Story: Family Tree DNA confirms two NFL players are half-siblings

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I received this press release from Max Blankfeld of FamilyTreeDNA today.  It's interesting to me for both the DNA aspects and the fact that one of the half-brothers is a San Diego Charger football player:

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Family Tree DNA confirms two NFL players are half-siblings.

 

 

Family Tree DNA, the pioneer and largest DNA testing company for genealogy purposes, through its Family Finder test, provided the conclusive proof that two NFL players are half-siblings.

Until a few months ago, Xavier Omon, from the San Francisco 49ers and Ogemdi Nwagbuo from the San Diego Chargers did not have a clue that they were related. Early August, at the request of ESPN, Family Tree DNA performed the Family Finder test on both, and the result was unequivocal: definitely half-siblings. More of the story can be found at the ESPN website, under the “Brother’s Tale” story [titled A brothers' tale for Omon, Nwagbuo.].

The Family Finder test allows connecting with family members across all ancestral lines. While the Y-DNA matches men with a specific paternal line and the mtDNA finds potential relatives only along the maternal line, Family Finder can look for close relationships along all ancestral lines. Anyone, regardless of their gender, may confidently match to male and female cousins from any of their family lines in the past five generations. The science is based on linked blocks of DNA across the 22 autosomal chromosomes that are matched between two people.

Based on this concept, Family Tree DNA bioinformatics team has worked extensively to develop the calculations that would yield the closeness of the relationship.

The possibilities to find matches abound: grandparents, aunts and uncles; half siblings; first, second, third and fourth cousins; and, more tentatively, fifth cousins.

About Family Tree DNA

Founded in April 2000, Family Tree DNA was the first company to develop the commercial application of DNA testing for genealogical purposes, something that had previously been available only for academic and scientific research. Almost a decade later, the Houston-based company has a database with over 345,000 individual records – the largest DNA database in genetic genealogy, and a number that makes Family Tree DNA the prime source for anyone researching recent and distant family ties. In 2006 Family Tree DNA established a state of the art Genomics Research Center at its headquarters in Houston, Texas, where it currently performs R&D and processes over 200 advanced types of DNA tests for its customers.

Media contact

Sharon Weisz, —tel: 323-934-2700; e-mail: Sharon@familytreedna.com

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CVGS Meeting on Saturday, 3 September on Pennsylvania Research

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The September 2011 Workshop for the Chula Vista Genealogical Society (CVGS) is Saturday, 3 September, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Bonita-Sunnyside Library (4375 Bonita Road in Bonita).

The workshop will be "Research Methods in Pennsylvania," presented by Susi Pentico, the CVGS Education Chair.

Planning for my visit to Dane County, Wisconsin

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After writing Planning for my visit to Dodge County, Wisconsin, I started working on planning to visit Dane County, Wisconsin (two counties southwest of Dodge County). 

I want to do research at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, looking for information about my Smith and Vaux families of Dodge County, but also information about my wife's Severson/Leland and Erikson/Natvig families that immigrated from Norway in the 1850s and settled in Deerfield and Cottage Grove towns, respectively. 

I had hopes that the homes might still be standing, so I needed to find out where the two families resided.  Fortunately, Ancestry.com has plat maps for 1873, 1890, 1899 and 1911 for Dane county and I easily found the maps for the two towns. 

Here is the town map of Dane County from 1873:

Cottage Grove town is two towns east of Madison, and Deerfield is three towns east of Madison.

The map of Deerfield from 1873 is shown below :

Looking carefully, I found T. Severson (Torger Sjurson) in Section 23 (three up, two over from the lower right-hand corner of the map above).  His land is the Southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 23.  This map page says that Deerfield town is Township 7 North, Range 12 East of the 4th Principal Meridian in Wisconsin. 

So how can I find that place on a current map?  I used Google Maps to see the road map and the satellite map for the area, but could not figure out exactly where the land was because the roads are different now than they were in the plat maps. 

