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.

The Rosenbloom Envelopes From Penza

Testing artifacts
The age of genetic genealogy has featured two basic verbs - "spit" and "swab." It's how we submit our DNA samples to the testing companies. The two have one thing in common. The subject must be alive, or at least dead-but-not-yet-buried.

We would like to know the DNA of our dead ancestors and several analytical tools have helped with that. I have had success with GEDmatch's Lazarus based on a combination of descendants and non-descendant relatives. Others have phased a missing parent, using children and the available parent. Visual Phasing works out grandparents based on grandchildren. But these are indirect methods that don't produce the full set of chromosomes for the missing ancestor.

The genetic genealogy community has been talking and asking about artifacts almost from the beginning. Grampa's hat has a bit of hair. Can we do anything with that? Only if there are follicles - and it would be a special, expensive project.

But what about that same spit that we already use, if applied to an envelope flap or a stamp. On one hand, this DNA is protected from the elements. On the other hand, how do we even know that the envelope was sealed and stamped by the actual letter writer. More than five years ago, Roberta Estes wrote about her attempts to get DNA from her long-deceased father and serendipitously acquired letters mailed by her grandfather. Roberta writes:

At the time my grandfather mailed those letters to my father, in the 1960s, my grandfather was living alone, so he should have licked the envelope and the stamp himself.

I called Bennett Greenspan at Family Tree DNA.  He referred me to a private lab that “does things like this,” called Trace Genetics.  Before you start googling, the company was subsequently sold and has now been defunct for years.  However, at that time they were doing custom processing of private forensic samples.

Yes, anything like that is considered forensic.  Anything you have to extract DNA from before you can have it processed in a regular lab is forensic work.

So, I got an estimate, took out a loan, and told them to go ahead.  You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.  The cost was in the $2000 range FOR EACH ATTEMPT.  So, we tried the envelope first.  No DNA.  Then we tried the stamp.  We got DNA, but it was female, so we knew it was contaminant DNA.  Think of how many people handle an envelope in the processing and delivery of mail, not to mention all the people who had handled it since.

Then we tried a second envelope.  No dice.

TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS! With less than 50% chance of success! Even if it's the person we think it is. For most of us, that is off the table.

Letters from Penza 

We actually have nine envelopes sent from Penza (Russia) where my great-grandfather lived his last years. Sometime during or (more likely) after the First World War, my great-grandfather and namesake Israel David Rosenbloom left - or was exiled from - Borisov (Barysaw) in today's Belarus and ended up in Penza, 680 miles away. With him were his second wife Yenta and her daughter Sonia (Sousha Chana) Resnikov and her family. The daughter they had together, Mera, was probably with them at first but by 1929, she was a physician living in Moscow. Also in Moscow was Israel David's daughter Alta Kaplan, from his late first wife Etta Bryna.

Israel David and Etta Bryna had two other children in the United States - my grandmother Sarah in Vandergrift Pennsylvania and Chaim Benzion (Uncle Hymen) who lived in Brooklyn. There was correspondence between the family in Russia and the family in the US during the 1920s, but only Uncle Hymen's copies survive.

I have nine envelopes and five letters addressed to Uncle Hymen. Fortunately he opened most of them with a letter opener, so the sealed flaps are largely intact. I scanned the nine envelopes and sent them to a company who offers this service and between three and seven were considered suitable for DNA extraction. The ones I list here as "maybe" were the result of comments like "if this was your only sample for this person we would attempt extraction on it."

Three are considered suitable for DNA extraction. Maybe four others. The identity of Mendel Wolfson is unknown.

There are five letters. I have copies of the Yiddish originals and translations into English of all five. I think that they are numbered in the order they were translated. Translations were done by various people, all arranged and paid for by Uncle Hymen's daughter, Cousin Ethel Klavan.

