Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

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.

In an earlier post, I reviewed the Family Statistics that MyHeritage provides. It pointed out that I had some data that wasn’t correct. So at the end of that post, I ran MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker and it found that my tree of 9,050 people has 492 issues and MyHeritage’s desktop software Family Tree Builder came up with 561 issues.

So what are these issues? How many of them are issues that I need to fix, and how many are incorrect diagnoses? What are the differences between the 492 and the 561 issues of the online and desktop software? 

Why So Many Issues?

Like most genealogists, I pride myself in recording accurate information from source records. Specifically, I am very careful with the information I record for all my ancestors and their children and children’s families, maybe 500 people. For them I try to ensure every fact has a source. Very few, if any of the above issues, are for these most important people in my genealogical research.

But then there’s the rest of the family. This is made up of my cousins and their spouses and their families. It also includes my place to place study of all people who travelled from Mezhirich in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to Winnipeg and all of their descendants. For these 8,500 people I’m not so rigorous.

The goal for the rest of the family is to build up these people as best as I can without too much research. Most of the information comes from MyHeritage Smart Hints and Smart Matches that include other people’s family trees. Often there is conflicting information here and I do the best I can. Information from records will take priority, but sometimes there aren’t records and there’s only family trees to use. Many of these people are living, and information about living people is harder to find, especially of people in Canada.

The rest of the family is where all these issues are appearing. So it’s very worthwhile for me to run MyHeritage’s Consistency checker to at least help correct some of the incorrect information I have for them.

MyHeritage’s Online Tree Consistency Checker

When running the Consistency Checker online, it shows you its progress and tells you how long until it is finished. You can interrupt it by pressing on the X but if you do so, it will leave you with just a partial list. For me the report takes about 3 minutes to complete,

This is what the the start of my report of issues looks like:

The printer icon at the top right allows you to print the list of issues.

The little gear icon at the top right brings up Consistency Checker Settings and lets you select which issues to check and allows you to change the default limits for each issue, e.g. how many years is too old or too young.

Types of issues are grouped into Errors, Warnings and Notices. By default, all issues are selected for inclusion in the report except for two: “Children with different last names” and “Inconsistent last name spelling”. There are 3 types of issues that are Errors, 148 that are Warnings, and 42 that are notices.

The 492 issues that came up for me and the number of each type were:

Error: Birth after death (2) 
Error: Child older than parent (8)
Error: Child born after death of parent (2)
Warning: Died too old (1)  
Warning: Alive but too old (10)
Warning: Parent too young when having a child (24)  
Warning: Parent too old when having a child (4)
Warning: Fact occurring after death (156)
Warning: Fact occurring before birth (41)
Warning: Siblings with close age (19)   
Warning: Large spouse age difference (4)
Warning: Married too young (8)  
Warning: Died too young to be a spouse (2)
Warning: Multiple marriages of same couple (10)  
Warning: Married name entered as maiden name (16) 
Notice: Prefix in first name (1)  
Notice: Suffix in last name (1)
Notice: Multiple birth facts of same person (15)  
Notice: Multiple death facts of same person (29)   
Notice: Tagged in photo after death (1)   
Notice: Incorrect use of uppercase/lowercase (2)  
Notice: Disconnected from tree (10)   
Notice: Death place resembles cause of death (3)  
Notice: Siblings with same first name (3)
Notice: Double spaces in name (7)  
Notice: Inconsistent place name spelling (113)

These total 12 errors, 292 warnings and 186 notices. 

MyHeritage does a good job of making it easier for you to correct each issue. There are links from each issue that will open the person and/or facts involved in a new browser tab.

So I went through each issue one by one to see what I could fix. 

The 12 errors are definitely issues that need to be corrected one way or another. Each has a couse, for example, In a couple of cases I saw I had the century wrong, with a parent born in 18yy but written down as born in 19yy by mistake.   

The warnings are all possible errors. The “died too old” is for people who were (by default) 110 years or older. I have one warning for that, and it is a person in my tree who is actually documented at passing away at 111 years old.

Over to the right, you can’t really see it in this image, is a grey X which you can click on and select “Ignore this issue”. In this case I did.

