Politzer

Customers of Family Tree DNA are familiar with the match alerts we get from time to time, whether our own kits or the kits of members of our projects.

As I manage over a hundred kits, I am not about to stop what I am doing to look at these every time I receive one and in any case, I want to see how a match fits not just with me  but with other family members including those not close enough to warrant an alert. So nearly two years ago, I decided to look at all the new matches across my family members every few months. Then I write to the ones that look interesting and ask them to upload to GEDmatch to see if these matches are on shared segments.

Usually nothing much comes of it. Even when the DNA points to a very specific portion of my family, the match usually doesn't know any of my surnames or even my geography.

Last week I prepared the matches for the past four months and Sunday I sent out messages to the scores of matches who looked even a little bit promising. So let me tell you about Cynthia, who happens to be the wife of a fellow I actually know.

So I asked her to register for GEDmatch/Genesis and after it batched I looked at her top 20,000 matches using the Tier1 one-to-many search. She matches seventy-eight of my kits and I did some chromosome browsers to see how her matches line up in family groups. As usual I was looking for segments of over 10 centiMorgans with multiple meaningful matches with my families.

On chromosome 3, she matches seven of us - four of my parents' children, one first cousin and two second cousins, all pointing to my maternal grandfather's side. All we have there are the surnames Gordon and Kugel. And it was a small match anyway, so probably from a pre-1800 common ancestor.

Chromosome 5 showed a 12 cM match with a pair of second cousins in the Nachman Pikholz branch of the family. Not much with that either - but if Cynthia had the relevant surnames, it could have been nice.

Chromosome 6 had two segments of minor interest - one with some second and fourth Pikholz cousins of mine and another with one first cousin and three second cousins on my maternal grandmother's Rosenbloom side. Here too, we have no other surnames, but we do know that the
family lived in Borisov (Belarus) for at least half of the 1800s.

Both chromosomes 16 and 20 brought matches with small groups of my third and forth cousins on

the Pikholz side.

Chromosome 22 has seven descendants of my Pikholz great-great-grandparents. Both of these ancestors are Pikholz.

Then there is the X, chromosome 23. The relevant matches look like this.

The four nearly identical matches belong to two of my sisters, my father's brother and my fourth cousin Lydia. They all triangulate, so they are all from a common ancestor.

This cannot be from my grandfather, because Uncle Bob gets no X from his father. So we know it's my grandmother's side. So given Lydia, who is part of my grandmother's paternal grandmother's Zelinka family, how exactly does this fit together and who is the candidate for the common ancestor?

Uncle Bob is a third cousin to Lydia's mother
so we and Lydia are fourth cousins.

Nathan / Nahum Zeinka's fallen gravestone

Our most recent common ancestral couple are Isaak and Sari Zelinka, who were born in the mid-1780s. But Lydia's second-great-grandfather Nathan Zelinka received no X from his father, the source of the match between Lydia and Uncle Bob must be from Sari, Isaak Zeinka's wife.

Nearly two years ago, Uncle Bob's daughter Linda and I were in Slovakia, together with our fifth cousin on the Zelinka side, Cyndi and while in Zilina we met Lydia. In the course of taking down her family information, I asked if she knows anything about our third-great-grandmother Sari. Lydia said that she understood that her surname is Politzer. This made sense to me because many years ago, my grandmother had told me that her father was related somehow to Joseph Pulitzer - he of the prize. - but she had no idea how. I have tentatively recorded Sari as Politzer, pending some kind of actual documentation.

So last year, Lydia gave our third-great-grandmother a name and perhaps a family and now we have an actual bit of her DNA.

(Note, I could have seen this with an analysis of Lydia, having nothing to do with Cynthia, but I didn't - so I can thank Cynthia for that.

Caveat - it is theoretically possible that the segment comes from my grandmother's MOTHER's side and that Lydia has some unknown ancestry in Hungary, but I consider this to be a vanishingly small possibility.

The Matching Segments tool on GEDmatch does not include the x chromosome, but on Genesis it does. They call it "Segment Search" and it is on Tier1. There are about three dozen people who share that match with both Uncle Bob and Lydia and I suppose I should write to them. Maybe something else will turn up.

(What I don't understand is why Uncle Bob and Lydia do not show up on Cynthia's Segment Search. I'll have to speak to GEDmatch about that.)

