Are My Parents Related

Related or not, my parents are married

The indispensible DNA-analysis website GEDmatch has a tool called "Are Your Parents Related." It's pretty straight-forward. You enter your GEDmatch kit number and it gives you a result. No options for threshholds or anything else. Just press the "submit" button.














They explain it like this:

Since you inherit half of your DNA from each of your parents, it stands to reason that large blocks of SNPs where both alleles are the same would be an indication that your parents each inherited that block from the same ancestor. These are called 'Runs of Homozygosity' (ROH). There are other utilities available that look for ROH for other purposes, but this analysis is specifically aimed at determining how closely related your parents might be.

They don't say so, but it is obvious if you think about it that the results are nothing more than an indication. After all, what they work with is your own personal DNA and since your siblings' DNA is different from yours, they will produce different results.

The GEDmatch kits of my brother and my sister Jean show that there is no indication that our parents are related. They both received the results - such as they are - on the right.

Mine was different and my sister Amy's was different from mine. Amy's kit shows that my parents share 7.1 cM on Chromosome 1. Mine shows that they share 7.6 cM on Chromosome 9.

Sarajoy's kit (below) has a third segment, with 8.3 cM on Chromosome 3.

That's 23 cM altogether.

Judith's kit (below) has two segments, Amy's from Chromosome 1 and mine from Chromosome 9.

There are six of us, so you might think that we encompass all of our parents' DNA. We probably do, but we don't necessarily have their matching segments together.

GEDmatch offers another option - one that I have written about before in other contexts, as recently as last week. It's an idea I had during the Shavuot holiday, Tuesday night.

I created a simple Lazarus kit for my father. His six children are in Group 1 and his sister and brother are in Group 2. I could have added other family members, but any of those would have introduced DNA from other sources. My father's cousin Herb, for instance, would have brought DNA from his father who in theory could be related to my mother.

This Lazarus kit is 3490.2 cM.

For my mother, I used the same Group 1, her six children, but she has no living siblings for Group 2. So here I had to use my mother's sister's daughter and her brother's son. Not quite as good and with a chance of some contamination - at least from the nephew. The niece's father converted to Judaism and would have had no DNA in common with my father.

My mother's Lazarus kit is 2823.2 cM.

I ran a "One-to-one" between my parents Lazarus kits. THAT should give me a minimum for how closely they are related. Spoiler alert, it's more than the 23 cM than we saw in our "Are Your Parents Related" runs.

Nine matching segments for a total of 95.7 cM. That's four times 23 cM. Blaine Bettinger's Shared cM Project would define that as third cousins or second cousins twice removed. My parents are certainly not related that closely. Two of those segments - on Chromosome 10 - are adjacent and they alone are nearly 23 cM.

My parents' Lazarus kits show no match on the X.

But the biggest surprise is that there is nothing on Chromosome 3 or Chromosome 9 that Sarajoy and I show. And there are two segments on Chromosome 1 but neither is the segment that Amy and Judith show. I am guessing that the Lazarus algorithm is not designed to recognize those Runs of Homozygosity and that my cousins do not have those matches with my mother.

I don't have much practical use for "Are Your Parents Related," so the discrepancy really doesn't matter to me. But it certainly is one of those things that make you go "Hmmm."

Housekeeping notes
I am posting this Sunday morning my time. This evening, I'll be speking for “Shorashim BaGalil” in Kiryat Tivon at the Library and Memorial Center Migdal Street 2. It will be the Hebrew version of
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey

I'll be speaking on the same topic on 19 June at 6:30, for IGS Rishon Lezion, Museum of Rishon Lezion, Ahad Ha’am 2.

Lazarus and Half-Siblings

Most of  my readers know by now that the Lazarus tool on GEDmatch (a Tier 1 tool which requires a small donation) enables you to recreate a partial genome of a person based on DNA of his descendants and other relatives.

If your Lazarus kit has 1500 cM or more, it will be batched by GEDmatch and you can use it in one-to-many searches. With that, you can see who else that kit matches and how.

Lazarus works with two groups of relatives. Group 1 is descendants of the target, children, grandchildren even great-grandchildren - though the further away you get, the less useful. Group 2 is non-descendant relatives of the target - siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins etc. The idea is that in a non-endogamous population, any segment that appears in both Group 1 and Group 2, must be shared by the target.

