Documenting Slavery in Ancestry Trees

Recall with me the complaint I made back in 2016 about a vital records collection out of Pittsylvania County, Virginia in which the information for enslaved people was improperly indexed.

Ancestry has this collection now and has done a tremendous job of indexing these records so slave owners are no longer inappropriately displayed in parental fields. I discovered this spontaneously while I was documenting and attempting to identify the people my family members enslaved.

Because this vital records collection has been fixed, I can use it for this purpose now. I want to outline the process for anyone else doing who might be doing African American genealogy in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. I'm certainly going to be using it to identify as many enslaved people by name as I possibly can. It's a project I've been envisioning for years. It feels surreal now that it's something I can finally accomplish.

Pittsylvania County, Virginia includes enslaved people in their vital records indexes. Their names, ages, sexes, birth and death locations, owners, cause of death, and informants are all included. Because it's the same index that was used for white folks, there is no difference in detail for the information that is collected, with the exception of parental information. All the records I've seen so far for enslaved persons leave that field blank.

There's a unique opportunity with this kind of detail to cross reference entries in the vital records collections and probate records of white slave owners with the slave schedule on the 1860 US Census. Instead of tick marks and ages, genealogical researchers in this community can potentially fill in the missing names of that slave schedule, reconstructing a more accurate snapshot of these plantations.

Revisiting Aletha Letty Keatts, we can view the potential of such a reconstruction.

According to the slave schedule in 1860, she had four slaves: a 24 year old woman and three children. Cross referencing the information in the vital records collection, we can identify these children as Henrietta, Henry, and William. We also know that all three of these children died in 1860 from "flux," which is dysentery. It's only taken together that these records present a clear image that begins to emerge. It's possible that these were the children of the 24 year old woman. If I can identify her, I won't have just reconstructed all the slaves in a white household. I could potentially piece together a family.

I've been at it for hours, trying to see how many enslaved people I can identify using this method. I've found the names of more enslaved people from Keatts households all over the county and lined them up with entries on the slave schedule. The ages can be off by a bit, but so far I'm finding that there are usually people of the right age and sex to everyone I'm finding in the vital records collection.

If I can find a place where probate records, vital records, and the slave schedule all line up, I may get lucky enough to piece together an entire plantation of enslaved people with names and ages. I thought I was going to get lucky with one of the slave owners in my family who died in 1860, but his will didn't list by name any of the enslaved people he was bequeathing to his children.

Part of the challenge is that John, David, Charles, Mary, and Susan are names that get reused A LOT in this family. When they all own slaves and operate their own plantations, it can be hard to tell them apart. I've successfully identified almost all of the Keatts entries in 1860. I need to check to see if I've already done the same thing with the 1850 slave schedules already.

I've still been working on how to best document slavery in my tree when I find it. I've been making extensive use of the Slave Owner tree tag that Ancestry has, which lets me revisit and reexamine cases I've previously looked at. But the nut I couldn't figure out how to crack was how best to display the information I've found about enslaved people in a way where it's visible and accurate. Where relationships have been confirmed by DNA, using the familial relationships functions would be accurate. Where no such relationship has been confirmed or even hinted at in family lore, I don't like this as a solution. I've seen all kinds of variations for these situation, including one that was recommended by Crista Cowan: adding people incorrectly to the tree as children, removing the relationship, then linking to them in the Links section and labeling them as slaves is one method. While this allows people to create profiles for the enslaved people in their families, that has the potential to confuse the AncestryDNA algorithm because the people are just floating in the tree and not attached in any way that's visible to someone other than the tree's creator.

A new approach I'm trying is using the events under the Facts section, then transcribing in the description the ages and sexes of the enslaved people listed in the slave schedule. Which one to choose gave me pause: Residence, Property (that feels gross), or a custom field I would even call "Slavery" or something similar. I can attach any sources I've used to piece together the information I've found in the vital records collections or probate records. When probates and wills list slaves by name, I can do the same thing in those descriptions as well.

The issue here is the character limit in the description. On small family plantations, this is doable. On a larger plantation, I would quickly run out of space. I'd love the see Ancestry create specific event fields in their trees specific to slavery. Instead of a text field, it could allow for individuals to be listed with dedicated fields to names, ages, and racial designations. If this fields were searchable within the tree, that would be the idea solution. Even better would be the ability to create profiles within the tree for these individuals, then link them to these fields. This would allow for comprehensive research to be contained within the tree, searchable, and displayed correctly. I've never seen any family tree software or service that has figured out a good way to do all of those things. For those in want of a solution to this problem, this is the one I'm currently using.

George Liston: the Ferryman of Halifax

Every once in a while, I come across a person in my research who is so larger than life, the page their story is written on can barely contain them. The memory of them is so vivid in the words describing them, I can almost hear their voice.

I've never seen a better example of this than George Liston, the ferryman of Halifax.

I'd be remiss if I didn't give credit once again to the venerable Judith Fingard for her work in "Rescue and Reward: Corporal George Liston's Heroism on the Halifax Waterfront." It never ceases to amaze me that whenever I'm arriving at another ancestor in the black community of Halifax, Judith has always been there before me, leaving sign posts and directions for me to follow.

I also owe a great debt to the r/genealogy community on Reddit. I couldn't have put this story together with the hours and hours of assistance from their kindhearted users over there. It started with a singular request for an obituary for my 4th great grandmother, Hannah Bailey, from Newspapers.com. From there, it quickly snowballed into one of my favorite deep dives I've ever done.

 

Clipped obituary for Hannah Bailey, The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 20 Sep 1909, p.12; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

William T. Bailey and Mrs. Rose Bailey Pinheiro are her children. William's wife name is Charlotte Dixon. I made a mental note that Charles Dixon is probably a close connection of hers, their families were friends, and to explore those connections deeper at another time. I cannot chase every shiny thing at once and right now there's something even shiner than that.