Housekeeping notes 

Order here.
European Jews have always married mainly within the tribe. Whether our numbers five hundred years ago in Europe were four hundred or four hundred thousand, the pool was limited. As a result, the members of the tribe today are all related to one another, multiple times.  This phenomenon, known as endogamy, makes Jewish genetic genealogy very difficult, often impossible. There is a similar phenomenon in some other population groups.

I was convinced that this brick wall is not as impenetrable as it seems, at least in some circumstances.

I believe that this book demonstrates that I was correct.

When I decided I wanted to write a book, I was not sure if I wanted to write a “How to” book or a “How I did it” book. The decision was dictated by the facts in the field. Different family structures, widely different numbers of living family members, and other similar factors dictated that writing “How to” would be irrelevant for most researchers.

“How I did it” is more likely to be helpful to the research community and more likely to instill the confidence necessary for such a project.

It is my hope that this book will encourage and inspire other researchers of their European Jewish families and other endogamous populations to say “I can do this!”

(These) GEDmatch Inconsistencies - SOLVED

The problem
Last week I reported in this space about a problem I was having with GEDmatch. A match named Lauren had eleven matches with my families (using the one-to-many search) which her father George did not share, but were definitely not from her mother. When I dug deeper, I saw that George in fact matched all eleven when I used the one-to-one search.

I sent a link to that blog to the GEDmatch team and gave them the relevant kit numbers. Since then, I have been going back and forth with John Olson and I am pleased to report that we have a solution which John asked me to pass on to my readers.

How the basic one-to-many works
As we know, most of us endogamous folk have a few tens of thousands of matches on GEDmatch, but they only show the first 2000. (Early GEDmatch showed only 1500 matches, which proved inadequate.) "First" in this case means the lowest numbers in the "autosomal generations" column, which is the default sorting key. Other matches are available on the one-to-one searches, but when you manage a large number of kits, as I do, looking for those one-to-ones is not practical.

Most of my kits are given a name beginning with "*0Pikh..." so they will all sort together, near the top and I had always understood that when I sorted on the name column, they would show the first 2000 names from the entire match list. It turns out that this is not the case. The first 2000 matches are fixed and any sorting works only within that set of matches.

In this specific case, George's first 2000 matches go up to 3.9 generations while Lauren's go up to 4.5 generations.

Here are the last four matches of each of them:

George's matches with the eleven "missing" kits are all further than the last of the 3.9 generations that are displayed.

This may be a problem peculiar to endogamous populations where the number of matches is huge. Perhaps non-endogamous populations will have in their first 2000, matches that go to 5.0 generations or more.

And George may have more matches under 4.0 than most endogamous kits. But I see that I also go up to 3.9 generations and my two first cousins (not siblings) with one Jewish parent, both go to 4.4 generations. Frankly, 3.9 generations is not enough, nor is 4.4, so we need a way to enlarge the match list.

The solution

The way to solve this is by using the Tier1 one-to-many. Tier1 is a set of seven (at last count) GEDmatch tools which are available to those who make a donation to GEDmatch. This is not a subscription. You can do a single month for $10 each time you need it. (I think they deserve ten dollars a month just on general principle so am always signed in to Tier1.)

The Tier1 one-to-many gives you a choice among seven match limits, from a low of 500 up to 100,000. Both George and I have bit more than 40,000. My two first cousins with one non-Jewish parent have about 29,000 and 33,500 total matches. And it covers all the matches, with the same sorting capacity that I have gotten used to.

The 100,000 match limit search took me less than a minute, so it's not terribly burdensome.

So henceforth all my one-to-many searches will be with Tier1.
"ONE-TO-MANY" IS DEAD. LONG LIVE "ONE-TO-MANY!"

Cousin Harvey

My father's sister, aka Aunt Betty, ordered her MtDNA test four and a half years ago and upgraded to the full sequence about eighteen months later. Initially, she had only three matches with no genetic difference and a fourth showed up about a year ago. Three more appeared in the final months of 2016. One of the seven was a suggested third-fifth cousin and the others were remote or not an autosomal match at all.

Aunt Betty's haplogroup is H10a1b and goes back to my great-great-grandmother Feige Stern who was born in Kalocsa Hungary about 1841. Her mother may have been Beti Grunwald.

Last week, she received a new match, a man named Harvey in North Carolina. In addition to the perfect MtDNA, they are suggested second-fourth cousins. It looked like it was worth following up. Harvey is active in genealogy but is a DNA-novice. There was nothing obvious in the surnames, and he let me upload his data to GEDmatch.