In endogamous populations, that's a bit more complicated as it is easy to mistakenly introduce segments that do not belong, as I discussed about six weeks ago regarding the Lazarus kit of my great-grandmother Jutte Leah Kwoczka.

The Facebook group "GEDmatch Lazarus Tool" gives users a place to discuss their experiences and problems and to get advice from others. That groups was founded by the indispensible Blaine Bettinger and he also provides a link to his blog with a detailed explaination on how to use Lazarus. Blaine's blog includes the following:

Later he repeats for emphasis:

The most important rule is to

NEVER EVER PUT A DESCENDANT IN GROUP 2!!

Why is that? Because if you are doing a Lazarus for your grandmother, her descendants will likely also be descendants of your grandfather as well and if you have descendants of both of them in both Group 1 and Group 2, the Lazarus kit - which accepts all the matching segments without differentiation - will give your grandmother's kit segments that are not hers, but her husband's.

Nearly two years ago, I challenged that blanket statement in this space. I wrote:

There is, however, an exception. When the target has children from multiple spouses who are not related to one another.

I explained this using a fictional discussion within a well-known historical family, which is worth a reread.

The subject keeps coming up, so I thought it worth a review.

The idea is that since the target's multiple unrelated spouses are, well, unrelated, if you put the descandants of one spouse in Group 1 and descendants of another in Group 2, you do not run into the problem of misattribution that I described above.

This subject comes up from time to time in the Facebook group because despite the fact that GEDmatch adjusted its instructions to permit half-siblings in Group 2, Blaine's linked blog still has the old instructions which warns sternly against doing so.

This is not a trivial matter. In my Jutte Leah Kwoczka blog cited above, I described how I struggled to reach the 1500 cM minimum, even though I had fifteen descendants in Group 1.

David matches Anna. Click to enlarge.

But let's look what happens when we use two half siblings - one each in Group 1 and Group 2. For this I return to my favorite fourth cousins, David and Anna, great-great-grandchildren of Uncle Selig. They have the same father but their mothers are not related to one another. Both mothers are Polish so there is no issue of Jewish endogamy in play.

Using a one-to-one, we get 1619.7 cM right off the bat, more than the 1500 cM we need for batching. (This does not include the X, but we don't need it because obviously David has no X from his father. If we were talking about two sisters, we would add the results of the separate "X 'One-to-one' " tool.)

Blaine's very important Shared CcM Project shows the average half-sibling match to be 1731.05 cM, but the diffrence between that  and David and Anna's shared 1617.7 cM probably includes the X which they don't have at all. In any case, 1617.7 cM is a reasonable result.

But we can do better.

The 1617.7 cM is based on a threshhold of 7 cM. That is, it excludes anything below 7 cM. In fact, if two half-siblings have smaller matches, they surely come from the shared parent. Their father also has those small segments, even if they came to him as IBS (Identical By State).

I ran the "One-to-one" again using a threshhold of 4 cM (the lowest permitted by Lazarus) and added these six segments. That brings the total match between David and Anna to 1649.8 cM.

This is what they share from their father.


I created a Lazarus kit (shown on the left), using the 4 cM threshhold, with only David in Group 1 and only Anna in Group 2. I fully expected to get a kit with that same 1649.8 cM. The result is 1642 cM - close but not perfect. I'll let GEDmatch figure out what the difference is and why.

The results are good enough for batching.

Of course, if David's full brothers would test, we could add them to Group 1 which would improve the results. Probably significantly.

If Anna also had full siblings, even better.

And if we could add their one known second cousin (whom I hope to meet at my presentation in Rishon Lezion in three weeks) to Group 2, we could also improve the results. I'm not sure by how much.

But the point is, this works.

Housekeeping Notes

Skalat memorial
The annual Skalat memorial at the Holon Cemetery outside Tel-Aviv is the day after Shavuot - this year Thursday the first of June at five thirty, next to the Skalat monument along the eastern wall of the cemetery. Those of you saying Yizkor that day may wish to keep us in mind.

Coming presentations in Israel
I am giving two presentations here in Israel in the coming weeks.

