Some Basic Chromosome Mapping

Chromosome mapping
Two years ago, I had my first interaction with chromosome mapping, when I sat with Kitty Cooper in Salt Lake City. Kitty had developed a chromosome mapper, in which she could see which segments of her own DNA came from each of her ancestors. I liked this, of course and blogged about it here. The meager results looked like this:

I didn't take this any further even as more family members tested, because I was more interested in the reverse - reconstructing the ancestors. But I knew it was something I should get back to and maybe four months ago, I actually put it on my to-do list.

The graphics aside, the theory behind chromosome mapping is fairly simple. If I have DNA that matches that of the descendants of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige from her first husband, then both they and I must have gotten those segments from Rivka Feige. In fact, five such descendants have tested and I match four of them, with a total of seventy-four segments. Fifteen of those segments are five cM or more and four are between 9.65 cM and 17.95 cM. (I am using 5 cM as a minimum because that is the default on the Family Tree DNA chromosome browser.)

Two of those segments are shared by more than one of the cousins.

The orange is Lillian, my father's half second cousin. The others are my half third cousins.

I should be wary of the small segments, of course, and I must be aware that there were marriages between Pikholz family members during that period, so some of those matches may have come to both them and me from someone else.  I am, however fairly confident that the seven largest segments - 7.93 cM and greater - are from Rivka Feige. These.

I am going to do this from scratch, with tweezers, not using Kitty's mapping tool. I'll deal with the graphics later.

My grandmother's father's mother's side
There isn't much to do with my mother's side. I have two first cousins who have tested, plus two second cousins on each of my mother's sides - in both cases, first cousins to one another. So the best I can possibly do is to label my DNA as "Mother's mother's side" and "Mother's father's side." And even that with reservations.

So I went to my paternal grandmother, where I have a bit more to work with.

I have discussed Nana's father's mother's Zelinka side here, not long ago. So let's start with Debbie who is definitely on the Zelinka side, even though we haven't yet figured out the specific relationship. Debbie and I have nineteen matching segments, including 20.78 cM on chromosome 2, 7.32 cM on chromosome 11 and 5.96 cM on chromosome 19. The one on chromosome is beyond all doubt - it's the one I wrote about a few months ago.
 

Debbie in orange, then Marshall, Lee, Fred and Susan.

To make sure that the smaller segments are not stray bits that came from someplace else, I looked at them vis-a-vis my four second cousins on that side (on the left) and (below) Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty.

Well, we know for sure that Debbie's two smaller matches are not from my mother's side. These look good for Zelinka.

Then I looked at my definite, documented Zelinka fifth cousin, Cindy. I have only two small segments of 7-8 cM with her, plus thirty under 5 cM.

The four second cousins don't match either of them nor does Debbie but Uncle Bob matches both and Aunt Betty matches one.

These are probably Zelinka segments, but I say that with something less than full confidence.

My grandmother's father's father's side

The only cousin on Nana's father's father's Rosenzweig side who is comparable to Cyndi and Debbie is my fifth cousin Miki, but I do not have a match with him according to FTDNA. What I do have is a nice set of matches with my half second cousin Fred. His only Jewish DNA is from his grandmother, Nana's half sister. So my matches with Fred are almost certainly either Rosenzweig or Zelinka.

Fred matches me (above) on only twenty-three segments altogether, ten of them over 5 cM and five of those 9.33-14.49 cM.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob (left) match him on eight of the ten. I saw no point in checking Fred's matches with the other second cousins.

Nana's mother side
On Nana's mother's side, all we have to work with besides the second cousins (without Fred) is my father's second cousin Shabtai. Nana's mother's parents are Bauer and Stern and we have no way to differentiate between them. Both sides are from Hungary - the Bauers from Apostag and later Kunszentmiklos and the Sterns from Kalocsa.

I have forty-one matches with Shabtai. Six are between 5.13 cM and 7.65 cM. Six others are more than 15.98 cM, including segments of 47.13 cM (chromosome 4) and 36.16 cM (chromosome 5). I assume that some of these are Bauer and others Stern.

Marshal, Lee and/or Susan match eight of the twelve, but only four of the six large ones. None of them share the 19.53 cM on chromosome 18 or the 17.03 at the right end of chromosome 5. Below on the right, we can see that Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob also have only eight of the segments that I have with Shabtai, demonstrating that my father received some Bauer/Stern DNA that his brother and sister did not.

It appears therefore that I have twelve identifiable segments from Bauer and Stern, perhaps ten from Rosenzweig & Zelinka (matches with Fred) and five unambiguously Zelinka (matches with Debbie and Cyndi). Add to that at least four and perhaps as many as fifteen from Rivka Feige Pikholz.