Harvey's most promising matches with my family appeared to be not on my father's side at all, but on my mother's mother's Rosenbloom side, from Borisov, NE of Minsk.

On chromosome 9, Harvey matches seven of my Rosenbloom family, all about 18 cM. The seven are my second cousins Sam and Beth (first cousins to one another), my first cousins Kay and Leonard (also first cousins to one another), my sisters Sarajoy and Jean and me.  (My other two sisters do not match Harvey at all and my brother's results are not in yet.)

On chromosome 11, there is a smaller match (on the far right) of over 12 cM with Kay, Beth and Sam's sister Beverly, one of the newer participants in our project.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote two months ago about a new project I am doing with Galit Aviv on a number of Borisov families. We are still laying the foundaton for this project, but I asked Galit to see if Harvey matches "her" members of this group. I was surprised when she said that they do. So using the GEDmatch Tier1 "Matching Segment Search" tool, I had a look at all of Harvey's matches, arranged by chromosome and segment.

When I did the matching segment search, I was able to add three of Galit's group to my family's matches with Harvey.

Then there are my Jaffe second cousins. Their grandfather is also from Borisov and Harvey has a match of about 17 cM with them.

And here too, Galit's cousin Nurit fits right in.

Galit has invited Harvey to join our project. Cousin Harvey!

But lest we forget, Harvey is a suggested second-fourth cousin to Aunt Betty. On a one-to-one comparison, we see they have three matching segments.

The small match on chromosome 5 is shared by a three other family members, but they are small, so I am not ready to draw conclusions.

The match on chromosome 13 is shared by no one else in the family. That leaves the large match on chromosome 3.

Harvey has 21.3 cM matches with Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, as well as with my second cousins Roz (on my grandfather's side) and Susan on my grandmother's side. When you consider that there are another dozen family members who ought to fit in here, it doesn't look like anything we can work with.

Diamond Endogamy

A Joint Post with Lara Diamond of Lara's Jewnealogy

Dorit and Evelyne
Last week, Dorit sat in my office learning about DNA match analysis. Dorit has tested her mother Evelyne (nee Berger), her mother's sister and a few other relatives and has the benefit of another of her mother's family (Jason) who manages a few kits on his own. (Dorit's father's family is Moroccan and of less interest, at least for now.)

Dorit's tests were done with Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) as were some of Jason's and some of them have been uploaded to GEDmatch.

We went over the basic tools offered by FTDNA for autosomal analysis and looked at some GEDmatch tools as well. In the course of looking at Evelyne's matches in the GEDmatch Tier1 "Matching Segment Search" tool, I saw some segments that match any number of friends of mine in the world of DNA. And, of course, since all European Jews are related to one another multiple times, it cannot be otherwise.

(GEDmatch is free except for a few items in Tier1 which require a donation.)

Among those matches were several with the family of my friend and colleague Lara Diamond, who shows up on GEDmatch as less than four generations away from Evelyne.

I cannot keep track of all of Lara's family, but I did have a look the list of Evelyne's nine matches with people named Diamond. You can see them here on the right, edited to eliminate the personal names.

Five are Lara's family, marked in red. In addition to Lara herself, we see her father, paternal grandmother and uncle. And also her mother, who is not known to be related to Lara's father..

So Evelyne is related to Lara through both of Lara's parents.

But Lara's uncle is a suggested "2nd cousin - 4th cousin" while his mother, Lara's grandmother, is only a suggested "4th cousin - remote cousin." So in addition to Lara's paternal grandMOTHER, Evelyne is also related to Lara's paternal grandFATHER.

Five matches is just what a FTDNA chromosome browser can handle so I opened one for Evelyne and lined up Lara's five matches: grandmother, uncle, father, Lara herself and her mother.

I left the threshold at the default 5 cM and the results look like this. (I am displaying only those six chromosomes where there are two or more of Lara's family on the same segments.) I added to the display the sizes of the segments in cM.

The two matches on chromosome 5 show segments from both paternal grandparents. On the left, Lara's father and grandmother have similar segments - clearly her father received this segment from his mother. On the centromere Lara and her father have an identical segment which is not from the grandmother, so it must be from the grandfather.

On the right ends of chromosomes 7 and 15, Lara has segments which are clearly from her mother.

