Ancestry.com is under Fire as new DNA Algorithm Drastically Changes the Ethnicity of Some Users

Follow-up: Ancestry.com is under Fire as new DNA Algorithm Drastically Changes the Ethnicity of Some Users

Dick Eastman · May 3, 2019 · DNA · 10 Comments

The following is a follow-up to my previous article at: http://bit.ly/2DN6o8y:
In the earlier article, I wrote:

“Ancestry.com is updating its databases and altering the results for some users. The new findings of ethnic origins has sent some users into a full-blown identity crisis. If you previously had your DNA tested by Ancestry and have already found your family’s ethnic origins, you might want to go back to the AncestryDNA web site and check again. The results may have changed.”

Some readers posted comments posted at the end of the article by newsletter readers questioned whether or not this was a new update to Ancestry.com’s DNA databases. However, that question seems to be cleared up by the following information written by the Ancestry Team and published in the Ancestry Blog at https://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2019/05/02/understanding-your-new-ethnicity-estimate/ on May 2, 2019:

“Understanding Your New Ethnicity Estimate

“We’re always looking for new ways to help support our customers on their journeys of personal discovery. Often that means updating our products and services to take advantage of the most advanced science and technology.

“Last fall, we introduced the capability to provide more precise ethnicity estimates to our customers using an algorithm that analyzes longer segments of genetic information. For some of our existing customers, this has meant that previous ethnicity estimates have evolved as a result of this new technology.

“We recognize that an individual’s personal sense of identity is very important and that any journey of personal discovery may take turns that are surprising or unexpected. However, it is important to keep in mind that your DNA doesn’t change, but the science and technology behind understanding it constantly evolves and we endeavor to ensure that this cutting-edge science is reflected in our offerings.

“All AncestryDNA® customers who have not already transitioned to their new, more precise ethnicity estimate will be transitioned starting May 30, 2019. If you received your AncestryDNA® results prior to September 2018 and wish to keep a record of your prior results, you may download them by July 20, 2019.”

DNA Spotlight: The Shared cM Project

DNA Spotlight: The Shared cM Project

April 09, 2019

When you get your DNA results, the DNA company tries to give you a sense of how you are connected to your matches. They will identify each relationship as parent, close family, sibling, second cousin, third cousin, fourth cousin, distant cousin, etc.
On MyHeritage it looks like this:


On Ancestry it looks like this:

It's important to understand that the relationship provided is just an estimate. There are actually a number of possible ways you could be related to any given DNA match.
Now take a look at those same images and notice that next to or underneath the relationship you see a number and the initials cM. cM stands for centiMorgans which is the unit of measurement for DNA. The more cM you share with a DNA match the more closely related you are. The less cM you share, the more distant your relationship.
The Shared cM Project
In order to understand better all the possible relationships you have with a DNA match, genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger came up with a data driven tool called the Shared cM Project. Blaine asked DNA test takers to provide the amount of cM they shared with known relationships. From this he was able to create charts that showed the various possible relationships through the range and averages of centiMorgans.
From the data, Blaine produced the Shared cM Project chart below. In each box the first line is the relationship, the second line is the average cM for that relationship and the third line is the range he has determined based on the data.
So if we take the example above - 2nd-3rd cousin, 276 cM - we would look for the box where the average is closest to 276 cM. You'll notice that there are three boxes that are pretty close: Half 1C1R (226 cM), 1C2R (229 cM) and 2C (233 cM). If you look beyond the averages to the ranges you'll notice that there are even more possibilities. This is just to show that your actual relationship to your DNA match could be any of a number of possibilities besides what the DNA company estimates for you. In this particular case, I know the cousin personally and I am accurately able to identify her as my second cousin and not a third cousin or any of the other choices.

Blaine Bettinger, The Shared cM Project, https://thegeneticgenealogist.com
(Click to enlarge), Creative Commons attribution

Interactive Shared cM Project on DNA Painter
Recently Jonny Perl, the creator of DNA Painter presented a webinar about DNA Painter on Legacy Family Tree Webinars (which is free to watch). Jonny has transformed Blaine's chart into an interactive tool on DNA Painter.
Let's see how it works with two new DNA matches I received just today.
From the main DNA Painter home page choose the Tools menu option.

On the next page choose the Shared CM Tool option:
Next put the amount of cM your share with your DNA in the Filter box.
For this exercise I will use my two brand new dna matches.