I had no idea that Hannah has a brother named George Liston. I've never heard this name before. And my excitement about it was palpable because my new friend over on Reddit proceeded to send me every mention of George in every newspaper from eastern Canada.

I was totally unprepared for how many there were going to be.

 

"Heroism at Home," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 22 Jul 1895, p.4; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The person on Reddit who was assisting me said that the vast majority of these articles had already been clipped by someone else. That's likely how they ended up in the Ancestry Hints were I saw the one for Hannah in the first place. I wouldn't have known there was anything to find without this person coming through and clipping the articles first.

 

"The Militia of Nova Scotia in 1861," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 18 Aug 1897, p.7; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

This user on Newspapers.com had hundreds upon hundreds of clippings, mostly related to members of the military. Possibly putting together some sort of military history exhibit at a museum in Canada? They probably took an interest in George one of the more public-facing and well-remembered names associated with the Victoria Rifles, the black militia regiment assembled in 1860.

Judith Fingard provides additional insight into the history of the Victory Rifles. The black troops received a mixed reception by the community of Halifax. Some targeted them with racial attacks. Others came to their defense. Anyone foolish enough to target George with racism could expect an immediate and unforgiving response. Fingard outlines some of those interactions, pointing out that he would largely walk away with little to no consequences.

Court records also provide some evidence of Liston's response to racism. One incident concerns a minor assault by Liston of a labourer he accused of 'calling out names after him' while he was attempting unsuccessfully to collect a bill from a client on Hollis Street. In his aggravated mood, Liston gave the offending party a swipe which knocked him against the wall of the Hollis Hotel. Liston was once again fined and bound over to keep the peace.

That may seem remarkable to anyone in the United States, whose history of lynching black men is well-known across the world.

How did George avoid that same fate?

By saving dozens upon dozens of people from drowning.

"George Liston's Great Record as a Saver of Life," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 10 Dec 1902, p.12; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The count of people George has saved is unknown, but it includes dozens upon dozens of people. No one was even afraid to fall into the harbor because they trusted George so completely to pull them out. the local joke was that they wouldn't even have time to get wet before they would be rescued. George had endeared himself to so many families from the rescues he had undertaken, he was a local hero in Halifax. And as a practical matter, attacking with racial epithets the person who may be tasked with saving your life one day isn't exactly a winning survival strategy.

Which isn't to say he was immune to coming into contact with Halifax's underbelly. Punching an assailant hard enough to flatten them takes a real amount of skill. George managed it in 1918 when he was in his early eighties.

"Assaulted Aged Boatman," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 3 Sep 1918, p.2; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

What hurts my heart is knowing that he likely had a traumatic brain injury after this, which led to a steep decline for him. It's clear in the articles that follow this attack that George was a treasured member of this community. It was difficult for them to see he was in decline.

"Faithful Old Servant Too Ill to Ring Fog Bell," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 24 Jun 1921, p.4; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The community rallied around George, to advocated for him to receive better treatment than to be put into the poor house.

 

"George Liston Deserves Better Treatment from the Citizens of Halifax," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 23 Nov 1921, p.15; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

He received a medal recognizing his years of dedicated service and the many lives he saved. He was also formally recognized by Mayer Parker of Halifax, who also took up the effort to get George Liston a better living situation in his final days.

 

"The Death of George Liston," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 13 Mar 1922, p.3; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

He passed away on 12 March 1922 at the age of 89. His obituary added incredible details that his parents were black refugees from the War of 1812, freed from slavery by the British and brought to the Maritimes. Judith Fingard was able to identify his parents' names in the cemetery registers at Camp Hill Cemetery: John and Mary Liston. From George's obituary, we gather they were freed from Richmond, Virginia. Taken together with the details from "Hero at Home" (posted above) that his parents were among the cohort of freed people that left in 1812, I have more details about my family's history during the time of slavery than I ever thought possible.

"Not a Sister, But a Niece," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 14 Mar 1922, p.14; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

Some of his contemporary family members are also listed: Mrs. Charles (Rose) Pinheiro and William Bailey, his niece and nephew. Also, a brother who is also buried in Camp Hill Cemetery. Note that a correction is posted later correcting the relationship from "sister" to "niece."

News of George's passing made it all the way to Montreal.
 

"George Liston, Negro, Aged 89, Dead in Halifax," The Montreal Gazette, 14 Mar 1922, p.10; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

His absence was so keenly felt after his death, he was the star of the Remember When? column almost two weeks later, referencing the visit on Queen Victoria's son, Albert Edward, to Canada in 1860.

"Remember When," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 25 Mar 1922, p.11; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

George Liston never married or had a family. He dedicated his life to being the ferryman, the watchman over the waters of Halifax Harbor. The only descendants he has are through his siblings children. And since many of ours have since left Halifax, there was no one among us who remembered his name or knew he was one of our own.

Until now.

For the rest of my life, I will hold a special place in my heart for George Liston. I already know I will be telling his story to anyone who will listen. As a giver of so many gifts, even beyond the grave he has given a special one to me. I treasure anyone who preserves the exact piece of information I need exactly where I will find it. 

George did that with a greater finesse than anyone else I've met in my journey so far.

MyTreeTags, ThruLines, and a Major Discovery

*taps mic*

Is this thing on?

Seems to be.

All right. Let's get into it.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. I went offline long enough for my entire site to go down for quite some time. I'm currently getting things fixed up and running again. It will take some time. I have a huge backlog of messages and issues on various platforms to address. I'm working my way through them and I appreciate your patience while I do so.

