capable and because I told her the story I just related to you above. Did she listen?

She did and she didn’t and well…it was like a can of biscuits. You push the the spoon in just a touch and POP it’s all out there.

And it is all out there.

She spent the weekend working social media with the information I gave her. We talked and texted over the weekend and each time I tried to get my, “take it slow”, “don’t go overboard with this”, ‘don’t be disappointed”, “don’t”, “don’t”, “don’t”… I got a text from her this morning…”______ _______ is my Dad, I just talked to him.”

It’s all good. It is. After 2 hours it’s all good. What a wild weekend for her. What a wild weekend for him. What a, “what can of busquits have I opened” weekend for me.

I wish I could have bubble wrapped her after our “revealing” meeting Friday night. At least I would have felt she and her newly discovered family could have had some protection – protection that in the end none of them seem to need.

Wow, what a weekend!

Roots Tech 2018

Roots Tech 2018 was another great event – the biggest event where WikiTree has a BIG presence! I counted 22 WikiTreers who came round for our Group photo on Friday. MANY, MANY more popped in and out of our great booth location over the entire conference and signed one of our Banners from Last year (thanks for the photo Erin Breen).

Location, Location, Location

Thanks to our tenure at Roots Tech and our industrious Forest Elf, Eowyn Langholf, we were one of the first booths to see when entering the Exhibit Hall. Literally, you came in the front door, looked to your left and saw a wall of Orange. What a great location this year.

Not once did I hear someone say they had trouble finding us or that they had to look very far. We were often the first stop on attendees day or two or three in the Exhibit Hall.

WikiTreers from near and far

The WikiTreers who came to man the booth, the Roots Tech Team, hailed from near and far. Aleš (and Family) win the distance contest – they traveled from Slovenia. The rest of us came from, England, Canada and the US. As best as my tired brain can count we had 15 Roots Tech Team members in attendence.

The Booth

We had a new booth format this year. In years past we spent a lot of time standing in and around the booth talking to people and running in to find a place to sit with visitors to share and explain WikiTree. This year we added a bit of a Bistro feel (no, no baristas, no latte’s – dang it). We had small tables and chairs set up and our WikiTreer’s showed up with plenty of laptops, Netbooks, Ipads and the like. We all spent time chatting with people, but a good bit of time was spent actually doing the thing we do, collaborating with the attendees and their limbs already on our great big ole shred tree!

I can’t tell you how great it felt to type in a Surname and have my booth guest squeal with glee that thier GGGwhatever was there looking back at them. Soon followed by another squeal when I revealed the DNA test connections of their ancestors, on their ancestor profiles! Being at Roots Tech is so rewarding on personal level.

Every year our booth is the booth for fun and enlightenment (of the Genealogical kind).

Roots Tech 2018 Conference Other Activites

There are other activities going on at the Conference and a few of us were able to take in some classes. We also spent time roaming around talking to people on the fly or posting Live FB Videos of happenings. We got to meet a lot of new people and meet up with old friends.

I have more pictures to post but at the moment my fingers are refusing to type more…

Like impromptu WikiTree lunches and breakfasts and dinners and trips to the Family History Library, strolls through the pre-snow covered streets of Salt Lake City and After Parties and Geneabloggers Tribe goings on, skiing at local resorts and…

Rest for now more for later…

70k Doc – First Connection

The last Blog Post was all about the 70k Document. It’s a Descendants of John Gaulding compilation document from a DNA connected (who is not connected to my Gauldings yet) cousin who is the keeper of a lifelong Gaulding researchers research. Up to speed? If not please read the, My Dad Has a Y DNA match to two Gauldings.

Making DNA Match Connections

I, personally, have DNA cousins and also people who should be DNA cousins, who are not a match to me, that I have wanted to connect for quite a while. The cousins who we think share a Gaulding MCRA (Most Common Recent Ancester) with me are of course the ones I want to connect first and especially the Y-DNA matches.

BUT, I have this friend and we have known for 3 or four years that we have the Gaulding Surname in our respective limbs of the Big Ole Shared Family Tree that is WikiTree. We have never been able to make that connection until…

You guessed it, the 70k Doc.

I know I should be tracking down those Y-DNA connections so I can confirm my fathers line back forever…

I couldn’t resist Liz and our shared wonder at the fact that we do not match via DNA. Yes, I am absolutely my fathers daughter and he matches two other Gaulding Y-DNA testers. We are Gaulding’s for sure and according to the 70k Doc we share my fifth great grandfather, John Mathew Gaulding.

Why not a match?

Matching a MCRA at our 64, 4th great grandparents is about as far back as you can go with auDNA. Give or take a shake or two. Knowing Liz and I match further back than our 64, 4th Great Grandparents at our fifth makes a non-match a definite possibility.

The other factor might be that we didn’t inherit as much of the same DNA segment from our MCRA or that we didn’t inherit ANY matching segments of DNA from our MCRA. It’s the same as looking at a pair of siblings who have different color hair or eyes. I didn’t inherit the exact same things from our ancestors that my siblings did and it’s obvious when you look at us.

The Excitment of the Hunt

Over the past week or so, Liz and I have shot emails back and forth exploring names that might break down her brickwall. We finally did it a few days ago and couldn’t have done it without the 70k Doc. So this is revelation #1, Brickwall busting #1 and possibly pulled muscle #1 from Liz’s happy dance. Now we just need to verify all the genealogy we are looking at and we are done.

Now back to those two YDNA matches.

TEST Please!

To any male Gaulding, Gaulden, Gauldin, Golding, Goulding descendants, please test! In particular any descendant of John Gaulding of Verginia (any of them) or William Goulding of Bermuda. William names a nephew in his will, another William, who lived in New England. Be great to prove the theory that he was the father of John Gaulding of Virginia, imported by the Ripley Family.

My Dad has a Y-DNA match to two Gauldings.

My Dad has a Y-DNA match to two Gauldings. This means we can confirm our family connections back to our most common recent ancestor. The other two Y-DNA testers are from a branch of the family that haven’t been connected to the main trunk by anyone with published information.

Distant Cousins and Gaulding Researchers

Over the past years I have been talking to a very distant Gaulding cousin (a close relation to one of the Y-DNA testers) who has one such unpublished document. To make the family connections she agreed to share it with me. The document arrived as a 70K word rich text document converted to a Word document format. There is no consistent numbering schemes. It does not follow any genealogical numbering system nor is it chronological, skipping around from sibling to sibling in one generation then back to the generation before. The formatting, because of the conversion, has globs of spacing and the indents and lists are crazy.

Making It Make Sense

It’s taken me weeks of night and weekend work to get it into a format to print so I can look at it, make notes and correct the formatting, chronology, indents and lists systems. I started three nights ago with the meat of the document. The “How are we connected?” work of getting the siblings, parents, grandparents, great grandparents all lined up correctly so I can start the research and sourcing to make it right (the author did not include his sources either).

The author of this document (in an introduction to the document) makes no excuses, no apologies for the document format or lack of sources and rightly so since it is not intended to be published.

My hope is to get the document in good nick, genealogically wise, make the connections to confirm my dad and their dad’s DNA connection and to send the re-formatted document file back to the cousin who sent it to me. What a wonderful labor this is. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate her willingness to trust me with this researchers life work. As I work, I will fill in the missing pieces on WikiTree from his work so you can follow along there if you’d like.

Follow along if you’d like

I think our most common recent ancestor is, John Gaulding, St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent, Virginia, (abt. 1665-1740).

Grandma's Genes

Author: mags