Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A couple of years ago, I introduced the horrible acronym BGRN to represent a new notation for DNA relationships which I extended to also include non-genetic relationships. Using this notation, one can define precisely how one person is related to a second person. Using just the notation, I can programmatically determine the expected amount of DNA shared between the two people (autosomal, Y, X and mt), and can express in English how the second person is related to the first.

e.g. YXY(YX)xy = male person’s mother’s fathers’ sister’s son.

Back then I decided to make it a universal (non-English-centric) notation using the DNA X for a women and Y for a man, using an uppercase letter for going up to a parent and a lowercase letter for going down to a child.

I was working to implement it into Behold last year, when I got diverted into Double Match Triangulator (DMT) development. Currently, I am trying to finish off DMT version 3.0 and I have found a need for the notation in DMT.

But as I was doing so, I realized something. If a computer is going to handle the notation, then a set of X’s and Y’s and x’s and y’s works fine. It’s not quite as good when people need to be able to read, enter and understand these values. In DMT, I’m going to allow people to enter the relationships of any of their matches that they know. People are not going to want to enter YXY(YX)xy. It is not simple enough and not understandable enough.

So here is my new version of Behold’s Genetic Relationship Notation (BGRN). It is an English-based version (sorry non-English speakers) that uses the initial letters of recognizable English words to designate the genetic connection.

For example, our YXY(YX)xy will in this new notation be:  MFRDS, which translates to: “the person’s mother’s father’s parents (both of them) daughter’s son.  All the letters are uppercase. The “R” represents the paiR of paRents for both the F(ather) and the D(aughter) and indicate that the F and D are full siblings sharing both parents. Using a single letter R rather than grouping F and M together eliminates then need for parenthesis as the (YX) had.

Let’s now define all the rules, as I did in the earlier XY version of the notation:

The Behold Genetic Relationship Notation (BGRN) Revised

Behold’s Genetic Relationship Notation defines a string of characters that represent how person A connects to person B. With this string and the sex of person A, you should be able to:

a) Determine the expected amount of DNA shared by the two people, and
b) Describe the relationship in words.

The basic genetic notation uses the following characters to make up the string:

• F = father
• M = mother
• P = parent of unknown sex
• R = pair of parents, to represent a pair of Common Ancestors (CA)
• S = son
• D = daughter
• C = child of unknown sex
• T = identical twin, e.g. FT means the “T” is the identical twin of the "F”.
• B = boy, optional, only used in position 1 if the starting person is male.
• G = girl, optional, only used in position 1 if the starting person is female.
• ? = rest of the connection is not known

That’s it. 10 uppercase letters and a question mark in this revised notation, compared to the 4 uppercase and 4 lowercase letters, a number, a hyphen and parenthesis of the original notation.

The sex of the starting person is optional. If included, it will be the first character of the string. This may be needed for some genetic analyses to allow determination of whether the Y or X chromosome is possible to be shared between the starting and ending people.

The core rules of the revised notation, for purely genetic relationships, are:

1. The string optionally starts with B or G.
2. This is followed by 0 or more of:  F, M, P.
3. This may be followed by one R or by one T
4. This is followed by 0 or more S, D, C.
5. It may end in a ?.

Below are some examples of the notation for genetic relationships and the full relationship in words (plus a simplified relationship in parenthesis) that can be generated from it:

BMF = a boy’s mother’s father (or maternal grandfather)   
MFR = a person’s mother’s father’s parent’s (or great-grandparents)    
BMFRDS = a boy’s mother’s fathers’ sister’s son (or 1C1R)
FDDDD = a person’s paternal half-sister’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter
    (or half-great-grand-niece)    
GSS = a girl’s son’s son (or grandson)
GFTD = a girl’s father’s identical twin’s daughter (or niece).

See how much easier these are to read and interpret their representation in my original version of this notation, which was:  YXY, UXF(YX), YXY(YX)xy, U(Y)xxx, Xyy and XY2x.

Here’s examples of some common relationships:

M = mother
MM = maternal grandmother
PPPM = great-grandmother (unknown side)
PRD = aunt
PRCC = 1st cousin
PRCCC = 1st cousin, once removed (1C!R)
PPRCC = 1st cousin, once removed (the other way)
PRCCCC = 1st cousin, twice removed (1C2R)
PPRCCC = 1st cousin, twice removed (the other way)
PRD = great-aunt
PPRCCC = 2nd cousin
PPRCCCC = 2nd cousin, once removed (2C1R)
PPPRCCC = 2nd cousin, once removed (the other way)

In the above examples, any of the P’s can be replaced by F’s or M’s, and any of the C’s can be replaced by S’s or D’s.