Where have I been?

Dealing with a lot of the issues I talked about in my last post on family fragmentation and revisionism. That post was autobiographical. The 2016 US election and COVID-19 have done permanent damage to several relationships in my family. Doing genealogy, in light of those conflicts and fractures, became incredibly painful. For my own health, I had to step away. 

Healing has been slow to come, so my reentry from that hiatus has been gradual. But in the short time I've been back, I've started several new projects and made a major discovery on one of my longest standing mysteries.

Let's talk about it.

MyTreeTags

I missed the major updates that Ancestry has been doing to their tree tagging system. The last time I was using them, the only utility I had for them was marking off folks in my tree as "DNA Match" whenever I successfully identified them on one of the DNA testing services and could put them in my tree. The obvious problem with that system is all the matches from the testing companies I use are mixed together, with no easy way to sort or target them.

That is, until now.

Ancestry's MyTreeTags added custom tagging at some point, which means I now have tags for all the testing companies and matching services where my DNA exists. I can now tell, at a glance, which matches are from which services, and which ones are available on multiples services.

My Access database was born out of a desire to have this information from all of the various testing services in one place. Ancestry has made the tree I work in the most the ideal place to store and handle this information now.

Documenting Slavery and Freedom using MyTreeTags

Additionally, Ancestry has added more Life Experience tags, including ones for slave holders. I spent an entire weekend documenting the slaveholders in my tree across the American South. It's the most comprehensive effort anyone in my family has ever taken to accurately document slavery. Because the slave schedules in the US censuses of 1850 and 1860 provide only first and last names of the owners, these records need to be cross referenced with other records to positively identify both the enslavers and the enslaved. It's an ongoing project that took me through wills, vital records, and various other record collections in the communities I research, trying to figure out how to identify the names of people enslaved by my family and to make that information accessible to researchers who need it.

On deck, I have other Ancestry default tags to utilize, including for the Free People of Color in my tree. I've been slow to circle back around to it because the tree tags aren't accessible on the Ancestry app, which is something I definitely need future updates to address. These tags are so much a part of my work process now, it's a huge inconvenience not to have access to them on my phone.

Other Opportunities to Use MyTreeTags

Other tags I will eventually use: Immigrants, Military Service, the Adoption tags, and the ones that indicate when a person Never Married or had No Children. There are several places in my family where aunts raised generations of children in my family that could easily be mistaken for their own.

I think it's also worth creating and documenting the LGBTQ+ folks in my tree with their own tag or tags. How to implement that is something I'm going to put more thought into and explore with other researchers before implementing it to make sure I do it in the most respectful way possible. It's a feature I'd love to see Ancestry adopt themselves to remind all family researchers that LGBTQ+ people have always existed and they deserve to be identified correctly and remembered for who they were and who they loved.

Using ThruLines and Common Ancestor Hints to Trace Private Trees

At some point, these ThruLines got good enough to document relationships to cousin matches with private trees. I have had cousin matches on my AncestryDNA match list that have been there for years, never being positively identified. Using the Shared Matches tab, I had a pretty good idea how several of them were related to me. But I recently discovered that once these relative matches have a Common Ancestor hint, clicking on View Relationship enters a space that uses public trees to provide match details to aid in identification.

When working on documenting matches from my DNA about a week ago, I saw multiple instances where my own descendancy research in my tree filled in the blanks on the Common Ancestor page. I was able to work down to the relative match, with the assistance of the algorithm, then use public records to identify them and add them to my tree. I've operated for years off of the assumption that the more information I fed to the algorithm through my own tree, the more heavy lifting it would ultimately do for me. I'm seeing now that this is coming to fruition in how I can now process matches with private trees.

I'm not entirely sure how this works. But based on the information that was being filled in for me, it appears to use a combination of other public trees, as well as information in my own tree, to populate the lineage from the Common Ancestor hint to the cousin match. It's especially effective, however, when the information is in my personal tree. In one instance, I knew I wasn't going to be able to deduce the mother for one of my relative matches on my own. I added all the siblings for that generation of the mother's family to my tree anyway. I was surprised to see the Common Ancestor match filled in which of the siblings was the match's mother. The algorithm gave me that confirmation simply because she was in my tree, even though the cousin match was not. 

I'm fairly certain that the anonymization of living people applies in these cases, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also unsure how much of what I was seeing was the algorithm using the information in my own tree to help me identify this match locally, without necessarily sending that confirmation to other people on the platform. I do have questions about this because there were instances where the lineage the algorithm was populating for me was pulling information from other public trees. Does it do that with my public tree and all of the descendancy research I've been feeding to it? If I input this person and their connection to me into my tree, how much of that information gets fed to other AncestryDNA users via their Common Ancestor hints?

I'll be honest: I'm not asking because I care. But there are a lot of people with private trees connected to their DNA who definitely care about these answers. I don't think it's clearly understood how much the algorithm is working around their privacy settings right now. The only thing that seems to be off the table, from what I've seen, is an actual positive ID of the match themselves. But depending on what information they provide about themselves on their AncestryDNA page through their username, personal details, and location, even that's not a guarantee. 

I identified at least half a dozen matches this way that have been sitting unconfirmed in my match list for years. Maybe this isn't news to anyone else and I'm simply the last one to know. But somehow, I don't think so.

To target these kinds of matches, activate the Common Ancestor filter and the Private Tree filters at the same time. Since the layout on these Common Ancestor hints is identical to the ThruLines interface, I suspect the two of them are connected and they work together to make this happen.

What does this mean? It means having a private tree attached to DNA results can be functionally meaningless in certain situations. And while I find that to be incredibly convenient and exciting for me and my purposes, it's pretty important for folks who think they're keeping secrets and protecting privacy in their private trees to realize it doesn't work that way once you connect them to your DNA results.