But she was the only one. The 10 people living over 110 years old are likely not living, but I just haven’t found their death record or obituary or otherwise know that they’ve died. It was worthwhile searching again for each of these to see if I could find a death record. Even if I couldn’t, it was probably safe to mark them as deceased and MyHeritage makes this easy to do by pressing the green “Mark as deceased” button.

The parent too young to have a child often turned out to be a birth year being wrong. A few times, it was a child linked to incorrect parents, and in two cases, I did have documents that indicate the child was indeed 15 years old, so I clicked the X in those two cases for the warning for those two to be ignored.  

The parent too old to have a child in one case was a situation where I do believe the father could have been 67 years old. I have some documents that seem to indicate that. The other cases I have no evidence, but a few birth years looked suspicious, so I blanked them out.

There are lots (156) of facts after death. Most of these are residence facts from MyHeritage’s U.S. Public Records collection. In many cases, they are within a year or two of when the person died, so the particular agency hadn’t yet recorded that they had died. I decided to delete most of these after-death facts.

Some of the facts after death are marriage facts which are actually for the remarriage of their spouse after they died. For some reason, when MyHeritage helps you transfer marriage information from a record, it sometimes assigns it to the wrong marriage. It’s important to remember when there’s multiple spouses to always check that marriage information from records is added into the correct marriage.

And there were a few facts that were “Added to Geni” which is not a fact that should be added to a person’s life. These must have been brought in from other family trees by MyHeritage’s smart matching. I deleted all the Geni events.The proper way to document is simply to include the Geni profile as a source.

Now this next one is an odd one. It gives me a warning for Burial date being after the death date. I know I have a lot of cases like this, but this is the only one where a warning is given. I don’t know what’s different about this death fact and burial fact from the others, so I just clicked the  X to ignore this warning for this person.

Facts before birth: Many of these are again residences, a few are immigration, and one is a census. These all needed deletion or correction.

19 pairs of siblings were said to be born too close together. These ranged from 4 months apart which has to be wrong up to 9 months and 23 days apart, which biologically is possible. Here is an actual case of siblings 6 1/2 months apart. This warning only involves siblings who both have exact birth dates. If only one of them had a document, then I’d set the other’s birth date to just an approximate (circa) year which will eliminate the warning.

Large spouse age difference: One example was a birth year was 1991 and should have been 1919.

The Married too young and Died too young to be a spouse warnings were useful and helped me correct a few errors.

Multiple marriages of same couple allowed to me eliminate an extra marriage event. Married name entered as maiden name, Prefix (e.g. Dr.) in first name and Suffix (e.g. III) in last name allowed me to fix those.

The multiple birth and death events for one person notices are nice to have. I had a couple of people with 5 death events. Those seem to have come from copying FamilySearch Family Tree information which often have multiple birth or death events.

And then I found I had 10 people who weren’t connected to anyone else (disconnected from tree). I was surprised to see these. They must have happened while I was deleting or moving a branch. After checking that they didn’t need to be added back somewhere in the tree, it was easy to delete them.

I had 3 “Death place resembles cause” notices. “Holocaust” was in the place of death so I moved them to the Cause of Death field.which MyHeritage makes easy to do.

Siblings with the same name did help me find some people who were entered twice.

Double space in name helped to quickly fixed that problem.

Then there were 109 cases of Inconsistent Place Name Spelling. This is a very nice check that gives you a quick and easy to fix many of the typos in your place names.

It took about a week, working an hour or two each day, to check each of the above consistency issues and fix what’s obviously wrong, find records to help correct what isn’t obvious, or mark issues to ignore if the data is correct. There were only a few (maybe 6) that I marked to ignore.

Rechecking With Family Tree Builder

What I did next was sync my online tree down to my tree in Family Tree Builder (FTB). Then I ran the Tree Consistency Checker in FTB. And I got this:

I’m actually surprised. When I had consistency issues, MyHeritage online gave me 492 issues but FTB gave me 561 issues, so I was expecting there still to be a few issues left over in Family Tree Builder once I synced. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Maybe the checks between the two are exactly the same but they are reported somewhat differently.

Family Tree Builder also has a Check for Deceased People that is not available online at MyHeritage. Even after fixing all the Consistency Checks, this check results in 39 more people who are likely deceased:

These likely deceased people do not have birth dates, but their descendants do which makes it likely that they are too old to be alive. I felt safe letting FTB mark all of these people as deceased.

