The X match
One of the most exciting things about working with DNA testing in genealogy is how fast things are changing, and how much we can learn with new tools that are becoming available.
And boy did that make The Legal Genealogist‘s heart glad this past week.
Because we’re pretty confident now that we’ve found Charlie, a missing member of the family, thanks to XDNA matching and a really neat new tool called the Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer — ADSA, for short.
Let me set the stage here.
My third great grandparents, Martin and Elizabeth (Buchanan) Baker have long been thought to have had six children — four sons and two daughters.1
Four of the children — sons David Davenport Baker, William Baker and Josiah Alexander Baker and daughter Martha Louisa Baker (my own 2nd great grandmother) — are now well documented.
But two of the children — son Charles and daughter Susan — had somehow fallen into oblivion. Where had they gone? What had happened to them? The available documentation didn’t give us an easy answer.
Some months ago, my first cousin and fellow genealogist Paula picked up on the available clues and started out on Charlie’s trail. She found a good candidate, one who unfortunately died young, in Kaufman County, Texas, in 1869.2
Although she found children that looked like they were Charlie’s, including an oldest daughter, Susan, the records just weren’t enough to say that this was our Charlie.
And then I took my first look at the new tool, the Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer. The ASDA is part of the set of tools at DNAGedcom, a major DNA tools site developed for initially the benefit of adoptees trying to use genetic genealogy to discover their own biological identities and now available to all. Rob Warthen, Karin Corbeil and the whole team at DNAGedcom are just terrific.
Their new tool ASDA was developed by Don Worth, a retired IT professional. What it does is take your raw data and your in-common-with matches from either 23andMe or Family Tree DNA ((correction: this only works with Family Tree DNA data now!) and plot them out in a graphical presentation that makes it so very much easier than it’s ever been before to spot patterns.
You have to register on the site to use it, but everything including the ASDA is free. There are instructions on how to use the ASDA and some sample output to play with before you consider using your own data.
And this tool only works with autosomal DNA results — results from the Family Tree DNA Family Finder test or the 23andMe test (see correction above).
But let me tell you: it’s one thing to see a match list, or even a list of matches you have in common. It’s something else again to see a chart like the one you see above — all nicely and neatly color coded to tell you that all these folks match you and match each other in the same place on the same chromosome. That tells you this is a pattern to follow up on.
So I started playing with the tool, checking out different family members and their results. And one of the patterns that started coming up was a match to a new cousin, Joe. And particularly intriguing was the fact that he has an XDNA match to two of my cousins.
I sent an email off to his contact address, got a response from his lady who’s the family genealogist, and an invitation to see his tree.
And he descends from that Charles Baker… through that oldest daughter Susan.
Now the autosomal evidence is good. He matches all the people he should match to be a Baker cousin match. But we have just enough unknowns on that side of the family to want more.
So I took this new DNA cousin’s line of descent and that of the two cousins to whom he has an XDNA match, and plotted them out on The Genetic Genealogist Blaine Bettinger’s great XDNA match charts.
You see, because of the way the X chromosome is handed down, there are fewer ancestors who could possibly have contributed DNA to that chromosome. In a male, only his mother’s ancestors could have contributed since he only gets an X from his mother (he gets the Y that makes him male from his father).3
If we were right here — if our new cousin’s Charlie Baker was our Charlie Baker, son of Martin and Elizabeth — it would have to show up on those charts. Each of the cousins would have to have a way for the DNA to travel down the generations from our common ancestor to them.
For every cousin, the XDNA had to come down five generations in a particular way. It didn’t have to be exactly the same way for each of the three men, but there were some paths it couldn’t travel — it could never make it, for example, if there were two males in a row.
I started coloring boxes and held my breath…
Take a look.
Dick and David are my known cousins. Dick’s (and my) great grandfather is the older brother of David’s great grandfather. Joe is our new DNA cousin.
In both cases, the yellow is the path the XDNA would have to take between the person being tested and Elizabeth (Buchanan) Baker, who is circled in red.