The Major Discovery

I started doing genealogy when I was 14 years old. I still have the first pedigree chart I ever made, handwritten, in the back of the journal I kept at the time. That pedigree chart had two blanks on it, which I've been trying to fill for eighteen years.

I filled the one years ago when I identified my maternal grandmother's birth father. My paternal grandmother's birth father was the only one who was still missing.

That is, until a couple weeks ago.

Because of DNA matching, I had my paternal grandmother's birth father narrowed down to four brothers in a family from Ontario, Canada. I had matches to three of the four brothers on AncestryDNA and had been trying to narrow it down further from there. With my own match, the centimorgans were inconclusive, being indicative of too many possible relationships to be useful by itself.

Then my sister tested. Her match to the daughter in Canada was significantly higher than mine. But before I tried to call it confirmed, I wanted to be sure.

A couple of months ago, one of my cousins in Canada took an AncestryDNA test. His match was high enough that it became clear that this woman was our grandmother's half sister. It's physically impossible for any other relationship to align with our centimorgans, age differences, and generational compositions, which is why the technique of triangulation is so valuable. While there were many explanations for my singular connection to this woman in Canada, there is only one that explains the relationship between her, me, my sister, and my first cousin.

After eighteen years of searching, the blank in our tree has been definitively filled because of DNA testing. At 32 years old, I can fill out a four generation pedigree chart accurately for the first time in my life. That may not be a big deal to some people, but it's a tremendously big deal to me. It's what 14 year-old me set out to do at the outset of this journey almost two decades ago.

I'm proud of her for taking the first step, and I'm proud of me for sticking with it for as long as it took to make this happen.

Genealogy in the Age of Misinformation

To be a genealogist is to be a caretaker: of artifacts, memories, and narratives. We are the ones who carry these things into the future, preserving them for others to take them up long after we’re gone. At its core, to be a family historian requires a healthy, uncomplicated relationship with documenting the truth.

That is how I’ve always viewed my role. I find the truth, digitize it, categorize it, label it, file it, share it, and make sure my digital filing cabinet of stuff is accessible to anyone and everyone who comes behind me. It’s a mundane process that most people don’t find entertaining, so they assume by extension that it must be unimportant.

 

Then the compromised, corrupt, and conceited tour-du-force that is Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million votes. Everything in our world changed, including our relationship with the truth—about science, math, ethics, and eventually history itself.

Every time our perceptions of basic truth become pawns in a game that politicians try to play, genealogists and family historians take on a role we’re not accustomed to having. We’re accustomed to preserving the truth from influences like time and apathy from disinterested family members. But in times like this, I would argue that we have additional challenges of protecting history from revisionism and misinformation. Once those forces taint the narratives and memories we’ve accumulated as a society, it won’t matter what artifacts we’ve managed to preserve. If we can’t agree on the narratives those artifacts represent, what we’ve collected will have lost all meaning and connection to reality.

This corrosion of fact is as destructive as any mold, water damage, or any amount of acid our collections could experience. That’s what I want to discuss today.

Confronting Revisionism

Revisionism takes a lot of different forms, but the purpose is always the same: establishing and maintaining social dominance through historical manipulation. By omitting some facts and greatly exaggerating others, it becomes possible to use history as a political weapon.

The first casualty of this indoctrination and radicalization process is oral history. Trying to have conversations with relatives about the past becomes difficult, if not impossible—especially when the past touches on highly politicized subjects like immigration, slavery and race, or the treatment of marginalized groups in communities. Sources of family shame are the first items to be concealed or distorted.

How do we deal with oral history that may be inaccurate, especially through the lens of the current political climate? The same way we always have: treating nothing we’re told like it’s too sacred to challenge or examine critically. Finding sources for each and every claim and clearly documenting which ones can be substantiated (with sources listed) and which ones can’t. While this job isn’t always easy, it’s a simple one that hasn’t changed very much. It relies on all the same tools and techniques we’ve been using already.

There’s another kind of revisionism, however, that traditional genealogy hasn’t prepared many of us for: the moment when our very existence gets edited out of our family’s lives. It’s an act that is on the rise and will have long-standing consequences for family historians, even once the threat of COVID-19 ends and Donald Trump’s populism fades into obscurity. There are DNA tests that will never be taken now because relatives passed away from COVID-19, research trips that won’t be taken even when it’s safe to travel, and phone calls and emails that will never be answered because contacts are blocked now in people’s phones from irreconcilable differences due to politics.

What do we do, as family historians, about that kind of revisionism?

Documenting the Current Moment

I don’t have a magical solution to fix these kinds of divisions in anyone else’s family, any more than I can fix the ones that have emerged in mine. I won’t pretend to have those answers, like there’s any sort of bulleted list that can put us back on solid ground.

My only suggestion is to recenter the focus on what we can achieve in whatever situation we’ve found ourselves in. If we can’t get information about the past from our relatives anymore, it’s worth focusing on the present and what we can do for the historical record of the current moment instead.

Document the interactions you’re having with the relatives in your lives. Write down what they say. Record their political affiliations, individuals they support, and viewpoints that they hold. If they’ve severed ties with family members, make a record of the date for posterity and the reasoning they gave.

The choices people are making in who/what to prioritize during COVID-19 is all part of a larger story that transcends individuals at this point. Being true to that is part of the commitment we’ve made as family historians to document the truth. It’s not our jobs to make anyone or anything look better than they were in this moment. How people act is how they deserve to be remembered.

