Newsletter - 26th March 2019
Last chance to save 25% on Ancestry DNA in UK ENDS WEDNESDAY
Half
of LostCousins members have taken a DNA test
Why you need your cousins to test
UK Biobank: 500,000 genomes sequenced by the end of 2020
Whole Genome Sequencing - the next stop for genealogists?
Coroners may be allowed to investigate stillbirths
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Last
chance to save 25% on Ancestry DNA in UK ENDS WEDNESDAY
DNA tests aren't nearly as
expensive as they used to be - if I told you how much I paid for my first tests
you would be horrified - but for researchers in the UK a 25% discount on the
cost of an Ancestry DNA test still represents a saving of £20.
First let me make something
clear - you DON'T need to subscribe to Ancestry in order to take an Ancestry
DNA test, or to contact the thousands of genetic cousins you’re matched with.
But you do need to register as an Ancestry user, and so does anyone you ask to
test - this is a safeguard brought in when the legislation triggered by the
GDPR directive came into force.
Remember, you can only order DNA
kits from your local Ancestry site - in fact, you'll usually be re-routed to
your local site when you try to access the DNA section of an overseas site.
Note: if you've previously purchased
an Ancestry DNA test you may need to log-out from your Ancestry account before
clicking the link below.
Ancestry.co.uk
- £59 plus shipping SALE ENDS 11.59pm (London time) Wednesday 27th March
Half of
LostCousins members have taken a DNA test
On your My Details page at the LostCousins site the very last question asks
whether you have taken an autosomal DNA test (by far the most common type of
test - indeed, it’s the only one most companies sell).
Whilst only 15000 members
have answered the question so far (it was introduced less than 3 years go, so most members won’t have seen it when they joined) I noticed
this week that for the first time the number of members who state that they
have tested is more than half of the total:
I have taken an autosomal DNA test (eg Family Finder, Ancestry DNA, 23and Me, Living DNA, MyHeritage):
51.2% - YES
35.1% - NO
13.7% - CONSIDERING IT
When you're matched with a
cousin you can each see whether or not the other
person has tested - this is extremely useful information because it’s only when
cousins also test that we're able to make the most of our own DNA matches.
DNA testing isn’t just about
finding tens of thousands of genetic cousins - it's also about answering
questions and knocking down 'brick walls'. We all have illegitimacy in our
tree, and with DNA we finally have a way of determining who the father really
was - as this example from a LostCousins member demonstrates:
"I
started my genealogy research over 30 years ago with one 'simple' aim - to try to
find out who my father's father was. My dad was born in September 1912 in Great
Marlow, Buckinghamshire. There is no father's name on his birth certificate,
nor on his and my mum's marriage certificate. My last name is in fact my
grandmother's maiden name. She had already had a previous 'illegitimate' son in
May 1910. She went on to marry in Little Marlow in 1915 and have four more
sons. But she didn't change the last name of my dad or his presumed
half-brother to that of her husband.
"My
dad died in 1964, his elder half-brother in 1970. For reasons best known to
herself my mum cut off all contact with the Buckinghamshire side of the family (the
legitimate children of my father's mother) and we vanished from each other's
lives.
"When
I started to research our family I showed my dad's
birth certificate and their marriage certificate to my mum and asked her if she
and dad ever talked about his father. What happened then I saw happen again
numerous times over the years - the shutters metaphorically came down over my
mum's eyes and she said that they 'didn't talk about those kinds of things'.
"In
the early 1990's I did trace one of my uncles from my paternal grandmother's
marriage. Our family reunion was going splendidly until I mentioned the fact of
my father's 'illegitimate' birth and again the shutters came down - it wasn't
talked about I was told. It looked like I would never find the answer to my
question. And now all the people who may have known the answer (because they
were there) are dead.
"However,
I continued to research the other branches of my tree until I was reasonably
confident that I understood the lineage for 5 or 6 generations back.
"Over
the past few years I have taken a number of DNA tests
but, despite Peter's excellent articles on the topic, had never really felt I
understood the potential for unblocking walls they offered. And then, one
afternoon in-between Christmas and New Year just passed, I looked at the
Ancestry DNA page for the first time in ages to see if there were any matches.
I had four new likely 2nd cousins showing. One has no tree, one has an unlinked
tree and the other two have very small trees of 18 and 12 people. I recognised
none of the names.
