Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A couple of months ago, Ancestry came out with a new feature called Parental Matches, that shows which parent a DNA match is connected to.

My own DNA should be a good test for this. I have 100% endogamy on all my ancestral lines, but my parents are not related according to GEDmatch’s test.

Both my parents passed away before I started DNA testing, but I did test my uncle (my father’s brother) at FTDNA and I have some first cousins who tested at Ancestry and other sites, so I can use them for additional comparisons.

Ancestry’s Parental Matches stems from the SideView technology introduced about 6 months earlier that reveals your ethnicity inheritance from each parent. The SideView ethnicity breakdown really didn’t help me very much:

Ancestry DNA’s Parental Matches

Of my 167,298 matches at Ancestry DNA, I have:

• 17,779 matches (10.6%) that are assigned Maternal.
• 16,573 matches (9.9%) that are assigned Paternal.
• Only 5 matches assigned to Both sides.
• 132,941 matches (79.5%) that are Unassigned.

I am somewhat surprised that more of my mother’s side is assigned than my father’s, since I have more known relatives on my father’s side in both my family tree and among my DNA matches.

I have in the past used the Leeds Method on my Ancestry matches with reasonably good success. That allowed me to assign is most cases one grandparent and in a few cases more than one grandparent to my closest matches at Ancestry. I assigned each match one or more colored dots representing the grandparent(s):

Where FF = my Father’s Father’s side, FM = my Father’s Mother’s side, etc.

Most of the Leeds assignments are on my Father’s side. 

• 173 on Father’s sides, made up of 127 on Father’s Father, 22 on Father’s Mother, and 24 on Father’s Mother’s Father
• 23 on Mother’s sides, made up of 2 on Mother’s Father, 16 on Mother’s Mother and 5 on Mother’s side but grandparent unknown.

The 25 starred matches are the people that I know how I am connected to and that I have in my family tree.

So the question is, how well does Ancestry’s Parental assignments match both my known relationships and my Leeds assignments.

For my known relationships, it did pretty good:

It assigned 24 of my known relatives correctly and the other was not wrong, but was just not determined.

My assumption would be that Ancestry must be using my Ancestry family tree itself to make the assignments. Otherwise it would not be able to determine what side any of my relatives are on. The one unassigned match might have been left that way because being a 4th cousin, he is my most distant known DNA match, and maybe Ancestry does not use the tree for cousins that distant.

How well do the assignments match the Leeds method?

Of my DNA matches where Ancestry assigned a parent, it agreed with the Leeds Method in 57 out of 82 cases (70%).  So Ancestry and Leeds disagree about 30% of the time. Unfortunately, we cannot in this case tell which one is incorrect.

Comparing Shared Matches

At Ancestry, I have DNA matches with two 1st cousins on my mother’s side, with one 1C1R on my mother’s side and one 1C1R on my father’s side. My shared matches with each of them should be expected to mostly match only people on the same side as they are.

If I look at the first 50 shared matches with each of them, this is what I see. (My 1C1R on my mother’s side only has 37 shared matches)

For shared matches, 48 out of 65 cases (74%) match the side the cousin is on. That’s not bad, but is a bit less accuracy than I would have hoped for since my parents are not related.

Side Assignment at Family Tree DNA

Family Tree DNA has had Paternal and Maternal matches assigned to each side for a long time. Like Ancestry, since I don’t have parents tested, it assigns sides based on comparison with testers that who I’ve placed in my family tree there.

I really only have two close relatives in my tree at FTDNA, my uncle (father’s brother) and the same “1C1R on M side” as at Ancestry.

With the two of them in my tree and a couple more distant relatives, FTDNA assigns my 35,169 matches as follows:

• 1,564 matches (4.4%) that are assigned Maternal.
• 10,732 matches (30.5%) that are assigned Paternal.
• 421 matches (1.2%) that are assigned to Both sides.
• 22,452 matches (63.9%) that are Unassigned.

Compare this to Ancestry’s assignments. There are so many more Paternal assignments at FTDNA than maternal, but Ancestry’s assignments are about 50:50. I don’t know why this is.

If I look at my first 50 matches in-common-with my uncle, 29 are assigned Paternal and only 2 are assigned maternal. That’s 94% correct.

With my 1C1R, 6 are assigned Maternal, but 15 are assigned Paternal. That’s only 29% correct. Again, I don’t know why.