Hopefully, you’re getting the idea and this seems easier to read than trying to decipher a string of uppercase and lowercase X’s and Y’s.

I won’t go into the calculation of how much DNA is shared since it’s worthy of another post, but let me say that the expected values can be easily obtained from strings written in Behold Genetic Relationship Notation along with the sex of the starting person.

Extending the Notation to Non-Genetic Relations

I still would like to extend this notation to handle more than just Genetic relationships and include all possible genealogical relationships. So let’s define the additional notation:

• f = non-genetic but legal father
• m = non-genetic but legal mother
• p = non-genetic but legal parent of unknown sex
• r = non-genetic but legal pair of two parents
• s = non-genetic but legal son
• d = non-genetic but legal daughter
• c = non-genetic but legal child of unknown sex
• h = husband
• w = wife
• z = spouse of unknown sex
• n = unmarried partner of any sex

The nice thing about this is all these non-genetic relationships are lowercase. So that means that as soon as you see a lowercase letter in a relationship, then you know the genetic link is broken and there will be zero DNA shared for this connection.

Examples of the extended notation and the relationship in words that can be generated from it:

n = Person’s spouse.
RD = Person’s sister.   
nRDcF = Person’s spouse’s sister’s adopted child’s father.
MMMhDhMh = Person’s mother’s mother’s mother’s husband’s daughter’s husband’s mother’s husband.
RDSFSwRCz = Person’s sister’s son’s paternal half-brother’s wife’s sibling’s spouse.

So BGRN can handle any relationship, no matter how complicated.

And if you notice, I’ve been careful to only include consonants as the letters of the notation. If any vowels would have been included, it would have been possible to create some relationships that would be real words in English, and that is risky as some not-so-desirable words could appear.

I am interested in hearing any and all comments, criticisms and suggestions.

—

Update: Sept 3, 2018:  I made the change of a pair of parents from “B” or “b” to “R’ or “r”. The “B” was taken from “both parents”, but that phrase does not read well when you string them together as in:  “father’s parent’s both parents’ son”. So the “R” now is more indicative of “paRents” and the phrase FPRS can now be generated as:  “father’s parent’s parents’ son”.  Notice the subtlety of the apostrophe before or after the “s” in parents to indicate if there is more than one. If that is too subtle, it could be translated to “father’s parent’s pair of parents’ son”.  Because of this change, I also had to change the spouse or common-law partner of unknown sex from “r” to “t”.

—

Update: Nov 20, 2018:  I added the optional B and G at the start of the string to indicate the sex of the starting person if that is relevant to the relationship (e.g. for X or Y chromosome purposes).

—

Update: Jan 2, 2019:  Changed spouse or partner of unknown sex from “t” to “n” so that “t” will not be confused with “T” which is for identical twin.

—

Update: July 5, 2022:  Changed “t” to be unmarried partner of any sex and added “z” as spouse of unknown sex.

—

Update: July 14, 2022:  At various times, I’ve seen people ask how to distinguish the two types of removals of cousins, e.g. 3C2R. I ike 2U3C to go from the current person up 2 generations and across 3 cousins. And 3C2D to first go across 3 cousins and then down 2 generations.

Today, I received an email from Living DNA that my test results are now available.

After watching several of the RootsTech livestreamed presentations by David Nicholson and Hannah Morden of Living DNA in February, their promise of their upcoming Family Networks capability to reconstruct family trees intrigued me. I hadn’t tested with them prior because I wanted them first to provide my matches to other DNA testers. Now they’ve said it’s coming.

I waited for the first Living DNA test kit sale. On April 20, they had a National DNA Day Sale and I purchased a kit online at $135.20 CAD, regularly $199 CAD, so it was 32% off. There was an additional $14.95 CAD delivery charge.

I had a bit of a rocky time with the test kit. They informed me it was shipped on April 23, with expected delivery time to Canada of 14 to 20 working days. It still had not arrived by June 4, so I contacted them and they said they would send out another kit with upgraded shipping. The new kit was shipped on June 19 and I got it on June 22. I did my test and sent it back the next day. Wouldn’t you know it, but the original kit I ordered arrived not too long after, on June 29, which worked out to 49 working days.

The test I sent back on June 23 through regular post arrived at their lab on July 6. They estimated the completion of the analysis to be Oct 1, but here it is Aug 6, so it took much less than their estimated time. I have submitted these dates to Leah Larkin’s DNA Test Processing Times survey.

When I login to Living DNA’s site to check my results, I get this menu:

The Family Networks will be their new person-matching system, and as you can see it is not available yet.