Chromosome 8 shows a large segment (18.57 cM) where Evelyne matches Lara's uncle, but less than half of that matches the grandmother. In fact, the grandmother, the uncle and Lara herself all have the same starting point (64,372,741) and the uncle, Lara's father and Lara's second segment all have the same end point (85,095,990). The grandmother's segment ends at the same point where Lara's second segment begins (70,702,700). So clearly, the uncle has two adjacent - or nearly so - segments, one that he received from his mother and one from his father.

But it's not so simple
But this raises another question. How did Lara inherit her segment on the left from her grandmother if her father doesn't have it as well?

The same question comes up on the left side of chromosome 15 where Lara and her grandmother have identical segments of 5.1 cM, but her father does not. I ran that question on the ISOGG Facebook group and Blaine Bettinger made the (obvious!) suggestion to lower the threshold. Here is what came up:

Lara's father has a match on chromosome 15 which is slightly smaller than those of his mother and daughter and the excess bits appear to be Identical By State (IBS) rather than properly hereditary. So far, so good.

The eight of Diamonds
But that does not resolve the anomaly on chromosome 8, where Lara still has a segment in common with her grandmother, but not with her father. (There is a school of thought to simply discard all the small segments of this sort, under the IBS banner, but I am not comfortable with that until it proves unavoidable.)

I did triangulation for the segments on chromosome 8. These are the segments pictured above.

Lara's match with her grandmother on chromosome 8 goes from 119,665.558 to 146,255,887. Lara's match with her mother begins at 154,984 and goes on to 146,255,887.

Lara's match with Evelyne is not from her paternal grandmother but from her mother.

Let's drop the threshold from 3 cM to 1 cM and see what happens.

Here we see that Lara's mother has three very small segments that did not appear before. The third of the three is 2.73 cM and it seems clear that Lara received those two right-most segments from her mother, with a bit of IBS detritus in between.

If we look at the same set of matches for Lara's family with Evelyne's sister,

the segments in question are very similar to the matches with Evelyne, but Lara's mother's match appears more complete.

My purpose here was to illustrate for Dorit the complexities of endogamous DNA, which the matches between these five members of Lara's family and Evelyne (and her sister)  show nicely. It is not my purpose here to figure out the multiple common ancestors shared by these two families. Perhaps we can do that later.

But let me give the floor to Lara, who will introduce her other family members into this analysis.

A Salk Guinea Pig On Tier1's Relationship Tree Projection

The GEDmatch Relationship Tree projection

Last week, I wrote about the Matching Segment Search offered by GEDmatch on its new subscription program, Tier1.

Kitty Cooper has blogged about the triangulation feature. Blaine Bettinger has blogged about a tool they call Lazerus, that recreates the DNA of ancestors based on the tests of living descendants and has put together a Facebook group to work with it.

That leaves the Relationship Tree projection.

This tool was on GEDmatch until a few years ago, but was removed because it was not really ready for prime time. There were, however, people who had used it with success, so it was revived as part of Tier1 due to popular demand.

Nonetheless, it is a work in progress, not a polished finished product.

The Relationship Tree projection is basically a calculator, using self-reported data rather than data that is drawn directly from the database. The results, therefore, are displayed very quickly. It also means that the user must be careful that the numbers are entered correctly.

I cannot get Blogger to show the entry form properly, so you'll have to take my word for the fact that it requires the following information:

1. The numbers of the kits being compared and the sexes of the people
2. The total cM and longest segment in the match
3. The total cM and longest segment in the X chromosomes
4. Which of the two kits is an older person and by how much

You can also add the names of the people being compared and there is a box for comments at the bottom of the page. These are optional.

I ran my own kit against four other people - my father's first cousin Herb, my no-closer-than-fourth cousin Dalia, my indeterminate but fairly close cousin Jane and my probably-about-fifth cousin Jacob. I have perfect Y-37 matches with Dalia and Jacob, but these are not considered by the calculator.

The calculator determined that Herb is indeed my first cousin once removed.

The calculater shows Dalia and Jacob to be my second cousins once removed and Jane to be my third cousin. These results are way too close and are no doubt a result of our Jewish endogamy, which the calculator does not consider.

The three results other than Herb also showed a very long vertical, multiple-path chart that I could not even see well, let alone understand. It is way too long to show here.

I ran my comments past the developers, John and Curtis, and John added two things I did not know:

To work properly, the 2 kits being used should have non-zero X-DNA comparison results.  Otherwise, the number of possible paths becomes very large.