I recalled attending Pam Sayre's class at FGS 2009, and Lisa Louise Cooke's class at Jamboree in 2010 about using Earthpoint and Google Earth to define the location of the Section.  I wrote about it in Using Google Earth to find land location in the Public Land Survey System States in 2009.

I knew the section description, so I went to the www.Earthpoint.us page for Township and Range - Public Land Survey System on Google Earth and entered the Section information, then clicked on the "Fly To on Google Earth" button, and saw:

Section 23 is outlined in magenta in the screen above.  I zoomed in to the Section and saw:

Fortunately, you can see some of the outlines of the 40 acre plots from the survey, especially in the Southeast quarter.  Zooming in some more to the Southeast quarter:

There's a house on this property in the current satellite map.  It is on North Fair Oak Road, just south of Fair Oak Road and north of London Road.

I found the Erikson/Natvig property in Cottage Grove too, and one of the roads through the current property is called Natvig Road.  However, there does not appear to be a house on the property now.

The 1890 plat map of Deerfield indicates that the property was owned by by C. Kufahl in 1890 (SE quarter of SE quarter, 40 acres), by Wm. Kufahl in 1899 (now S half of SE quarter, 80 acres), by Wm. Kufahl in 1904 (S half of SE quarter, 80 acres), and by Wm. Keufahl in 1911 (S half of SE quarter, 80 acres).

It appears that Torger Severson (later Torger Leland after the family adopted the Leland name before 1880) sold the property before 1890.  T. Leland and O. Leland are listed with the London post office on the 1890 plat map. 

Aren't these online tools cool? 

(Not So) Wordless Wednesday - Post 168: Bess and Gerry at the Train Station

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I'm posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be Wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.
Before I started this (Not So) Wordless Wednesday series, I posted The best picture from Gerry's collection that showed my grandmother (Alma Bessie (Richmond) Seaver) and my Aunt Geraldine Seaver posing with my father (Frederick W. Seaver) and mother, and my maternal grandparents, at the San Diego train station in July 1942, just before my parents wedding.

Here is a photograph from the Geraldine (Seaver) Remley albums that I received after her death in 2007:

This picture is of my grandmother, Alma Bessie (Richmond) Seaver (1882-1962) and her daughter, Geraldine Seaver (1917-2007), arriving at the San Diego train station in July 1942.  My understanding is that they came all the way from Leominster, Massachusetts on the train, no doubt changing trains at several stops along the way. 

My first reaction to this picture was "I'll bet they 'freshened up' and 'changed clothes' after they got off the train and before they took this picture."  Nobody could look that good after three days (?) on the train - wearing dresses, jackets, hats, gloves, pearls and heels (and who knows what else?) in July.

I wish that I could ask Aunt Gerry about this - I'm sure that there's a story here for a 25-year-old young lady traveling with her mother to see her brother get married.

Dear Randy: Tell me about Syncing FTM 2012 and Ancestry

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My colleague DearMYRTLE asked a question in a comment on my post "Thinking About Software, Online Trees and Syncing":

Randy, when Syncing FTM2012 to Ancestry Trees and back, does it upload and download the attached document files? THAT would really be wonderful, even if you had to take a break from the computer for the task to be accomplished.

DearMYRT:  YES, it does, flawlessly.  And fairly quickly, if you've added only a few media items since the last synchronization.

As long as you understand these four things:

1)  The sync occurs from within Family Tree Maker 2012.  You have to upload your tree to a new Ancestry Member Tree (AMT) from the 'Plan" workspace in FTM 2012.  That tree in FTM 2012 can have the media files (documents, photos, audio, video) attached to Persons or Facts in your FTM database, and they will appear in the new Ancestry Member Tree "synced" to FTM 2012.  We had this feature in FTM 2011 - the media went from FTM 2012 to a new Ancestry Member Tree when we pushed the Upload button in FTM 2011.

Depending on the selected setting when you set up the FTM 2012 to AMT syncing, the syncing occurs either manually (you press a "Sync Now" button in FTM 2012) or automatically (when you save, as long as you have the Internet active, are logged into Ancestry, and have FTM 2012 open).

