Unearth the Past: A family history & genealogy podcast

S2: Ep1: Unraveling the Mysteries of Your Ancestry with DNA Painter's Jonny Perl

• Dr Michala Hulme • Season 2 • Episode 1

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WE ARE BACK WITH SEASON 2!!! Yes, Michala is back with your favourite family history podcast, and we are kicking off with a bang!

Dream of uncovering your family's hidden past? Join us in a captivating conversation with genealogy enthusiast Jonny Perl, the founder of the brilliant DNA Painter website, whose quest for family history was kindled by his mother's tales of her ancestors.

Ever wondered how DNA testing can help unearth your roots? We dive into the intriguing world of DNA research, with a focus on DNA Painter - an innovative tool developed by our guest Jonny Perl that visualizes and predicts relationships based on shared centimorgans (cM). Hear our surprising tales of unexpected DNA connections and learn how Jonny's tool has revolutionized genealogy research. We also take a closer look at "What Are the Odds?", a unique genealogy app designed to help you find unknown relatives.

Lastly, we reveal the secrets of the Shared cM Project on DNA Painter, a breakthrough tool that pinpoints possible relationships based on shared DNA. Get a walk-through of the process, explore its latest features, and understand how it can aid your genealogical searches. We also shed light on various DNA testing companies, discussing their strengths and drawbacks, and how they've transformed genealogy research. Join us in this enlightening session with Jonny Perl, the genius behind DNA Painter, and discover the unparalleled power of DNA in your quest for family history.

Websites mentioned on the show:
www.michalahulme.com
www.dnapainter.com
https://dnapainter.com/tools/coverage
https://thednageek.com/a-new-coverage-estimator-at-dna-painter/
https://dnapainter.com/blog/how-to-use-the-new-dna-coverage-tool/
https://www.legacytree.com/blog/genealogy-tools-dna-painter-coverage

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to Unearth the Past, a genealogy and family history podcast brought to you by me, dr Michaela Hume. So, folks, we are back. Have you missed us? I hope you have. So, yeah, so we're back now with season two.

Speaker 1:

I had to take a bit of time off, not because I was ill. Thank you for your messages. I thank you to everybody that has sent me an email as well through to my website, saying how much you missed the podcast. It's really nice to hear. So, as you guys know, I'm an academic. That's my day job. So the new term started, so I've been really busy getting the new term up and running and also I've been busy filming. Yeah, it's been a really busy few weeks of filming TV shows, which is always very nice, and you'll get to see them in 2024. Thank you to all the lovely messages as well.

Speaker 1:

For those that saw me on Jblades the West Midlands through time, can I just say as well, in my defense, it was really difficult to push a canal boat through a tunnel. Even with Jay, who you can see is like very strong, it was really hard. I was absolutely knackered. I got the canal boat through, but yeah, thank you to all those that have reached out to me on social media through our website and said that you saw that. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. If you haven't seen it, you can catch it. I think it's my five is their catch up show that you'll be able to see it on. So, yes, if you haven't seen it, check it out on there it was.

Speaker 1:

I had a great time filming with Jay, who's absolutely lovely, and, as I say, we've got more stuff coming up in 2024. How exciting. Anyway, I'm kicking off the show, the new season, with a bang. I have got somebody who should be genealogy rock and roll royalty with a name like this. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the very, very lovely Johnny Pearl. Johnny, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast.

Speaker 2:

My pleasure. I mean, what an introduction, Michaela. I'll come in every week if you're going to big me up like that.

Speaker 1:

So can we start then right back at the beginning with you? So how did you get involved in genealogy and family history? What was it that started you off on this crazy journey?