Entries in the "comments" box are not used by the software. They were intended to be feedback to us during the development process, but quite frankly no development has been done for several years.

Conclusions:

The fact that this tool was returned to the site because users found it useful means that there are users who found it useful. You can hardly argue with that, ready for prime time or not..

If you have significant amounts of endogamy in your family, this is probably not for you.

The calculator is "a work in progress," but that does not mean that is being worked on at this time. The developers themselves refer to it as "experimental."

John and Curtis are very responsive within what their time and resource constraints permit. Not everything is going to be useful for everyone. Knowing that something is not is also useful knowledge. I can hardly complain when three out of four tools are useful.

Guinea pigs for Dr. Salk

On the occasion of last week's one hundredth birthday of the great Dr. Jonas Salk (thanks to Google Doodle for pointing that out), please indulge me a bit of personal recollection.

From the National Registry of Historic Places

I attended first grade at Dilworth School in Pittsburgh in the 1953-54 school year. (I am quite certain about that because we moved and changed schools at the end of that year.) Dilworth was - and still is - at 6200 Stanton Avenue, on the corner of Collins Avenue, backing onto Saint Marie Street.

We lived in easy walking distance, at 6401 Stanton Avenue.

One day, someone came into our classroom and told us that we were to be given a new shot that was supposed to prevent some illness that most of us had never heard of. Polio, they said. As they passed out the parental permission slips, most of the children began crying - no six year old ever liked shots. Most cried, but not all.

Miss Merritt and her first grade class

I didn't cry. I was not concerned in the least. I hated shots, but whenever I had an injection of penicillin, Mother would say something like "It's for your own good. We don't enjoy this either. YOU KNOW WE WOULD NEVER ALLOW YOU TO HAVE A SHOT IF YOU WEREN'T SICK." And there it was. I wasn't sick, so there would be no shot for me.

And that evening at home, they signed the paper. It was years before I truly believed them again.

That was only the first part of the trauma. The day of the shots itself seem to have been designed to create the greatest amount of hysteria. First of all, they led us to the gym. That huge room with the fancy wood floor that no first grade shoe was ever allowed to touch. The only other time we had been there, we were in socks.

And so not to contaminate the floor further, they lined us up single file along one wall. The wall was on our left and we were as close to it as they could get us. And as we looked towards the head of the long line of children ahead of us, we saw a large table with medical personnel in white gowns and these large tubes of blood hanging from racks.

No one had said anything about blood!

Bwahahaha

We watched in horror as each child came up to the table, received an injection from what looked like a really fierce needle, then extended an arm and had their arms tied with rubber straps to make another cup for Dracula. Some of the children yelled and thrashed and had to be restrained throughout the process.

And we all watched.

And moved another couple of feet closer to the table.

Terrified.

No doubt some screamed when it was their turn, just because they thought it was expected.

I have no recollection of subsequent years. I was in a different school and do not even remember where the injections were administered.

Years later, when Pitt had some kind of ceremony marking fifty years since those first school injections, I first learned that we had been guinea pigs. I supposed it was common knowledge by then, but not for me. They knew the vaccine itself was safe, but there were some questions about effective and safe dosage. Hence the blood tests. Somehow I doubt that was on the permission slip that my parents signed.

A Look at the Matching Segment Search (GEDmatch)

Last week, for the first time, I wrote about GEDmatch, just in time for the launch of their four new subscription tools which they call "Tier1.

Kitty Cooper has blogged about the triangulation feature and Blaine Bettinger has blogged about a tool they call Lazerus, which recreates the DNA of ancestors based on the tests of living descendants.

Miriam and my second cousins - a directed search
Last week I looked at GEDmatch results for a woman named Miriam who is connected to quite a few of my family. Miriam tested with Ancestry. Her matches were with two second cousins of mine of my mother's side, first cousins to one another. Miriam's two matches with these two cousins are on the order of 9-10 centiMorgans and I wrote to Miriam that we really need a tool that allows us to see who else matches her on those two specific segments - on chromosomes 8 and 15..

Later that same day, I saw the announcement of the GEDmatch Tier1 tool Matching Segment Search. It took a few days to register my subscription but by early Friday afternoon, I was ready to have a go.

I logged in at GEDmatch and found the four Tier1 links on the bottom right. You don't see the utilities until you have completed your donation. I chose the first - Matching Segment Search - and it gave me the screen below:

Note that what was called "Matching Segment Search" on the first screen is "GEDmatch DNA Segment Search" on the second.