When Politeness Becomes Revisionism

Social media and virtual interactions have become invaluable now that social distancing is a normal part of life. They will be for the foreseeable future. Name any hobby or activity with which you can engage others on the internet, and the same standard rules apply. Somewhere between “Don’t be a jerk” and “no hate speech” is usually “no talking about religion, politics, or current events.”

Now, I expect that kind of rule from my knitting groups, the folks I trade recipes with, and the subreddits where I look at adorable cat videos. I abide by those rules, even when I disagree with them, because I understand that politics and religion are often irrelevant to what those communities are trying to accomplish. In the eyes of some online community leaders, the cost of potential conflict outweighs any potential gains from allowing those topics of discussion. I can understand that.

I’ll be honest though… that attitude feels deeply flawed and out of place in genealogy or family history communities of any kind. The truth is too central to what we do not to talk openly about the individuals, groups, and forces in our society poisoning that well.

The thing making our political climate so toxic is the sheer number of inaccuracies, lies, and misinformation we’re all being expected to metabolize and accept as normal every single day. That climate of deception can greatly diminish our ability to do our jobs properly, to say nothing of correcting revisionism and holding each other accountable.

How can we create communities of genealogical researchers worth belonging to if we can’t talk to each other about the truth of what is happening to us? Who benefits when we all agree to remain silent to preserve a misleadingly peaceful coexistence with hostile parties who are overwhelmingly responsible for why we have to live this way?

I expect that thin veneer of polite denial of *gestures widely* all of this from groups dedicated to succulent care, Animal Crossing, and fountain pens. Not family historians. Not the one group of people, more than any other in society, who is on the front lines of deciding who gets to be remembered and what will be forgotten.

Linking Trees and DNA Results Together

When your tree has large families in it, working some cases with DNA testing takes a long time. Especially when you're trying to help someone with a Non-Paternity Event (NPE), you can easily dedicate weeks, months, or even years from start to finish on a single project. So anything you can do to create shortcuts for yourself is time well spent.

Because honestly. How many times has this (or some version of it) happened to you?

Okay, today's the day I'm finally going to fill in this blank on my family tree. Let me pull up those cousin matches I found last week that I want to look at again. Shoot. Can't find them. What was that surname they had I thought looked familiar? I think I have it in my tree. Let me open that, too. Was it in this census record? OH! This neighbor's surname looks familiar! I saw that on one of my cousin matches' pages! 

But that was 20 minutes ago, and I have no idea which one it was.

I'm over it just thinking about it.

Bouncing back and forth between our trees and our cousin match pages is part of this process of solving family mysteries with DNA. But keeping track of all the moving pieces becomes really hard, especially as we're managing lists for multiple relatives who have tested. So how can we do this more efficiently? How can we make the seams between our cousin matches and our trees disappear? That was my question as I added 23 and Me as the final player in my testing lineup. And I believe I've found the solution I was looking for.

I'm going to gear these suggestions towards Ancestry/AncestryDNA and their tree building platform, but much of what I'm about to share will work on others too. I checked MyHeritage, and they have similar functionality in their tree builder. Many other tree building websites, apps, and hordes of desktop software will as well. But to achieve the full end result I'm going to discuss in my approach, you'll want to use a web-based option, for reasons that will become clear later on.

Using the Notes Section

In an Ancestry tree, every person has a personal landing page. From that page, you can access all kinds of tools that Ancestry has tucked away. One of those tools is the Notes feature. To use them, you first need to activate the hidden toolbar so you can see them.

Notes are private places to leave plain text information for each person in your tree. Some people use them for research logs. Others use them to record private information that needs to be remembered, but not broadcast to the rest of the world. I've seen others use them to transcribe and annotate all the sources they've attached to the person. (If you're already using them for one of these purposes, sit tight. I have an alternative solution for you that I'll cover in a bit.)

For most people, however, opening the Notes section is going to give you a blank slate.

If you've followed me for any length of time, you know I advocate for having a separate tree strictly for tracing biological relationships. Every time you find and confirm a DNA match, it's wise to add that information to this tree. For each confirmed match you have on your DNA match list, ideally there would be a corresponding person in your biological tree.

And it eliminates a lot of confusion when your biological tree is the one linked to your DNA match results.

Stop! Attaching! Your DNA! to Trees! that Don't! Belong! to You!

So you've been working through your cousin match list, and you've found some relatives that you recognize. Maybe even some others that are more distantly related. You want to keep track of this information because it won't be long until there's too much information to remember. So let's make things easier and tie knots at both ends, as it were.

Open the DNA match page for the person in the AncestryDNA interface. In this example, I'm using the entry for one of my close relatives.






I copy the link from their tree page and paste it into the Notes section of their AncestryDNA page.

Then I copy the link from their AncestryDNA page and paste it into the Notes section on my tree.

No more hunting to get back to a match I can't find on AncestryDNA. No more wondering if the person in my tree is the same one from my DNA match list or not. I'm still in the process of setting this up, and I've already come across so many lines in my tree that are missing. And since every testing service (except Family Tree DNA) creates unique URLs for each of their cousin match results, you can add testing data from MyHeritage DNA and 23 and Me to your notes in a similar fashion.

Bonus Tip: Link from the Ancestry Profile page instead of the AncestryDNA match result

Another option for creating these links from AncestryDNA is to click on the person's name to go to their Ancestry Profile page instead. Well, most of the time you'll click on the person's name—unless they have a "managed by" link instead.

Clicking on whichever one they have will take you to the Ancestry Profile page of the person who either took the test, or the one who administers it. If you'd rather use this page, copy the URL from this page and paste it into your tree instead.

This is an especially useful thing to do if you manage multiple tests, or the person you're linking to does, as is the case on both sides with this particular relative. On this page, I can see all the tests she administers and compare them to each of the tests I manage. Since I manage four kits of my own at this point, this saves me a lot of time. And in the event that my relatives take or administer more tests, I'll be able to see that any time I click this link. If I linked to the individual match result, I'd lose out on a lot of that additional functionality.