Speaker 2:

To be honest, it was a gradual process. I'm a bit of a late developer when it comes to genealogy. I think I was 33 or 34 when I became obsessed, but it was a bit like flipping a switch overnight. I was suddenly up all night. You know, in other way, when you're really, really obsessed with something, you just do it all your time. So I was doing a job and then I was coming home and just staying up all night and what happened was my mama had come over and she suddenly dropped into conversations the names of some of my ancestors on her side, and I'd never heard these names before because I'd never asked. I didn't know her parents. Sadly, they passed on before I was born. So it just suddenly opened up a whole world that was new to me yeah, it shouldn't have been new to me, because it was my ancestors, you know and I was just really really struck by it immediately.

Speaker 1:

And from your family history, then from some of the stories that you found out, what has been that sort of takeaway moment. So what is that story in your family tree that you tell people say at a dinner party?

Speaker 2:

Okay, well, it's a funny one. I mean it's not entirely positive but it's sort of amazing. I had this piece of paper from my great great grandfather, so this is, amazingly, my dad's cousin. You know, there's kind of a genealogist in every generation sometimes and if you confide them then you're onto something. So in my generation it's me, and then my dad has this cousin who's who's quite into it and he had gathered everything from my great aunt who was the genealogist in the previous generation. And anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a piece of paper that just gave a little tentative bit of information about a kind of fourth or fifth great-grandparent of mine.

Speaker 2:

And I was researching the internet and I had one of these moments where suddenly three or four generations were knocked down at one time and I found out that I'm the ninth or 10th great-grandson of a guy called Nicholas Crisp, who was this incredibly rich guy who unfortunately was involved quite heavily in the slave trade in the UK in the early days. So yeah, it was just. It was really really hectic to find this out, but I reminded myself that, you know, I may not even have any of this guy's DNA. He's a very he's one of about 2000 ancestors I have at that level, so I don't have to feel personally ashamed. But to suddenly, you know, suddenly figure out that connection was kind of a shocker and kind of amazing.

Speaker 1:

How did you deal with that then? So there's going to be people listening who are going to get results that they're not quite expecting when they're doing their research. And I know that firsthand because this week I contacted a guy. I've been doing a family tree for somebody who's a client and they've done a DNA test and there's quite a strong match on one side and this person doesn't know who their grandfather is, right. So I've contacted the strong match on that side and I reached out to him on ancestry and said Hi, you share DNA with this person. I wondered if you could shed any light on well, one, what side of your tree is this person on? And two, do you know anything about? You know this particular person, whatever? Anyway, he came back rather quickly and said you know your DNA match is on my dad's side and, just to let you know, we're related to Hitler.

Speaker 1:

Right he came straight out with it. Yeah, just to let you know, we're related to Hitler. I can't believe it. That's the first person I've ever had, Johnny, that is related to Hitler.

Speaker 2:

That is a shocker, but you know, I guess he's. He's obviously faced a head on this person and came straight out with it. I mean good on them in a way.

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, I mean, look, I will say this for the record, I'm actually going to do the research myself and see that it is true. I can't understand why this gentleman would you know sort of say that in an email. I mean, it's a bit of a. I suppose. If you had 100 people in a room and said who do you not want to be related to, I imagine most of the people would put Hitler at their number one.

Speaker 1:

So, I can't quite get why he'd be making this up, but I am going to do a bit of research myself and have a look into it. Now, speaking of DNA, I was a bit late coming to DNA Painter right Now. Johnny will know, because this is Johnny's child, johnny's website that if you haven't done DNA before and, johnny, I'm sure there are a lot of people who maybe necessarily haven't come across your website if they are just starting out, yeah, doing their DNA Now, I was a bit late to DNA. I'll be honest with you. I was sort of heavily using paper records for a long time and I was kind of a bit late. I didn't really understand about cousin matches, so I suppose I was a bit late to the party. Can I just say your website has changed my life, like it's just changed my life.