I entered Miriam's kit number and left the minimum default values untouched. I also chose the chromosome bar (the default) in order to get a better visual picture.

The results came up in about a minute. Today (Sunday) as I repeat the same process, it is taking several minutes. I assume this is a server issue.

This is what the heading and the first few results look like after I blurred the identifying information for privacy:

The results are the matches for the twenty-two chromosomes - not the X.

You can copy and paste the results into an Excel file where you can manipulate them as you wish and save them for future use. But in this case, I had two specific segments in mind, so I saw no need for anything more than a single screen shot for each of the two relevant chromosomes.

My cousins are marked by the arrows. Kit numbers, names and emails are hidden for privacy.

The table on the left is the segment on chromosome 8 and the one on the right is the segment on chromosome 15. First I Iooked for people who matched Miiriam and my cousins on both segments and I was surprised to find none. I know a few of the names - one is a Pikholz descendant - but nothing jumped out at me as interesting.

I suggested to Miriam that she write to those matches, starting with the ones nearest my cousins on the list and ask if they have any of the ancestral surnames which are relevant for my cousins: Gordon, Kugel and Jaffe, or anything else in the right parts of Lithuania and Belarus. She can also show the charts to the matches to try to determine which of these matches match each other and if any are known family to one another.

The party on chromosome 6 - too many matches

About six months ago, I discussed the matches we have with Steve Turner on chromosome 6 and I decided to have a look at those with this new tool.

I entered Steve's kit number and set the minimum at 8 cM. Ffiteen minutes of waiting and I gave up. I raised it to 9 cM and the same thing. At 10 cM, I got results - but of course the only matches were 10 cM or more.

As I have discussed before, we are told we should ignore the smaller matches as they are probably Identical By State (IBS), splinters of DNA from the far distant past, beyond what we call genealogical time. But it seems obvious to me (though not to everyone) that when you have several matches of 10 or 12 or 16 cM and probable family members fall in the same segment with matches of 6 or 8 cM, these are almost certainly relevant.

So I wanted Steve's matches from at least 8 cM and couldn't get them. (This was Friday.)

I tried to look at Aunt Betty's matches and couldn't get anything below 10 cM there either.

Then I had a look at a few of my people whose other side is not Jewish - people who have fewer than 2000 matches on FTDNA rather that the 3500 or more that the 100%-Jewish descendants have. Those came up with no problem.

So this was obviously an issue of too many matches and the solution looked simple. GEDmatch should allow us to download a person's matches in two or three pieces.

I discussed this with GEDmatch Friday and although they understood my problem, they felt that my solution would create server pressure.

After Shabbes, I found the following message:

Israel,
I have increased the maximum number of segments to 10,000.  Please let us know if this works better for you.
John Olson
Co-Administrator, GEDmatch.Com

I wasn't sure if the 10,000 match limit was a temporary solution or meant for long-term. Keep in mind, the number of tests is rising all the time as is the percentage of tests uploaded to GEDmatch, so what works now may not work a few months hence.

I had a look and was immediately pleased by a new screen:

 Excellent.

Now I know the system is working on retrieving my data and I'm not just hanging around.

Of course, I had no idea how many segments they had been allowing before, so I did not know what to expect from the new 10,000 limit. I see now that they are at the end of the results

Aunt Betty's results came up at 8 and even 7 cM within an eminently reasonable two-three minutes.  Aunt Betty had 4174 matched segments with a minimum of 8 cM and 6477 with a minimum of 7 cM.

Steve Turner's did not. GEDmatch was having server problems.

Mark Halpern, guinea pig

One of the earliest non-Pikholz to join our project is my friend, veteran researcher, with known Skalat ancestors, Mark Halpern. Mark matches twenty-three known Pikholz descendants plus my two Kwoczka cousins. He matches seven of the nine descendants of my great-grandparents plus several others whom we think are close to us. Eight of his matches with us are suggested third-fifth cousins. Seven of his matches with us are from the Rozdol Pikholz family.

Tier1 looked like a good place to see who else matches in the same segments. It took maybe five minutes to pull down his matches at 8 cM and then quite a while to move it into Excel in six or seven pieces - probably an Excel problem on my end. Of 3771 segment matches, 61 match my families' kits. 