Letter #1
A six-page letter dated 30 September 1930 and opens "Dear Brother Yankev," so it would have been

Lieber Bruder Yankev

written by the step-daughter Sonia Resnikov. She mentions writing to their mother - whom we know to have been in Penza - so she was elsewhere. We knew that her brother had come to the US but never had much success looking for him. She mentions his wife and children, whom we know nothing about. In any event, this doesn't appear to be from one of the nine envelopes. It is an interesting snapshot of life in Stalin's USSR and perhaps I shall post the translation separately.

I don't know why Uncle Hymen had this letter. Perhaps his step-brother lived with him for a time, though they are not together in the 1930 census. The same census has a Jacob Bandes family living on Eastern Parkway, about two miles away, who may or may not be the step-brother.

Letter #2

"Israel David Rosenbloom" in his own hand?

A two-page letter from Israel David Rosenbloom to his son Uncle Hymen ("Chaim Bentshe"). He mentions that his grandson "Alta's Jakov" visited, met a girl and married her and that they have a daughter, making him a great-grandfather. The implication is that this is the first great-grandchild. This daughter died in childhood, and we do not know exactly when she was born.

The family knows that Jakov's wife Fania Pinskaya was from Penza and this confirms my assumption on how that came about.

Letter #3
A letter that is less than a page and a half in the same handwriting as letter #2. The letter is undated but the translation is stapled to a copy of the December 1928 envelope. I am not sure if that attribution is correct. The letter thanks Uncle Hymen for the $10 that he sent for Passover, eight months earlier than the date on that envelope.

The letter concludes "Regards from Alte and her children. She already has 2 grandchildren from her two sons, both girls." The second granddaughter is still living (in Moscow) and she says that she was born 23 August 1928.

I think the handwriting is the same on all three of these letters.

Letter #4

Lieber Kinder - Dear Children

This two-page letter opens "Dear Children" is specifically signed "Your mother, Yente." It is confusing and that may be the fault of the translator. The date "27th" appears at the top. The handwriting is the same as in letters 2 and 3, so it appears that one of the couple did the writing for both of them.

Letter #5
This two-page letter is definitely from daughter Mera to Uncle Hyman and it is dated 13 October 1929. The translation does not cover the entire letter. Mera thanks him for sending regards with someone named Mendel and that may be the man whose name appears on the last envelope. Mera lived in Moscow, so perhaps none of the envelopes are hers.

The card

There is also a card which records the receipt in Penza of seventy-eight francs on 23 April 1929 by Israel David Rosenbloom. My cousin Katya translated the card and added "due to his illiteracy in accordance to his personal request it is signed by (signature)." The reverse side says that it was sent to my great-grandfather in Penza.

I assume that he may have been illiterate in Russian but surely he read and wrote Yiddish. Katya suggests that perhaps "he decided that in 1929 it was safer to pretend being illiterate." I mention this because it may be relevant to the question who addressed and sealed the Rosenbloom Penza envelopes


totheletter DNA
Recently there have been new developments. Blaine Bettinger blogged about this a few weeks ago and has since revised it with updates. Blaine himself has sent envelopes to an Australian testing company called totheletter DNA. This is the company to whom I showed my nine scans. Their testing process has multiple stages:

• You send them scans of the front and back of the envelope and they tell you if it appears to be suitable for DNA extraction. That part of the service is free.
• You place the order for A$781.50 (=US$559.90) and send them the envelope.
• They attempt to extract DNA, which costs A$140 (=~US$100). That part of the cost is non-refundable, regardless of the results.
• If the extraction is successful, the actual genotyping costs A$621.50 (~US$445). That is refunded if the extraction is unsuccessful.
• The last A$20 is for the cost of returning the envelope to the customer.

The company will upload the autosomal results to GEDmatch (Genesis) as part of the service.

(MyHeritage has announced that they will be offering a similar service, but they have not yet said what their prices will be and what exactly they will be offering. Nor are they willing to give a timetable for providing these details.)