I previously had done tests with the 4 major DNA testing companies:  Family Tree DNA, Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and MyHeritage DNA. I did a comparison of the results back in March in my post: A Tale of Four DNA Tests. I’ll now compare my Living DNA experience with the other 4 tests.

Processing Times

As explained above, it took 67 days for the first Living DNA kit to arrive after I ordered it. It took 3 days for the upgraded shipping kit to arrive. The other four companies took from 6 to 18 days for the kit to arrive after ordering.

It took only 13 days for my tested kit to arrive back at Living DNA’s lab after I mailed it. That was quicker than the 15 to 25 days it took to mail back to the other companies.

The test took 31 days for Living DNA to finish processing and make my results available to me. The other companies took between 12 and 32 days.

Ethnicity Percentages

Now this was interesting. The other companies have me listed as between 84% and 99% Ashkenazi Jewish. But Living DNA does not have a Jewish category.

Living DNA gives me just this:

• Europe: 63%
• Near East: 35.9%
• Africa: 1.1%

Their complete breakdown to subregions is this:

The only sub-regions that correspond to where my ancestors are from include East Balkans (1.1%) which represents my Romania, and the part of Northeast Europe (3.4%) that includes my Ukraine but is not Poland.

So unfortunately for me, I don’t see that as being at all helpful, since less than 5% of their regional breakdown corresponds to where my ancestory were from. Living DNA really needs to include ethnic groups like the other companies do, especially when endogamy is involved. Ethnic group genetic ties are often stronger than location-based genetic ties.

I hear they do a wonderful job for people from Great Britain, getting right down to the county, so I was hoping they’d do a bit better than this for me.

Haplogroups

Living DNA gives you both your Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups with their basic test. Here’s my comparison of haplogroups with Family Tree DNA where I took both Y-DNA and mt-DNA tests and with 23andMe. Ancestry DNA and MyHeritage DNA do not supply haplogroup information.

Y-DNA haplogroup:

• Living DNA:  R1a –> R-M198 –> R-M417 –> R-Z645 –> R-Z93
• 23andMe:  R-M417
• FTDNA:  M198 –> M417 –> Z93 –> (7 levels ) –> R-BY24978

Living DNA does give my Y-DNA haplogroup two levels deeper than 23andMe does. But as would be expected, my BigY Family Tree DNA test gave the most detail with an additional 8 levels beyond R-Z93.

mt-DNA haplogroup:

• Living DNA:  Haplogroup K1a, Subclade: K1a1b1a
• FTDNA:  K1a1b1a.
• 23andMe: K1a1b1a

All 3 companies match on my mt-DNA haplogroup.

DNA Relatives

Living DNA’s matching to other testers is not active yet. When I go to the Family Networks page, I currently get this:

Last Fall, Living DNA was accepting DNA transfers to their One-Family project. On Oct 26, I transferred both my and my uncle’s raw data from Family Tree DNA. Back then they gave an expected completion date of Aug 6, 2018 which I was waiting patiently for and coincidentally happens to be today, the same day I got my actual test results. Living DNA sent me this in an email about the One-Family project today:

The status of this test is listed as “Awaiting Testing” and shows the following message:

Also, on July 19, Living DNA announced a partnership with Find My Past and said there would be a new DNA Matching portal that would be available for free and for a limited time. I wanted to see if this was anything different. I uploaded my 23andMe raw data via this portal. This upload shows up on my Living DNA account as a test with status: “Awaiting Testing” and shows exactly the same message (see above) as my One Family transfer. So both the acceptance of raw transfers last fall as well as the new Find My Past partnership seem to be going to the same place.

I’m looking forward to seeing what matches result out of all this and what autosomal and family tree tools Living DNA will provide. In February, Living DNA made a short You Tube preview about Family Networks. It looks interesting and will include a chromosome browser:

Raw Data Files

Living DNA gives you 3 raw data downloads:

I compared autosomal raw dna from two of my tests in a blog post last year:
Raw Data Comparison: FamilyTreeDNA vs MyHeritage DNA.  I plan to do a new comparison that will include Living DNA, Ancestry DNA and 23andMe files in a future blog post.

Today, MyHeritage announced a new feature – a brand new filtering system for DNA matches. They describe it here on the MyHeritage Blog. They say they are rolling out the feature gradually, so you may not see it yet.

I can see the new features and I thought I’d give it a run-through.

They now show me having 1 close family (my uncle), 148 extended family (I don’t know how I’m related to any of them) which go up to what they say are 2nd to 5th cousins with a minimum of 53.3 cM, and then 5,711 distant relatives which are said to be at 3rd to 5th cousins and further (and I again don’t know how I’m related to any of them). The first listed distant cousin shares 77.7 cM. The 5,711th shares only 1 segment that is 12 cM.