For the first new cousin I get this result:
You can see there are a lot of possibilities for this relationship! In fact, this cousin I know personally. She and I are Half first cousins once removed (Half 1C1R). That result was in the second tier of options. It's important not to make assumptions when working with unknown matches.
The second new match of the day was also described as a 3rd-4th cousin.
It's interesting to see how much the results change just by changing the cM a bit. The results are quite different even though they were both presented in the same 3rd-4th cousin range. This person is unknown to me. I will have to compare our shared matches and do some research to determine which of the above relationships is accurate. It's intriguing and I can't wait to uncover this new cousin.
Both the Shared cM Project chart and DNA Painter are free to use.  These tools will greatly help you in your genetic genealogy research. Give them a try.
You can learn more about understanding your DNA results from classes in the Legacy library. If you are just starting out with DNA take a look at Blaine Bettinger's Foundations of DNA series. If you're already pretty comfortable with DNA then choose from among the 74 DNA classes in the library.

Marian Pierre-Louis is the Online Education Producer for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. She hosts the monthly evening webinar on the second Tuesday of each month.  Her areas of expertise include house history research and southern New England research. Check out her webinars in the Legacy library.

Ancestry.com Sued for ‘Misleading’ Customers About DNA Data

Dick Eastman · April 26, 2019 · DNA, Legal Affairs · No Comments

Genealogy information provider Ancestry.com has a “longstanding practice” of failing to get sufficient informed consent agreements from customers who submit medical and DNA information, a new lawsuit alleges.
Lori Collett sued the Utah-based company’s subsidiaries—Ancestry.com DNA LLC and Ancestry.com Inc.—for allegedly “misleading and deceiving patients in California and across the country about what Ancestry was actually doing with their DNA.”
Bloomberg news has a brief radio report about the lawsuit at http://bit.ly/2VAn7Gt.

New Online Tool Will Help Families Track Down Scottish Ancestors

Dick Eastman · March 28, 2019 · Online Sites · 3 Comments

The Scottish Emigration Database lists details including the town or village of origin, address, destination and occupation, as well as information about specific vessels and shipping lines. The free online tool contains the records of 21,000 people.
The main search focuses on people – you can filter based on name, occupation, gender and address. You can even search by destination port. The database also allows people to search by ship name – so if you know which ship your ancestors sailed on, but don’t know a great detail about them, this might help.

The online database allows you to search thousands of entries using as much, or as little detail as you have – a detailed user guide is available here.

You can learn more at: http://bit.ly/2uuoffz.

Is DNA Evidence Reliable?

Dick Eastman · March 26, 2019 · DNA, Legal Affairs · 2 Comments

DNA has become a major tool for use by police in solving cold cases of murder and other violent crimes. In the past year, about 50 cold cases have been solved nationwide using public genealogy websites. But is this evidence alone reliable?
James H. Manahan, J.D., has written an article in the Lake County (Minnesota) News-Chronicle that tells why DNA evidence alone can be misleading. Manahan cautions that DNA is a great tool but also must always be used in conjunction with old-fashioned police work.

Manahan describes a case when a homeless man was accused of murder, based upon DNA evidence from a 7-year-old cold case. Luckily, the man’s public defender found a subtle problem with the evidence. In short, the DNA evidence obtained was “identified” as coming from the wrong man. Instead of spending the rest of his life in jail, the homeless man was quickly cleared of the crime. Had the public defender not been suspicious, the outcome could have been far different.
The article quotes DNA and genealogy expert CeCe Moore. It also quotes the homeless man, Lukis Anderson, when he got out of jail: “There’s more that’s gotta be looked at than just the DNA. You’ve got to dig deeper. Reanalyze. Do everything all over again before you say, ‘This is what it is.’ Because it may not necessarily be so.”
You can read this interesting story at: http://bit.ly/2TWn6wi.

How to Find More Obscure Collections of Genealogy Records

How to Find Some of the More Obscure Collections of Genealogy Records

Dick Eastman · March 22, 2019 · Genealogy Basics, Online Sites · 2 Comments

Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and other search engines are great for finding online databases that are useful to genealogists. However, smaller collections and even obscure ones are not prominently listed in the big search engines. Yet there are a few online listings that can point the way to finding what you seek.
The Genealogy Roots Blog at https://genrootsblog.blogspot.com contains pointers to many online genealogy databases, records and resources. The focus is on vital records (birth, marriage and death records), obituaries, census records, naturalization records, military records and ship passenger lists. Although the blog is based in the USA, online European, Canadian, and other records sources are sometimes included. You may also occasionally see a fun post or genealogy news. Joe Beine does a great job of adding more and more links as time goes by.
Another huge resource is Cyndi’s List, available at: https://www.cyndislist.com. The site contains roughly 336,000 links to genealogy-related web pages in more than 200 categories. The various categories include many sources online records as well as pointers to newsletters, religious groups, historical information, geography, and much, much more.