The Kwoczkas

Then there is the matter of my father's paternal grandmother's Kwoczkas. My great-grandmother had two brothers. One has a grandson - Bruce - who has tested. The other has a great-grandson and a great-great-grandson - Pinchas and Ben, uncle and nephew. I have eighty-four matches with these three, twenty-five over 5 cM.

Of those twenty-five, ten are 10.49 cM or more. The four largest and two others are with Bruce. Three other matches of the top ten are with Pinchas and Ben's is identical with one of those three. The other fifteen are 7.71 cM or less and I think I'll ignore them for now.

Here are the remaining nine. No need to count Ben's which matches Pinchas. But I am going to move this comparison to a GEDmatch browser because there are more people are involved. (FTDNA's chromosome browser can take only five kits at once.)

Click the image to enlarge

So those matches that I have with the descendants of my great-grandmother's brothers are shared pretty liberally and convincingly by other descendants of my great-grandmother.

This is both partial and needs review. Expect to hear more on this in the coming weeks.

"Tip of the Iceberg"

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the inquiry into the possibility that the Skalat Pikholz Y-DNA goes back to Iberia. Our project administrator Rachel Unkefer spoke about the project in Seattle. You can see her presentation "Tip of the Iceberg" here. Very near the end, there is a reference to a red map pin which may be moving soon. That's us.

Baruch Dayan Haemet  ברוך דיין האמת

Miami Herald

My father's first cousin Herb Braun passed away Tuesday at age ninety-seven.

I met him once when I was fourteen and once when I went to see him in Miami three years ago. Regular readers will recognize his name as he was one of the first to test for our project.

The Bauers and the Rosenzweigs

Autosomal results came in recently for Susan, my second cousin on my father's maternal side.

This is the structure of the family. The shaded names have tested and results are in. One more is not on GEDmatch yet.

We have two children and six grandchildren of my grandmother, a grandson of my grandmother's sister and now Susan a granddaughter of my grandmother's brother. All these are descendants of my great-grandparents Moritz Rosenzweig and Regina Bauer. Their mothers are Zelinka and Stern, respectively.

We also have tests from my father's second cousin, Shabtai, on the Bauer/Stern side and from Fred, the grandson of my grandmother's half-sister on the Rosenzweig/Zelinka side. Fred's Jewish DNA is all from Aunt Ella.

Susan's first matches, as ranked by Family Tree DNA, include all those known relatives plus a second cousin on her mother's side.

I set up a chromosome browser on GEDmatch for all eleven of Susan's matches on our sides to see if we could discern a significant amount of DNA from each of my great-grandparents' sides.

GEDmatch estimates Susan to be 2.4-2.6 generations from Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob and 2.7-3.1 generations from the seven second cousins. They have her as 3.2 generations from Shabtai and 3.3 from Fred.

On the right is the color code that GEDmatch uses to distinguish segment sizes. Remember, the sizes of the graphic bars are not proportional to the actual centiMorgans.

On the chromosome browser which follows, I marked Fred's matches with Susan in red and Shabtai's matches with Susan in blue. I didn't label any of the rest of us because it doesn't matter who is who for the purpose of this exercise.

I did not include the X chromosome because Susan is related through her father's father, which produces no X component.

Seven of Susan's chromosomes have matches with both Fred and Shabtai, eight with Shabtai but not Fred, four with Fred but not Shabtai and three with matches with neither. After triangulation, we can tell without much doubt that certain segments of our DNA come from one side or the other. Of course, we also have segments which are clearly on my grandmother's side, but since neither Shabtai nor Fred shares them, we cannot tell whether they come from the Rosenzweig/Zelinka side or the Bauer/Stern side.

Normally, I would say that we need to test additional cousins on each side, but Fred is an only grandchild and Shabtai has only one living sibling and no known cousins. We have a fifth cousin on the Zelinka side but she does not match Susan and we have a fifth cousin once removed on the Rosenzweig side, but his small match with Susan on chromosome 6 does not match any of the rest of us.

I really have to refresh myself on the use of Kitty Cooper's mapping tools. Doing this on all sides would help understand which ancestral couple provided what parts of our DNA but also what was the make up of the ancestors themselves.

Housekeeping notes
This Wednesday, 13 April, I am speaking about DNA at the Petah Tiqva branch of the Israel Genealogical Society. Seven o'clock at Yad Lebanim, Arlosorov 30. I'll be speaking in Hebrew. Signed copies of ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People will be available for purchase.

Seven weeks until my next programs, in London and Toronto. You can order books for pick-up there until 30 May.

