Amber's Genealogy and Family History Blog: October 2013

Sunday, October 27, 2013

My AncestryDNA Journey Part V: AncestryDNA Update

On the evening of October 17 I went to Ancestry's website and saw that they had finally released their updated version of AncestryDNA. These are the genetic ethnicity estimate results I received:

As you can see, they are quite different from my previous results and much closer to what I would have expected. I was very excited to see Europe West appear in my updated DNA results, as it was entirely absent in my previous results, despite the fact that my maternal grandfather's lineage was largely Dutch and German. Seeing this I wondered, why did it show up this time when it didn't before? Several other questions came to mind as well, such as why do I still see percentages that don't necessarily make sense (e.g. the 7% Irish result)? What is the meaning of the range given to the ethnicity estimates and where did it come from? To answer these and other related questions, we have to take a closer look at the updated AncestryDNA.
First, let's examine the ethnicity estimates and their associated ranges. To estimate your genetic ethnicity, Ancestry compares your DNA to the DNA of a "reference panel". The reference panel consists of 3,000 DNA samples from people from 26 distinct global regions who not only are native to their particular regions, but also whose ancestors for several generations were native to that region. Ancestry is operating under the assumption that if a person's parents, grandparents, etc. lived in a particular region, then it is probable that their more distant ancestors also inhabited this region.
The way Ancestry calculates your genetic ethnicity in this updated version is they run 40 analyses on your DNA using randomly selected portions of your DNA. They compare your DNA to their reference panel, looking for genetic markers specific to a given region. Since different segments of your DNA may contain varying percentages of traits specific to a particular ethnicity, Ancestry's results may vary from one test to the next. So my DNA results from the 40 trials may have yielded results like this (note that this chart I just made up for illustrative purposes):

Ancestry then averages the results of the 40 trials, which is where the percentages come from. So, out of their 40 tests on my DNA, the average amount of Europe West genetic traits in my DNA was 34%. They create the range by figuring out upper and lower bounds wherein most of the results from the test fall, although I'm not sure of what computations they perform to determine the range. My range was 12%-56%, meaning that most of my results fell between these two percentages. On my fictionalized chart, these results could be represented in the following manner, with the black line giving the average result and the blue shaded region representing the range:

You could still have some tests with results that were a bit lower or higher than what the range covers, as is the case with my made up chart, but those results would be in the minority.
That's a basic overview of where the ethnicity estimate and its associated range comes from. Now let's take a look at some of the other features of AncestryDNA 2.0. Below the map which you see in the first image I posted, Ancestry provides a comparison of how my results compare to a person native to Europe West along with some examples of results for people native to Europe West, as shown in the picture below:

The first thing to notice about this is the size of the reference collection, that is the number of people Ancestry used to come up with their estimate. In this case, it's 416 people, which is not all that large, and in many regions Ancestry used an even smaller number of people to generate their results. Using a small number of people to determine the unique traits of a population can leave some room for error.
Another thing to note is that even people native to Europe West on average have more genetic markers from other regions (52%) than they do genetic markers specific to Europe West (48%). From the examples they provide of results for people in their reference collection, we can see that in some cases, people native to the region didn't have any of the Europe West Genetic markers or very few. This highlights where some of the difficulty with determining genetic ethnicity stems from. Although there are a few regions in the world that are fairly insular, most populations have intermingled over time, which can make it difficult to determine from people living today which traits are specific to a given region.
You may be wondering what other ethnicities are prevalent in the populations of a given region. The chart below the Genetic Diversity chart provides some insight:

If there are some other ethnicities often found in a group of people, then it seems plausible that traits could be misidentified or something like that, which could explain some of the unusual results. This just goes to show that genetic ethnicity is an imperfect science. Fortunately it is one that is constantly evolving as new techniques are developed and I am all in all pleased with Ancestry's update.

Photo of the Day

Lucy Clifton Biggs with brother Walter Joseph Biggs Jr.