It might be a bit of a Paternal bias at FTDNA. I don’t know if this is real (because of more people on my Paternal side testing there) or if it is a by-product of the way their algorithms work with my matches.

Also, I don’t know why I have 6009 matches in common with my 1C1R at FTDNA but only 37 in common at Ancestry.

Conclusion

Parent assignments on your DNA matches is a nice feature to have, especially when you haven’t had your parents tested.

Family Tree DNA has had this for a while using information from the family tree you put together on their site. Ancestry has now just added this.

The assignments appear to be fairly good and seem to be correct more often than not. They are useful, but should be thought of as a reasonable hint, rather than an accurate determination.

There are more advanced techniques that the companies could use to make this feature more accurate and more useful. Incorporating automated Leeds assignments, clustering techniques, or comparing segment matches would improve the results.

23andMe assigns parent information only if you have parents tested. MyHeritage DNA, Living DNA and GEDmatch do not yet assign parent sides to your matches.

Parental assignment is a good feature. The companies should all include it, and be working to make it more accurate and useful.

Followup:  Jan 4, 2023:  Family History Fanatics (Andy Lee) just posted a YouTube video worth watching: How ACCURATE is Ancestry’s Parent1/Parent2 DNA Match Separator? Andy found 90% of his DNA matches had a parent assigned compared to only about 20% for me. He also had very few matches with “Both” parents assigned.

That got me to go back and look at my matches again, and I was surprised to see that only a week later, my numbers changed to:

• 18,823 Maternal (up 1044)
• 17,038 Paternal (up 465)
• 963 Both sides (up 958)
• 130,795 Unassigned (down 2146)
• 167,619 Total (up 321)

So a couple thousand more assignments were made in the last week, and my very low number of Both Side (5) was substantially increased to 963.

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree.

Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV show Shark Tank.

The challenge was a whole week, from Dec 1 to Dec 8, where a few dozen people, myself included, worked hard to research Mark’s genealogy and add information on WikiTree to his ancestors and their nuclear families.

Wiki Tree Challenges

WikiTree has been very innovative in publicizing their platform when they devised the WikiTree Challenge. In 2021, its first year, each week WikiTree chose a well-known genealogist as their subject, breaking many of the brick walls that had previously stumped these admired researchers and professionals. In 2022, they changed their tactic to use noted personalities and entertainers.

I first wrote about the Challenge in March 2021:  No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge. In July 2021, I myself was honored to be chosen as one of the genealogists to be featured: My Week as the WikiTree Challenge Guest. A lot of interesting was added to my relatives’ profiles on WikiTree. It was just amazing to have a team of people work on my tree for a week.

I also participated as one of the people helping with several of the challenges. My expertise is in Jewish Genealogy in what is now Ukraine and Romania, so naturally I selected those guests where I might be able to contribute.

A few week before my week,t I helped with the challenge for Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger  - The WikiTree Challenge – From the Inside. 

The week after my week was Daniel Loftus, and he had one mysterious relative Peter Welsh who emigrated in Manitoba and just happened to be buried in a cemetery within biking distance from my house. I had never been to that cemetery before, so I visited and took a picture of Peter’s grave and found additional information that I added to Peter’s profile.

In September 2021, I helped with Melanie McComb’s challenge on her Jewish side. Melanie had previously put in a lot of work on my challenge, so I was very happy return the favor and to do the same for her.

And in December 2021, it was Marian Wood whose challenge I participated in.

For those participating in a challenge, each one is a week-long intensive effort to flesh out new ancestors and find sources confirming them. We’d then write up their profiles on WikiTree and add to their biographies, source information and research notes. All week, the participants would all be collaborating on the WikiTree Discord channel for that challenge.

There would be a "kickoff” on YouTube with Mindy Silva (the challenge coordinator), the Team Leader for the challenge, and the featured genealogist. And a week later, there would be a “results reveal” on YouTube where Mindy and the Team Leader would “wow” the guest with all the brick walls broken and information found.

Mark Cuban’s Challenge

When the format changed in 2022 to famous people and celebrities, there were fewer people I felt I could really help with. You really need to be dedicated to spend a week of your time. It’s a very intensive week. So there would need to be a personal connection or something of interest to draw me in.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Elaine Martzen, who is the coordinator of the Jewish Roots Project at WikiTree. Elaine has been participating in a lot of the challenges, and was a contributor during my week when I was the guest. Elaine had asked me in September if I could participate in the Scott Turow challenge, but I was busy that week. This time she asked me if I was interested in helping with Mark Cuban. I was available and Mark looked like he had a very interesting Ancestry, all lines being Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe, so I said sure.