The Mission
I would love to try this extraction and genotyping on at least one of the envelopes, but US$560 each is beyond my budget. Perhaps some of my family members would like to step up and help out. I think I would send the three envelopes which they deem "suitable" and let the company itself choose the one that looks the best for a start. If that one shows matches with us - the fifteen tested great-grandchildren - of 600-1000 cM, we would know it is Israel David's DNA. If not, we could consider whether to try another. We have the advantage here of knowing that none of the other of the Penza Rosenblooms (except Mera who lived in Moscow) has any of our Rosenbloom DNA.

The three "suitable" envelopes. One even has a bit of a stamp.

Housekeeping notes
I shall be speaking, in Hebrew, for the Rishon LeZion branch of the Israel Genealogical Society on Monday, 14 January at 7 PM at the Rishon LeZion Museum, 2 Ahad Haam Street. This is not a DNA presentation, though there are a few DNA references. The topic is

מֵעֵבֶר לְסָפֵק סָבִיר

מה שיודעים, לעומת מה שאפשר להוכיח

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

Second Cousins and Siblings

In the course of the lecture that I have been giving about DNA analysis and endogamy, I make the point that it is important to test as many family members as possible and particularly first and second cousins.

I show a slide based on Wiki of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy which shows estimates of shared DNA for various relationships.

I emphasize that second cousins share on average only about 212.5 cM or 3% of their DNA, which means that they do NOT share nearly 97%. Second cousins are people that many of us know and have grown up with. Sometimes we even resemble one another. So by not testing second cousins, we lose alot of information.

Some months ago, Blaine Bettinger did a non-scientific (self-selected) survey of peoples' known relationships and showed that second cousins share about 246 cM on average. That's more like four percent, still not very much.

I was curious to see how endogamous families were different from non-endogamous families. (I am talking about general populations, not cases where close cousins married one another in the last few generations.)

So I did my own mini-non-scientific study. No cherry-picking. (Note, the comparisons below are for segments of five or more cM.)

Here I compare four second cousins to my own results.

The two numbers for each person are number of matching segments and total matching cM.

Sam is on my mother's mother's side. Ruth is on my mother's father's side. My mother's parents are from Belarus/Lithuania, but apparently Ruth's father is a Galizianer, hence the much larger match with her.

Marty, Terry and I are mutual second cousins on the Pikholz side.

We see that Sam, Marty and Terry match me in the general range suggested by ISOGG and Blaine's study. Ruth, as I explained above, has a greater level of matching.

For purposes of comparison, I asked Roberta Estes if she would share some of her second cousin data and she readily agreed.

Roberta was comparing her mother Barbara and two of her mother's first cousins, Donald and Cheryl, to a second cousin named Rex. The closest of her three matches - Donald with 10 segments and 191 cM - is lower than the weakest of my matches - Marty, eleven segments and 223 cM.

So, at least in this bit of anecdotal evidence, my endogamous family has much better matches than Roberta's - which makes it much more difficult to make sense of it all. I added a slide into the newest version of my presentation, in order to make that point.

Roberta's data shows something else. Cheryl is Donald's sister and her matches - both number of segments and total cM - are a third less than her brother's. So we see another demonstration of the importance of testing siblings.

I have made this point before, most dramatically at the end of this. But for sport, I ran another Pikholz second cousin Rhoda (who is also a second cousin of Terry and Marty) against my sisters and me.

Here the number of segments that we match Rhoda is in a small range - 12-15. But Jean's total cM is 217, significantly less that Sarajoy, Judith and me. Amy has only 141 cM. Imagine if we didn't know that Rhoda is a second cousin and we had only Amy's results to compare to her. We would have seen 35-49% less matching DNA.

So please folks, test your second cousins. Test your first cousins. Test your siblings. As many as you can and as many as your budget allows. Oldest first.

And while FTDNA and Ancestry are having sales is a good time.

Housekeeping notes
The Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) has announced a course in Advanced Genetic Genealogy to be held 17-22 July in Pittsburgh. Registration is 2 March and I shall be on tenterhooks until then.