FTB also has a nice Check for Duplicates which in my case gave me 32 pairs.

Of those 32 possible duplicates, 3 of them actually were duplicates that I needed to merge. It looks like they were added once through one person’s family, and a second time through that person’s spouse’s family

Is My Data Better Now?

The reason why I was prompted to do this Consistency Checking and fix the problems was from MyHeritage’s Family Statistics that were indicating I had some issues to address.

So now if I rerun MyHeritage’s Family Statistics online and go back to the ages tab, I can see it looks a little bit better. Now my oldest living person is 106 years old which may be possible, but I’ll still check it. A very simple way is just to put the person’s name into Google and see if his obituary pops up. I found about 5 very quickly that way. My “oldest when married” includes 10 people who were over 75. And I still have 5 people who were married at ages 10 to 15. I have a husband 30 years older than a wife, and a wife 17 years older than a husband. These may all be correct but will need to be checked. I don’t know why the Consistency Checker didn’t report some of these, especially the person married at age 10.

My data is now better. But I’m sure there’s still a lot of mistakes in it. The proper way to error check is to rigorously go through your tree one person at a time and fact check each person against source records. Even source records can be wrong, but not nearly as often as data from family trees are wrong. It’s just that  one by one checking is not fun and can take a lot of time..

Which is why the new Smart Matching and automated record matching services that MyHeritage and other companies now do for you is something every genealogist should partake in. There is no way I would be able to find one one-hundredth of what these automated searches find for me.

The challenge then is to disseminate the good results from the not so good. Fortunately, the information found automatically is often correct, and even if not, it is usually helpful in some way.

Michael Kaplan, a user of my Double Match Triangulator program sent me information about how he was using DMT and also asked a number of questions. I thought this conversation would be very good for other DMT users to read. Michael gave me permission to post the relevant parts of his email to me and to give his name. Thank you Michael.

Here is what Michael had to say and ask (shown in “quotes”), along with my responses in green.

The Dialog, Questions and Answers

“I have begun using DMT (on GEDmatch) in earnest.  I now have a total of 161 kits in my B folder, including your kit.  Note that I do have a number of unrelated people in the database, including my wife, our daughter from my wife’s first marriage, and a couple of adoptees that I have helped. I’ll also add unrelated matches of my own matches, in order to determine of which side of my match’s family our relationship might be.”

“I began the process by generating my own segment match file, then doing the same for each of my known cousins.  When doing the segment search, I left the default minimum segment size as 7 cM.  That’s recommended, isn’t it?  I don’t want to bother with false matches.  In addition, reducing that threshold would actually reduce the number of discrete matches captured, since the limit of 10,000 segments would be reached much sooner.” 

Yes. The default of 7 cM is recommended. Even triangulations can be false (matches by chance) if they are under 7 cM.

“I manage kits for quite a few of my cousins.  Others have done the upload to GEDmatch on their own.  Then assigned MRCAs, as appropriate.  I do manage a kit for one close match whose relationship is yet to be determined.  Renee Watson has ended up in the "FFF" cluster but haven’t confirmed the exact connection.“

“Is there a recommended next step?  Unfortunately, I don’t think I documented the exact path that I have taken. I’ll try to reconstruct my thought process.

1. Find the closest match (person B) which has not yet been added to the B folder.
2. Generate segment match file.
3. Make initial DMT run to generate People file for person B.
4. Re-run DMT on my People file (person A), looking for triangulations with known cousins (and other matches already processed)
5. Run "Match both kits or 1 of 2 kits" on A and B, with shared matches first ordered according to shared DNA with A, attempting to find additional triangulations. 
6. I’m running DMT with recommended settings of 7 cM for Min Triang and 15 cM for Single Triang.  Default settings for "Match both kits or 1 of 2 kits" are 10 cM for threshold of largest segment to qualify as a match, and 10 cM for threshold of total matching segments to qualify as a match.  Should I reduce both of those settings to 7 cM to match DMT?
7. Then select the closest shared matches (ideal number TBD) for "Multi-Kit Analysis", running "Triangulation" on that subset.  Default setting for triangulation is 7 cM.  Should I leave it at that? 
8. For each shared match C which is reported as triangulating with A and B, generate a segment match file and add to the B folder, if one has not yet been created. 
9. If the segment match file had already been created for C, confirm that B is shown as a match in C’s People file.  If not found, generate one-to-one files for match between B and C.
10. Then re-run "Match both kits or 1 of 2 kits", this time ordering shared matches according to shared DNA with B.
11. Repeat steps 7-9.
12. Now, look at tab on "Match both kits or 1 of 2 kits" for kits matching only B.
13. Generate segment match files for the closest matches.
14. Re-run DMT for person A (me) and person B.
15. If tree for person B is available on GEDmatch, try to assign MRCAs on B’s People file
16. Otherwise, examine source for GEDmatch kit (e.g., Ancestry, MyHeritage, FTDNA) and check if tree available on that platform.
17. Return to step 1 and iterate through remaining unprocessed matches, periodically re-running DMT, as appropriate.”