And the path works for them all.
If Joe’s Bakers had been on his father’s side, we wouldn’t have gotten an X match at all. If the Bakers had been on his mother’s father’s father’s side… it wouldn’t have worked. Or if Dick’s or David’s Bakers had been on their mother’s father’s side, it wouldn’t have worked.
But the path works for them all.
Hello, Charlie. Welcome (back) to the family.
SOURCES
- Elma W. Baker, The Rugged Trail, Vol. II (Dallas, TX: p.p., 1973), 23, citing family Bible records and individuals who reported information to him. ↩
- 1870 U.S. census, Kaufman County, Texas, mortality schedule, page not shown on image, Chas. K. Baker; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 1 Feb 2014); citing National Archive microfilm publication T1134, roll 10. ↩
- See generally Judy G. Russell, “X marks the spot,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 5 Jan 32014 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 1 Feb 2014). ↩
So…..the chart shows that Dick and David’s mother’s mother’s father’s mother’s mother is the same as Joe’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s mother? Too cool!
It is just that cool, Ginny!
Can someone send me the name of a DNA genealogist I could hire to help me with my line in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area?
Thank you.
Karen
You may not find one immediately in the Dallas area, Karen, but there are a number of folks out there…
Debbie Parker Wayne is a genetic genealogist in Texas.
You say you’re “pretty confident now” that you’ve found Charlie. Could you please elaborate on why you’re only “pretty confident”?
Thanks very much.
Linda
I haven’t had a chance to eliminate the outside chance that there’s any other candidate for that shared XDNA. All the colored segments are possible candidates, and though it’s very unlikely there could be second line that’s shared, I need to at least look through those options to be able to go beyond “pretty confident” to “doggoned sure unless and until something else shows up that I didn’t see before”!
Thank you so much for the kind words about my little program, Judy! I’m so glad people are finding it useful and it is fun to read about how that happens. And, yes, Rob and I are working on a way to get ADSA working with 23andMe match data too!
Don
Don, that “little program” is the best thing since sliced bread for really being able to see the patterns that are so important in analyzing autosomal DNA results. Major league kudos to you… and major league thanks!! Glad to hear a 23andMe version is being considered!
Thank you so much for posting about this tool. It is a wonderful tool, allowing you to compare much of the information you had to use multiple screens for on FTDNA, such as the chromosome browser and the matrix tool. You can also read the family names, etc., right from this one screen as well as save the information to your documents.
I first learned about the tool on Jan 9 when Roberta Estes posted about it in her blog. When my sister’s autosomal results became available after the Xmas sale, I was surprised to see that our 2nd-4th cousin lists were different – no overlap. For the most part they were listed as 3-5th cousins in FTDNA, though a few I did not find at all. I had already played with the matrix tool and the browser to compare the 2-4th cousins on each list, but both tools allow only a small group of comparisons. This tool allowed me to look at a much larger pool and see how my sister’s list and my list compared and how the segments differed for each of us.
This really allows you to see how we each receive a “different deck of cards” from our ancestors. It also allows you to see a large group of people and how they have particular segments in common. It is interesting that despite the large number of matching segments for my sister and I, there were cousin matches that show no segment matches with one of us – at least not in the range (5cM and 5th cousin) I designated – so any match would be outside of a 5th cousin range.
If you have Ashkenazi ancestry please read the special instructions when using this tool. Because I have only one Jewish parent it is possible you will need to be more limiting – I started smaller and then went larger.
Your discussion of the X chromosome tool shows how I can build on what I have learned from the ADSA and take it another step with my x matches.
Glad this helped take you a little further down the road with the tool, Carolyn!
I love the possibilities this tool offers, but I have some questions about privacy and ethical issues involved in using it. I read DNAgedcom’s Website Agreement but didn’t find answers to my concerns there:
1. What is DNAgedcom’s privacy policy and where can one read it?
2. Right now who has access to the data a user uploads from Family Tree DNA?
3. Are there any guarantees that the data collected will be subject to the current privacy policy if the website ownership changes?