Speaker 1:

I watched a YouTube video of you explaining how to use it and how to and specifically. So there's two things that I've used up to now on it and one of them is the prediction. So if you put the centimorgans in, for those that don't know anything about DNA, dna is measured in something called centimorgan, so it's a small c and a big m. And if you've taken an ancestor DNA test or any other, because there's a few out there you will notice that your cousin matches have this centimorgan number, but the centimorgan number won't say to you, it doesn't really say to you oh, this is 100% your first cousin, right? So what you have to do is try and figure out how these people are related to you, and one of the ways to do that further that prediction is to go on to DNA Painter type in the centimorgans and it gives you, doesn't it, very clearly the different ways that this person might be related to you. Have I said that right, jonny?

Speaker 2:

You have, and, of course, the challenge is that even for quite a lot of centimorgans shared, there are a lot of possibilities, aren't there? So there's no kind of it's not a magic website that can give you the answer. It can just give you a sort of guideline as to what the parameters of your answer might be, but you do still have to do a bit of work in order to be so we've got the prediction right and you're writing what you're saying.

Speaker 1:

there are a number of different possibilities. So then I moved on to another part of your website, which is where, once you've figured out how your cousin matches are related to you in sort of a big family tree, if that makes sense or how they are related to each other should I say, once you've figured out and you've done a big family tree, and you've figured out how they, what's their common ancestor, how are they all related to each other, I then put that into your website and it predicted, it gave me a prediction of where the person that I was looking for, where they, would sit in that big family tree. I don't know how you thought of this. Like, can you talk me through how this website came about? Because DNA Painter has changed my life and I often talk about how genealogy has helped. Sorry, how DNA has helped, right, how to help my genealogy. But DNA Painter, johnny, is just a game changer, so can you talk me through it?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I'll try and be sort of brief, but obviously there's quite a lot to it. But the gist is I was also late coming to DNA, really late. I took my test at the end of 2016,. Right, so that's 16 years after a family tree DNA was created, for example, and I didn't really understand much about it either when I started, like most people, but it just so happened, I was a freelance web developer, right. So when I found out that I, having identified a cousin, I found this cousin who was related via a third great-grandmother, I realized that if I had the segments of DNA that I shared with him, then I could visualize those and I wanted to record that. I was so proud I'd found this connection. I wanted to stick that into something. So I found out what chromosome mapping was, and I developed this application to do chromosome mapping and that's a really fun visual and it's kind of a way of keeping track of who you've identified and which of your ancestors DNA makes up you, right. But the thing you're talking about, or the two things you're talking about, are, in fact, what happened next, right. So, having built this application, I put it out there.

Speaker 2:

Facebook is a really massive platform in terms of communicating with the community at large. So I kind of made friends with lots of people out on Facebook and then I kind of became this guy who was a developer, who was into DNA, and so people would reach out to me. So the first thing I did was I took some data which Blaine Bettinger had produced called the shared CM project, and that's the relationship you enter the number and it tells you what the possible relationships are. And I actually did that without speaking to him, because he's a really interesting guy and he's a genealogist and he's also an intellectual property lawyer. So he made that data available under Creative Commons. So, as long as you give attribution, you can use it. So I felt emboldened to just casually make this little web page, and I honestly didn't think it was all that. When I made it, I was a bit like well, I thought this would be really good, but I'm not sure. I put it out on Facebook and there was a massive, massive reaction to it and I realized that maybe it was quite good after all. So that was nice. And then, very soon after that, we're in the autumn of 2017.

Speaker 2:

There's another genealogist called Lea Larkin, who's based in California, and she had the idea for what are the odds? And she was. She'd worked with another genealogist who's actually an English guy called Andrew Millard, who works up at the University of Durham. He'd helped her with some mathematical stuff and they'd made this app. So the only problem was it was in Google Sheets and it was obviously quite hard to use.