Small Segments (and Endogamy)

The issue of small segments
When we compare autosomal matches on the basis of individual chromosomes, there is a natural tendency to concentrate on the larger segments. If you match someone on 30 or 40 centiMorgans (cM), it is clearly a good match. Small matches of one or two cM get overlooked - often deliberately.

When I first began looking at segment matches, I wondered about that because all my DNA came from my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, even the smallest segments and if I match someone who got those same segments from his ancestors, perhaps both of us got them from a common ancestor.

After I raised this question several times at the GRIP course last summer, CeCe Moore convinced me otherwise by agreeing with me. That is, she agreed that these small segments - I prefer the term slivers - had to have come from somewhere in my past but since they are small, they probably came from so far back that searching for a common ancestor on that basis would not be a productive use of my time.

FamilyTreeDNA's chromosome browser starts showing matching segments with a minimum of five cM, but you can raise it to ten cM or lower it to three or even one cM. GEDmatch suggests seven cM, but you can change that to whatever you wish. But when you download raw data or total matches, you can pretty much do as you like.

There are researchers who begin any examination of matches by deleting all segments that are less than whatever minimum threshhold they set for themselves, never looking at those small segments again. Some go so far as to say that it is wrong to look at small segments.

When I met with Kitty Cooper and Gaye Tannenbaum in Salt Lake City last summer, we discussed the logic of starting with nine or ten cM but once you have a segment of that size, other smaller matches - perhaps even four cM - become relevant.

Not everyone takes this approach. One of the most consistent and convincing champions of using small segments is Roberta Estes of DNA Explained. Roberta has defended advocated the use of very small segments for triangulation and is rightly proud of her successes in having done so. Last week, Roberta posted a long blog after several weeks of laying the foundation. As you can see from what she writes, Roberta is a friend of this blog and I want to make a number of comments on what she wrote.

Moshe Hersch (And you thought we were finished with him!)
But first I want to show you something I found during the last few days in my own work which demonstrates the importance of very small segments.

Some weeks back, I concluded a discussion of two men named Moshe Hersch Pikholz, whom I thought might be the same man. Great-great-grandchildren of one (Charles and Leonora, second cousins to one another) and great-great-grandchildren of the other (Jane and Nan, also second cousins to one another) did Family Finder tests.

The maternal grandmothers of Charles and Leonora (sisters) are the daughters of two Pikholz parents whose relationship to one another is unknown. Aside from that, Leonora's maternal grandfather also has two Pikholz parents, in this case first cousins. So on one hand, Charles and Leonora have extra doses of Pikholz DNA, but on the other hand it makes it very difficult to say for certain which ancestor contributed what, moreso than with normal European-Jewish endogamy.

Nonetheless, I concluded that the genetic match between the two pairs of second cousins was good enough to demonstrate that the two Moshe Hersch Pikholz are indeed the same person.

This week, I took a closer look at chromosome 20 of the four cousins, using GEDmatch at a threshhold of 5 cM..

The bar graph is illustrative but it is not at all proportional.

In the first segment of chromosome 20 (the left side of the bar graph and the top row in the two charts above) Charles and Jane have a large match of 34.1 cM. Both match Leonora on the first part of that segment and both match Nan on the second part. Leonora and Nan do not match each other, but that is not a problem. I don't need all four to match.

The second segment (the right side of the bar graph and the second row in the two charts) is not so simple. Here we have a match of 60 cM between Jane and Nan, part of which matches Charles and part of which matches Leonora. Charles and Leonora are not a match. However nearly a quarter of Charles' match with Nan and Jane overlaps with Leonora's match with Nan and Jane. If this description is complete and correct, something must be wrong, because it is inconsistent.

I asked Roberta what she thought and she suggested that I lower the threshhold as far as possible. Perhaps, she suggested, there are some small segments that explain the inconsistency.

So I lowered the threshhold to one cM.

The long blue bar at the top right is the 60 cM match between Jane and Nan. The medium-sized blue bar at the right of the third line is the 24.5 cM match between Jane and Leonora. The bottom right where there is supposedly no match between Charles and Leonora, we see a series of about a dozen small matches in the same segment where Jane and Nan match. It is as though the long matching segment, to use Roberta's phrase, "has been chopped up." Or if you prefer, disintegrated.

If we ignore the red breaks, Charles' match with Leonora extends nearly all the way to the right end of Jane's match with Nan. Not only that, but Leonora's match with Charles extends Leonora nearly all the way to the left. If we count the small segments, all four line up very well together. To me it is clear that the 60 cM segment that Nan and Jane share came from Moshe Hersch (or his wife, assuming he had only one) and that it began to break down somewhere along the ancestors of Charles and Leonora, perhaps as early as their great-grandmother.