Cyndi’s List is free for everyone to use and is meant to be your starting point when researching online for information in the United States and also in many other countries. Indeed, Cyndi Ingle has labored many thousands of hours since 1996 to produce this huge online resource at https://www.cyndislist.com.
I would suggest you check out both the Genealogy Roots Blog and Cyndi’s List to see if they contain information that may help you in your family history searches.

Loyola University to Create Database of Loyalist Americans’ Claims

Loyola University to Create a Database of Loyalist Americans’ Claims

Dick Eastman · March 18, 2019 · Announcements · 4 Comments

Loyalists, the women and men who chose to stay loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution, have been the subject of a resurgence of scholarly interest over the past decade. Many of the Loyalists moved to Canada as the U.S. Revolutionary War came to a close and a few others moved to England.

Previously dismissed as the losers in the conflict, scholars have turned their attention to those who separated themselves from their friends and neighbors and gave up their land and possessions when they chose to leave the new United States at the end of the American Revolution. The story of that difficult decision recorded in the Loyalist Claims Commission is one that has been largely overlooked since the end of the war.


The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary has awarded Benjamin Bankhurst, assistant professor of history at Shepherd University, and Kyle Roberts, associate professor of public history and new media and director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago, with a $5,000 Lapidus Digital Collections Fellowship for “The Maryland Loyalist Project.” The project is a collaboration between Bankhurst and Roberts, aiming to make the letters and petitions of British loyalists who fled the American Revolution housed in the British National Archives available in a digital archive.

You can read the full story in an article in the (Martinsburg, WV) Journal at: bit.ly/2XZSkB4.

Teaching Kids About Family History.... Helps Increase Resilience

Teaching Kids About Family History Reportedly Helps Increase Resilience

Dick Eastman · March 13, 2019 · Genealogy Basics · One Comment

I wish I had read this article when my children were young and I was just beginning to research my family tree! According to an article in the (Utah) Daily Herald:

“Resilience, or the ability to overcome challenges in life, is a trait many parents hope their children will develop. Resilient children are more likely to have good emotional and mental health.

“Research has shown that children who know more about their families and family history are more resilient and tend to do better when facing challenges in life. This may be because seeing patterns of overcoming failures and surviving hard times can help children recognize that people can recover and triumph, despite hardships. One of the best things families can do is develop a strong family narrative.”

You can find this interesting article at: http://bit.ly/2T2Yv3F.

Where to Find Personal Papers in Genealogy Searches

Dick Eastman · March 13, 2019 · Genealogy Basics · No Comments

Sometimes, the documents we seek as genealogists go beyond government-generated paperwork like vital records, federal and state censuses and military records. Sometimes, we need private documents — letters, business records and diaries or journals — to confirm dates or relationships. Those aren’t the kinds of things you usually find at the National Archives or your state’s archives.
Daniel Klein has published an interesting article in The Jersey Journal that offers suggestions for finding these personal documents, wherever they may be stored. The article may be found at: http://bit.ly/2Ja1FTy.

State-By-State Look at Your Public Records Laws

MuckRock Provides a State-By-State Look at Your Public Records Laws

Dick Eastman · March 13, 2019 · Legal Affairs, Online Sites · 3 Comments

These are laws that strongly affect genealogists. Many states are locking up public domain birth, marriage, and death records under the bogus claim of “preventing identity theft.” What’s the odds that an identity thief wants to use the personal information of my grandmother who died more than 60 years ago? Does anyone believe a thief can obtain a loan or a credit card in her name?
In any case, MuckRock tracks the laws of 50 states plus Washington D.C., all with different statutes, exemptions, and limitations that dictate what you can get from your state and local agencies. With the rules of access differing across the board, MuckRock provides an easy way to keep track of them all through our interactive database showcasing the best, the worst, and the confusing parts of state records law.
MuckRock is available at: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/mar/08/sw-state-guide.