Using Web Links

If you're already using your Notes section for something else, you have another option. If you scroll down to the Web Links section of the person's tree page, you can enter the URL link for the match there instead. Label it "AncestryDNA" rather than something like "DNA test" to distinguish it from others you might add in the future from other sites.

And before you panic and think putting these URLs in your tree means anyone could see or use them, that is not the case. You must be logged into the respective accounts from each testing company for the URLs to open the match pages. The links are there purely for your own personal use and reference. Even if someone with full access to your tree clicked on these links, they'd be prompted to login before the sites will display the match.

A Greater Purpose

What I like about this approach is how it serves a two-fold purpose. Yes, it enables me to be as lazy as possible by making it easier for me to click on less things to get to where I want to be. It also provides the ability to solve another problem that really doesn't have any easy solutions.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about these DNA connections I work with, and how to give them permanence. I don't feel like our community has reconciled the absolute expectation on us to honor the privacy of DNA testers with the need to document the discoveries we're making because of them. We need the ability to record what we're learning, and to discuss the evidence we've used openly. For years, I've struggled to know how to do this without causing a maelstrom of personal attacks from others about being "careless" with other people's "private information."

Me to the people in comments. And on Twitter. And in my email. And on the internet in general.

But where did this illusion come from that anyone taking a DNA test gets to maintain ANY kind of privacy? Who lied to you? And do you realize how badly you've been lied to?

The fundamental transaction behind DNA testing is completely incongruent with privacy. In agreeing to take a DNA test, we trade away our right to privacy in exchange for knowledge. We can't have any illusions about that. There's no other way to interpret what we're after, and what we're giving up to obtain it. And if the people we're inviting to test have any other understanding about this transaction, we've promised them something that DNA testing is going to prevent us from delivering.

I don't have a perfect solution for how to reconcile privacy with documenting and discussing DNA as evidence. But creating a paper trail in our trees for these connections is a start, even if we're the only ones who can see them. Hopefully the act of writing down our findings will take away some of the stigma surrounding this issue, so we can all prepare ourselves to openly admit there is no other solution.

Genetic Genealogy Simplified: Intro to AncestryDNA

AncestryDNA is the Goliath of genetic genealogy. They broke 7 million testers in their database at the end of 2017, and will likely only continue to grow as we enter the 2018 holiday season. To give you an idea of how many people that is, it's roughly the population of the entire state of Arizona.

So what does this mean?

It means that more people than ever are taking AncestryDNA tests to learn something about themselves... and more people than ever are going to look at their ethnicity results and think, "That's it? That's what I paid all that money to find out?"

But it doesn't have to be that way!

The AncestryDNA test, like all genetic genealogy tests, does more than cheap scientific parlor tricks in estimating your ethnicity. It can tell you volumes about your genealogy, your personal history, and your connections to all the best highlights of history.

The trick is, it takes work. And time. And research.

All those commercials that told you finding out about yourself was as simple as spitting in a tube? Gimmick. Pure and simple.

 

But don't let that stop you! AncestryDNA has some amazing features, which I talk about in my newest video. There has never been a tool like it to document and discover the story of your family. And because DNA tells the stories that have been lost from memory and written records, it's likely the only way to find the secrets your ancestors took to their graves... or never knew about.

So if you're looking for a guide to AncestryDNA for beginners, look no further. Get ready to dig into all the best tips and tricks right here. And if you want to get even more bang for your buck, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more tutorials on all things genetic genealogy.

Facebook Groups and Crowdsourcing for DNA

The way some commercials and advertisements talk about genetic genealogy, it's easy to believe all you have to do is spit in a cup and learn the secrets of your family history. Not so! There is A LOT of work that goes into learning anything truly substantial about your family from genetic testing. And along the way, it becomes necessary to ask for help from people who have also put in the work to learn.

One of the places I recommend people to start is with Facebook groups dedicated to genetic genealogy. The people, knowledge, and resources available to you in those spaces is truly without price. Imagine an entire community of people who personally invest themselves in what you want to know about your family, and engage with you to find answers with you. You may be new, but you don't have to be completely lost and alone while trying to make the most of your DNA test.

All you have to do is search for "DNA testing" into the Facebook search box, sort by Groups, and you'll see so many of these groups appear. Why are there so many? What's the difference between them? How do you know which ones to join? And what should you post once you join them?

No Two Groups are Exactly Alike

Each group has different rules about what kinds of posts they accept. Some welcome people to post their GEDmatch kit numbers. Others don't. Some are targeted at new users. Some are targeted at adoptees and the donor conceived. Some allow sharing personal success stories. Others want to focus solely on inquiries and solving specific research problems. Some don't mind if you post relevant or topical stories from the news as it relates to genetic genealogy. Others view those posts to be a distraction from the core purpose they are trying to fulfill. To find the groups that best match your needs and interests, you'll want to familiarize yourself with the conversational culture of the group.

Most admins will try to communicate those rules and the group's purpose in their About section, as well as their group entrance questions, and possibly even a welcome post to all new members. Be sure to familiarize yourself with these before you post in a group. This truly is not something you should skip, and attempt to learn "on the fly" if you truly want people to help you.

Inquiries

When you're writing a message to a cousin match from a testing site, it's very important not to throw too much information at the person all at once. You go into the interaction assuming they may not know anything about genetic genealogy, segment data, or their family tree. You break your research questions into basic, digestible chunks. You try to engage someone in a prolonged conversation, in which you explore many questions over an extended period of time--months, or sometimes even years. At the same time you're trying to solve research problems, you're also trying to build a personal connection with another relative or family member.