Speaker 2:

It didn't do very much for you. You had to master maths, but you had to enter all the possible relationships manually and obviously it wasn't really viable to go out there. So she said is there anyone who can help me? And I said yes, and she said who are you, you know quite reasonably, and eventually we came to an understanding. I put quite a lot of work in and by I guess, the spring of 2018, we had this app and, yeah, it's probably the most useful thing on the website. Certainly, I was working on a new version of it just before we spoke. It's the sort of app that if you've developed it, you're driven to make it better and better because you can see how much it helps people, which is obviously quite humbling and, yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1:

Can we go back then to what are the odds? So if somebody's just starting out, they've gone on Ancestry and they have seen their cousin matches and they have grouped them into cousins that share DNA with each other, what is the process then of getting that information onto? What are the odds? So if I'm looking for somebody and all I know is this person shares DNA with a group of people on my matches, what's the process?

Speaker 2:

Okay, so the first step is the most difficult one, right? And the funny enough when I talk about it, because you don't use my software to do it. I just say, yeah, well, first you do this. But this is the most difficult bit. The most difficult bit is you take all the people in that cluster and you figure out who they are, you figure out who their parents and their grandparents are and you figure out how they connect and what you're basically doing is building a little mini family tree which is their tree and then, because you're genetically related to these people, that kind of means it's in your tree too. Their tree is a part of your tree. Yeah, so what are the odds is doing is helping you join their tree to your tree by fitting you into their tree, basically. So the next part of the process, having built that tree, you come to DNA Painter. You go to what are the odds and you either just by hand say, okay, well, I've got this common ancestral couple, then they've got this child called Stephen, I've got another child called that. You build it out that way, you add the centimorgans in that you share with the people in that tree, or if say you've been on ancestral. You've been in your local family tree software and you've built the tree there. You could export the tree as a GEDCOM, which is a kind of standard family tree format, and you can actually import that straight into my software. So if you've got loads of matches, it might go in a kind of big tree. It might make sense to do it that way.

Speaker 2:

And then the next part of the process is to consider hypotheses about where you might fit into this tree.

Speaker 2:

I'm assuming you're the person who has an unknown parent at this point, but you can use it for more complicated problems, and so what you're doing is having a look at this tree. You know you fit there somewhere, even if you have to go way up, way back in the tree and back down again. Somehow you're genealogically related to these people, based on the genetics, based on these centimorgans of DNA that you share with them. So, yeah, you can go anywhere in the tree and you can say, do I fit here or do I fit here, and it gives you a score. And then also, if you want, you can just say, hey, tell me where you think I might fit. Please suggest some hypotheses, and you can do it that way. So yeah, it's quite complicated. The hardest thing about it, to be honest, is explaining it to people, and I've been trying to explain it to people for five years now and I am slowly getting better at it. But yeah, it's a bit of a challenge, but once you get your head around, it is quite powerful.

Speaker 1:

What I will do. Actually, I'll put a link to the. You did a brilliant YouTube video explaining it and I'll put a link to that in the description of the podcast. So if anybody wants a bit of a longer description, there will be a link in there for you to do that. Where's the technology then going to go next? I mean, this is kind of a combination, isn't it? Obviously you've got you as the computer person, then you've got the math side working out how you are related and the probability of being related. You can kind of rule some people out, can't you be the ages, for example?

Speaker 1:

So if you know, if it's a match with me and they're a lot older than me, then I can more or less rule out that. You know that they're not going to be. You know, my niece put it that way. So you can rule something at some point, can't you be the ages? But where do you think the sort of the technology will eventually go with this, johnny?

Speaker 2:

Well, I'll give you near steps and then possible bigger future steps. So at the moment I'm developing a version of what the odds, which is going to be less confusing because it's going to basically, let you say, I am looking for the unknown father or the unknown mother of this person who was born in this year. So at the moment, if you're looking for a grandparent or a great grandparent, you can do it, but it's really confusing because you have to keep adding the tree down to where you are. So this new version is going to kind of automate that process for you. It's going to add so just say that you, michaela, were looking for your great grandfather, right, the mother, so let's say, the father of your grandmother. You can actually say that. You're saying you could say I'm looking for the father of my grandmother. She was born in, I know, 1940 and you can see, and we're going to use my DNA, michaela's DNA, and I'm her granddaughter, and then that basically makes it. It demystifies the process.