4 June 2017, 7:00 PM – IGS “Shorashim BaGalil” Kiryat Tivon, Library and Memorial Center, Migdal 2

and

19 June 2017, 6:30 PM – IGS Rishon Lezion, Museum of Rishon Lezion, Ahad Ha’am 2.

Both are the Hebrew version of
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey

   

Moscow

I have my ticket in hand for my trip to the US for the Orlando conference, with a stop in Moscow for a day and a half. I'll be meeting there with two more of my newfound Kaplan-Rosenbloom second cousins. I am very excited about this. (I introduced you to this family here, here and here.)

Presentations in Orlando
I have now signed up introducers for all four of my presentations at the IAJGS Conference in Orlando 23-28 July. Two of them are people I have never met - but they are Pikholz descendants, one from Skalat and one from Rozdol.

   

Unveiling

On my way back from Orlando, I'll be in Chicago for a couple of days.  I understand that my sisters there plan to have my brother's unveiling then.

Jutte Leah Kwoczka's Lazarus Kit

Last summer at the IAJGS Conference in Seattle, I gave a new presentation called GEDmatch.com’s Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy. It was well-received but I felt it needed some changes. I also received a few more kits that I had to add. I am beginning to work on those for the Orlando Conference in July. This is the summary I submitted with my proposal.

Lazarus is a tool offered by GEDmatch.com, which can create a partial genome of a person based on autosomal test results of descendants on one hand and non-descendant relatives on the other. This recreated kit can be compared to other kits in order to help determine and clarify relationships. 
But for endogamous families, this is more complicated, especially when you consider that there are two distinct types of endogamy. 
This presentation will address the two types of endogamy and the way to best use Lazarus while reducing "contaminated" input inadvertently introduced due to multiple relationships. It will also address the use of Lazarus as a tool for DNA analysis. 
The presentation – much of which is based on the speaker's recently published book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" – will use examples from the single-surname Pikholz Project.

The talk will take place on Tuesday 25 July at 2 PM in a room called "Osprey 2" and will be introduced by Mindie Kaplan. The handouts are mostly tree charts so people will be able to follow the family structure.

The kit I am most interested in recreating in this presentation is my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz (~1853-1931), but along the way, I shall recreate kits for my father, my great-grandmother and Hersch's mother Rivka Feige, with a nod to my grandfather as well.

People who have done Family Finder tests are shaded in green.

It is the kit of my great-grandmother, Jutte Leah Kwoczka (~1855-1926), Hersch Pikholz' wife, which I wish to comment upon here. We have Family Finder tests for fifteen of her descendants - three grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren. 

Those fifteen descendants should be fine as Group 1*. (Actually we have two more great-grandchildren, but I am not using their tests as their parents are already included.)

For Group 2*, I used the grandson of one of Jutte Leah's brothers and a great-grandson of the other. That gave me a Lazarus kit for Jutte Leah of 1490 cM, not quite enough for GEDmatch to make it useful for one-to-many comparisons to other people.


I figured I should be able to make up the missing 10 cM and then some by testing a great-great-grandson of Jutte Leah's brother Pinchas.

The "and then some" turned out to be more than one hundred cM and the new kit was 1816 cM, more than enough for batching.

Finally - well not quite finally - this week I received Family Finder results for a sister of the great-great-grandson that I had added previously, giving me a fourth person in Group 2. The total cM went up by another 16 cM, for a total of 1833 cM. Not very much gained there.

But there are definitely false matches in that total. Aunt Becky's husband, Uncle Harry, is the son of Pinchas Kwoczka's wife's sister. 

That means that Aunt Becky's two granddaughters share Zwiebel/Lewinter DNA with the three descendants of Pinchas - DNA which has nothing at all to do with Jutte Leah Kwoczka and should not (MUST NOT) be included in her Lazarus kit.

So I had no choice but to remove the granddaughters of Aunt Becky and Uncle Harry, leaving thirteen members of Group 1*. This reduced the size of Jutte Leah's kit to 1644 cM. The irrelevant Zwiebel/Lewinter DNA was 189 cM, a very significant amount.

Please note that the last day of Passover begins this evening (Sunday) - the last two days if you are still in exile. I'll not be reacting to comments made during the holiday until my Wednesday morning.