2)  Once the Ancestry Member Tree has been created, then the user can go into their AMT, edit persons, facts, notes, sources, and attach even more media to persons in the tree by uploading files from their computer into the AMT.  The information and media changed in the AMT will be downloaded to the FTM 2012 when synchronized.

3)  But, and it's a big but, if you have "Saved" an Ancestry.com record to a Fact in your Ancestry Member Tree, then the image of that document is not in the Media tab in your AMT or your FTM 2012 file.  The source citation created by Ancestry for the document is in both the AMT and FTM 2012 files, but the image is not.  From within the AMT, you can "View Image and "View Record" when in the "Facts and Sources" tab for a specific person.  From within the AMT, you can attach a media file, but only from your own computer file folders, not from the Ancestry collection.

UPDATE:  Duff Wilson, a Family Tree Maker developer, wrote in Comments to this post:

"Related to point number three above, an update for the Family Tree Maker 2012 Beta was just released today which addresses this. With this update, Ancestry record images that are attached to your online tree are downloaded to Family Tree Maker automatically subsequent to the next sync."

That is good news!  Back to the original post:

4)  The FTM 2012 user can use the "Web Search" workspace to find online images on Ancestry.com and attach them to persons in the FTM 2012 database.  When you do this, the Ancestry document image is added to the Person and the Facts, and the user can attach these Facts to other family persons.  When you sync the FTM 2012 tree to Ancestry, these media items and sources are uploaded.

So far in my three days of working with the latest FTM 2012 beta program version, this has worked perfectly.  I've done all of those functions, both ways. 

As long as the user keeps their specific Ancestry Member Tree linked to an FTM 2012 file, the user has a true synchronization between the two systems.  If the user unlinks their Ancestry Member Tree from the FTM 2012 file (while in the AMT Tree Settings), then the sync doesn't work any longer.  Likewise, if the user deletes or renames his FTM 2012 file, the AMT tree is unlinked.  In either case, the user can download the current AMT from Ancestry, or upload to a new AMT from FTM 2012.

I hope that explains it clearly.  Why are my posts always so prolix?  Is that a new word for you?  If so, go look it up!

Merge Decisions in Geni.com - Got a Match!

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Yesterday in Merge Decisions in Geni.com - No Match!, I showed the process when there is not a match between your person and the person(s) that Geni.com thinks might be a match to your person.

Today, we'll look at the process when there is a match to your person.  From the "Randall Jeffrey Seaver's Merge Center," I clicked on one of my ancestors, Mary Hazard (1764-1857).  The "Tee Matches" page for her is:

There was one match for her, so I clicked on the check box and then the blue "Compare Profiles" button  to compare the two profiles for Mary Hazard - mine and the other person's.  [Note, I could have clicked on the "Compare profiles" to the right of the screen also] 

When I clicked on "Compare Profiles" I saw:

Here are the two profiles side-by-side.  I decided, based on the information provided (same parents, same spouse, same child) that this was a match, so I clicked on the blue "Yes, merge these profiles" at the bottom of the screen, and saw:

The "Conflicting Data" screen above shows the items that are in conflict between the two person profiles about to be merged.  In this case, it was only the last name - I had "Hazard" (Mary's maiden name) and the other profile had "Oatley" (Mary's husband's surname).  I chose Mary's maiden name (shown in green above) because that is the standard most of us use for female names - we use the name she was born with.

clicking on "Save," I saw:

This screen told me that Mary Hazard was now merged.  I clicked on Mary's name, and saw her profile:

This shows that Mary's profile was added by the other person, and I am listed as a manager along with the other person.

This worked pretty well.  Geni.com makes the decision process pretty easy - you just have to make a judgment.  If I have any doubt, I do not merge the two person profiles. 

