THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO FAMILYTREEDNA , by Roberta Estes - A Review

Some weeks ago, I was asked by the Marketing Director of Genealogical Publishing Company to review "The Complete Guide to FamilyTreeDNA by Roberta Estes. I first met Roberta (online) ten-eleven years ago and she was a great help to me in my first steps in DNA, so I was pleased to say "yes." I have not discussed this review with Roberta, aside from telling her that I had received a review copy. I don't think we have ever met in person.

The 247-page paperback book is large - 8.5" X 11" (21.5 X 28 cm) - which makes it unwieldy for reading on, for example, public transportation - but this was unavoidable because of the many very large images. I wished that some of them were even larger.

The review copy does not show the colors in the images (perhaps there is color in the text as well, I cannot tell) which detracted from the reading experience and from understanding some of Roberta's points. This is not her fault, of course, and in any case is not relevant for readers of the actual book. (The marketing guy was not able to give me a working link to colored charts.) I am familiar with Roberta's blogs and her charts are always clear and useful, so I have no doubt that this is the case in the actual book.

No one ever wishes for greater detail in Roberta's blogs - at https://dna-explained.com/ - and if you try to take in too much at once, your eyes can glaze over. I certainly do not mean this as criticism, but you have to get used to her style and adjust your reading accordingly.

That said, many of the numerous footnotes are for Roberta's own blog posts where you can find even greater detail, as well as examples from her own work.

The point of view in this book is that of a "normal" researcher and there are only passing references to the endogamy which complicates Jewish research, while enriching our actual Jewish lives.

A bit about my own research, for context. I did my (autosomal) Family Finder more than twelve years ago and my MtDNA and Y-37 a year earlier. I have since done a both Y-111 and Y-700. In advancing my family projects, I have signed up over ninety Pikholz descendants for Family Finders and a dozen for MtDNA or Y-tests, as well as fifteen other family members. This does not include family members who tested with other companies. These numbers include six of my parents' seven children. (The seventh is long deceased and in any case is an identical twin.) Both my parents predeceased my DNA testing.

We have nothing exotic such as Native American and only three people whose fathers are not who they are supposed to be. Only two cases of adoptees have been identified as part of our family. As the kids say, B-O-R-I-N-G.

So I know a thing or two about testing with FTDNA and working with them afterwards. I have five FTDNA projects, but mostly for the convenience of keeping my families organized and accessible. And I do not trust any site, company or algorithm that purports to do my work for me, DNA or otherwise.

The book is divided into eleven numbered chapters plus a seventeen-page glossary, but no index. To give you an idea of how detailed Roberta is, the Table of Contents runs six and a half pages, with the headings and sub-headings of the eleven chapters.

She begins with Acknowledgements, Introduction and "How To Use This Book," followed by

Chapter 1  - TYPES OF TESTING (beginning on page 6)

Chapter 2  - SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS (page 11)

Chapter 3  - Y-DNA - YOUR FATHER'S STORY (page 24)

Chapter 4  -  MITOCHONDRIAL DNA - YOUR MOTHER'S STORY (page 97)
Chapter 5  - AUTOSOMAL DNA - THE FAMILY FINDER TEST (page 132)

Chapter 6  - X CHROMOSOME - UNIQUE INHERITANCE PATH (page 173)
Chapter 7  - ETHNICITY - MY ORIGINS (page 187)

Chapter 8  - ADVANCED MATCHING (page 207)
Chapter 9  - FINDING, JOINING AND UTILIZING PROJECTS (page 209)
Chapter 10 - THIRD PARTY TOOLS (page 218)
Chapter 11 - CREATING YOUR STEP-BY-STEP ROADMAP (page 225)

GLOSSARY (page 231)

As you can see, the chapter on Y-DNA is by far the largest, nearly as large as Mitochondrial and Autosomal combined.

Now to the book.

The brief How To Use section introduces us to Roberta's gray-shaded, bold-faced tips that appear throughout the book. Read all of them, even if you are only skimming some of the harder sections.

I was please to find that Roberta did not spend an inordinate amount of time on the most basic aspects of DNA - the stuff we learned in high school biology. People are learning what this is all about and we no longer have to spend a third of a lecture or an article explaining the equivalent of oceans and boats in a lecture on immigration. The brief TYPES OF TESTING chapter handles all this well.

That chapter concludes with a paragraph called "Your DNA is Archived for a Quarter Century." That sounds like a long time, but as many of us are already at the half-way point, it raises questions about the future - especially if they develop new products.

In SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS, we learn how to make sure our matches can know enough about us to facilitate the first stages of contact, while not surrendering more privacy than we care to. Many people do not list their known surnames, which makes it difficult to analyze matches. Roberta explains both how to do it and why it is important. This will not help us know anything about our matches, but it will help them know about us.

Part of that setting up is putting in a family tree, a matter on which I myself am negligent.

The chapter on Y-DNA is long and - for a novice - difficult. Y-DNA is different from autosomal DNA, has several types of tests and markers (STR and SNP) and a collection of analytical tools and projects. Because it is difficult, it might be wise to look at the Family Finder chapter first. That way, the novice can enjoy some tangible progress before dipping a toe into the hard stuff. That can help avoid the temptation to throw up your hands in frustration at even the basic understanding.

For "normal" researchers, Y-DNA is closely related to stable surnames. Not so with Jewish research where many of us did not have surnames before 1800 and even afterwards they were not always stable. And even into the late 1800s, many religious marriages were not recorded with the civil authorities, so the "illegitimate" children were assigned the mother's surname. (I would call that an eastern European phenomenon, but it happened with the birth of one of my grandsons!)