* In fact, GEDmatch gives you only slots for ten kits in Group 1. But I have more than that in this case, so I had to reverse Group1 1 and Group 2. That doesn't matter to the computation.

The Large DNA Matches of My Great-Grandfather

I have written about GEDmatch's Lazarus tool before - most notably here, here and here. (I had quite forgotten about the last of those three and very much enjoyed rediscovering it this week.)

I have also spoken about Lazarus in a talk I gave at the IAJGS Conference in Seattle, "GEDmatch's Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy." (I would be happy to give that talk during my coming US trip - see below for available dates.) For that talk, I created a Lazarus kit for my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz and that kit is the subject of the first of the three links above.

Fourteen descendants of Hersch who tested. Ten were used in Group 1.

Descendants of Hersch's sisters

To review, you create a Lazarus kit using descendants of the target in Group 1 and non-descendant relatives in Group 2. Of course, you cannot use people who match each other other than through the target. This produces a partial genome of the target, in this case my great-grandfather. For him we used ten descendants in Group 1, while Group 2 consisted of nine descendants of his sisters and half sisters and ten other cousins. The resulting Lazarus kit is 2742.4 cM.

I used that kit to see what I could learn about his relationships with other Pikholz descendants. In one case, it was a big help; in others it was just one more bit of vague, ambiguous evidence.

The cousins round out Group 2. Mordecai is a Pikholz, but we don't know the relationship.

Now I am ready for the next step. Who else is related to the partial genome which is the Lazarus kit of my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz?

For that I turned to another of the GEDmatch Tier 1 tools -  the Matching Segment Search. This shows all the matching segments of a given kit, in a very convenient, visual format.

The default for the search is 7 cM, but in order to make it more manageable, I set the threshold at 20 cM. I figured it was likely that the smaller matches would not lead anywhere. Remember, both of Hersch's parents are Pikholz and we have no other surnames in his ancestry. In the results above, 28 of 29 listed matches are known family members of my great grandfather. I have no idea who the other one is - but of course that is the purpose of this exercise.

The Matching Segment Search produced 230 results of 20 cM or more, 179 of which are our own. The remaining fifty one are on twelve segments but the majority of those appear to be "pile up regions."

None of the fifty one segments are as long as 30 cM.. With one exception, all the chromosomes with multiple matches come on the same segment.

There are a few matches where we have no corresponding Pikholz matches - matches that would have been necessary to create the Lazarus kit. I suspect that these are not real segments, at least not that big, but are compounded from smaller segments. Nonetheless, I am following them up.

The kwoczka announces that 
Hersch Pikholz' match said the secret word.

So far, I have written to twenty-six of these new matches - most of whom are not people I know. We'll see what comes of that. Eight have responded so far. The very first knocked my socks off by saying that her mother was from Berehove, a city in Sub-Carpathian Ukraine where one of my close Y-DNA matches comes from. There is some serious potential here regarding where we were before Galicia.. I hope that before long Lara Diamond will be organizing record acquisition from Berehove.

Another match for my great-grandfather's Lazarus kit has Beinenson ancestors from my maternal grandmother's home town of Borisov (Belarus) and he will be joining our project there.

Actually several of the responding matches have ancestry from Belarus, which is not an area we generally associate with the Pikholz family.

Anyone who cares to do a one-to-one with my great-grandfather is welcome to do so, using his kit LL557686.

Housekeeping notes
I have added a stop at the JGS of Los Angeles to my winter itinerary. See details below. (I did my basic DNA presentation for them fifteen months ago.)

Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some open dates for my US trip in the winter, including Sunday 12 February in the west. Weekdays are available between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017, Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

FTDNA's big sale is on, led by the $59 price for Family Finder. Also reduced prices for the Y and MtDNA tests, together with coupons. If you are a family member, talk to me.

A Month Abroad: Part Three - Seattle

This is the third in my series of blogs on my recent four weeks in the US. Part One (Iberia) is here. Part Two (GRIP) is here.

Time and Place
The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference was held this year in Seattle, a place I had never been. I was supposed to have gone to the World's Fair with my parents and brother fifty-four years ago, but chose not to. That's a story for another time. So there was something of a personal closing in attending this conference.