4. Should a user seek permission of his/her matches before uploading files that include information about them? (That hardly seems practical considering that many FTDNA customers have hundreds of matches, but my understanding of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ Code of Ethics is that it prohibits publishing or posting information about the living without permission.)
I very much appreciate the DNAgedcom volunteers’ generosity in making the ADSA tool available to the genealogical community and certainly don’t intend for my questions to cast doubt on their standards. I just want to be sure I know how to use it responsibly.
Thanks very much.
Hi Linda. You have great questions and I will try to answer them here.
Our policy on the data is that the data is your data. We do not and will not share it with anyone else without your permission. That is why you have to log into the site to be able to access the data. We use one way password encryption on your login to ensure that your password can not be taken. We only use third party passwords you provide to us to login and we do not store that password for other use. The data that your provide is stored on the web server so that you can do additional things with it. Karin (who answers support e-mails) and I are the only people with access to this folder.
We will be adding “third party” developers such as Don to be able to use this system. However, he does not have direct access to the data. He installs his program in a test area and I review the code and move it to production. This provides for an additional level of security and to ensure that your data stays your data.
I’ll leave the question of permission to others. However, I will state that we will strive to give the users the tools so they can state what level of sharing they are comfortable with. Of course when we add sharing, you will need to opt into sharing and we will try to give a granularity to that sharing.
Finally, if there is someone out there with experience building a privacy policy, I’d love to talk to you about building one for our site. This is entirely a volunteer group and we do not get paid for our work so we have to wait for donations to cover any costs that we have as we grow.
If anyone has any other questions, feel free to e-mail me at Rob.Warthen@dnagedcom.com and I’ll be happy to answer.
One thing I’d add on the permissions issue is that the only tool that shows information about matches is the segment analyzer, and it’s not showing any information that the person tested can’t see — albeit in more steps and taking more time — on Family Tree DNA’s site itself. For example, the only person who sees information about my matches (or those of kits I have permission to manage) is me, and it’s the same information I can see on Family Tree DNA itself.
So you’re saying a registered user has access only to information from the kit(s) he himself has uploaded and can’t browse through other users’ uploads? I hope so, because one of my concerns has been that some people who are comfortable with letting their matches access information they’ve uploaded within the FTDNA website might not want their names and e-mail addresses or their match information posted to an outside website without their knowledge or consent if that would enable non-matching individuals to access their information. Keeping my fingers crossed while waiting for your reply!
Rob can answer this with more precision, but it looks like you understand it correctly, Linda. I can only see and access the kits that are linked to my registered name.
That is correct. A user has access only to the data they can see from their website, albeit all pulled together. They do not have access to any other users uploads.
I should add that in the future, we will add some sharing capabilities, but you will control what is shared. We might do this, for example, to allow a Search Angel or an Genealogist access to the information so they can help. You will have to explicitly choose to share, though.
I certainly will be listening to thoughts of the community on sharing. 🙂
Thanks very much for the confirmation, Rob. Your proposed sharing capabilities sound both helpful and appropriate to me.
Many thanks for your good work.
Hi, Rob,
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions in such detail. I’m looking forward to getting started.
When you say that the tool does not work with 23andMe–do you mean that it will not work with the new v4 test, but it works if you have older results from v3?
Unfortunately, no, it doesn’t work with any 23andMe data yet at all, whether V3 or V4. The developers hope to get it working with 23andMe data soon.
“if our new cousin’s Charlie Baker was our Charlie Baker, son of Martin and Elizabeth — it would have to show up on those charts”
Wait. A couple of weeks ago, you showed that sometimes the X recombines all to one side, not the ~50/50 that we are used to with regular autosomal. So is there not a possibility that it could be true but would not show up?.
Israel, I think you may have missed the fact that these folks all DID have an X-match. To be the RIGHT match, they all needed to share the path showed. It is significant that they DID have it, but only because they already had the X-match. If they hadn’t had an X match, that wouldn’t have disproved anything. Does that help?