Step 6:  No need to change default GEDmatch settings. The 7 cM and 15 cM settings in DMT are for individual segments. The 10 cM settings at GEDmatch are for longest segment and total of segments to determine which people to include as matches and does not filter individual matches. With endogamy, you might if anything want to increase the longest segment, rather than decrease it.

Step 7:  Default setting for triangulation is fine at 7 cM.

Step 12:  I’m not sure why you want kits matching only B. The point is to find the connections with Person A, so how will anyone not related to Person A help?

Steps 13 to 16:  I don’t see how using DMT for the B people is useful unless you want to determine Person B’s connections. Looking up Person B’s tree is definitely useful to see if you can find a connection with Person A’s tree, but there really is no need to find person B’s MRCAs and run them as person A in DMT if they are not your subject of interest.

“What’s the optimal procedure to determine the next kit to add to the B folder, given only the available kits in GEDmatch?”

I don’t know if there’s an optimal way. Using the closest match as you are doing is okay.

“How do we deal with a match with status "In Common With B" in assigned cluster "M"?  Do I need to find shared matches which will triangulate?”

“In Common With B” indicates that A has segment matches with C and B has segment matches with C, but none of the matches triangulate for A, B and C together. To find triangulations, you’ll need segment match files of other B people who have matches with C on other segments.  Matches will triangulate for everyone who is a true match of A on that segment on one of the parent sides.

“For status "Only AC matches", I need to also find shared matches which will triangulate.  Is that true?”

In this case, person C does not match any of your B people. The segments Person B matches with you should not triangulate with anyone else on both your father’s and mother’s side. If they do, then either the segment is false or your father or mother’s triangulation group must be false. As you fill in more and more of your segments with triangulation groups, you should reduce the number of “Only AC matches”.

“Matches with status "Has triangulation" in cluster "U" appear to match multiple other kits at the same location.  However, those segments have not yet been associated with a common ancestor.  Is that correct?  I assume that process involves more in-depth examination of family trees.” 

Yes. If none of a person’s segment matches have been assigned an ancestral path, then they will be put in Cluster “U”.

DMT can only assign ancestral paths to segments where the MRCA of Person B or C is known. So the goal is to include as many MRCAs as possible in Person A’s file, whose relationship with Person A is known and is only a single relationship (not related 2 or more ways). Second cousins and further are best since they will give you at least the grandparent level FF, FM, MF and MM.  It might sound like you’d want to go as deep as possible, e.g. 6^th cousins, but the worry the farther out you go is that they might be related a different way that you don’t realize.

“While I am aware that I have a large family and many known cousins have already tested (and uploaded their data to GEDmatch), those kits do not uniformly cover all of my ancestral lines.  There are still quite a few gaps in my chromosome map.  Importing the chromosome map data DNApainter.com, on my paternal side, I’ve got 46% of 396 segments painted, including the following:

On my mother’s side, though, it’s only 13% of 131 segments painted:

Total is 29% of 527 segments painted.”

“Do you have any recommendations as to how I can increase that test coverage?  My father’s side is larger.  I’ve just sent my sister an Ancestry DNA kit.  Hope she might be a closer match to some of my more distant matches.  I’ll transfer her data to GEDmatch when it’s ready.  Another paternal 1st cousin has already tested on 23andMe and Ancestry, I’ve asked him to upload to GEDmatch.  One of my maternal 1st cousins is already on GEDmatch.  I’ve asked the rest of my 1st cousins who have not yet tested anywhere if they’d be willing to contribute to my ongoing research.  Unfortunately, one of those was adopted, so not a blood relative.  Another has had a bone marrow transplant and is not a good candidate for a DNA test.”