In fact, I had originally planned to skip it entirely due to the fact that the entire conference was scheduled for the period of mourning for the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. Not just during "the nine days" - we have seen that before - but with the Tish'a beAv fast Sunday there was no way do get home in time. (It is my personal custom not to do that fast abroad.)

The timing during the nine days of mourning also precluded my participation in any of the entertainment-type aspects of the conference, though I usually skip those anyway just because they do not interest me.

In the end, because of the publication last year of my book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People," I decided to submit several speaker proposals and if they were accepted and scheduled for the beginning of the week, I'd come for the first three days, going home to rebuilt Jerusalem Wednesday morning. I appreciate the efforts of the Program Committee to make that happen.

During my three days at the conference, there was a minyan for services three times a day and they were quite well attended. Thanks to Elliot Greene for organizing a Sefer Torah and siddurim.

Program items
In Part One of this series, I discussed my participation in programs that are relevant to my own probable Sephardic heritage and the important Conversos Project, so I needn't repeat them here.

I attended two other DNA talks and one meeting. On Tuesday at 7:30 AM, the legendary Steve Morse spoke about the basics of DNA. Why do I need to hear about the basics of DNA? Well, first of all, Steve is an entertaining speaker and I had never heard him on this particular subject. Furthermore, he has a way of simplifying complicated subjects, which can be useful even if you are already familiar with the material. For instance, Steve addressed the fact that Y-DNA mutations are more frequent than mitochondrial DNA. He pointed out what should be obvious, that even if the mutation rates of the particular alleles are the same, there are so many more in the Y chromosome than in the mitochondria that the appearance of any mutation in the Y ought to make the total Y much less constant than mitochondrial DNA. In fact, the question should be why the mitochondrial DNA mutates relatively quickly.

Another DNA talk was by Mary Kozy on autosomal DNA, at one-thirty Sunday. I must admit that I had never heard of this speaker before and I attended just to see how other people present subject matter that is similar to my own.

At 7:30 Monday I participated in the DNA Project Administrators meeting which was run by Yitzhak Epstein. Janine Cloud was there representing Family Tree DNA. It was a useful meeting. I think Janine had a lot of trouble hearing through Yitzhak's heavy accent.

Just after the lunch break Tuesday, I attended a talk by Rob Weisskirch on "Strategies for Online Research on Immigrants to Argentina." The description is

For many Jewish immigrants, Argentina served as a haven and means to build a new life. With the largest Jewish population in South America and 8th largest in the world, many relatives may currently reside or had resided in Argentina. For genealogists, there are Internet resources that can be accessed at a distance that can help track and locate relatives from the past and current ones as well. This presentation will provide strategies and Internet resources for finding those relatives with ties to Argentina as well as review the history of Jewish immigration to Argentina.

Although I don't have a lot of activity in Argentina, there were bits that I may find useful.

Monday after the lunch break, I attended consecutive talks by Crista Cowan of Ancestry and Todd Knowles of Family Search on what's new with each of their companies' record-searching sites. Both were useful.

Attending Todd's talk was a tough call as it was opposite Brooke Shreier Ganz' presentation on her important "Reclaiming the Records" project. But since I am unlikely to initiate such a project myself, I decided I could skip it.

Monday's lunch break featured a Media Lunch (or rather "lunch"), attended by about a dozen blogger-types and chaired by IAJGS President Marlis Humphrey. It was a very good conversation and Marlis appeared to be open to the comments and suggestions. I made some of the points that I have been trying to make for years - why must the conference be in the expensive months of July and August? What's wrong with June or - holidays permitting - early September. (Does someone think we are all school teachers?) And how about having speakers' proposals include three people who can recommend them, should the Program Committee choose to follow them up.

I was surprised to hear Marlis report that the largest line item in the conference budget is the rental of audio-visual equipment. I would think that some of the member societies could be persuaded to bring such equipment, perhaps in exchange for a free registration. Much was said about next year's conference in Orlando Florida. (Perhaps they will bill it as "The Hottest of Conferences.")