Speaker 2:

There's a big wall at the moment at the front of one of the odds which stops a lot of people from understanding it, and the effect of people asking me the same questions for four years is that I finally reprogrammed it to make it easier to use for these things. So that's been going on. I'm trying to make it a bit smarter in terms of the suggestions it makes. At the moment, theoretically, it might suggest a woman when you're looking for a man, because I don't ask for that information, so it's becoming slightly more accessible. But the fundamental technology of it is obviously there's these simulations which dictate what those probabilities are. So there are simulations that say, ok, well, if it's the first cousin and you share 440 centimorgans of DNA, well, that's possible, but it's not that likely and it comes up with this number. Now, those simulations are the source of debate. You know they're actually derived from a white paper that came out in 2016. We've tried improving them, in inverted commas, by using some more recent stuff. It hasn't universally made it better. Some relationships is better, some is worse.

Speaker 2:

I'm sure that that whole side of it is going to change a lot over the next few years. There's more and more scientific work being done. Leia, who came up with the idea, for what the odds is, developing a separate app which is using a different approach, which is aimed at helping people who are related to people in lots of different ways. There's potentially lots of, lots of new paths. My new version of what the odds will let you load in different probabilities, potentially from different places, while using the same kind of architecture. My aim is to make the user interface is really nice to use and basically understandable as possible for people, so that hopefully, the technology can do its thing in the background without being overwhelming to people.

Speaker 2:

But in the future, I guess the big thing will be hopefully getting AI to help a little bit with the genealogy of it. I'm always slightly skeptical about that, but this seems like a good case for it, doesn't it? If you've got all of these different people, different DNA matches, you've got a tree or a list of names for some of them, or you can gather a list of names, surely a bit of automation to help you make those connections and fit those people together should be possible. There are people who've tried to do that a little bit, but I don't think any of the big companies have really tried super hard to do. We've got through lines, we've got theories of family relativity, my heritage, but yeah, I think there's more scope for better performance for those types of parts of the technology.

Speaker 1:

Are there any other aspects of the website that you think people that are new to looking at their DNA should pay attention to?

Speaker 2:

Well, one thing I'd like to give a little shout out to, just because it's new and I think it's quite accessible, is the DNA coverage tool. Have you ever used that, michaela? No, I haven't. You haven't ever heard of that one.

Speaker 2:

Well, it looks a bit like what are the odds, except it's got a different color scheme and it's quite interesting because it's a way of figuring out how much of an ancestor's DNA is statistically likely to be represented by their descendants who've tested.

Speaker 2:

So the example I often give is if, say, you have an unknown second great grandfather, probably a lot of us have got one or two of those right At least. Yeah, so what you can do is you can see which descendants of them have tested. And so essentially, just like in what the odds, you import a tree and you say you know, put let's just call him James Smith, right? So put James Smith at the top, and you don't know who his mother and father are. So what you want to do is get as much of his DNA as possible so that potentially you might have more matches to irrelevant to his parents. So if you test as many of his descendants as possible, you can see what percentage you're at. So, say you, maybe you've tested a couple of cousins. You might be up to 32% of his DNA. Then you might think, well, how can I get more? I don't know who his parents were, so it will suggest to you who you should test in the tree in order to get more of James Smith DNA represented.

Speaker 1:

Wow, how do you even think of these things, Johnny? Are you like? Are you like walking the dog or something? And just these things?

Speaker 2:

No, I didn't think of it. Actually I am. There's a guy called Paul Woodbury. He's a genealogist, really nice guy. He works for a company, legacy Tree, in Salt Lake City. He met me and talked to me about this years ago. I said, yeah, that's a really cool idea. We'll have to do that. I was in 2019 and I launched it last year. So, yeah, it took a while. But yeah, now I realize I had the interface to do it and what I need to do is I need to be able to see that I can actually push that boulder up the hill and just get it done. And I couldn't quite see away for a few years.