This may not always work so neatly and so conclusively, but to repeat a mantra of Roberta's, if you throw out the small segments even before you begin your analysis, you will never see this obvious result.

But that does not mean that I have totally signed on to Roberta's attachment to small segments. When you are talking about matches that are only small segments, the kind that do not overlap large ones, CeCe is probably right. It's generally not a productive use of my time to examine them.

That is even more valid when talking about endogamous populations where we know in advance that there are distant common ancestors simply by virtue of our being Jewish. For us, the strategy I discussed with Kitty Cooper, looking at smaller segments once you have a large match as an umbrella, is still the way to go. How large is large and how small is small is still a matter of personal preference - and mine is to be conservative. To quote myself in another context "If it might be wrong, it doesn't belong."

For the non-endogamous, such as Roberta, you can probably afford to be more liberal.

A Study Using Small Segment Matching, by Roberta Estes
I  am going to step through Roberta's blog and comment as I go along.

Sherlock Holmes is quoted as saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." That does not mean that if we have nothing to go on aside from DNA, then DNA must have contain a usable truth. Maybe yes and maybe no.

Roberta writes " So we need to establish guidelines and ways to know if those small segments are reliable or not." I say, very carefully. Different circumstances require different tools and also create different opportunities. I want to read what all the experienced experts have to say but then I want to make my own decisions for my own families. Usually I will write about those decisions and will entertain debate. Ridicule, not so much. Genetic genealogy is way too new to have hard and fast rules, especially ones that begin :You can't..."

Roberta is obviously correct when she says "assuming the position that something can’t be done simply assures that it won’t be." That is true for an individual project which discards small segments according to some rule, as well as studies on small segment research as a genre. Roberta says correctly "The only way we, as a community, are ever going to figure out how to work with small segments successfully and reliably is to, well, work with them." To that I add if you have a few cases that are proven based on small segments, there are almost certainly many others which are not proven because those small segments were never examined.

I am well-aware that my work is different from that of most others because I an not looking for "new" relatives, rather looking to figure out how the ones I know fit together.  One-name studies is a legitimate field with its own requirements and opportunities.

Finding three people who match on the same segment may be "the commonly accepted gold standard of autosomal DNA triangulation within the industry" but among the endogamous, we strive for the platinum standard. There are too many ways to be wrong if you have only three people using segments that are not large enough and not numerous enough.

Sometimes I want to get more than one trangulation within a potential family group. I suppose that has to do with endogamy. I think of these multiple triangulation scenarios like this.

Roberta's Sarah Hickerson article "was meant to be an article encouraging people to utilize genetic genealogy for not only finding their ancestor and proving known connections, but breaking down brick walls." Absolutely. Many of us read to find not only ideas but encouragement. And some of us write not to show how smart we are but to bring others to the point where they say "I can do this too."

Roberta, please note - for some of us 5-6 generations does not qualify as "low hanging fruit."  And still our small segments can be useful.

I can understand that FTDNA and the other companies must draw a line dividing matches from non-matches. But it would me very very helpful if we could get at our non-matches on FTDNA's chromosome browser. Not everyone is on GEDmatch.

I think that will do.

Genes From My Father

My father's name
This Wednesday evening, the fifth of Kislev, my father will have been gone thirty-four years. His name is Eliezer Yitzhak. Aunt Helen called him "Leizer Yitzchok."

Based on his initials, Lawrence Irwin Pickholtz, my mother often called him "Lippy." (Actually, "Lippy dear.") What my mother didn't realize is that the standard Yiddish kinui (=nickname) for Eliezer is Lipa.

My father was named after his great-uncle Lajos/Ludwig Bauer who was a Hungarian government minister at some level and who was probably living when my father was born. He would have been two days short of forty-eight.

Simon Bauer's 1862 marriage record, naming his father Lasar

We know that my third-great-grandfather was Lasar Bauer but we have no specific knowledge that either he or Lajos/Ludwig had the second name Yitzhak. I missed the chance to ask my grandmother about that.

It is quite possible that the Yitzhak comes from my grandfather's side, as my second-great-grandfather was Isak Fischel Pikholz. My grandfather had an older brother named Eisik Fischel who died at nineteen months. So my father's second name may have come from there. Otherwise none of the descendants of my great-grandparents carry his name.

Eisik Fischel's birth record (adjusted on the page)

My father's DNA
A few weeks ago, GEDmatch came out with some new analytical tools that require a subscription. One of them - Lazerus - uses descendants and relatives who are not descendants to reconstruct the DNA of deceased people.