Talks I probably would have attended had I remained for two more days of the conference
Wednesday
Carpathian Puzzle (Alex Denysenko)
Jewish Family Research in Pre-Trianon Maramaros (Vivian Kahn and Sandy Malek)
DNA of the Jewish People (Bennett Greenspan)
Jewish Portugal (Genie Milgrom)
Ancestral Towns Might Not Have Been So Ancestral (Lara Diamond) - I probably would have introduced this one

Thursday
"Next Generation" Y DNA (Rachel Unkefer)
Sub-Carpathian SIG meeting
Open Access - Ethical Questions (Zvi Bernhardt)
Will You Be Able to Get Records in the Future (Jan Meisels Allen, Teven Laxer)

Speaking of things I missed, the Israel Genealogical Society submitted an authorization for me to represent them at the IAJGS Board elections. But that was scheduled for Wednesday so I missed it. I hear it was not the usual rubber stamp meeting.

My own programs
My first program "Lessons in Jewish DNA - One Man's Successes and What He Learned on the Journey" was at 9 AM Sunday, the first speaking slot of the conference. I did the first slot before, but then it was eleven o'clock. I expected a small turnout due to the early start and its being the first day, but I was pleasantly surprised by a fairly full (large) room. Robinn Magid gave a wonderful introduction and our timing was perfect. I could not see the audience well because it was being broadcast live and the lights were in my eyes, but I received many compliments afterwards. There were just enough questions to fill the allotted quarter hour.

The book sales hour afterwards was cancelled.

That afternoon, I spoke on "GEDmatch.com's Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy," the maiden presentation of this talk. It was billed as a more advanced lecture, without all the usual ABCs we expect from a talk about DNA. It was in a smaller room, but the sixty-odd places were pretty much all taken and I didn't see anyone walk out. (I was worried about the getting the level right.) Jeanette Rosenberg introduced. Something possessed me to wear a suit and tie instead of one of my usual genetic genealogy T-shirts. People laughed where they were supposed to. I went too quickly, so we finished early.

The book sales hour afterwards was cancelled.

My final talk was one I had given before -  "Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove" - and was held Tuesday afternoon in a room way too large for the audience. Lara Diamond introduced and as we both noted, could have given it herself. It is probably time to retire this one, unless some individual society wants to hear it.

The book sales hour afterwards was cancelled.

In lieu of book sales after each talk as had been promised, each speaker with books was assigned one random hour in the exhibit hall. Mine was 4:15 Monday afternoon. I - and most of the other speakers with books - found this arrangement quite unacceptable, but I did get some traffic and sales.

The folks at the company doing the recording responded to my inquiry about getting copies with "Yes we will get a list of emails from IAJGS and will send all speakers their
presentations."

I look forward to seeing evaluations of my presentations. (I am still looking forward to evaluations of my talks from previous conferences.)

The exhibitors
Since I have mentioned the exhibit hall, let me say that I was surprised by how sparse it was. The big companies were there, but some of those who make this a colorful place were not. I stopped by the FTDNA booth where it is always good to see Janine. She straightened out a few things for me with some of my kits. Bennett was there.

I spent some time at Ancestry. As I mentioned in Part One, I had decided to test with them, so I did that then filled in my basic ancestral tree. For now I don't think I need to do more. As of now, I have fifty "shaky leaves" to check out. Always good to see Crista.

I let my subscription to My Heritage lapse last month as I have not used it since signing up last year. I do not find them intuitive and haven't the time to learn how to best use it and now twice they have promised to remedy this.

For me the conferences have become more about meeting old, new and online friends and less about the lectures. I guess I did that, but there were friends there I never ran into despite the fact that all the lecture halls were in one area. I roomed with Avrohom Krauss, an American Israeli, like myself, from just outside Jerusalem. We know each other mostly from the minyan. We had a rollicking time - not at all appropriate for the nine days.

Part Four is here. And a Part Five is here.

Another Option for GEDmatch's Lazarus Tool

I have written about the Lazarus tool on GEDmatch as have Blaine Bettinger and others. In fact, there is a Facebook group dedicated to the subject.

Lazarus is a tool which helps you recreate - in full or in part - the genome of someone who cannot himself be tested. Usually because he is long dead.

Lazarus is one of the "Tier 1" tools  which require a contribution to GEDmatch. (They do very important work and the contribution is definitely warranted, even if all you use are the standard tools.)