They give me locations where my DNA matches live:

Other than Israel in 3rd spot, all the other countries you see above are listed in almost the same order as the picture shown on MyHeritage’s blog post. That seems to indicate to me that it may more be the distribution of MyHeritage’s test takers, and my matches follow that (with the Israel thrown in). I have to go way down the list to get to Ukraine 5 and Romania 1 which is where my ancestors actually come from.

My ethnicities are the same as previously. Ashkenazi 83.8%, North Africa 5.8%, South Europe (Iberia) 4.5%, East Europe 3.8%, Middle East 1.1% and Eskimo/Inuit 1.0% – yes, I’ve still got that Inuit in me it appears. It’s cold in Winnipeg in the winter, brrr.  I only consider the Ashkenazi and East Europe correct as I should be close to 100% Ashkenazi. 23andMe has me at 99.2% and Ancestry DNA’s latest update put me at 98%.

But what’s new is they give the ethnicities of my matches, with my ethnicity percentages to the left for comparison:

Why I have 671 matches with North and West European people and 735 matches with Irish, Scottish and Welsh people is beyond me. But I only have 5,860 matches in total and that matches shown there total way more than that, so some of my matches must count as more than one ethnicity. The 5,476 Ashkenazi out of my 5,860 does give 93.4% and that’s not too bad.

So what’s their new filtering system? Well, it is based on these charts. You can click on any item, and it will take you to a page where it will show you only the people who corresponding to the item. So you can click on the first chart to get either your close family, extended family, or distant relatives. You can click on a line in the second chart to get your matches who live in a certain country. And you can click on a line in the third chart to get your matches who have a certain ethnicity.

I’ve got 5.8% North African ethnicity according to MyHeritage. If you go way down the ethnicity match list, you’ll get to the 10 people with North African Ethnicity that I match to. I click on that and bring up the list and see that they would all be classified as distant relatives as the closest is only said to be a 3rd to 5th cousin. When I review the 2nd of the 10 matches, it is a person with a Jewish name living in Netherlands, and all his ancestral surnames are Jewish, so I wonder how he became a North African. When I compare myself with him, I can see the ethnicities and I see this:

Well, MyHeritage says he’s got 13.1% North African ethnicity, so I guess that’s enough for him to be a North African match to me. He is a match for me for Ashkenazi and for Yemenite Jewish, but not for Middle Eastern which is 6.1%. So MyHeritage must have used something like 10% as the minimum ethnicity a match must have to be considered an ethnic match. 

And what about my 1% Eskimo/Inuit?  Nope. Nobody that matches me has at least 10% Eskimo/Inuit in them.

MyHeritage has also added these 3 filters (relationships, locations, ethnicities) to their DNA Matches page.

In my case, these 3 filters don’t help me much, but they may do better for you.

The filter on their DNA Matches page that is potentially the most useful to me is their “Has shared surname” filter which is under the “All tree details” dropdown:

Using this filter cuts down my list to just 46 matches. I manually checked all of them and cannot find a surname/place connection.

The “Has Smart Matches” filter could be useful for me one day. I do have my DNA and my uncle’s DNA connected to my tree at MyHeritage, but it has not found any DNA SmartMatches for me yet.

A filter that MyHeritage does not have but would be appreciated would be an ancestral birthplace filter, matching the towns my ancestors were born in with the towns the ancestors of my matches were born in. Surnames were only adopted by the Jewish people in Eastern Europe in the early 1800’s so connecting with 5th cousins or more by surname is usually not possible for us. But connecting by birth town, when our DNA has a match, might have more promise.

—

Followup: June 29.  Only a few hours after I published my post, I received a very nice unexpected email from Gilad Japhet, Founder & CEO of MyHeritage, with his comments along with some clarifications and explanations for me.

He explained that my speculation that the countries of my matches reflect the distribution of MyHeritage DNA test takers is incorrect. He said that about half of MyHeritage’s test takers are living in European countries. It is more likely that the example on their blog post was of a Jewish person which is why my countries almost match theirs. And he is correct in saying that I have few matches from Ukraine and Romania because very few Jews still live there, with most of the descendants now being in the USA, Israel, etc., like me in Canada.

Gilad pointed out that my speculation that 10% is used as a minimum ethnicity match and that people will be listed under multiple ethnicities is stated right in the MyHeritage blog post. Whoops. In the future I’ll try to read announcements more carefully so that there would be no need for me to speculate (bad on me!)

He did admit that my 1% Inuit might be a false positive.

Thank you Gilad for those clarifications. Please continue to innovate. Everybody benefits.