You enter descendants in Group 1 and non-descendants (siblings, cousins etc) in Group 2. Lazerus then assigns the reconstruction any segments that match people in both groups. The assumption is that if my aunt and I have a match, my father must have had that same segment. (I am probably over-simplifying here.)

As with all DNA issues, the more actual test results, the better.

The reconstructed kit, if large enough, can then be compared to other kits, the same way any other kit can be.

I have been talking about doing this for my great-grandparents since last summer, using the tools developed by Kitty Cooper. But Lazerus is easier, almost automatic. This is good, but also problematic, for reasons I'll explain below.

Running Lazerus for Leizer
But before I tried Lazerus on my great-grandparents, I decided to run it on my father. (The irony of using Lazerus to reconstruct the DNA of someone named Leizer was not lost on me.)

I hope the explanation is not too technical and that I make myself understood, to both the laymen and the citizen-scientists among my readers.

I have three descendants for Group 1 - two of my sisters and me. (A third sister said she will test, but hasn't done so yet.) For Group 2, I used the kits of my father's sister and brother, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, and their first cousin Herb. (There is one other living first cousin and I am working on him to test.)

There are several others a bit more distant whom I could have used, but I decided to start conservatively in order to reduce the possibility of endogamy. If, for instance, I were to include my second cousin Terry or my father's second cousin Bruce in Group 2, I would be taking the chance that their mothers have some kind of match with us via my mother and that would find its way into my father's Lazerus kit where it doesn't belong.

Herb and Kay (Surely no one in our family has ever referred to those two cousins together!)
The way I set it up, the only person who could have that endogamous match would be Cousin Herb. So to check that out, I looked for segments where Herb matches my first cousin Kay, whose mother is my mother's sister. There are five such segments.

Matching segments - Herb and Kay

On the first segment on chromosome 3, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob both match my sisters and me, so we don't need Herb's match.

On the second match on chromosome 3, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob do not match us, so this segment is disqualified from the Lazerus because it is based solely on Herb's match with my mother's side.

On chromosome 7, we have the same thing. That segment has to be disqualified.

The segment on chromosome 20 is covered by Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob.

The segment on chromosome 12 is more complicated. Part of the Herb-Kay match is covered by Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, but a bit at the beginning is not.

I cannot be precise, but it looks like I should remove 2100-2200 SNPs from the Lazerus kit that was generated for my father. If there were a way to do so. (GEDmatch does not offer a mechanism to remove - or add - specific segments.)

The total Lazerus kit has 666,901 SNPs, so we are talking here about less than a third of one percent, so the Lazerus kit for my father is essentially free from endogamy.

I'll spare you the math, but the kit has about 62% of a full set of twenty-two (X2) chromosomes. Others may have more or less.

A second trial kit
I then ran a second kit for my father, but I added six other people to Group 2 - a child of each of three of his first cousins and three more distant cousins. Those have a higher likelihood of introducing segments that should not be there. That kit has about 1.24% more SNPs than the first kit. That increase hardly seems worth the bother, so I decided to stick with the first kit.

Very small segments
Let me clarify one other point. Generally, when we compare peoples' DNA to one another, we ignore the really small segments. Where we draw the line is a matter of personal preference, but most choose somewhere between 6 and 10 cM as a lower limit and reject anything smaller. In this case, I decided to accept all the small segments since we are talking about known close relationships, where the small segments would have certainly been passed on from the previous generation. It doesn't matter if they are not relevant to three-four generations back.

In any case, it would not be significant. I have only one segment smaller than 7 cM  matching the Lazaerus kit. My sister Sarajoy also has only one and my sister Amy has three. Not much to be concerned about there.

Analyzing the Lazerus kit
So how do I analyze my father's kit once I have it? And why is it significantly different from what I can do with the kits of Aunt Betty or Uncle Bob? I am not sure about the second question, but I can show you some of what I did.

I ran my father's kit - remember it's not a full kit - in GEDmatch and of the fifteen hundred matches, I pulled out the twenty-five that are part of my own project.

Those twenty-five break down as follows:

The descendants of my great-grandparents - 9
Kwoczka cousins (my g-gm's side) - 2 (Bruce and Pinchas)
Descendants of my g-gf's sisters - 1 (Ralph)
Other Skalat Pikholz - 8
Other Pikholz - 3
My mother's Jaffe cousins - 2

I ran a chromosome browser with those twenty-five. What I would really like to do is to see how the other Skalaters might fit together, but I am not really sure how best to do that.

In any case, here are a few of my father's matches, by chromosome. The colors indicate the quality of the match for each segment.

