All the best in 2018!

  Hope you all had a great holiday season to round up 2017 with great family time. During the holidays I was able to meet all of my living ancestors, as well as all of my siblings and their kids, so I am definitely satisfied.

What I want to achieve in this blog post is wrapping up last year with the evaluation of my 2017 goal set, so I can improve setting up a more realistic 2018 list.

Let's shortly revise what I set up to:

1. Have a healthy son introduced into the world. 
2. Improve the family tree. This has subgoals as per the latest 2016 balancing blog.
   2.1. Identify 40% of ancestors up to 10th gen - identify 818 ancestors (out of 2046).
   I currently [think I] know 512 of them. This means 306 new ancestors in 2017.
   2.2. Identify half of my paternal grandfather's 7th generation. I.e. 64 ancestors. 
3. Run a Czech series for newbies in genetic genealogy. 
4. Break one or both of my closest brick walls.
   4.1. This includes a sub-goal of gathering as much relevant samples as possible.
   4.2. Work on recombination map and chromosome coverage on paternal side.
5. Test my own children.
6. Start an "Ancestor of the week" feature - were I blog about one of my ancestors.
7. Keep working with my genetic genealogy matches (this includes 23andMe matches and the relevant goal mentioned in the recent 2016 balancing blog).

Let's start with the resounding successes:

1. Have a healthy son introduced into the world. 

Yes! Vitus is not only a great boy (he can already say "daddy"), I was able to deepen the knowledge of my paternal ancestry driven by my first born son - here. 100% complete

2.2. Identify half of my paternal grandfather's 7th generation. I.e. 64 ancestors. 

By very focused work, I was able to just achieve this goal! Yay!

7. Working with genetic matches.

I was definitely active in this direction and was able to map several US cousins to my tree (usually by building their own tree in the process).

On to the partial successes:

2.1. Identify 40% of ancestors up to 10th gen - identify 818 ancestors (out of 2046).

Well, today finds me at 635 ancestors. Some somewhat hypothetical. That is not too bad of a growth from the 512 I had last year (24%). I guess my goal was just too aggressive.

If I want to aim at another 24%, my goal for 2018 would be 788 ancestors.

3. Run a Czech series for newbies in genetic genealogy. 

This was a very small success at the last minute. I ran a blog about the most common Czech DNA test - Genetics and Surnames project.

4. Break one or both of my closest brick walls. 

Based on DNA testing, I now have a candidate father for my great-great-grandfather, Antonin Sula, 1871. The new supposed ancestor is Frantisek Skrejsovsky, 1837.

Further testing will be needed to verify this hypothesis.

The other MPE will be harder to identify, as there is quite heavy endogamy in the Hornacko region, and lack of Czech testers.

5. Test my own children.

This was another last minute save. We sent out my daughters tests to 23andMe on Dec 23rd. It was a pleasant surprise that my 3 year old was able to spit enough (not verified by the lab).

My youngest remains untested. I am kinda on a lookout for FTDNA move to GSA chip...

Total failure:

6. Start an "Ancestor of the week" feature - were I blog about one of my ancestors.

Well the Ancestor of the week is the only thing I have not managed to start in 2017. Hopefully, I can do better in 2018!

With that I am looking forward to the 2018 plan post and hope you all had better success planning your goals than I did.

2017 Goal 2.2 - half of my 7th great grandparents on paternal grandfather's side identified

So 2017 is running to an end and I have barely blogged. As I explained, it was largely due to my 3rd kid and first son being born and generally time being at a premium.

So how did I fare against my goals?
Well I can report at least one success. The research of my paternal grandfather, Emil Krchak.

The goal was to identify half of my 7th great grandparents on Emil's side of the family.
And here is where I am (number of identified Emil's ancestors, generation per line):

While I am already missing two 4th great grandparents, I managed to hit the coveted 64 7th great grandparents. Unfortunately after that, the amount on known ancestors totally plummets...

Why?
[- Forget indices. Obvious, but always a tough one.]
- It is hard to keep fighting the ever increasing number of ancestors.
- The older materials are harder to work with. No parent information even on marriage records, no house numbers, no surnames for wives...
- The instability of surnames. Unfortunately, it seems the surnames are not completely stable any longer around the 17th to 18th century transition.
- There are several surnames, that cover significant portion of a village.
- The deeper we go, the more locations we need to cover, and any move is very hard to track...

Note: these are all Hornacko parish records on actapublica, i.e. Velka nad Velickou [then "Velka"] parish pre-tolerance.

So what do I do to combat the problems above?