Posting in these groups is completely different. You go into these interactions with completely different assumptions and behavior because your audience is different. You're talking to people who DO understand segment data, and who will assume that to you do too (unless you clarify otherwise.) You take into account the volume of inquiries the group has. Your post is one of many that is entering what essentially amounts to an assembly line. The more already-complete pieces you can bring to that line, the more complete your final product will be. And the results you get will vary depending on who is on the line that day.

What the users in these groups need to know to help you is who you're trying to find, what cousin matches you think might be related to your question, the segment data for those matches, and what you've already done to solve your own problem. All these details center around the same one question: "Do your numbers and segment data line up with the relationships you think you share with these people? And if not, why not?" You won't need to include loads of private information or back story. The segment data is its own language for family relationships, and will help people to tell you where to look for the answers you're trying to find.

Questions

Sometimes the questions you need to ask won't always be related to a research problem. Sometimes they'll be conceptual problems, and trying to grasp how DNA works and how to use it. Don't be afraid to ask these questions when you need to. Even if people have taught about something like X DNA a thousand times, and you read all the background material in the world, there's no guarantee that someone would explain it in a way you understand it completely. Sometimes the only way to achieve understanding in your own mind is to ask questions. 

A good example of this for me was when I was seeing my cousin matches line up on my chromosomes in the same places, but the people weren't related to each other in any way I could see. It was a basic question that I knew must have a very simple answer, and I didn't want to ask it for that reason. But I asked it anyway in one of these groups because I knew it was the only way I would learn.

The answer I got from one woman was perfect, and even came with a visual that I still think about to this day. We don't just have one copy of each chromosome. We have two of each: one from our birth mother and one from our birth father. And we can think of these as being overhead projector transparencies sitting on top of each other. The only way to tell them apart is to see who does and doesn't match each other in these positions together, and then determine which matches come from our maternal side, and which from the paternal side.

Had I not asked that question where and when I did, I don't know when or how I would've had the "A-Ha!" moment when everything finally made sense. But it would've been much later on in my journey than if I'd tried to do everything myself.

Thread Etiquette and Tips

Discussions in these groups are organized into "threads." You have two options in how to interact with these threads: to post a new thread, or to respond to someone else's thread. Knowing when to do each one can be really helpful in being the most efficient and respectful group member you can be.

Before you ask any question or make a post, it's helpful to search the back catalog of the group to see if someone else has asked the question before. In Facebook groups, the search box is on the left side of the page. Think about how you might Google the question you're asking, breaking down your question into search terms. Use those in the search box and see what you find. You may find not only the answer to the question you were looking for, but answers to questions you haven't even thought to ask yet!

It may be helpful to tack your question onto a previous thread, if the issue or question you're trying to explore isn't substantially different from what someone else has already posted about. It can save you and others the work of having to get and reframe the same context that went into that discussion. What you should avoid, however, is posting a completely irrelevant response or question on someone else's thread. It distracts people's attention away from the original poster's question, making it less likely they will get the help they asked for. And for posts that may be very old and involve a lot of respondents, it's helpful to consider how many people will have to sit through a slew of notification and responses in a conversation they not longer want to be a part of.

The temptation to post your same question, word for word, into various other groups isn't the best course of action. I recently saw a woman do this, and someone pointed out that he'd seen her same post for the 4th time that day. It's better to err on the side of assuming that most people will be in more than one group. If you're going to post the same question to multiple groups, consider spacing them out a week or more apart, and posting them at different times of day to get the greatest variety of responses.

What makes Facebook groups great for traditional genealogy and connecting with local communities where our ancestors lived also makes them great for DNA analysis. Who you know or can access in person is no longer a limitation with the social media machine on your side. And with just a little bit of prep work, the returns on that time are sometimes exponential.

A Group List

Here are some Facebook groups you could consider joining for your genetic genealogy journey. Note, there are other regional, national, and ethnicity specific DNA analysis groups that are more specialized than these. Try combining different search terms together with DNA to see what you find!

• Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques
• Ancestry GEDmatch 23andMe FTDNA MyHeritage Genealogy DNA
• AncestryDNA Matching
• GEDmatch.com User Group
• International Society of Genetic Genealogy Facebook Group
• DNA Newbie
• DNA Detectives
• DNA Painter User Group

Uploading Your Raw Data to MyHeritage DNA

If you've tested your DNA with one company and want to connect with others from other companies, we can all meet together on MyHeritage DNA. The upload is free, and includes access to segment data. Why wait? Take advantage of those features today for your DNA analysis!

Jane Lyon and Willaim Penn's Welcome Fleet

Having recently discovered Amy Johnson Crow's #52Ancestors blogging prompts on Twitter, I'm excited to get started this week with the "Oldest" prompt.

Immediately, my mind jumped to the oldest female immigrant to the United States I've been able to document in my family so far. I could've sworn I'd previously written about her. But seeing as I haven't, let me introduce you to Jane Lyon, my Quaker foremother from Lancashire, England!

Friends Meeting House, (woodcut), Philadelphia, PA, circa 1830.

Jane Lyon was one of the original Quakers from Lancashire, England. She came over on the ship Submission in 1682, as part of William Penn's original fleet. Being unable to pay for her own passage, she came as a servant to an older couple from Lancashire named James and Ann Harrison. These settlers, known in many circles as Welcome claimants, were among the earliest Quaker settlers in the New World. They have their own lineage society, similar to that of the Mayflower descendants. The difference between the two, however, is that original passenger lists for the Welcome fleet do not survive. Much work has been done to reconstruct these lists and determine who made the voyage as part of this fleet.