The order of the matches as displayed is different for each chromosome. (Note to GEDmatch: It would be easier to read if the order stayed the same throughout.)

On chromosome 1, as on most of these charts, the top five are my sisters and I, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob. The order of the basic five is not important. We do see that they line up pretty well with one another.

Line 6 is my second cousin Rhoda and 7 is my father's cousin Herb. Line 8 is Micha from Rozdol. Line 9 is Charles, a Skalat cousin whom I wrote about a few days ago, who should be moderately close to us. Line 10 is the putative great-grandson of Uncle Selig.

There is a nice set of overlapping matches on lines 13-17. Line 13 is Ralph, which should identify this segment as Pikholz rather than Kwoczka. Jane is 14, my cousin Lee is 15, 16 is Gene from the Irene family and 17 is Lloyd. (Some of these names should be familiar to you from my previous post, where I identified them in detail.)

Lots of other small scattered matches.

In chromosome 3, the first eight are the basic five plus Herb and my cousins Terry and Rhoda, followed by my cousin Lee on line 11. In between, on lines 9 and 10 are the two Jaffe cousins on my mother's side. I do not believe this is an error of endogamy, but rather a legitimate very old connection between the families. One or both of the Jaffes appear in other chromosomes as well.

Line 12 is from Uncle Selig.

There seems to be a bit of grouping at the bottom right, involving a group of Skalater Pikholz  descendants. Here too we see Micha on line 19. He seems to have some round-the-back connection to the Skalat Pikholz families.

On chromosome 7, we have something interesting. Directly after the basic five comes my second cousin Lee and there is a significant segment on the far left that includes mainly those six people. Lee's grandfather is my grandfather's brother, but our grandmothers are sisters. So my guess here is that this segment - which has no other Pikholz matches of note - is from our grandmothers' side - the Rosenzweigs (or Bauers or Sterns or Zelinkas).

On chromosome 18, lines 7 and 10 are the Kwoczka cousins Bruce and Pinchas. We can safely say that those segments come from my great-grandmother's Kwoczka side rather from my great-grandfather's Pikholz side. We have the same phenomenon on other chromosomes, particularly for Bruce, who is my father's second cousin. (Pinchas is one generation later.)

 Finally, chromosome 19, where we have the basic five followed by Herb and Lee, taking up almost the entire chromosome. The important one here is line 9, where Ralph claims that segment as Pikholz, rather than Kwoczka.

The longish segment on line 8 is Gene from the Irene family. His third cousin Bonnie is on line 11.

All this is mostly experimental. The real test will come from a look at the great-grandparents. Lazerus or no, it still may make sense to copy some of these segments into Kitty Cooper';s Chromosome Mapper for the great-grandparents.

Moving on to the great-grandparents
As I said, what I really want to do is Lazerize my great-grandparents, Hersch Pickholz and Jutte Lea Kwoczka. Both parents of Hersch Pickholz are named Pikholz and if I can recreate a significant amount of his DNA, I can compare that to other Skalat Pikholz families, as well as the Rozdol Pikholz descendants and the set of non-Pikholz who have joined our project.

I discussed this subject three months ago when I wanted to do this using Kitty Cooper's Segment Mapper. This was a difficult task and in any case, there was no easy way to compare other people to the finished product.

This is no simple matter because although we have tests for nine descendants of Hersch and Jutte Lea, we have only one relative on his side and two on hers to help distinguish between them. And there is the matter of endogamy - having to try to figure out whose matches might be from another direction.

I am also thinking about whether it is right to include my father's kit in my ggps Lazerus - or whether it makes a difference in the results.

Lazerus kits are easy to compare, so that problem is solved, but the problem of distinguishing between my two great-grandparents remains. And checking for endogamy is both an uncertain task and a tedious one.

Also note that Lazerus looks for matches between the segments in Group1 (the descendants) and those in Group 2 without our having any control. When I was doing it with Kitty Cooper's Segment Mapper, I could look at each potential match and decide if it was good enough for me.

The great-grandparents is the next big project on my list.

My thanks to Curtis and Jon at GEDmatch, to Jim Bartlett and to Rebekah Canada for comments along the way. And, as always, to all the cousins who have tested.

Housekeeping notes
FamilyTree DNA is having a sale on DNA tests and upgrades.   A good explantion of all the options is here. Order here.

One Pikholz has already ordered a Family Finder at the sale price..

There is now a dedicated Facebook group for GEDmatch Lazarus tool.

What DNA Came From Which Ancestors

As I have gotten older, I have become more hesitant just diving into new technology. Invariably, once I get into it, I get used to it fairly easily, especially when I really need what it has to offer.