Of those sixty-one segments, one is 20.8 cM and only two more are more than 15 cM. Twenty-four are less than 9 cM. That sounds like a huge number of segments less than 8 cM. The IBS splinters from the distant past.

Taking Mark's matches with me as an example, we have a total of 21 matching segments at a total of 88.79 cM, but only three segments over 8 cM totalling 30.1 cM. And of the small ones, only one is more than 4.89 cM. Truly alot of splinters.

The Pikholz who matches Mark the most is Charlie, with five segments and 46.8 cM, followed by my Uncle Bob with three segments and 34.4 cM. In my personal family, Rhoda and Lee have three segments, one other Skalater, two Rozdolers and one of my second cousins on my mother's side have three segments each.

This is not an impressive set of matches. But there are nine matches which involve more than one of mine together with Mark and it's worth a look to see exactly who and where. However, I think the place to do so is the triangulation tool..

So now that the GEDmatch server seems to  be working...
I went back and looked at the Steve Turner matches. There were over two hundred matches on the same segment of chromosome 6. About half of those are between 7 and 9 cM and about half of the rest are below 12 cM. About half the matches are from 23 & Me kits, so these are clearly matches I would not see if I worked within FTDNA.

I am not quite ready to draw conclusions about the Matching Segment Search. It is certainly an excellent solution for a directed search. We'll see what else.

Housekeeping notes
Well, not strictly housekeeping, but some clean-up from last week.

I wrote last week about an apparent connection on the X chromosome between a second cousin (Rhoda) on my grandfather's side and my grandmother's Hungarian side. This was due to the fact that Rhoda and my two sisters matched Aunt Betty on the same segemnt of the X chromosome.

A closer look solved that. Aunt Betty, like all women, has two X chromosomes. Rhoda matches her on one, her father 's, and my sisters match her on the other, her mother's. I know this because Rhoda does not match my sisters on that segment.

The match that Aunt Betty and Rhoda share comes from my great-grandmother's Kwoczka side.

Using GEDmatch

GEDmatch
Anyone who is serious about doing DNA for genealogy uses GEDmatch.com. Sooner or later. It's been later for me but I am finally here.

GEDmatch is a free site run by two volunteers, which provides tools for analysis of autosomal DNA match results. People who have tested with one of the three testing companies upload their results to GEDmatch - it can be done anonymously - and the GEDmatch tools allow comparisons among results from all three testing companies, in addition to advanced analyses that even FTDNA does not offer internally.

GEDmatch is meant to be intuitive, but my own intuition on these things is not what it once was, so I have been hesitant about getting involved. (I was disappointed that my GRIP course did not include any hands-on GEDmatch exercises.)

Nonetheless, now that I have been interacting with some of the big names in the field, I felt that I was ready to have a go at it.

Matches with Miriam
My first experiment was for a woman named Miriam who tested with Ancestry and who showed many matches with my families based on a look-up on GEDmatch. Here are results from her eighteen interesting matches with us. There are five more among the Rozdol Pikholz but there was nothing significant there and I left them out for space reasons. You will probably need to click on the image to see the actual numbers. (The splotches of color I added myself and will explain below.)

The five tables on the left are Miriam's matches with me, my two sisters and my father's sister and brother.

The first two in the second column are second cousins on my mother's side (first cousins to one another). The bottom two are descendants of Peretz Pikholz (~1820-1873). 

The top two in the third column are my father's first cousin Herb and my second cousin Rhoda, followed by my two cousins on my great-grandmother's Kwoczka side.

The top three in the column on the right are descendants of Nachman Pikholz (~1795-1865) and the two at the bottom are indeterminate Pikholz/Bernstein cousins.

I then added a splotch of color to the matching (or near-matching) segments so Miriam could see her matches more specifically. For instance, my match with Miriam on chromosome 4 (starts at 97,112,821 and ends at 111,328,469) is nearly identical with her matches with one of my sisters and my aunt. I marked them in green.

My two sisters and my aunt have a match on chromosome 9 and I marked them in red.

My aunt and my uncle share three segments, one of which they share with one of the Kwoczka cousins and another with both him and Rhoda.

What does all that tell us? First it says that the grey and purple segments on chromosome 9 come from the Kwoczka side and that Miriam and my ggm have a common ancestor.

It is hard to say more about the matches with my sisters, my aunt and uncle and me. We have no one to test on my grandmother's side and there are no matches shared by the others on my grandfather's side.