(Last time they let me give an evening presentation about Jewish genealogy. Perhaps they'll let me give one this time on Jewish DNA.)

If that works out and if my speaking proposals for the IAJGS Conference in Seattle are accepted, I'll have two weeks in between - 24 July-5 August - when I'll be in the US and available.

But before all that, I have registered for RootsTech in Salt Lake City (3-6 February) as an exhibitor, with books and genetic genealogy T-shirts and tote bags for sale. Needless to say that my booth will only be open only until mid-afternoon Friday. (The local Extended Stay is about twenty minutes walk from Chabad's synagogue.)

I am also putting together a lecture tour for about ten days before and after RootsTech. Three of the four Sundays are taken, but most of the weekdays are available. Anyone looking for a presentation on genetic genealogy - Jewish societies, non-Jewish societies and groups that are not genealogy-based - please contact me by email. Tell your friends.

Finally, I have an article in the newest issue of the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly. I told much of that story here, a couple of years ago.

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.

Sam and Sarah, Ben and Sadie

My Denver third cousin Joe Pells was one of the last people to sign up for DNA testing during the big sale that FamilyTreeDNA had in December. Joe is the older brother of the late, great Betty Lee (Buzy) Hahn who introduced me to Skalat nearly fifteen years ago. I met Joe a few years back when one of his grandsons celebrated his bar mitzvah here in Israel.

When I first asked him to test, he was not keen on the idea, but now he has both an MtDNA maternal line test and an autosomal Family Finder in process. Joe's mother is the only all-female descendant of our great-great-grandmother, Rivka Feige Pikholz. I have no idea where that test might lead, but at least it will soon be in the system, available for potential matches.

Joe is also the first Family Finder test we have for descendants of my great-grandfather's sister Bessie. (For his other sister, Leah, we have one test and a second on the way.)

But none of this is why I am telling you this story. Joe wants to learn something about the family of his maternal grandfather, Sam Francis who died in Denver in 1963.

Sarah (later Sadie) Frankel, was born to Bessie Pikholz and David Lozel Frankel in December 1872 in Skalat  and arrived in New York in September 1891, about three months shy of her nineteenth birthday. She travelled with Dwore Pikholz, a cousin of some sort, whom I may write about in a few days. It is not clear whether they travelled together because they were cousins or just because they were two teenage girls from the same town.

According to what Buzy Hahn told me years ago, Sarah married Max Hochman and they lived in Baltimore. Max died while Sarah was pregnant with their son, who was born in July 1894. According to the story, the family sent Sarah's cousin Sam to the United States to marry her and he arrived after the birth. Sam gave the child his surname and the family name became Francis. They later had a daughter Jennie (Joe and Buzy's mother) and a son Max who died as a baby. Joe confirms this story.

I had found no documentation when I did this a few years ago..

A word about the surnames. Frankel is of German origin, indicating that the bearer (or his ancestors) came from France. Francos (pronounced Frantzos) is the Polish equivalent. Franzos, best I can make out, is a Germanized spelling of the Polish version. We assume, but do not actually know, that since Sam and Sarah - now Sadie - are some sort of cousins, Sam was originally Frankel, like his wife.

Oh, and Sam is actually Szulim (=Shalom) according to his tombstone. His parents' names are unknown.

So I went to work on the documents. I still see nothing about Max Hochman - not his marriage, not his death and not the birth of a son. But Joe wanted to know about his grandfather, Sam, Sarah/Sadie's second husband..

I have not found them in the 1900 census, but I do see Jennie's 1901 Manhattan birth in which she is called Frankel. So at that point they have not yet become Francis. They had by 1910.

In the 1910 census, we see Sam, Sadie, Jesse and Jennie Francis in Denver. Jesse is not the name that we know for the older son, but perhaps that was changed at some point. Or perhaps the census entry is wrong. Or they reported his Jewish name and the census taker heard it wrong. Fischel can sound like Jesse. Can't it?