Prior to the challenge, Mindy as the Challenge Coordinator, set up Mark’s Ancestors up to his great-grandparents as our starting point. I was one of 23 participants on the challenge team. There were also several other members of WikiTree who participated unofficially and provided additional help.

On Thursday Dec 1 at 11 am, we had a Zoom Kick Off session, with about 12 of us from the team in attendance, so we could meet each other and discuss strategies.

I spent most of the first day on my MyHeritage site adding a new family tree that I called “Cuban Family Tree”. I seeded it with the ancestors up to the great-grandparents that Mindy initially put up. I used the “Quick and Dirty” techniques for building a family tree that genealogists often use to determine the ancestry of their DNA matches. That was helped greatly by the wonderful Smart Matching to records and trees that MyHeritage provides. I quickly built the tree up to about 80 ancestors, their siblings and spouses. My goal was to find approximate birth years and originating towns in Eastern Europe of Mark’s family.

Interestingly, I got Smart Matches from a MyHeritage user named mcuban, who turns out to be Mark Cuban himself.

and also Brian Cuban who is Mark’s brother.

It seems the Cuban family is very interested in their genealogy and unlike many of the other 2022 Challenge celebrities, have done quite a bit of research themselves.

Mark Cuban was contacted by the Wiki Tree people lto see if he’d be willing to be the subject of a challenge, and he was fine with it. Mindy wrote on his Challenge Page:

We had spoken to Mark Cuban about this challenge. He is "big into genealogy" and has used Ancestry, MyHeritage, and 23andMe. But he wasn’t so sure we can find anything new for him. "Not sure you would have sources I don’t," he told us.

So the challenge was on!

The Week’s Progress

The team had another Zoom session that evening. Jewish Genealogy in Eastern Europe is not simple. You can go back to 1800 if you’re lucky (it’s hit and miss depending on the town) but very few of the available records are digitized and fewer yet are indexed. The records themselves are in Russian and sometimes Hebrew, and the people themselves spoke Yiddish. And just to add to the fun, the handwriting in these languages on these records is often atrocious.

Even so, I still was going to try to find some records of Mark’s family that were in Eastern Europe. I was very familiar with using JewishGen and many other Jewish Genealogy resources. A few others in our group were as well, but the majority of our team although new to Jewish records, were quite experienced with North American research. They looked for and found many immigration records and gravestones which were essential to help determine or confirm where the ancestors were from and what the person and father’s name written on the stone in Hebrew was.

Everyone helped everyone else on the Discord channel throughout the week, asking questions, getting answers, posting interesting finds and getting help with certain tasks.

For my initial searches, I started looking at Mark’s maternal grandmother’s ancestors. They were from what is now Lithuania. Wow, JewishGen had a lot! I had no experience with Jewish records from Lithuania, so I was amazed at the incredible amount indexed compared to my ancestors’ locations. I was able to collect evidence for 3 more generations of Mark’s Ziv ancestors than he had on his MyHeritage tree.

There were so many Lithuanian records for the family that it took me 3 days to compile them and write up people profiles and source on WikiTree. I spent 3 hours developing a spreadsheet to help me generate the source citations, because doing 100 of them manually one-by-one would have been torture.

I knew these records were accessible by anyone on JewishGen if they knew where to look. So I presume a lot of this information would not be new to Mark.

Four days had passed already. Only 3 days remaining in the challenge and I had only really looked at one of the four grandparent lines.

I noticed early in the week that Mark’s paternal grandfather came from the town of Malin (now Malyn) that is now in the Ukraine. That was very near to where some of my ancestors were from. I know a researcher, Boris Makalsky, who has a group that has been scanning records from the archives in the Zhytomyr province. Boris has found about 200 records for me over the past 3 years from several of my and my wife’s lines. I emailed Boris and asked if he might have any records from Malin and I gave him information about Mark’s great-grandparents.

On Tuesday, Boris emailed me back. He had found and provided me with one record for each great-grandparent which added another generation onto both lines. Both I and the team found this very exciting, and this surely was information that Mark could not have found, as this information had not previously been scanned and was not available in any form online.

Not only that, but Boris said he has records for both families going back to about 1750. Mark would very likely want to contact Boris if he would like to get access to the other records available.