Miriam has two matches with the cousins from my mother's side, but not with us. That may mean that Miriam has something in common with their Jaffe grandfather. I told Miriam Sunday morning, when we Skyped, that it would be nice if GEDmatch had a way to see who else in their database matches those two specific segments. Little did I know!

Finally, Miriam has a match with two of the descendants of Nachman. Those two are second cousins to one another and that match is likely from their "other side."

Aunt Betty's X chromosome
I have not been doing anything regarding X chromosome matches. This is one of the sex chromosomes - women have two of them and men have one plus a Y. Men get their X from the mother and women get from both parents.

Later Sunday, a woman I have been speaking with on Facebook - Kathy, who I think is in New Zealand - posted something about X chromosome analysis using GEDmatch and as a result of our ensuing discussion, I decided to have a look at Aunt Betty's X matches within the Pikholz families.

Here are her ten matches.

As in the case of Miriam's matches, I marked the identical or near-identical segments with color.  The blue segment shared by Aunt Betty, Lee and Pinchas (a Kwoczka cousin) almost has to be on the Kwoczka side. It cannot be on the Pikholz side, as my grandfather did not receive any X DNA from his father, only from his mother.

In fact, Aunt Betty cannot have any Pikholz X DNA, so her matches with Herb, Terry and Rhoda are either Kwoczka DNA or something from my grandmother's side via some unknown (and unimagined) common ancestor. That is not as trivial as it sounds, because the red segment is shared by Rhoda, Aunt Betty and my two sisters. Any X DNA my sisters received from our father must have come from his mother, as he received no X DNA from his father. (The same is the case for the green segments that my sisters share with Uncle Bob.)

But it does clearly mean that Rhoda has a connection on my grandmother's side and it must be on Rhoda's mother's side.. (Rhoda's father could not have gotten from his father, so the connection is not that way.) I know nothing about Rhoda's mother's family, but Monday evening she and I had a furious exchange of emails which included my finding quite a few documents for her mother's family.  My grandmother's known ancestral names include Rosenzweig and Zelinka from Slovakia and Bauer, Stern and maybe Grunwald from Hungary. I was hoping to find one of those surnames in Rhoda's mother's family.

I ordered the New York marriage record for Rhoda's grandparents and in the meantime she told me that her maternal grandfather was from Galicia. The documents I found this week show that Rhoda's maternal grandmother's parents were from the Humene area in Zemplen County, Slovakia. The surnames there are Eichler and Schonfeld. Perhaps something more useful will turn up later.

Tier1
In the meantime, Sunday afternoon, I saw a Facebook post by Blaine Bettinger, one of the lecturers at my GRIPitt course, saying that GEDmatch had announced four new tools in a category they call "Tier1." There was no meaningful explanation of what those four would do, but the idea is that you buy a subscription at $10 a month for access. The basic GEDmatch will remain free.

So far, Blaine has blogged about a tool they call Lazerus, which recreates the DNA of ancestors based on the tests of living descendants. As my readers know, I have been trying to do this for the last six or eight weeks, using Kitty Cooper's mapping tools which Kitty herself ran with soon after. I am thinking this Lazerus tool (Blaine has already turned "Lazerus" into a verb) may do the trick, though I am concerned that it may overlook the   endogamy problem. That could result in recreating the ancestors incorrectly, so the process will have to be monitored.

When they receive my subscription, I'll be able to have a look. Meantime, here is how Kitty describes Tier1:

I will also be looking forward to seeing what Jim Bartlett has to say about this. He is not an endogamy expert, but he is very very good at using these tools and in particular knows how to explain it to the layman. He gave an excellent talk at the recent International Genetic Genealogy Conference which I purchased.

I also very much  enjoyed the talk by Tim Janzen MD from the same conference and our subsequent discussions about chromosome mapping. Tim is considered one of the top people in the field and he has convinced me that we should have a bit of testing with the other two companies, 23 & Me and Ancestry. Both those companies have issues with orders from outside the US, so I asked Aunt Betty do those tests. In any case, her DNA is one generation better than mine  anyway. Tim also said I should get some tests from one of her sons and we are working on that.

Kitty herself has blogged about the triangulation feature of Tier1.

If you recall, I mentioned above that I told Miriam that she needed to search for people who match specific segments of my Jaffe cousins and that is another feature that we find on Tier1.

Now that the holidays are behind us, I hope to get back to my regular Sunday morning schedule, either next week or the week after.