But I was looking at the census records for something else. Immigration. Or Sam's birth.

The son Jesse was listed as being born in New York, not Maryland. But I do not see him in New York City by any name. Sam's immigration is listed as 1892, which is earlier than in the family narrative. Sadie's immigration year -  1891 - is correct. Sadie is 37 years old (correct), Sam is 35 (no birth record found). They are listed as being married for seventeen years, which is incorrect and that Sadie has borne two children, both living, also incorrect.

In 1920, Sam Francis is 45 (consistent), Sadie is 44 (having aged seven years in the previous ten) and Jennie's birth has moved to Colorado. Sadie's immigration is 1894 and Sam's is 1895. Maybe no one was home and the census taker interviewed a neighbor.

In 1930, the household has grown to include Jennie's husband and her son Joseph. Jennie's birth has returned to New York. Sam is 55 and Sadie is 58, having made up the lost years. Both were twenty-one when first married. Both immigrated in 1894. Who answered those questions? Maybe Jennie.

The 1940 census does not include immigration or marriage information, but we may note that Sam is 65 and Sadie is 64.

None of this helped me turn up a passenger manifest or birth record for Sam/Szulim.

Then Joe remembered Uncle Ben. This is why I am telling you this story.

It seems that Joe's grandfather Sam had a younger brother Ben, who lived in New York or New Jersey. His wife was also Sadie. Maybe that would lead us somewhere.

In the 1920 census, Benjamin and Sadie Francis appear with their three children in New York. Benjamin is 32, Sadie 29. The eldest child is seven. Both immigrated in 1903. He had applied for citizenship, but the only candidate that seemed to fit was born in "Kief Russia."

I may have had better luck with passenger lists. Benjamin Franzos, age nineteen, arrived in New York in 1903. He had come from Zagorze, which is very close to Zalosce. We actually have a Franzos married to one of my Kwoczka uncles, also from Zalosce and it will be interesting to see if there is a DNA match between her grandson and Joe. There are no records for Zagorze and no one in the Zalosce records that might be Sam's brother Ben.

My last stop was New York marriages and this is why I am telling the story. On 22 January 1912, Sadie Stern married Benjamin Francis in Manhattan. Joe ordered the record. Since Sam and Ben were known to be brothers, at least we could find out Sam's parents names, even if that took us no further.

The record arrived and the groom's name seems to be "Barry Francus," but the signature (which appears on the back, but which I brought forward to show you) says "Benj. Francis." That must have been what the indexers used.

The bride's name, Sadie Stern, is also clearer in the signature.

So Ben's parents are Josef Francis and Sara Halner or maybe Halsner. I suppose Ben has already transferred his  American "Francis" to his father who was Franzos or Francos or Frankel. No town name, just "Austrian Galizia." So we have kind of dead-ended with the mission Joe sent me to do.

But that is not why I am telling you this story.

Look at the bride's information.

Sadie Stern, Ben's wife, was born in Skalat Austrian Galizia. She said she was twenty-one when she married in 1912.

Her father is Marcus Stern. There are fourteen Stern records in Skalat. No Marcus, no Sadie.

Most of the Sterns here are the mothers and almost all fourteen come from someplace else.

Maybe we can learn something from Sadie's mother. And who might that be?

Well, knock me over with a feather. Sadie Stern, a bit player in this story, is the daughter of Ester Pickholz. And I haven't a clue who she is. We have nine Ester/Etie/Ettel Pikholz descendants from Skalat, born in the 1850-1877 range, but they are all accounted for. Either they died young or they are married to men who are not Marcus Stern.

Someone had a daughter Ester and didn't tell me! The genealogists' lament.

(I obviously need to find some grandchildren of Sadie who have some DNA to spare.)

I thought I was not going to turn up any more "new Pikholz descendants" from that period. What do I know?!

That's why I told you the story.