Lucy Clifton Biggs

Lucy Clifton Biggs (on right) with cousin Kate Southall (see the Photo of the Day from this post for more on Kate Southall)

Lucy Clifton Biggs

Lucy Clifton Biggs was born February 9, 1880 in Norfolk, Virginia to Annie (Southall) and Walter Biggs (profiled in the Photo of the Day segment of this post). By the time Lucy was two, her family had relocated to a farm near the town of Big Spring (today known as Elliston) in Montgomery County, Virginia on land purchased by her paternal grandfather Kader Biggs. According to the 1940 census, Lucy attended four years of college. She married, probably between 1910 and 1920, Lewis W. Langhorne. However, by 1923 she had been widowed. She lived out the remainder of her years in Salem, Virginia. She died in Salem on September 14, 1967. She was buried in Sherwood Memorial Park in Salem, Virginia.

Walter Joseph Biggs was born on June 4, 1886 near Big Spring, Virginia. He attended the New York School of Art (according to the 1940 census, he spent one year there) and became a renowned illustrator, being inducted into the Illustrator's Hall of Fame (here's a link to the induction speech and here's a link to some of his illustrations. And another link, with some biography. Also, if you do a Google image search you will find all sorts of paintings of his). He married probably between 1920 and 1925 Mildred Armstrong, whom he divorced sometime between 1930 and 1940. Although he spent much of his adult life living in New York, he died in Roanoke, Virginia on February 11, 1968. He was also buried in Sherwood Memorial Park.

Sources for Lucy Clifton Biggs:

"Descendants of the Reverend Daniel Southall of Eastern North Carolina" by Seth Warner, The Genealogist Vol. 22, No. 2

1880 census
1900 census
1910 census
1920 census
1930 census
1940 census
1923 Directory for Roanoke, Virginia (on ancestry.com)
Find A Grave

Sources for Walter Joseph Biggs:

"Descendants of the Reverend Daniel Southall of Eastern North Carolina" by Seth Warner, The Genealogist Vol. 22, No. 2

1925 New York Census (on ancestry.com)

Wikipedia (yes, he has his own Wikipedia page)

Find A Grave

Monday, October 14, 2013

My Ancestry DNA Journey Part IV: Member Matches

In my last post I discussed the Genetic Ethnicity Summary component of Ancestry's DNA test. However, there is another component to Ancestry's DNA test. On the AncestryDNA results summary page beneath the Genetic Ethnicity Summary you will see what is called "AncestryDNA Member Matches" and below the heading a number of member profiles, like what you see pictured below:

These profiles are for other individuals who have taken the AncestryDNA test whose genetic makeup is similar enough to yours for Ancestry to speculate that you are related. There are several key facts you can learn about a match from this page. Below an individual's user name, Ancestry provides an estimate of a person's relation to you, such as in the profiles pictured above in which Ancestry hypothesizes that these individuals are 4th-6th cousins of mine. Underneath the possible relationship range, Ancestry includes an estimate of how likely it is an individual is related to you, such as the 96% confidences in the picture above. There is no guarantee that the people who show up as matches are related to you, but the higher the confidence, the more likely it is that an individual is related to you.
The middle column tells how many individuals a user has in her or his family tree. If there is a lock next to the number, like in the case of M. in the above picture, this person's tree is private. I would have to send her a message if I wanted to view her tree and she would have to confirm me before I would be able to see it. If there is a leaf next to the number, as with WABRYANT in the picture below, this means that Ancestry has found an ancestor in your tree who matches an ancestor in their tree. This does not mean that all of the people without hints are mistaken matches. The two of you may just not have traced your trees back far enough to find your common ancestor or one of you may have made a mistake in tracing your tree.

Clicking on an individual's profile can provide you with some additional information. If Ancestry has not found a common ancestor, when you click on the profile, the person's tree along with a list of surnames shared between the two trees (if there are any) will pop up, such as the list in the image below.