Once you’ve got all your relatives tested that you can get tested and you’re maxed out on how the % you have painted, then it might be worthwhile to study your DMT Combined Run for Person A (yourself) to see what else it tells you. Start to identify triangulation groups the way Jim Bartlett does on his segmentology.org website. 

Another thing you can try, is to go into your People file and look for people who match on 4 or more segments and look for people whose segments are all in the cluster they are put into or else are “U”. That may indicate (no guarantee, especially with endogamy) that they match Person A along that cluster’s ancestral line.  Then you can try adding MRCAs for them, but don’t include the “R” at the end, since you don’t know their exact MRCA with person A. e.g.  If they have 4 segment matches on FF, FF, FFM and FF, then you try assigning them an MRCA of FFM (not FFMR). DMT will use that MRCA as part of its attempt to initially assign each segment, but it will be overruled by any triangulations with ancestral paths from MRCAs ending in “R”. This may help fill in some unknown areas where there are no known relatives with segments.

“Is it feasible to work the other way around, say, using the DNApainter chromosome map to select an as yet unidentified segment on one side or the other?  Then enter that segment into the GEDmatch segment search tool, finding matches who have a shared match with me on that segment.  I could then examine trees for those matches, if any, to potentially find a common ancestor.  If no tree is available (or insufficient depth is provided), I could reach out to the match for additional detail.” 

You can do that to find people at GEDmatch who match you on a specific segment. The only problem is, you won’t know what ancestral path they match you through. Searching that person’s ancestral tree will only help you if they connect to Person A’s tree. Everything in DMT including the MRCAs are done from Person A’s point of view/

“I have begun building floating trees for many of my closer unconfirmed matches on Ancestry, where they have trees.  Also using public records searches to identify other matches who have relatively unique names.  I’m reaching out to my closest matches, introducing myself, listing my known immediate ancestors, describing our shared matches, offering to share trees, and asking of they’d be willing to upload to GEDmatch.  I’ll do the same on 23andMe, MyHeritage, FTDNA, and GEDmatch.  I’ve given up on LivingDNA.  Response is likely to be low, but I’m hoping to find connections to the poorly covered branches of my family.  I’ve already gotten a favorable response from one close match and have begun to analyze our connections.

As you are progressing through an analysis, at what point do you give up and determine that a match is likely due to endogamy alone and probably untraceable?” 

In my case, any match that goes further back than my furthest researched ancestors is probably untraceable, simply because there are no more records from the Russian Empire and Romania that will connect them.

With regards to endogamy, it is almost the same as pileups. Endogamy segments are from long ago that have been passed through many people on various lines. They do indeed triangulate because they are actual segments and each segment is passed down to you through one specific ancestral path. But that path is always too deep to trace and connect to.  They are no different than any match that goes further back than my further researched ancestors.

“What are your minimum criteria for considering a match in the first place.  I generally focus on matches with more than 90-100 cM shared DNA and largest segment of at least 15-20 cM.  However, I’ve had cases where ThruLines (on Ancestry) has found a legitimate match of as little as 8-9 cM, when there are well-documented trees on both sides.  So, I’ve tried to provide as much depth on my tree as possible.”

For the B people, I’ll start taking the people I know the MRCA for. For the rest, I’ll then want to take the highest matching ones in each cluster, and try to get 5 or 6 in each cluster so that I have maybe 50 Person B files. I’m not as concerned about the cM as much as trying to get coverage of the closest matches in each cluster.

“Does DMT make any adjustment for known pile-up regions or any other corrections for endogamous populations?”

No. A pile-up or endogamous region are true segments that are passed down an ancestral path. The only difference is they are too far back to find the connection. You can identify them easily in DMT when you see dozens or even hundreds of triangulations all lined up over a segment. These could overlap with perfectly valid segments of closer relatives who can be identified, so don’t ignore those regions. Just ignore the people you don’t recognize in those regions.

“Any further strategies/hints/suggestions for making optimal use of your wonderful tool, DMT?  I’m very happy with it, so far, and hope to learn quite a bit going forward.”

Check out the last page of the Help File that comes with DMT, titled:  “Ideas, Tips and Tricks”.