One thing that happens when you merge profiles like this is that sometimes the spouses or children or siblings are listed two or more times (depending on how many profiles were merged).  I think that if the names are different (for Mary Hazard Oatley above, there are now sons "Rev. Jonathon Oatley" and "Jonathan Oatley" who are the same person), a separate child is listed.  Now those duplicates need to be merged too. 

I worked my way through all of the "Tree Matches" on my home page yesterday, and today there are 40 more.  This looks like a never ending task. 

Tuesday's Tip - Use Ancestry.com's Free Offerings

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This week's Tuesday Tip is to:  Take advantage of Ancestry.com's FREE offers to use their collections.

This week, Ancestry.com is permitting FREE use of their Immigration collection, in honor of Labor Day (you do have to register for a free account, but not provide a credit card).  There are 331 collections in the Immigration and Travel category in the Card Catalog.  The collection is available for free until 5 September.

At other times, Ancestry has opened specific collections for limited periods of time, usually for a one week period.

Ancestry.com also offers a 14-day free trial to their entire collection for non-subscribers.  You do have to enter a credit card number and cancel before the end of the 14 days if you don't want to subscribe to Ancestry.com. 

The Immigration and Travel collection includes records from the United States and other countries, including England, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, etc.  The collection includes Naturalization records also.  If you don't have an Ancestry subscription, you can use this free week to find records of interest to you from all countries.

Here is a screen shot from my search for surname = Seaver (exact match) in the Immigration collection (from my non-subscriber account):

That list includes record collections for the USA and other countries.

I have a paid U.S. Deluxe subscription to Ancestry.com, so I don't have access to the other record collections.  This week, I'm going to "mine" the Immigration collection for Seaver, Carringer, Whittle, Vaux and several other surnames in some of the non-USA collections.  My target collections include:

*  UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960
*  Canadian Passenger Lists, 1865-1935
*  Border Crossings: From U.S. to Canada, 1908-1935
*  England, Alien Arrivals, 1810-1811, 1826-1869
*  Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934

*  England & Wales, Criminal Registers, 1791-1892
*  Canada, Ocean Arrivals (Form 30A), 1919-1924
*  New South Wales and Tasmania, Australia Convict Musters, 1806-1849
*  New South Wales, Australia, Assisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896
*  New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834
*  New Zealand, Naturalisations, 1843-1981

I had a fun moment last night - my 88-year old neighbor came down to visit on his evening walk.  He escaped from Austria in 1939 and came to America.  I asked him what year he came, and he said 1939.  I quickly found him in the New York Passenger Lists arriving on the ship Comte de Savoia.  I printed out the record summary, the passenger list page, and the picture of the ship and gave it to him.  He had tears in his eyes and thanked me profusely.  He said he had always wondered if there was a record of his immigration.  Then he said that he and his wife went to Europe to visit family in 1949, and returned.  I went and found them on the ship Vulcania and printed that for him too.

New Features in Family Tree Maker 2012

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Tamura Jones alerted me to the message board post titled "What is new in 2012" by suecucch on the FTM Sync Beta board:

"So far in looking at 2012, I don't see anything different from 2011. Can someone tell me what the difference is between the two? The only thing I noticed is that when importing my data, it needed to convert my file to a new designator. So far my data seems to have converted without problems but my file is quite large so I can easily miss something."

Duff Wilson, the leader of the Family Tree Maker 2012 development team, responded with:

"The main new feature is the ability to synchronize your tree between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com and we're especially focused on making sure that works well.

"Here is a list of new features:
1. TreeSync - Ability to synchronize your tree between FTM and Ancestry.
2. Blended family view - Easily show all of the children for two spouses whether they are children of one or both of them.
3. Index of Individuals Report
4. Chart improvements
- Show generation labels
- Add text anywhere on a chart
- Option to limit descendant chart to the direct line between two people
5. Report improvements
- Custom fact sentences (used in genealogy reports & Smart Stories
- Automatic Smart Story generation includes primary individual, spouse, and children
- Research notes report changed to "Notes Report" with options to include other types of notes"

Further down the message board thread, is this comment by Marshall Sinback:

"There appears to be a new option of exporting a 5.5 GEDCOM file that will include media. Is this correct?"