You can click on the surnames and a list comparing some of the people in your tree with a given surname to people in the other tree with that same surname will pop up. So, for example, I clicked on Hathaway, and these are the results I received:

These comparisons can help give you an idea of where a connection between your tree and this other individual's tree may be located. Notice that TDanielsPA's William Hathaway and my Joshua Hathaway (born 1727) are two years apart and were born in the same town. This is a strong indication that the two were related, perhaps as brothers or cousins. Pulling out my copy of Hathaway's of America, I quickly located a William Hathaway, born June 6, 1725 in Freetown, MA to Ephraim Hathaway and Abigail Davis. Ephraim's father was John Hathaway Jr. In my tree, Joshua's father was the Isaac Hathaway listed in the above picture. Isaac's father was Jacob and Jacob's father was John Hathaway Jr. This would make William and Joshua first cousins once removed, according to this kinship chart. Comparing TDanielsPA's family tree with mine, I found that we are 10th cousins, so we're very distantly related on the Hathaway side. Since Ancestry estimates we're 4th to 6th cousins, there may very well be another shared ancestor between our trees.
Note that not all shared surname results will be as helpful as this one was and there is no guarantee that your link to this individual will be through one of the common surnames. One or both of you may have yet to discover ancestors with the name that links you to your common ancestor. So, for example, TDanielsPA and I both have Smiths in our tree, but there is not a clear link between my Smiths and his Smiths:

There are two Smiths in my tree born around the same time as his Elizabeth, but neither one was born in the same geographical area as Elizabeth. This does not ensure that there is no connection, but it does diminish the likelihood that I would find a close relationship between my Smiths and his Smiths.
If Ancestry has found a common ancestor, when you click on the other user's profile, you will receive a shared ancestor hint, like in the picture below.

The shared ancestor hint starts with out common ancestor, John Wheeler, and traces from him to me and from him to koestler, telling me how I am related to each person in her tree. When you receive a result with a shared ancestor hint, you need only make sure it makes sense. Once you have done this, you can look through their tree to see what sort of information they have about your shared ancestor and perhaps learn something new.

Photo of the Day

Annie Rebecca (Southall) Biggs

Annie Rebecca Southall was born in September of 1850 or 1851 to Sarah Clifton (Wheeler) and James Hunter Southall. In 1860 she was living in Columbus, Mississippi with her parents and siblings. Her mother died on July 13, 1861 and Annie and her brother Jimmie (James Hunter Southall Jr., profiled in my Photo of the Day in this post) were then brought by their father to the plantation Mulberry Grove in Hertford County, North Carolina, owned by their aunt Julia Munroe (Wheeler) Moore and her husband Dr. Godwin Cotten Moore. Their father died the following year in December.

In 1870, Annie and her sister Josephine (my great great grandmother) were attending Wesleyan Female College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. According to the 1940 census, Annie completed four years of college. On November 10, 1874 Annie married at Mulberry Grove Walter Joseph Biggs, born in September of 1850 to Lucy A. (Myrick) and Kader Biggs. In 1880 the couple resided in Norfolk, Virginia with Walter's parents and their four month old daughter, Lucy, one of two children to live to adulthood. By 1900 they were living in Salem, Roanoke, Virginia with their two children. By 1910 Annie had been widowed and was still living in Salem, where she resided for the remainder of her life, with Lucy. She died in 1948 and was buried on August 23, 1948 in Sherwood Memorial Park, Salem, Virginia.

Children Annie and Walter:

1. James Southall Biggs, born October 18, 1875 and died in August of 1876.

2. Kader Biggs, born October 18, 1875 and died on September 16, 1876.

3. Louisa Myrick Biggs, born March 3, 1877 and died August 23, 1879.

4. Lucy Clifton Biggs, born February 9, 1880 and died September 14, 1967, married
Lewis W. Langhorne

5. Julia Southall Biggs, born January 4, 1883 and died January 5, 1883.

6. Walter Joseph Biggs Jr., born June 4, 1886 and died February 11, 1968, married
Mildred Armstrong.

Want to learn more about Annie and Walter's children Lucy and Walter Jr.? Keep your eyes peeled for my next blog post, in which they will be chronicled in my Photo of the Day.