"Second
cousins share great-grandparents. Well, I knew an awful lot about three of my grandparents
but nothing about my father's father. Luckily one of the two matches with a small
tree has a reasonably unusual last name. I was very quickly able to work out
who their great-grandparents were through their father's line - and they did not
fit into my tree. To check my hunch I then found all
four of their great-grandparents and none of them fitted into my tree. Could
the link that Ancestry was showing be correct and we actually
were 2nd cousins - and I had
found my missing great-grandparents? It looked like it. But who was my grandfather?
"My
putative great-grandparents (Thomas and Ann) lived from the late 1840's to the
late 1920's in Wiltshire/Hampshire. I have been able to find 17 of their
children - although 8 were dead by the time of the 1911 census. My father, as I
have said, was born in late 1912 in Buckinghamshire - were any of the sons of
Thomas and Ann in the right place at the right time? Looking at the 1911 census
it turned out that three of them were.
"They
were Albert Edward (a game keeper), Frederick Charles (a poultryman), and
Michael Barnes (a police constable). All were single in the 1911 census and
living a few miles away from where my grandmother was. A fourth brother -
Alfred Edgar - emigrated to Canada with his family in 1928 and it is through
this line that I am related to the two cousins with online trees. I have also
been able to fit other people listed on Ancestry as DNA matches and born in
Canada into this new family tree.
"It
is now highly probable that one of the three brothers is
my grand-father. Will I ever be able to say which one? Well, my father's first name was Charles so
I'm inclining to Frederick Charles. In
the meantime I'm trying to open lines of communication
with my Canadian cousins and looking for photos (my dad was very tall for his
age cohort and had what I can only describe as Prince Charles' ears). I am now
trying to trace descendants of the three brothers to see if they would be
willing to take a DNA test."
Even if it isn’t possible to
prove beyond all reasonable doubt which of the three brothers was the father
(for example, if they have no living descendants who are prepared to test) the
'brick wall' has still been knocked down, because they all share the same
parents - so, after 35 years of searching, this member's missing great-grandparents
have at last been identified.
Why you need
your cousins to test
If you follow my advice and
test with Ancestry you’re likely to have upwards of 20,000
matches with genetic cousins, far more than at any other site. But it won’t be
immediately obvious how your cousins are related to you - in fact, it’s possible
that you'll never know how the majority of them connect
to your tree.
I'm going to assume that you've
already followed the advice in my Masterclass
- if so there's a good chance that by now you've found some 'lost cousins' who
have already tested, or are considering doing so. This is great news - because the
matches they share with you are almost certain to come from the part of your family
tree that you also share.
The more closely they're
related to you the more matches you'll share, but that's not necessarily what
you're looking for. For example, a 1st cousin shares half your tree, so all you’re
going to find out is whether the matches you share come from your mother's side
of your tree or your father's. It's better than nothing, but what you really
want to be doing is tackling your 'brick walls', and this usually requires more
distant cousins.
The table below shows which
'brick walls' cousins of different degrees are most likely to help you solve:
|
Cousin |
Tree shared |
'Brick wall' ancestor(s) |
|
1st |
1/2 |
Parent or grandparent |
|
2nd |
1/4 |
Great grandparent |
|
3rd |
1/8 |
2G grandparent |
|
4th |
1/16 |
3G grandparent |
|
5th |
1/32 |
4G grandparent |
In other words, the ideal
cousin is someone who shares only the 'brick wall' ancestor(s) with you.
Shared matches can be used
positively or negatively. For example, if a 1st cousin tests you'll find out
which matches you share, and which you don't - enabling you to roughly split
your matches into maternal and paternal.
But bear in mind that the
more distant your cousins, the less likely it is that there will be a DNA match
at all - the table in the Masterclass shows what the probabilities are. For
example, there's only about one chance in three that two 5th cousins will have a
detectable amount of shared DNA - so you probably shouldn't pay for a 5th
cousin to test unless you've just won the lottery!
Finally, there's an enormous
pool of cousins that you mustn't forget about - your DNA matches. They've already
tested, so every match you can diagnose adds to your resources at no cost to
you other than your time.
Note: please make sure you not only read the advice in
my Masterclass, but follow it!
UK Biobank: 500,000
genomes sequenced by the end of 2020
Given how important DNA is to
genealogy it’s easy to forget that in the years to come it will be even more
valuable in the field of medicine, and the UK Biobank (a registered charity) is
one of the leaders in the field.