Duff responded with:

"Yes. You can now include media links in the GEDCOM export."

All of those sound like useful upgrade features, but it's the TreeSync feature, to synchronize (either way) your Ancestry Member Tree with your Family Tree Maker 2012 database, that will be the big selling point for the software.  Assuming it works well, of course. 

I have been working with the latest version of FTM 2012 and have found no problems using TreeSync so far adding/deleting persons, adding/deleting facts, adding media, adding/changing sources, etc. in FTM 2012 or the linked Ancestry Member Tree. 

There are some "fine points" about sources that need to be understood, however.  I haven't had any problems with "free-form" sources, but "template" sources can not be edited in the Ancestry Member Tree.  The Tree page for a source created in Family Tree Maker 2012 with a source template has a message "This source uses a Family Tree Maker template that can only be edited in Family Tree Maker." 

Thinking About Software, Online Trees and Syncing

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There were several comments and blog posts referencing my GEDCOM, Software, Online Trees and Syncing post last week, including:

*  Tamura Jones commented:

"What you want is AncestorSync Ultimate :-).  They have no plans to produce that yet, but if more genealogists tell them they want it, who knows..."

I had forgotten that Tamura wrote this back in May 2011.

*  Louis Kessler commented:

"Sounds like what you really want is to do all your adding and editing of your familytree data in one program (in your case, RootsMagic).

"Then in an ideal world, you’d like that one program to do all the functionality needed so that you do not have to load it into other programs. (In your case, you are helping others, but if one program did everything - remember this is an “ideal” world, then you’d simply recommend to others to use this ideal program.)

"Finally, the ideal program would have one button syncing to the one ideal all-inclusive online database that (and this is important) keeps everybody’s data separate - no one but the author can update the author’s data!!! What this ideal online system has is another database of linkages, which allows people to “conclude” that a person in their tree is the same as a person in another tree. Then this online database will “virtually merge” the data for the same people together when displaying it for you (maybe showing your data in one color and other people’s data in another).

"Sadly, I don’t see the industry going this way … yet."

Louis wrote The Ideal Genealogy System on the Louis Kessler Behold Blog shortly after my post, including: 

"First, I’ve written before about my strong feelings against merging data. No matter how well it is sourced, you’ll still lose the context of the original researcher and the work they did. You’ll dilute the work. You’ll incorporate errors made by others (and others may incorporate errors made by you) that may never get detected but get supported by the fact that multiple works of research support them."

*  DearMYRTLE wrote Syncing and GEDCOMing - can someone press the fast forward button? and noted:

"I have no interest in syncing my data in a "borg tree" as Tamura Jones calls them, where another researcher can independently modify my previously uploaded data without my knowledge or permission. (This model is currently expressed by Geni.com and FamilySearch.com among others.) Such a sync would effectively wipe away the integrity of my personal database.

"Ancestry.com trees currently supports a better model for syncing - sorta. There I can accept or ignore suggestions from the trees of other researchers, yet my tree is out there for collaborative purposes. I would like to sync my tree and attached image files with my pc-based data. I do not however, want to be forced to use Family Tree Maker. In fact I use several genealogy management programs for the variety of views, report layouts, etc."
As a result of these shared thoughts, I think I've crystallized my thinking a bit as to what it is I want, informed by the wisdom of my colleagues noted above.  Here are my ideals:

1) The "I-Own-My-Tree" program: 

In my ideal world (I know, we've wandered through this before!), I want to have one master database, with one set of names, relationships, places, sources, facts, media, notes, etc. that I control. But then I want to share that master database with any number of online unconnected family trees and with other software programs.  I want to be able to press one "synchronize" button and everything gets updated.

This ideal synchronization program can read my "master" database, whether in native software format (e.g., RootsMagic, Legacy, Family Tree Maker, Reunion, etc.) or in an online family tree database with unconnected, contributed family trees (e.g., Ancestry.com, Rootsweb WorldConnect, MyHeritage.com, GeneaNet, FindMyPast, etc.). 