A few days ago, I finally got into mapping chromosomes with the help of two graphic tools from Kitty Munson Cooper, whom I met in Salt Lake City.

The object of this exercise is to see which bits of my own DNA can be traced to specific ancestors, or more correctly to which ancestral couple. (An extension of that would be to reconstruct the DNA of those ancestors, but that is another story.)

I am going to present here only my paternal side. I expect to see test results from two second cousins from my mother's side and I'd rather wait on those before drawing conclusions there.

Segment Mapper
I have ten known relatives on my father's side who have tested. Seven are descendants of my great-grandparents Hersch Pickholz and Jutte Lea Kwoczka. One - Ralph - is a great-great-grandson of one on my great-grandfather's sisters and the other two are the grandson (Bruce) and great-grandson (Pinchas) of my great-grandmother's two brothers.

The other seven are my sisters Amy and Sarajoy, my father's sister Aunt Betty, my father's first cousin Herb, my double second cousin Lee and two other second cousins Terry and Rhoda.

The chromosome browser provided by Family Tree DNA, allows a comparison to only five people at a time. Kitty's Segment Mapper allows comparison to as many as forty people at once.  Soon enough I'll try more comparisons, but for now all I need is ten.

I left out the X chromosome since that is only from my mother's side.

Ralph has two bright green segments in chromosome 1 and another in chromosome 19, all of them overlapping several descendants of my grandparents. Since Ralph is on my great-grandfather's side, these segments must be from his parents Izak Fischel and Rivka Feige.

Pinchas has the same kinds of matches on chromosomes 1 and 7 and Bruce has one each on chromosomes 1 and 16, so those segments would be from my great-grandmother's parents Mordecai Meir and Bassie.

Chromosomes 4 and 20 have matches only from the four people who come from my grandmother's side - my sisters, Aunt Betty and Lee. None of the other Pikholz appear there. That indicates that the entire length of those two chromosomes are from either my grandmother's Rosenzweig side or my mother's side.

There is a nice match involving Ralph, my sisters and me on chromosome 3, but no one else among my father's relatives. I have not included that because it is quite possible - prehaps even probable - that this represents a connection between Ralph and our mother's side.

Many of the remaining segments are pretty clearly from my great-grandparents, but we don't know enough to say which of them. Yet.

I should be able to add additional segments to my specific ancestors by using someone other than me as the base. That would be the case if Ralph or Pinchas or Bruce matched a handful of my father's family members, but not me. I am not sure there is a tool for this.

Chromosome Mapper
So what does it look like? I ran it through the second of Kitty's tools, the Chromosome Mapper.

As I say, I am trying to be conservative here, so I did not label any of the sections of the middle chromosomes, even though the first figure shows a high likelihood that there are segments on my Pikholz/Kwoczka side.  I'd like a bit more proof there.

I am also aware that all of this is tentative because the chromosomes come in pairs and it is possible that when I have a match with two people at the same place, one might actually be from my mother's chromosome and the other from my father's. I need to figure out an efficient way to check this. (See my remark about chromosome 3 above.)


But thanks to Kitty, the process wasn't hard. I think I am getting the hang of it. I should be able to add some other Pikholz descendants to the segment mapper and we'll see what shows up. But not this week.

Housekeeping notes
We are away for a few days, so I may not be as responsive as usual.

Salt Lake City

I posted Thursday about my week in Pittsburgh, neglecting to mention that this was probably my best ever visit with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken.

This has been a different kind of conference for me than in years past.

I was surprised to find that most of the people I talked to here had never heard of GRIP, so one day I skipped my new set of "I LOVE ENDOGAMY" T-shirts and wore the shirt we got from GRIP. The rest of the time was the new T-shirts except when I spoke, which was shirt and tie.

I spent very little time with my Galizianer friends, spending more time with the blogger crowd. There were a few meetings that I was invited to - bloggers, media etc - and I saw alot of the same people at each. I also attended the talks of several of them. These included people I have known somewhat over the years but also some younger ones who have become Facebook friends in the past months, including two with Pittsburgh-area ancestors.

At one point in one of those meetings, I was exchanging Facebook direct messages with someone who was sitting three seats away from me, like the modern version of passing notes.It was like I was seeing for the first time how the younger generation works.

I am not going to review all the lectures I attended. The lectures are availble for purchase and enough people blogged talks in real time - here, here, here and here, for instance.

Jim Tanner, not in his usual
 bent-over-the-laptop pose

There was one prominent blogger from the general genealogy community who was here for the whole conference, typing away all day. James Tanner is said to be the most prodigious of the genealogy bloggers and some of his children have followed him into the field. I had not been familiar with his work until now.