As my veteran readers know, I have been able to determine what our name was before it was Pikholz, probably four hundred years ago, and I did not need the Y-700 to do that. Y-111 was sufficient.

The Discover links

Roberta gets heavily into haplogroups and the haplogroup tree. If you only do Y-37 or Y-111 tests, you will be assigned to a haplogroup that goes very far back in time. So far back that Roberta and I belong to the same R-M269 haplogroup. The Y-700 brings that forward towards the present, where my haplogroup is shared by only one non-Pikholz thus far.

 

And only after that does she get to a heading called "Down in the Weeds!"

 

The Y-DNA chapter also includes a thirteen-page survey of FTDNA's "Discover" reports, which show different aspects of your male-line results. It's not for everyone but if you like your results as a narrative, you will find them useful.

Yes, Y-DNA is complicated and working with the results of the Y-700 can be difficult. But FTDNA has projects and if you are fortunate - as I am - to be part of a project with good, active administrators, there is much you can learn. This chapter covers that briefly, but well.

This chapter concludes with four case studies, each coming at Y-DNA research from a different perspective.

Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) is passed from women to all their children. The mitochondria is small, so mutations are very infrequent. That - along with the changing surnames in every generation - makes MtDNA less useful for most people. Roberta addresses this in two sentences:

Misinformation, especially on social media, leads people to believe that mitochondrial DNA isn't useful.

As a result, fewer people test, inhibiting the growth of the database which in turn results in fewer matches.

I would like to have seen that in large, colored, bold-faced type. It cannot be overstated. (I speak as someone who ignored the "warnings" and made two significant discoveries using MtDNA.)

Roberta addresses the value of the two partial tests (no longer available but still in the database). Yes, they can be useful. I, for one, have ignored that and will have a look when I have a chance.

There is much on mutations in great detail, also including reverse mutations, unstable mutations and heteroplasmies. A few years ago, I was able to pin down one of the last in my own family by testing two family members and finding a single variation.

She goes through the steps for using the site, as well as the results - migration maps, ancestral origins, and haplogroups - though I personally do not find these features useful.

There is a one-page discussion of "Advanced Matching for MtDNA." This is an important tool that I have used successfully for years, for both MtDNA and Y-DNA. Unfortunately it has not been working for some weeks and FTDNA's support has not been responsive.

The chapter concludes with four case studies.

Autosomal DNA comes from all the reasonably close ancestors and is represented in the Family Finder test. However because it comes from all ancestors, each ancestor's representation is halved every generation. That limits its usefulness.

Autosomal DNA is what the other testing companies do and Roberta goes right into the subject of transferring results from other companies to FTDNA.

Endogamy plays a major role for groups like Jews. Roberta says she has 7878 matches altogether. I have 38,374 and some of my relatives have even more.

The chapter goes into the "buckets" that automatically sort matches into father's side and mother's side, based in part of your family tree (if you entered one). Endogamy messes with this as endogamous familes have many matches which come from both sides. And as I said above, I don't trust automatic matching functions - but that's me.

In this chapter we learn about triangulation (very important!), matching, and chromosome browsers. That last one breaks down matches into individual chromosomes and segments, allowing analysis of seven matches at once. You must understand the brief section "Do Your Matches Match Each Other?" before you do any actual triangulation and those sections should probably have been consecutive.

The chapter concludes with using spreadsheets and the site's matrix tool for analysis. I, myself, do not use either.

There are no case studies here, but the chapter has a lot of anecdotal bits.

The X chromosome, not to be confused with MtDNA, has one side from the mother but only daughters get from the father. Males do not get any X from their fathers. The number of ancestors contributing to a person's X increases from generation to generation in a Fibonacci Sequence, rather than doubling each generation like autosomal DNA.

Roberta does a nice job summarizing how the X works and how to use it in our research. It is something I need to spend more time on in my own research, though I have not neglected it completely.

Ashkenazi Jewish is the yellow bit

My Origins supposedly tells you where you came from. It may or not agree with what other testing companies say because each company has its own distribution of DNA by geography.

In my case, My Origins has me defined as 100% Ashkenazi Jewish yet I know from my Y-700 that at least my male line is from Spain or Portugal - ie Sephardi Jewish.

Advanced Matching deserves its own chapter, even the brief page and a half, even though it was mentioned briefly earlier. It is important and easy to use. When it works.

Projects is also an important subject which was discussed in earlier chapters. Different kinds of projects work for different research goals. these include surname, haplogroups and geographical projects. There is more than a bit of the luck of the draw here - some projects have active, knowledgeable administrators, some less so.

Roberta discusses two Third Party Tools - Genetic Affairs and DNA Painter. The latter is color-based and is very very popular in the research community. I dabbled when it first came out but did not see that it added to my research.

If I have one major criticism of the book, it is the omission of GEDmatch in this chapter, though it appears in the Glossary. I cannot analyze autosomal matches without it and it is useful even when all the matches are from Family Finder tests.

The final chapter discusses creating a road map or research plan. Just a few pages but they wrap it all up nicely. The last two pages - at least in my copy - look like they were meant to be in the previous chapter, as they return to Genetic Affairs and DNA Painter.

It ends with a brief section called "You don't Know What You Don't Know." A truer statement was never written. Until you get into it, you do not know where your research will lead. In fact, it may be years before the best matches show up. You need this both for yourself and to convince (potential) family members to join with you.

Roberta has produced a fine work. It will sit on a shelf at arm's length and I will no doubt refer to it from time to time, especially when I want to get into areas where I have not been before.