I can tell the program where the "master" database is, and the software file types and names I want to sync to, and the online tree file names I want to sync to, and it will synchronize the file in the different software programs and the online trees so that they are all the same.

For example, if my "master" database is in RootsMagic, and I want to sync with my tree on Ancestry Member Trees or MyHeritage, it would do that.  And vice versa.  At present, we only have the FTM 2012 Beta/Ancestry Member Trees sync that works both ways.  Family Tree Builder will sync "up" to MyHeritage, but not down from MyHeritage.

2)  The "Our Shared Tree" program:

This is a program that will synchronize data from my "master" database with one online inter-connected (shared) family tree (e.g., Geni.com, WeRelate.org, WikiTree.com, new FamilySearch Family Tree).

The program could be a stand-alone program (that reads the online tree or software database), or be embedded in genealogy software, like the RootsMagic (and other programs) interface with new FamilySearch Family Tree (that works really well, except for the limitations on sources in nFSFT). Using this feature, the user would select what information to add or change on the Shared Tree, or to download from the Shared Tree to the "master" database, wherever it is. 

Ancestor Sync promises to do this one "source" and one "target" at a time, with a user's choice of each.  But my understanding is that they will do it by creating a whole file in native format (or GEDCOM), not synchronizing person-by-person or fact-by-fact. 

Ancestor Sync also promises to sync with shared trees like Geni.com and new FamilySearch Family Tree, possibly using techniques developed to interface FamilyInsight software with new FamilySearch one person at a time. 

I look forward to seeing how all of this works out!

What say you?  How would you make these ideas work?  Are these ideals even possible? 

Merge Decisions in Geni.com - No Match!

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My dilemma with Geni.com  has been that I uploaded a GEDCOM with over 1,000 persons in my ancestral families back in 2008, but they went back only eight generations.  Therefore, there is the probability that others have added some of my ancestors in their profiles, and may have data that I don't have.

My choices to add data at this time seem to be:

1)  Add data one person at a time.  I refuse to do this, pending some sort of synchronization program.

2)  Search for and find my "end-of-the-line" people in Geni.com and Merge them one at a time.

I checked into the second option, and found that Geni.com has found quite a few possible merges for me.  Here is a screen shot of my home page on Geni.com:

Over on the right-hand side of the screen above is the area for "Tree Matches," with green buttons to tell me how many other trees they are in.

I clicked the "View All Tree Matches" link (beside the "Tree Matches" title) and saw "Randall Jeffrey Seaver's Merge Center:"

At this time, I had 93 potential "Tree Matches." The words below that says "We've found your relatives in other trees. Review these matches to discover new branches of your tree."

I clicked on the link for "View 2 other trees" under the "Acton" column for William Knapp (the first entry on the screen above): 

This screen told me that I had these two possible matches for my William Knapp.  I clicked the check box for both of them and clicked on the blue "Compare Profiles" button and saw:

I reviewed the information comparing my data (on the left side) with the profile on the right.  I decided that this was not a match (it was easy - different parents, different spouse, different children, different siblings, etc., but I had a birth year and the other profile did not.  Ergo, the possible match, I think).  I clicked the blue "No, not a match" button.

After I clicked the blue button, the second possible match came up, and it was not a match either.

OK, that one is crossed off my list of "Tree Matches." 

Frankly, that label "Tree Matches" should be labelled "Possible Matches."  How many people click on each one and accept the match without checking the details for the potential identical person?  I don't know, but I'll bet that is pretty frequent.

I've found that most of the "Tree Matches" in "Randall Jeffrey Seaver's Merge Center" are not matches, but result from the Geni.com algorithm that tries to identify possible matches due to similar name and similar parents and/or birth date.  When there is no birth date, Geni.com seems to find persons with non-similar parents names. 

I'll look at the sequence when there is an actual "Tree Match" in a later post.