Speaker 2:

I figured out how I could do it. It was a bit of a mind bender to do the maths. To be honest, leia Larkham is also involved with that and she's always quite a good person to have on board with the maths. But yeah, we got it working and yeah, it's just a really nice, pleasant way to lay out a tree and you can do colour coding and you could just use it as a tree visualizer or a match visualizer even. But yeah, from the coverage perspective, I think it's probably a bit underused at the moment, so I wanted to mention that.

Speaker 1:

I probably use the prediction part of the website the most because I'm always just pointing people in and thinking how can these, you know, how are these sort of related? So I'll put it in and it'll come up and it's great because it gives you all the different variations of how that's then to Morgan. You know how you might be related to a person with that number of cents. Morgan.

Speaker 2:

Have you had a look at the and I've got really interesting. Sorry to bother you. What is this? Okay, right, so Go on.

Speaker 1:

I've got a website up here, so I'm going to have a look.

Speaker 2:

Go on. So when you're in the shared CM tool and you enter a number so I don't know 200 or something, so what happens then, is the grid of relationships narrows, doesn't it? Some of them get grayed out and some of them are still visible. So that's how you come under those relationships. What do you see? Yeah, a little overlay comes up, and what it shows you is what the distribution of contributions were. For that you getting there.

Speaker 1:

Right, ok, so what I've done now. So I've put, I've got somebody who we share 256 centimorgans.

Speaker 2:

Very good.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I don't know who they are Right, so I can't quite know who they are.

Speaker 2:

That's a big one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm going to be in the country Straight away. If you've not done this before, I'm going to talk you through it. So you go on the shared CM project on DNA Painter and it asks you for the total number of centimorgans for your match. So I've put in 256. Then as I scroll down, it gives me a percentage of how they may be related right to me. So, for example, I've got a half great aunt or uncle, I've got a second cousin, and it goes on and goes on. And then if you go down again, highlighted in blocks of a family tree, and it gives you the centimorgans of the range of how they can be related to you, you'll see that the ones that could be a potential match are highlighted. They're bright, ah right, ok. So then if you click on one of the highlighted matches, it actually gives you a table, doesn't it Johnny? And it gives you like a graph.

Speaker 2:

I've got like a little graph and a red arrow. It's just a red arrow. Yeah, the red arrow shows you the number you've put in.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and to be clear, you can also click on any of the relationships at the top with the percentages to get to that as well, and it's just quite a useful insight into where I mean. To be clear, some relationships are kind of you share an unusually high or an unusually low amount. That can happen right, but it shows you how unlikely it is. So if you find it's way off and it's only just about within range, you can say to yourself OK, well, this could be like a one in a million chance or one in 10,000. Or maybe I should think about other possibilities.

Speaker 1:

So I've got a friend who doesn't know who her granddad is and unfortunately her dad is passed away so we couldn't test him and it's on the paternal line, it's his dad. She has got a match on ancestry that is 506. The person, yeah, and the person who's match it is. I've sent a message to and she's come back and she doesn't know who her dad is and she was born in the 1930s. So I've just put that number in and it's coming up as a potential great great aunt or uncle, half great uncle, half great niece and nephew, great great niece and nephew, half first cousin, first cousin. Wants removed, now, that is 90%, right. So that is a pretty high percentage, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

It's very likely to be one of those.

Speaker 1:

So do you think it could be yeah, or 6%? It could be, for example, great-grandparent? I don't think it's a great-grandparent because she's not old enough.

Speaker 2:

Sure.

Speaker 1:

It could be a half aunt or uncle, which would be really useful because obviously then you know they would both share. So both this lady and my friend's dad, who's unfortunately no longer with us, would share the same dad, if that makes sense. They would be half siblings, so that would be really interesting. But have you found with the predictions and the probabilities that they are pretty accurate, as in like, people are coming back to you and saying, yeah, you know what, I was not in the 4%, I was in sort of the 90%, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 2:

It's a good question. I'm not sure I know the answer to that exactly. What people come back and say is thank you for the tool, it's nice and easy to use, but it doesn't do the work for you. I mean, you'll notice, it doesn't give you a super, super specific answer. There is, but I'll finish saying this before I introduce you to something else. But I mean, a lot has changed since I first brought that tool out.