Sources:

"Descendants of the Reverend Daniel Southall of Eastern North Carolina" by Seth Warner, The Genealogist Vol. 22, No. 2

1860 census

Friday, October 4, 2013

My Ancestry DNA Journey Part III: The Results

The results are in and . . . they're definitely not what I was expecting. Here's what happened. Tuesday morning I awoke to find an email in my inbox from Ancestry telling me that my DNA results were in. I clicked a couple of buttons and arrived at the following page:

As you can see, there is no Native American heritage in my ethnicity pie chart (which does not mean definitively that I have no Native American ancestry, but I'll discuss that more in a minute). The British Isles result, which includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, made sense because I have a lot of ancestors from those regions, particularly England. I was initially a little confused about the Southern European result until I realized that it included Portugal, which I have some confirmed and some unconfirmed lines that trace back to this country. The percentage seemed a bit higher than what I was expecting to find, but I could accept it.

There were, however, two things that baffled me about this result: the 18% Scandinavian result and the absence of results from other regions that I was expecting to see. I have not traced any ancestors to any of the Scandinavian countries and I have found ancestors born in countries not included in this chart, such as the Netherlands and Germany. My initial reaction was that Ancestry had to be wrong, that they must have swapped my DNA test with someone else's or messed up the test somehow or something like that. Then I started questioning my own genealogical research, scrutinizing the branch of my tree containing my Dutch ancestry, searching for mistakes. I began to worry that I had traced my family tree incorrectly.

While it is possible that my tree has errors, when I finally sat down and took the time to investigate the meaning of my DNA results, I learned that I did not have any reason to be panicking. Apparently, it's fairly common for people to get results different from what they were expecting using these DNA tests and, because of this, Ancestry put together an excellent video explaining what it means to get unexpected results. I'm including the video below in case you are interested. It's a bit long, but explains things really well, much better than I can in this short blog post, although I have tried to summarize the key ideas below.

One thing I learned from this video is that I've been thinking about ancestry in the wrong way, as I'm sure many of you have. We tend to ascribe to ourselves ethnic heritages based on only a few recent generations. For example, I have a second-great grandmother, Ella E. (Smith) Rice whose traceable maternal ancestors all were born in the Netherlands. Because of this I would like to claim that she is 50% Dutch and that in turn I am 1/32 Dutch, or about 3%. But what if some of her ancestors, the people with Dutch surnames but whose parents I have not traced back to their country of origin, what if one of them had a mother who was, say German? And what about her ancestors born in the Netherlands? For how many generations had they been in the Netherlands? Did any of them migrate from some other region in the past thousand years? Our DNA carries information about where our ancestors lived thousands of years ago, farther back than most of us can trace our trees, so it should not be surprising that we would find some unexpected ethnicities encoded in our genome.

Here's another example. Many people who have taken Ancestry's DNA test, such as me, have found that they had Scandinavian ancestry that they were not expecting to find. One probable reason why so many people are finding this result is because the Vikings invaded a number of countries, including Germany and England, intermixing their genetics with the native populace's. So you could have ancestors who lived in Germany for hundreds of years who descended in part from the Vikings. You're not going to be able to catch that by tracing backward from yourself, but the DNA test will catch this.

The other major reason why your results may not come out exactly as you would expect has to do with the way genetics work. Let's suppose that we have a person, Abigail, whose father was born in England, maternal grandmother was born in the Netherlands, and maternal grandfather was born in Wales. It would be tempting to say (assuming we did not know what we learned in the previous paragraphs) that Abigail is 50% English, 25% Dutch, and 25% Welsh, but genetics don't work exactly like that.