Their target is to sequence
500,000 genomes by the end of 2020, and the first 50,000 were made available to
researchers this month - you can read more about the project here.
In case anyone's wondering,
they didn’t get the samples from one of the genealogy testing companies - the
participants have all given explicit permission (and can withdraw at any time, though
I can’t think of any reason why they would want to). This link takes you to the participants
area of the UK Biobank website.
Tip: if you want to know more about how genetics is or
will be used to improve healthcare there are links to articles (mostly from the
mainstream press, rather than specialist journals) here.
Whole
Genome Sequencing - the next stop for genealogists?
Ever since the human genome
was first sequenced between 1990-2003 at a cost of nearly $3bn I've dreamt that
one day it would be possible for me to have my own genome sequenced (ideally
for $1000 or less).
Last November there was an
opportunity to purchase Whole Genome Sequencing from Dante Labs for the bargain
price of €169 (the regular price quoted was €850). I didn’t publicise this in
the newsletter because at that price it seemed too good to be true, and I'd
rather risk my own money than risk yours.
A month ago
I received an email to let me know that that my DNA had been successfully
extracted from the sample provided, and on Friday I got confirmation that the sequencing
had been completed. Now all I have to do is wait for
confirmation that my results are available, then figure out the best way of
downloading 180GB of data (which is more than the capacity of my laptop hard
drive).
What to do with it after that
is a different question entirely.... as you'll see from this blog posting
(which, believe it or not, I read before placing my order), I can't just upload
it to one of the usual websites.
I recently published
a request from Professor Rebecca Probert who was seeking examples of
unprosecuted bigamies in family trees. Here is Professor Probert's response:
Study of unprosecuted bigamists –
preliminary findings
A
huge thank-you to all those who have been in touch – whether by email or via
the online survey – to provide details of bigamists who were never prosecuted.
The information provided has been incredibly useful, whether it was a single
data point or a richly detailed story.
I
now have a sample of 355 (and rising!) to compare with those who were prosecuted and a few very clear findings have emerged.
First,
those who were never prosecuted were likely to have travelled considerably
further for their second marriage. Around a quarter of the sample for whom such
information is available married overseas, often as far afield as Canada,
Australia and New Zealand.
Second,
there are also a significant number of double remarriages in this sample – ie both spouses remarried bigamously. Clearly in such cases
neither would have wished to prosecute the other! This also contributes to the
higher number of female bigamists
Thirdly,
quite a few waited a long time to remarry. This is particularly significant, as
it was a defence to bigamy that the other spouse had been absent for at least
seven years and the remarrying spouse had no reason to believe they were alive.
So some of these individuals would probably have been
acquitted even if they had been prosecuted for the offence.
Other
trends that are emerging are the greater likelihood that the second marriage
would take place in a register office and the propensity of both male and
female bigamists for describing themselves as bachelor/spinster and knocking a
few years off their ages!
And
happily, most second marriages seem to have endured – again in sharp contrast
to those that ended in prosecution.
I
will be writing up the findings more fully for publication in a peer-reviewed
journal and will include the full list of thank-yous
then, but just wanted to share these preliminary findings and express my appreciation
to you all once again. And if you haven’t yet got in touch
I’d be delighted to hear from you!
Ironically, shortly after publishing
this appeal I found the first example of bigamy in my own family tree!
Coroners may
be allowed to investigate stillbirths
Until 1st July 1927 there was
no way for the birth of a stillborn child to be recorded. Stillbirths are,
thankfully, much rarer than they were in 1927, but they still represent 1 in
225 of all births in the UK.
According to this BBC article the government is
consulting on whether coroners in England & Wales should be given the power
to investigate still births, in the hope of driving the rate down even further.
The consultation ends on 18th June.
This is where any
major updates and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted
an error first reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check again before writing to me, in case someone else has
beaten you to it......
I'm sorry this newsletter
is shorter than usual, but I've had a succession of sleepless nights (not worrying
about Brexit, but suffering from a very painful sore
throat which has spread to my inner ear). At least I've got plenty of books to read
while I'm laying awake.
Hopefully I'll be
hale and hearty by the time your emails arrive in my inbox, but if there is a
short delay in replying I trust you will forgive me.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
Peter Calver
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