Speaker 2:

The tool is about nearly six years old now the version with the probabilities and quite soon after we launched that tool, Ancestry added probabilities to their own site. So I think they thought, oh, this guy's doing this, this looks cool. I don't know what will happen, but it appears to be what happened. So they added them. That was great, yeah. And then, and then recently, my heritage added quite a cool tool to their website that uses age as well. And then there's another developer that uses the number of segments as well.

Speaker 2:

So there's a few different things out there now, which is really cool because it means you've got comparisons. Some of them take the approach of OK, I've got the ages, I've got the segments, I reckon it's probably this. So they just sort of give you one or two possibilities, and that is both a blessing and a curse, because in a lot of cases it's like, yeah, sure, the ages dictate that this is probably your uncle, not your nephew. But in some cases it says, yeah, it's your, it's your, it's your half uncle, whereas actually it's your half brother and they didn't really know that. But they gave a kind of certainty that you didn't want. So I think you always have to take a breath and consider it.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, there's loads of different things out there. So the approach of the Shared Seeing Project honestly, I've refined it a bit over the years, but it hasn't changed that much. It basically says, well, look, I don't know who this is, but here's who it isn't. Yeah, right, and here's here's. Here's a lot of possibilities for you and here's some tools for you to try and refine that. And one thing which I think the latest development with the tool is there's a version where you can enter two numbers. Right.

Speaker 1:

So if you've tested, yes, I think your friend, yeah, maybe her.

Speaker 2:

Maybe she has a sibling who's who's tested as well, maybe she doesn't, but let's say she has for this purpose. And if the sibling shared, you know, nine hundred cents of organs with unknown match, that'd be amazing. So that's what this other version of the tool does. It lets you enter two numbers If you've got two people who are at the same distance from the unknown match, and then it helps to refilter that kind of grid of relationships.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you want to sit on the fence with this question, right, it's perfectly fine, but there are obviously a lot of different DNA companies out there. Have you got one test you prefer over another? If somebody is listening to this now and thinking of buying a test for Christmas, maybe, or they're thinking of doing a test themselves is there one company that you favor over another, or are they all pretty similar?

Speaker 2:

It really depends on what you want out of it. If you're looking for unknown family, then essentially you probably want to be in all of them, don't you eventually? So it's almost just about who do you pick first. So there are two companies where you can't transfer your test to them. Those are Ancestry and 23andMe. So those are the two you've probably paid to test with first. If you're looking to cover all your bases and then you can transfer in potentially to MyHeritage, to Family Tree DNA and also to LivingDNA, then there's also two additional databases, jedmatch and Geninet, which you might want to consider going to In terms of the DNA tests themselves. I mean, they all do the job pretty well. All of the companies have got their own strengths and weaknesses with their tools. I recommend all of them. To be honest, I don't have any favorites.

Speaker 1:

How has DNA changed? Your research then, Johnny.

Speaker 2:

You know I'm going to be completely honest with you, not quite as much as I wanted or hoped that it would. The reason for that is twofold. One is my own ancestry. So one thing that DNA can't do is do the actual paper research for you. The problem with me is I'm half Irish, so the paper research does hit not a completely impregnable wall, but it's much, much harder as you go back. If I had the English paper records for some of my Irish DNA matches, I'm sure I would have gotten much, much further, but because I'm half Irish I don't have that.