We receive 50% of our DNA from our mother and 50% from our father, but that does not mean that we get half of of every single trait our parents carry. So Abigail's mother, inheriting half of her DNA from each parent, would be genetically 50% Dutch and 50% Welsh. However, since Abigail is only inheriting part of her mother's DNA, she could receive all of the Dutch genetic traits and none of the Welsh genetic traits, all of the Welsh genetic traits and none of the Dutch, or some combination of both which may not be in equal proportions. While it is unlikely that Abigail would receive none of the Welsh DNA, as we look at Abigail's children, grandchildren, and so on down the line, it becomes increasingly likely that these individuals could receive none of the Welsh DNA traits. So this test does not say definitively that I have no Native American ancestry, as I initially assumed. I could still have Native American ancestors, but over time these genetic traits have disappeared. I could get a much stronger result if my father or grandmother took a DNA test, as they are much more closely linked to our purportedly Native American ancestor than I am.
After doing some searching on the internet I also found that the high percentages of Scandinavian ancestry in DNA results may be a flaw in Ancestry's test. The Legal Genealogist mentions it in this post and numerous people have blogged about it, comparing their AncestryDNA tests with other DNA tests they have taken. Ancestry is going to be releasing a major update to their DNA package here soon, so hopefully this will help correct any issues there are with their Scandinavian percentages. Their description does say they will provide "more refined ethnicity estimates," but their description of the update is very vague, so I'm not sure what exactly this entails. You can read about the update here.

That's the basic idea of why your DNA results may not match your expected results. Hopefully if you are planning on taking the test, this post can help you better understand what you'll be seeing. I know I wish I had taken more time to research the meaning of the results before taking the test so that I could have avoided panicking this morning over whether I had done my family tree completely wrong.
There is another really interesting feature of AncestryDNA, in which they compare your DNA results to other members to predict whether you are related. Since this is already a rather lengthy post, I'll discuss that feature in more detail in my next post.

Photo of the Day

Albert Weston Seybert with grandson Grant Weston Seibert

Christmas greeting from Albert Weston Seybert to Grant Weston Seibert

Albert Weston Seybert was born in June of 1846 in Pennsylvania to Cassandra (Stall) and Henry D. Seybert. In 1850 he resided in Salem, Luzerne, Pennsylvania with his parents and two siblings and in 1860 he was living in Salem with his parents and five siblings. In census records, he was listed as a farmer and as a laborer.

Albert married about 1867 another Salem resident, Lydia Alice Hosler, born in September of 1841 to Phoebe A. (Gensel) and Jacob Hosler. In 1870 Albert and Lydia were living in Briar Creek, Columbia, Pennsylvania with a young son at the home of Albert's maternal grandmother, Ann T. (---------) Stall. In 1880 they resided in Berwick, Colombia, Pennsylvania with four children. On April 19. 1885 Albert, Lydia, and their daughter Lizzie joined the United Methodist Church in Berwick. By 1900 Albert and Lydia were living in Centre Township, Colombia, Pennsylvania with three children.

Lydia died in 1904 and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Berwick. In 1910 Albert was living in Center, Columbia, Pennsylvania with his youngest daughter. According to his son Ernest, Albert suffered paralysis during the summer of 1911, which left him unable to work. On November 5, 1911, Albert and his daughter Ella joined the Wesley United Methodist Church in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania. In the 1920 and 1930 censuses, Albert and his daughter Ella were living at 702 South Catherine Street in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania. Albert died in 1931 and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Berwick, Columbia, Pennsylvania.

Albert and Lydia had several children:

1. Forrest E. Seybert, born in 1868 and died in 1877.

2. Elizabeth H. “Lizzie” Seybert, born in July of 1870.

3. Mary C. Seybert, born in 1872 and died in 1880.

4. Harry R. Seybert, born in 1875 and died in 1880.

5. Clark A. Seybert, born in 1878 and died in 1881.

6. Ellen M. “Ella” Seybert, born in January of 1882 and died in 1952. She married

sometime after 1930 but before 1940 William James VanDine, born February

10, 1880 to Charles Everett and Anna Louisa (Grittner) VanDine. Ella and

William lived at 702 Catherine Street in Bloomsburg, Columbia, Pennsylvania in the

house that Ella’s father had owned. William married (about 1906) and divorced

Agnes Ingertha (Strom), a Norwegian immigrant , born about March 7, 1887 and