The idea behind Lazarus is that you look at the target's descendants and see what segments match other known relatives who are not descendants. For instance, if I have segments that match my father's sister or brother, then those segments must have come to me from my father. For a Lazarus of my father, I would be in what they call Group 1 and my aunt and uncle would be in what they call Group 2. My sisters would also be in Group 1 and they would allow us to recreate additional bits of our father's genome.

Adding other relatives of my father to Group 2 - his first and second cousins, for instance - allows us to enlarge his Lazarus kit even more. Unfortunately we do not always have enough kits of these cousins to give us a significant number of matches with Group 1.

Furthermore, in the case of endogamous families, where people are related fairly closely in mutiple directions, this must be done very carefully. I discuss this issue in detail in Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of my book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" and I after that I show practical uses of several Lazarus kits.

The form at GEDmatch tells us:

Group two is a list of kit numbers for available remaining relatives of the target Lazarus person we wish to deduce the atDNA. That will be brother/sisters, parents and cousins.

The implication here is that Group 2 must not include descendants of the target. This is stated specifically on Facebook and in other discussion groups.

The reason for this exclusion is that the members of Group 1 carry the DNA of both the target and the target's spouse (the other parent of the descendants). You want to be sure, therefore, that no one in Group 2 might share DNA with the target's spouse, DNA which would be mistakenly attributed to the target's genome.

There is, however, an exception. When the target has children from multiple spouses who are not related to one another.

Let us take as an example our forefather, the Biblical Jacob, who had thirteen children from four women. Leah gave Jacob seven children: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zevulun and Dinah. Jacob had two children - Joseph and Benjamin - with Leah's sister Rachel. Jacob had four additional sons with his two concubines, Bilhah (Dan and Naftali) and Zilpah (Gad and Asher).

For the purposes of this analysis, I shall ignore the fact that Jacob was a first cousin of Leah and Rachel, in addition to other family connections. I shall also ignore the Rabbinic tradition that Bilhah and Zilpah were sisters of Rachel and Leah.

So let's say that Jacob's family has just returned to Egypt after burying him in his family plot in Hevron and Reuven says "Too bad we didn't do a Family Finder test on Dad while he was alive."

Levi, who was always particuarly conscious of his lineage, says "Well, half the DNA of each of us comes from Dad. We should be able to work with that."

Judah wasn't so sure. "We'd have to figure out a way to see what came to each of us from Dad and what came from our Moms. But we would probably need to phase our DNA using some other relatives."

Joseph, the worldly, practical one, said that he heard that GEDmatch had a new tool called Lazarus (whoever he is) which allows recreation of a dead person's genome based on matches between descendants and other known relatives. The descendants go in Group 1 and the other known relatives go in Group 2.

Dan, whose deaf son Hushim had whacked off the head of Jacob's only brother Esau when he misunderstood all the wild gesturing over the ownership of the burial plot, pointed out that they were not likely to enjoy any cooperation from Esau's kids.

"So," Reuven sighed, "We have only ourselves to work with. And we are all candidates for Group 1. It says that right here in the instructions."

"No so," said the learned, analytical Issacher. "Group 2 have to be people who are not related to the other parent of the descendants in Group 1. Generally that means not descendants of Dad. How about if we put the nine children of Leah and Rachel (who are sisters) in Group 1 and the four sons of the concubines in Group 2. Joseph and Benjamin cannot be in Group 2, because Rachel and Leah share DNA that would then be misattributed to Dad."

Dan, Naftali, Gad and Asher hated being reminded that they were the sons of concubines. When they were young, some of the others teased them by calling them "porcupines." But they couldn't argue with Issachar's logic.

"In fact," Issachar pointed out, "the DNA of the four half-brothers would be even better than the DNA of Esau's disgusting sons or even Uncle Esau himself, because the half-brothers are a full 50% from Dad." The porcupines were proud of that designation.

"Let it be written so" said Judah and Joseph in a rare moment of agreement.

Housekeeping notes
My next two speaking appearances are in Hebrew - 27 October at the IGS Jerusalem branch and 28 October in Carmiel. "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" will be available for purchase and signing. After those two events, the Israeli price will go up from NIS 120 to NIS 140 (plus shipping from Israel).

Outside Israel, books and genetic genealogy T shirts and tote bags are available at www.endogamy-one-family.com .