Because Jane Lyon was a servant to James Harrison, following the record of his journey to Bucks County, Pennsylvania will mean following Jane's as well. And it's important to note The Submission deviated significantly from its original navigation. Due to a storm and some possible intentional interferences from the ship's captain, the ship had to detour into Maryland instead of the Delaware River. James Harrison's family disembarked in Choptank, Maryland at the end of October--nowhere near their original destination of Pennsylvania. James Harrison left his family and servants in the house of William Dickerson and attempted to rendezvous with William Penn in New Castle, Delaware. He and his son-in-law then headed for Philadelphia, and eventually made their way to Bucks County. They wouldn't send for their families and associates to join them in Bucks County until the spring of 1683.

"Pensilvania in America, Divided into Countyes Townships and Lotts," surveyed by Thomas Holme, ca. 1687.
(Note the property of Richard Lundy, listed as person 22 in the plot immediately to the left of Pennsbury Manor, the estate of William Penn)

Jane Lyon was among these early settlers of Bucks County. I've attempted to determine the length of her service to the Harrison family, but there don't appear to be any surviving records of it. She doesn't reappear in what records I can access until 1691. She appears several times in various congregational records for the Society of Friends, called meeting minutes. And as a good example of what these minutes look like, here's her marriage record to Richard Lundy from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

"U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935," database, Ancestry.com (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2189 : accessed 6 August 2018), filed under Bucks Quarterly Meeting, "Records for Marriage Certificates, 1683," image 53, entry for the marriage of Jane Lyon and Richard Lundy; citing Society of Friends (Bucks County, Pennsylvania), "The Quarter meeting record for marriag certificates in Bucks County beginning in the yeare 1683," call number: RG2 Ph B86 3.2, Swarthmore College.

An important thing to keep in mind with Quaker records is how to read the dates on the records. Dates from before 1752 in Quaker records use the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar we know today. This means that the marriage date in this record, rendered the 24th day of the 4th month, is June 24th. Not April 24th. Here's a guide on how to convert the dates in case you need one.

Another thing to know is Quaker meeting minutes were not just a record of a single event, kept in a local congregation (called a monthly meeting) for their reference. Activity in monthly meetings were presented in Quarterly meetings, and were also published in their records. This means that the same event will appear in various meeting records, including in records for communities in which the event did NOT take place. The records were also recopied and abstracted for the sake of records preservation, and will appear in meeting minutes in later time periods. The Ancestry entries and indexes to these records rarely, if ever reflect this distinction. You must examine each image carefully to determine its age and source.

This record appears in the Philadelphia (Archer Street) Monthly Meeting minutes, even though the event took place in Bucks County. It's also an abstracted copy of earlier records, assembled and published in 1889. I've included it here because it's much easier to read, and even provides some insight into the ceremonial content of early Quaker marriages.

"U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935," database, Ancestry.com (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2189 : accessed 6 August 2018), filed under Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, Arch Street, "Record of Certificates of Removal, 1682," images 76-77; abstracted entry for the marriage of Jane Lyon and Richard Lundy; citing Society of Friends (Bucks County, Pennsylvania), "A Record of certificates of removal of Friends, commencing in the year 1682: copied from the original records int he year 1889," pages 149-150, call number: MR Ph 738, Swarthmore College.

Quaker records hosted at Ancestry are not easy records to cite, especially to appropriately reflect when they are derivatives of other records. One source citation, as in the example above, may include information for an online database, information for the primary source, the derivative, and the repository holding the records. But making the attempt is always important because it's the most direct way to wrap our minds around the exact record, among many abstractions and reproductions that also exist for the same event in Quaker collections.

Society of Friends records are some of the oldest records in the United States. If you have Quakers in your family, don't overlook these amazing resources in your quest for family stories. They do have a learning curve to them. But few communities have gone to as much trouble to document and re-document their history. For that reason, Quaker genealogy is some of the most fruitful and rewarding to genealogists who are lucky enough to have those roots!

X DNA Analysis for Microsoft Word

If you haven't checked out my shop lately, you won't want to miss out on my newest addition for X DNA analysis. I've got loads of great products on deck for you and your research, right now, so be sure to check back often!

X DNA is a double-edged sword in DNA analysis. It's great because it follows a strict inheritance pattern that allows you to zero in on certain lines at the exclusion of others. But because it follows a strict inheritance line, it can be really hard to visualize which ancestors gave you your X DNA and which ones didn't.

A common way to overcome the challenge of visualizing X DNA inheritance is to use spiffy charts. That's what I was doing the other day, working from a really popular inheritance chart for X DNA... which was clunky, slow, and didn't make the best use of space on the page. That template is dated, which is part of why current versions of Word are struggling to load and use it. It was past time to replace it with something else.

There had to be a better way to represent this information, I told myself. Where the writing is legible and the chart is visually appealing on the page.

So that's what I sat down to create.

What resulted from those efforts is a collection of charts that are easy to use, easy to read, and easy to annotate if you're looking for living relatives. The screenshot I've provided is just one example from the collection of charts I've created. Use whichever one makes the most sense to you, or visually appeals to you the most. 

I learned a lot about X DNA recombination in preparing these charts. While the chart shows you all possible ancestors who could've passed on X DNA to you, chances are you didn't actually receive it from everyone listed here. DNA recombination means that some relatives pass along paternal or maternal X DNA, in tact right from their mothers. Other times, you may receive a recombined X chromosome, which can include a wider range of X DNA from more relatives. And this will vary even from sibling to sibling.

For all you know, that missing ancestor you've been stuck on for years may fall along an X DNA inheritance line, and the only person living who still has their X DNA could be you!

Don't forget to check out the research guide, included for free in the listing. Learn everything you need to know to make the most of your X DNA today!