Housekeping notes
A friend of this blog, Roberta Estes, wrote an important blog a few days ago about small segments of DNA. It is long, but worth a read. I plan to dedicate a post to Roberta's thoughts, probably next Sunday. It's important and I need time to get my own thoughts organized.

Family Finder Illumina OmniExpress Matrix

Filtering Family Finder matches by project
For some months now, I have been complaining that Family Tree DNA has not been responding to my pleas to add a "by project" filter to the Family Finder match page.

This is what the results page looks like for my sister Sarajoy, showing her six closest matches. I have access to this page because I am a group administrator and she is a member of my group.

I removed the surnames here. Note that all have known relationships entered.

Among the tools offered on this page are filters by name and ancestral surname. If for instance, I want to see whom she matches who has listed the ancestral surname Gordon (our mother's name), I can enter "Gordon" in the window to the left of the red arrow (which I added for convenience) and press "Apply." then all we will see is matches that Sarajoy has with people who have Gordon among their ancestral surnames.

I can do the same thing for the "Name" window - I can see whom she matches among people actually named Gordon. And I can use both filters at the same time.

What I cannot do is see whom she matches among members of a project. I solved that problem originally by having all my Pikholz descendants list "Pikholz" (that specific spelling) among their ancestral names and using the "ancestral surnames" filter. But some two dozen non-Pikholz who match many of the Pikholz descendants would not make it through that filter, since they do not know of any actual Pikholz in their families.

So I have been lobbying for an additional filter based on membership in a project and have been complaining to whomever will listen that my pleas are getting no response.

Along comes Roberta Estes
Last week in her blog "DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy," Roberta Estes published what she calls "the second in a series about DNA projects, how they work and how they can benefit testers and others," which you can read here.

About halfway through this long post, Roberta dedicates five short paragraphs and one screenshot to an FTDNA tool called "Illumina OnmiExpress Matrix" which I had not seen before. This matrix is a tool available to project administrators and the link to it appears at the top of the second column of the group administrators home page.

It looked to me like this might be a way to work around the filter problem that has had me so troubled.

Now, I try to keep up with developments, whether by reading blogs, following groups on Facebook, listening to podcasts or following FTDNA on Twitter and either this is the best kept secret in autosomal analysis or I have been sleeping though the presentations.


Here is FTDNA's FAQ for the matrix.

I had a look at the matrix and found that while Rebekah Canada is quite good at explaining the various parts of the FTDNA site, this October 2013 FAQ is just not right.

First of all, it does not allow you "up to" twenty people. I entered forty-five and it has yet to stop me.

Second, there is a fourth option for display of data.

Third ... well let's just have a look.

But why talk about it when I can show you
I started with my Kwoczka project which has a manageable nine members, just to see how the matrix works. (We have results for a tenth but she hasn't joined the project yet.) All the relationships among the nine are known.

All nine names originally appeared in the "Group Members" box and I had to move them one by one into the "Selected Members" box. If I wanted to rearrnge them after selections, I had to move them up or down one at a time and one row at a time. No drag and drop.

The four data-display options appear in the small window towards the center and I chose "Relationship." Note that these are not the known relationships I entered into the system, but the suggested relationships as calculated by FTDNA. But with anomalies.

One that I like is that it omits the remote cousins, as you can see with Pinchas and my two sisters.

Actually I have no trouble with their listing my sister Amy as a bit closer to our Aunt Betty and our father's cousin Herb. Such is the randomness of DNA. But I was very surprised to see the relationships listed next to my red arrow. FTDNA thinks Amy is Aunt Betty's grandparent, grandchild or half-sibling, while it thinks that Sarajoy and I are her "Aunt/Uncle, Niece/Nephew." But ever since we began looking at autosmal relationship charts, we have been told that all these show matches of about 25%. No one has ever made a distinction between the relationships suggested for Amy and those suggested for Sarajoy and me! Did I sleep through that too?