Seven days is never enough. I would have needed another 7 days to thoroughly research Mark’s other two grandparent lines. But you can only do what time will provide. I was very happy with my contributions to the team.

And I must say the team’s work was equally amazing. They found and documented many stories and details about Mark’s family, There were 21 Interesting Finds recorded on the Challenge Page. And the 23 of us registered for the challenge over that week added profiles for 16 more ancestors and 513 of Mark’s other relatives to WikiTree, totaling 2,711 profile edits. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Wrap Up

I was invited to be a on the panel in the Challenge Wrap Up yesterday. It is available for viewing on YouTube. Mindy, Elaine, our team leader Thomas Koehnline and I discuss what we found:

We don’t know yet what Mark thinks of the research we did on his family, but Eowyn Walker of WikiTree emailed him and he responded:

This is amazing. Let us spend some time with it.

Thank you so much !!!

I’ve paid my deposit and my wife Cheryl and I will be going on the Find Your Roots on the River Cruise with Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell from October 17 to 24, 2024 (yes, almost 2 years away), from Amsterdam through Germany to Basel, Switzerland.

This is an opportunity no genealogist should miss. With a capacity of only 156 passengers, we’ll be a close-knit group and it will be a delight. Blaine and/or Judy will be giving a talk each day. Blaine and Judy give superb presentations and both have been Keynote speakers at many genealogy conferences around the world.

Don’t wait because available cabins are being snatched up fast. For more information about the cruise, see their subscribe page at: Find Your Roots on the River (subscribepage.io). If you’re on Facebook, this cruise has its own page at:  https://www.facebook.com/FindYourRootsontheriver

There’s an early booking bonus of $500 per person if you sign up before Dec 31, 2022. If you tell them that I referred you, then both you and I will get a free airport or hotel transfer.

Judy Russell – The Legal Genealogist

I have had the pleasure to be at several genealogy conferences with Judy.

The first was the 10th Unlock The Past Genealogy Cruise in 2016 that took us around New Zealand and Australia. Judy was part of our Hobbiton gang who ventured off together in the land of the Lord of the Rings.

The Hobbiton gang together in Middle Earth, Tauranga, New Zealand. Left to right: Judy Russell, Allyson Luders, my wife Cheryl, myself, Helen Smith and Lyn Hudson-Williamson. Photo courtesy of Lyn Hudson-Williamson.

Following one of Judy’s talks on this wonderful cruise, Judy implored me to get my 93 year old uncle DNA tested, so she really got me started in DNA.

Just 4 months later, I saw Judy again at the Ontario Genealogical Society’s conference in Toronto, and I got to introduce the moderator of Judy’s panel on “the Future of Genetic Genealogy”

Then we met again at RootsTech in Feb 2017 in Salt Lake City, where Judy was a Keynote speaker and I was a finalist in the Innovator Showdown.

Then in Nov 2017, I spent time with Judy again at Family Tree DNA’s 13th International Genetic Genealogy Conference in Houston.

I’m looking so forward to spending time with Judy again in 2024.

Blaine Bettinger – DNA Expert

Every genealogist who has done DNA testing will know the name Blaine Bettinger. Blaine literally wrote the book on DNA testing. Here is my own well used copy:

I always wanted to get the opportunity to meet Blaine, and when I found out he’d be the Keynote speaker at the Kelowna District Genealogy Conference in Sept 2018 in Kelowna, British Columbia, I jumped at the chance to go. I was accepted as a speaker which allowed me some wonderful one-on-one time to talk with Blaine at the speaker’s table at the buffet dinner following the conference.

Photo courtesy of Blaine Bettinger.

European River Cruising

It was the 3rd Unlock the Past Genealogy Cruise in February 2013 that got Cheryl and me hooked on cruising. Including our two genealogy cruises, we have now cruised 7 times on large ships, the last being in February 2020 just before Covid hit.

We have always wanted to try river cruising on their smaller more intimate ships, but had never found the perfect cruise to go on. When I saw Judy’s post on Facebook a few days ago, I realized that this was the one.

I was planning to go to the MyHeritage Live event that was to take place in Tel Aviv, Israel in the Fall of 2020. But that was kiboshed by Covid. So this cruise in 2024 might be the first live genealogical event that I go to since Kelowna in 2018.

Genealogy and cruising. There’s nothing like combining pleasure with pleasure.