Speaker 2:

So what DNA has given me on that is lots of these trees where I know that I'm connected to them, but I currently the genealogy to actually link me to those trees is out of my reach, which is a shame, and the big breakthrough that I've had in the last five or 10 years isn't even really proven by DNA. I've proven it to my complete satisfaction with genealogy, but the only DNA matches I've found but because it's an unknown, it's my mother's great-grandmother. I managed to place her in the correct Scottish family. So essentially what I was doing was finding out a set of third-great-grandparents for me. Well, third-great-grandparent isn't the DNA signal within me from those third-great-grandparents is variable, isn't it? Some people might. For some of my third-great-grandparents I might have inherited a lot of DNA from them. For these I might not. So, when it comes down to it, I have found people who are descended from this family that the DNA connection is pretty weak, and if I wasn't certain of the genealogy then I'd have been like, oh well, this doesn't prove anything.

Speaker 2:

So I have had some massive, massive breakthroughs. I've helped a lot of people find unknown parents and this sort of thing. But within my own genealogy I found out about a lot of siblings of people who I didn't know existed before. I found out about some interesting branches who went to different places. But I'm still waiting for my big breakthrough. Now, this isn't just because of my ancestry. Part of it is because I've been too busy building tools to be doing my own research all the time. I do what we call. I do what we call dog-fooding, which is a development term where you use your own software. I do do that.

Speaker 1:

It's so funny. Actually, I was filming yesterday and the person who I was filming with, who is like a celebrity, turned around to me and said oh, say to them, mikaela, how far have you gone back with your tree? And you know it's that question. You think not far enough, because I've been too busy helping everybody else and too busy doing research for everybody else that I never actually get time to spend on my own tree. And Jennifer Doyle, who's been on, who's from Progen, will tell you I think she spent just as much time looking into my Irish ancestors for me as I have, because I just never have time.

Speaker 1:

I'm so busy trying to find everybody else's ancestors that, unfortunately, I might have got to take a bit of a backseat. I think I must have hit a brick wall a while ago and I just thought I'll go back to it. I'll be honest, johnny, I haven't gone back to it yet. Every time a new record comes out yeah, every time a new record comes out, don't go wrong. I'm the first person to put all their details in a new record. If you didn't see the live that I did with Find my Past a couple of weeks ago, if you have any Manchester ancestors or should I say greater Manchester ancestors? They've just released 25 million new records, so it is worth, by the way, checking out.

Speaker 1:

Find my Past, if you have got any Manchester collections because they've just released a load of new records and we love a new record drop. So when the records dropped I was frantically putting all the names in seeing if I can find any more information on them. But I just don't really get time, I'm too busy doing everybody else's.

Speaker 2:

To be honest, I make the time, whatever goes on.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you see, you're so much better than me. You're so much better than me, Johnny.

Speaker 2:

I make the time but I get nowhere because I've got a really small pool of names. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, I must admit, it's my Irish side that I think has stopped me dead in my tracks. So all my, I think when Jenny came over Jenny's based in Dublin we had a look at my because we had an update on my DNA to say that. You know, my ethnicity estimate has been updated and I think I figured out I was actually more Irish than Jenny, who is Irish, which was yeah, well, you're probably I'm half Irish and you're almost certainly more Irish than me.

Speaker 2:

I'm mostly Scottish.

Speaker 1:

They say Can I just say a huge, huge thank you for kicking off this season of the podcast. Johnny, you have the best name in genealogy and if you are doing any updates on the website or you've got anything new coming out, please, please, jump back on and talk to us. I know for a fact our listeners would love to hear about it.

Speaker 2:

Very good. Thanks so much for having me on, Michaela, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

So that is it, then, for this week. We will be back next week with a new edition of the podcast. Thank you so much for listening and, yeah, we are back for a brand new season. Don't forget, if you need to contact me, you can do so via my website, which is wwwmacalahewcom, and I'm going to leave some links in the description below to DNA Painter and some of the other websites that we have been talking about. Have a great week researching folks. Thank you so much. Perfect safetyers that have been ready to work on those projects. Ok, so good. Thanks, 뼛backstage. I'm going to then say good luck to you folks.