I switched the data display to "Relationship Range" and got what the FTDNA match page shows, including the remotes. And it continues to ignore the known relationships.

When I set the display to "Total Centimorgans," it gave those to the tenth decimal point, even though the last four-to-six digits were zero in every case. I cannot imagine whom is served by that supposed degree of accuracy, especially since in larger matricies, it makes it impossibly wide.

The fourth data display - the one that does not appear in the FAQ - is "In Common With Members." As best I can tell, it lists everyone who matches all nine of us (about 125 people), with the relationship to each. Again, the remotes are counted but left blank.

The Pickholtz Surname project has about sixty members, about half of whom are actual Pikholz descendants. In order to test the limits of the matrix, I selected forty-five members and displayed by relationship. Here is the result. I had to shrink the page substantially in order to present it here, but you really are not supposed to look at so many all at once.

There is no significance to the two shades of grey. The left side is normal page width and the "extra" is on the right. The names along the top and the left side are not frozen in place, so once you begin scrolling, you lose them.

A bigger problem is that there does not seem to be any way to save a matrix other than as a screen shot. So if I want to make a modification tomorrow or next week, I have to rebuild the entire matrix from scratch, a very cumbersome process.

Roberta says she would really like "the ability to simply generate a file that downloads to a spreadsheet with a match matrix for everyone in the project."

As for me, I think there should be a way to associate some of these families together as a way to get a handle on the complexities of the matches.

VISITING THE X-CHROMOSOME

So until now, in the Pikholz DNA Project...
I have looked at the Y (male line) chromosome of some of the Pikholz families and we see that three of the Skalat families have a perfect match to one another at 37 markers. This tells us that these three families have a common ancestor most likely six or seven generations back. (They cannot be closer, as we know the five most recent generations.)

The Y tests also told us that certain other family members do NOT have a male line that matches the rest of us.

We did a MtDNA (female line) test on a member of the one Pikholz family that has only an all-female line. That showed a few good matches with non-Pikholz tests, but nothing good enough to work with.

And we have been looking at autosomal DNA tests, as I have discussed before on several occasions. Those are the twenty-two pairs of non-sex chromosomes. Most of the results have been ambiguous to this point.

The X chromosome
So now I'd like to say a bit about the X chromosome. Men have one, which comes from their mother. Women have two, one from the mother and one from the father. The one a woman gets from her father is the same one he got from his mother, so essentially, women have one from the paternal grandmother and one from the mother.

Genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger put together these diagrams which show how the X chromosomes of men and woman are made up. (Pink represents female ancestors, blue male.)

The circle in the center is the male. His X is from his mother. She in turn gets from her two parents, who get from his mother and her two parents. And so on. The number of ancestors in each generation increases according to the Fibonacci Sequence.

The percentages in the illustration assume that a woman passes on half from her mother and half from her father. but this has been found to be incorrect, as Roberta Estes demonstrates. The mixture that she passes on from her parents can be 50/50, but it can also be 90/10 or 73/27 or anything else.

On the right we see the female chart from the circle in the center. Her right side is the same as that of a man's, all of it coming from the mother in exactly the same way.

But she also has an X from her father and that is what appears on the left.

Family Tree DNA, the test company our project uses, began to include the X chromosome in its results about a month ago.

(Let me emphasize that the X chromosome is not the same as MtDNA, though both involve the mother.)

The surname that will not go away
The first person I looked at was Mark. He is a non-Pikholz from a Skalat family, who matches many of us, and I wanted to examine his theory that he matches us on his mother's side.

He matches six of us on the X chromosome, in two distinct groups, both of them nearly perfectly overlapping. A seventh match (Micha) overlaps no one else, so I am ignoring that.

In the first group, Mark matches Dalia, Gadi and Robert. Mark's matches with Gadi and Robert appear identical. As it happens, both Gadi and Robert are Rozdolers, but these are X chromosomes, so they would be from their mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides.