Wednesday evening, I had the privilege of spending two and a half hours with Kitty Munson Cooper and Gaye Tannenbaum, talking tools for DNA analysis. Kitty has written a few tools herself and is well thought of in the general DNA genetics world. Kitty will speak to the folks at GEDmatch about creating a tool which would have specific relevance to my own work.

I know Gaye's name because she co-authored one of several articles by Dr. Jeff Paull, for which I served as a pre-publication reviewer. Another in that series is due out in the Fall Avotaynu.

And I spoke with Alex Denysenko about some record sets in Podolia, particularly Nemirow. Unfortunately, those end in 1852, while I want 1865-1880. He will check about census records, which should serve a similar purpose in my Pikholz research.

 I was involved in two presentations - a panel and a lecture.

Gary at the podium while the rest of the panel looks on.*

The panel was on Monday afternoon and was called "Internet Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online?" The concept began as a pro or con debate on Geni.com and programs like it and took off from a presentation at the conference last year. I discussed this at some length a few months ago. The panel ended up a bit more generic with each of three debaters explaining how he brings his family tree to the attention of the general public.

We were told to write up a full text of a fifteen minute opening, then ask each other questons. I wrote up my fifteen minutes a few weeks ago, but when I looked it over, it seemed more like an article than a talk. Although I speak reasonably well from notes, I have never actually written a speech and this did not sound like one.

I took advantage of being with Uncle Ken in Pittsburgh and we went over it in quite a bit of detail - until 11:30 at night, way past his usual bedtime. I made some changes in the text, but most of the change was in the way I spoke and the way I listened to myself - both thanks to him. Uncle Ken has been mentoring graduate students art Pitt since his retirement twenty-five years ago, so he knows whereof he speaks.

Thanks to Preeva Tramiel for this one

I also spoke Wednesday morning on "Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove," the same title I used for a similar talk at the DC conference three years ago. I was once again introduced by my good friend and colleague Renee Steinig and the talk went well. Turnout was not what I had in the much smaller room in DC, but you can only control so much.


The handout for that talk can be found here.

Following that talk was a bit of unpleasantness. I was scheduled for 9:00-10:15, with the last fifteen minutes for questions. But there were few questions, so we ended ten minutes early. I was still at the podium with ten minutes left on the clock, when the speaker scheduled to follow came up and ordered(!) me off the podium so she could set up. There may be ramifications to this going forward.

I attended three talks on publishing. Tammy Hepps presented her Treelines program, which serves as an online tree, but with a story-telling capability.  Very impressive, but it looks like a lot of work. Perhaps If I had an assistant, I'd have a go at it.  Treelines is not a finished product and we should expect it to become a pay site when it is further along, though Tammy says that those who join now will be grandfathered in free. It is an impressive piece of work, even if it may not be right for me.

Mike Karsen spoke about publishing actual books, but in small bites. One part of the family at a time. He has an actual Pledge Card where people promise him that they will publish something within twelve months, in exchange for various goodies from Mike himself.

Part of the idea here is that once you have done one, it becomes much easier to do others.

This is an excellent idea and a very good way to approach publishing, but here too, I don't think my schedule is up to it.

Finally, Marlis Humphrey, the President of IAJGS, gave a talk about publishing online. Clearly the wave of the future, but just as clearly, too much for me, at least right now.

I attended Martin Fischer's lecture "Finding Living Relatives: Techniques for Discovering Previously Unknown Mishpoche." One of the questioners afterward  said that he has overcome reluctant relatives by sending them incorrect data about themselves, which almost forces them to set the record straight. (making a woman older than she is, for instance.) This got lots of laughs and applause as it is clearly one of the more efficient ways to address this phenomenon.

However, I have seen more than one discussion - I don't recall if on JewishGen or on non-Jewish sites - where everyone agreed that this is unethical.

I posted about this on Facebook and got quite a few comments, mosty objectng to the questioner's suggestion. My son, who studies Jewish law on such things, says that is definitely improper.


At the last lecture I attended before leaving the conference, I found myself sitting next to my MtDNA match that I wrote about four months ago.

I am pleased to say that there was a minyan three times a day while I was at the conference. The food, on the other hand, did not give us the idea that there is a vibrant Jewish community in Salt Lake City.

Housekeeping notes
* The photo from the panel debate was taken by Lara Diamond and graced her blog post here.

On either end of the Conference, I got to spend Shabbes with my son and his family in Chicago. (Number two son is away at camp.)

Monday the eighth of Av and we are going into the Tisha beAv day of mourning. May everyone have an easy and meaningful day and may this be the year that this day of national mourning becomes one of rejoicing.