Earlier this month, I spent
an exciting (and exhausting!) week at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG). My brain is full of new information about genetic genealogy, and my
flash drive is full of new records about my ancestors. I enjoyed reconnecting
with friends who share my passion for family history, as well as meeting new
people.
I took the course “Getting
Started in Genetic Genealogy,” coordinated by Debbie Parker Wayne, CG, CGL. Blaine Bettinger,
PhD, JD, and CeCe Moore also instructed significant sections. The three of them made a good team, and we covered a lot of ground. The binder of handouts we received will make a great resource
going forward.
Many people have asked me
what the course was like, and whether I’d recommend it. The answer to the
latter is definitely yes. First of all, SLIG is an incredibly well-organized
institute, the new hotel facilities are good, and the people couldn’t be nicer.
Still, the true test of a course is in its content and instructors, and I’m
happy to say this one delivered on both counts.
We started out with an
overview of DNA testing and basic genetics, talking about the different tests
and the “big three” companies: Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA, as
well as specialty testers. We spent some time the first day learning some scientific vocabulary. I now understand terms like centiMorgans, alleles, recombination,
pseudo-segments, and endogamous populations, not to mention MCRA, CRS, IBD and IBS.
Not sure of the difference between a SNP and a STR? Neither was I before this course.
Debbie Parker Wayne covered
mitochondrial (mtDNA) testing, and what it can reveal about your direct
maternal ancestry far back into history. Crucial to this is understanding that
a mother passes her mtDNA to all her children, but only daughters can then pass
it on to the next generation.
While using mtDNA to solve genealogical problems for recent generations can be challenging, we talked
about ways of approaching it. For one thing, mtDNA can often be used to either
support or refute a supposed relationship. It also can be used to prove
questions of Native American ancestry through the mother’s line. For me, a key
point in our mtDNA discussion was understanding more about haplogroups, which
indicate where your maternal ancestors originated many hundreds of years ago.
Y-DNA also deals with deep
ancestry, but on the opposite side of the pedigree chart. Only males inherit a
Y chromosome, so Y-DNA passes from father to son through many generations, with
occasional small changes. These changes, or mutations, can provide big clues
for families. Blaine Bettinger presented an excellent discussion of the
advantages and limitations of Y testing, using Y-DNA results, finding Y-DNA
cousins, surname projects, STR markers, haplotypes and haplogroups. He told us
about some third-party databases and tools for analyzing results, and showed
how Y-DNA can be used to identify whether two males share a common paternal
ancestor.
We also learned about X-DNA, which
is tied to the sex chromosomes. A female inherits one X chromosome from her
mother and one from her father. A male inherits an X chromosome from his mother
but none from his father (he gets a Y instead). Because of its more complicated
inheritance pattern and the fact that it hasn’t been studied as much, X-DNA
often gets overlooked. In the right situations, though, it can be used to
narrow down the ancestral lines you should focus on.
In addition to lectures, we
did in-class projects designed to identify individuals on a pedigree chart who
could be tested for a common ancestor. One takeaway from this was that when you
start to work with DNA, those collateral relatives—your grandfather’s brother’s
kids, your grandmother’s aunt’s kids, and cousins of every stripe—become
vitally important. I have a renewed sense of how valuable it is to include
these collaterals in my traditional genealogical research.
That's a quick overview of our first two days. I'll talk about what we covered the rest of the week in my next post, and tell you about opportunities to take a similar course at GRIP and SLIG. There was just too much happening to fit it all
into one!
--Shelley
DNA image: "DNA methylation" by Christoph Bock (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DNA_methylation.jpg#mediaviewer/File:DNA_methylation.jpg