The match with Dalia is nearly identical. In her case, the match could come from either her Pikholz father or her non-Pikholz mother. Dalia is a Skalater.

The second group has much smaller colored bits but is much more interesting genealogically. Herb and Betty are first cousins. (Betty is my father's sister.) Their matches with Mark are identical. (I could not appear there because my X is from my mother's side. My second cousin Terry could, but doesn't.)

The third person in this second group, Miriam, is a Rozdoler. Her match cannot be from the Pikholz side, as that would be her father's father's side, and her father received his X from his non-Pikholz mother.

So I looked to see what I know about Miriam's mother's side and it turns out that Miriam's mother's maternal grandmother is Miriam WACHS. Well, we certainly know the name Wachs. That was the family I discussed in my very first blog post.

We know that Herb has Wachs in his ancestral backgound, on his father's side. There is a persistent tradition, confirmed by Wachs descendants from Pittsburgh, that there is some sort of connection between them and my own Pikholz family from Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, no one has a clue what it is.

Mark tells me that his paternal grandfather had a cousin who married a Wachs in Tarnopol, but that shouldn't matter because that Wachs would have no common ancestry with Mark and besides, the connection is on Mark's father's side which doesn't affect the X chromosome.

So I haven't a clue how to resolve this.

Robert
Next, I decided to look at X matches for Pikholz males - generally their non-Pikholz sides. I wanted to see if some of the non-Pikholz who matched many of us did so on our mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides. When I did this for Robert, I find something remarkable. He matched three Pikholz on his mother's side, two of them men, which meant on their mothers' sides as well.

Not only that, but as you can see on the right, those matches overlap with one another.

Note that I had inadvertently set the level of testing to 1 cM (centiMorgan), which would include very small segments, but as you can see, these are not very small segments, so that appeared to be irrelevant. At least that's what I thought.

Since one of the excuses the experts use to explain this kind of thing is that the matching segment is too small to be meaningful, I had a look at the precise sizes. And here there was a surprise. The longish green match between Robert and Dalia turns out to be two nearly adjacent matches, the first 1.52 cM, the second 5.23 cM. Robert's matches with Micha and Gadi are 5.83 cM and 2.16 cM respectively.  The experts say to ignore bits less than 5 cM, so we can ignore Gadi here entirely.

I'm not sure what the close matches among Robert, Micha and Dalia can tell us, but we can certainly see that the size of the colored bits on the chromosome browser is very misleading. Gadi's match with Robert looks to be bigger that Micha's, but in fact it is less than half the size.

Another odd thing here is that Robert Gadi, Dalia and Micha match in the same place as Mark, Gadi and Robert but Micha and matches Mark in a different place on the X chromosome.

So I went back to Mark
The actual numbers for group with the larger colored matches with Mark are Dalia -1.29 cM. Gadi and Robert - 1.41 at exactly the same place. These numbers are supposedly too small to be on interest, but it is hard to ignore the precise overlap of the three men and the near-precise match with Dalia.

The actual numbers of the very small colored segments in Mark's second group are Herb and Aunt Betty 4.65 cM in exactly the same place and Miriam 8.2 cM. Miriam's match with Mark includes the entire segment of A. Betty and Herb. These are much more significant numbers that the ones that appear larger.

Now I have to figure out what to do with them.

But I have a plan 
I really have to learn more about how all of this works and to that end have successfully enrolled* in the week-long Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh course in Practical Genetic Genealogy to be held in July in Pittsburgh.

I am hoping that that experience will make me better equipped to analyze all these test results.

I also hope that the lecturers do not end up saying that Ashkenazi Jewish (what they call AJ) DNA is too difficult to do well, because the population is too deeply inbred.

* Successful enrollment was no small matter. When registration opened last Wednesday at 7 PM my time, they had so many applicants that the server crashed. They were finally up at 7:09 and when I finished submitting my form at 7:12, all I got was a waiting list. But that came through the next morning.

Housekeeping Notes
My interview is now live.