1. I maintain a list of all relevant surnames, and try to memorize it well.
   It is just not feasible to go through the same parish book over and over again, with one of few surnames in mind. Going through it once, or few times, with many surnames in mind is more time efficient.
   So how many? I try to cover all known 7th great grandparent surnames. They start to repeat, so this makes it around 38 surnames currently (some unknown, some repeated, some known to be in a different parish).
2. I maintain a pen&paper ancestral index at hand.
   Having a quick reference of my ancestors, with all relevant where & when is indispensable tool.
3. Note down every detail.
   Only by diligent research of every bearer of the surname in the parish can you distinguish the many occurrences of multiple pairs with the same name of husband & wife. Without house numbers, you need to use the indirect information - names of godfathers, alignment of children being born with mother's death.
   Similarly, only this can help you connect your multiple time widowed ancestor wedding information as being about the same person.
4. Patience.
   It takes time. If you are not willing to pull 5 hours of work without obtaining a single new bit of information about your actual ancestors, this approach is not for you.
5. Work on the weddings first.
   It is best to establish the known pairs who made it too adulthood, than decorate them with children. And only at last, fill in the details from the death records.
   The best approach to timeline for me being: generation T weddings first, then generation T+1 kids, then generation T+1 weddings, then T+2 kids and last but not least generation T+2 deaths...
6. Some more patience.
7. Have partners, friends, grandmas or great uncles work with you.
   Unfortunately, I did not succeed in this direction much, but clearly, all of the effort above scales well with people. Get them on board.

Best of luck to anyone, who decides to go for it. You definitely find matches with the wrong parents, descendants of a kid who died at 5 days of age, etc. when you compare your well researched surname results to less systematic research of some cousins. And that feels good.

On the other hand, without the DNA to back the tree up, it is all just a shaky hypothesis.

Vitus, new Krchak introduced into the world!

Hello everyone and sorry for the prolonged hiatus. Did I ever mention that maintaining a bilingual blog is twice the work of maintaining a single language blog?
Also, did I ever mention that taking care of three kids is almost the same like taking care of two, but it still means you will have even less time for your hobbies as a result?

Well, let's get to work then. You aren't here to hear me complain!

So Vitus. Vitus Krchak. Third in this generation (~2010 generation) of Czech Krchaks. We are on the verge of extinction.

So who are we? Male Krchaks? Coming from Hornacko region, in south east Moravia? I started glimpsing into the paternal linage by taking the 23andMe autosomal V4 test, that included several thousand Y chromosome SNPs.


I was denoted I2b* branch, but some small research against the ISOGG Y tree revealed I am actually I-M423, I2a1b branch.
23andMe offers some haplogroup history write-up on their own, but the best source is probably eupedia. There, I learned about the basic I-M423 history.

I clearly saw that SNPs are so much more powerful for Y research than STRs and chose the next step as a I-M423 panel at yseq.net. This is a great price performance ratio, and the yseq.net team goes out of their way to always keep their panels updated with latest developments. Big kudos to Thomas Krahn and team.
This offered me my terminal SNP of I-Y16473 and 4 closest matches - Narog, Telencio, Rohaly and Girya. Poland, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Most recent ancestor 200AD. Slavic expansion!
Awesome.
To be able to identify the I-S17250 and it's nearest subclades so clearly with the Slavic expansion in early centuries of AD was a great feeling and justification of the testing effort.



The next step in my Krchak lineage research was a small STR test. This was done for free thanks to a great Czech project "Genealogy and surnames", which tries to map various surnames to haplogroups - genebaze.cz/gap.html (Czech only).
So what did I learn there? How could a small STR test add something to state-of-the-art SNP test? Easily. There SO MANY genealogists, that have only done STR testing, that while SNP testing is superior, to provide better timeline and paternal tree, you should not omit STRs.
In my case, this meant some close Slovak matches, that have not done SNP testing, that hint at correctness of the family lore, that Krchaks came to Hornacko region from Slovakia.
(This is further strengthened but quite close Slovak autosomal matches on my paternal grandfather "quarter" of my DNA.)
Macak. Orava. I hope I will get them to test some SNPs one day.
The ID on ysearch.org is AH7EK. Which is also linked to my WikiTree account.

As I always say, there are two approaches, you can take with your Y reseach. Active or passive.
Passive means waiting, for your matches to test, for them to pave you the SNP way. It is the cheaper road. Yet, it may never get you anywhere.
Active means acting. Testing that NGS Y chromosome test. Finding your novel SNPs. Working with the testing companies to get some of them on their panels and their single SNP tests. Working with your matches to try to verify if they have any of these SNPs common with you. Trying to motivate your distant cousins to do a NGS Y chromosome test too. This will be (much) more expensive but will lead to results so much more likely so much faster.

Of course I choose the active path, so here I was, buying a Big Y test from FTDNA. Or was I?

FTDNA requires you to purchase a STR test, before buying a BigY test. This is probably fair, because you don't want to spend 400$ on your cousin to find he was a NPE.
You can order a 12STR test through a project, to save most money, but I wanted to tackle FTDNA STR database and went for 37STR markers. This added roughly 15 on top of what I had from GAP.

Was it worth it? Not much. Would I do it again? Yes.
The FTDNA limit for matches on 37STR level on FTDNA is very strict to motivate you to purchase 67 or 111 panel. I consider this an ugly money-poaching tactic, but it is, what it is.
FTDNA earns their living off of STR testing after all.

Nothing tangible I got from the 37STR test, but there is always a chance to persuade some of my matches to test BigY. Study modal STR values on various SNP levels, etc.

With the STR test out of my way, the BigY was finally in sight. Except it was further than it seemed, taking over 3 months... Eventually, the test happened, and boy did it deliver.

New terminal SNP with my match Larry Telencio. I-FGC40352. Super awesome. Super exciting. Y-tree in the making.
On top of that I got 8 unnamed variants (that actually included two named SNPs, but nevermind).
Potential for further research closer to present. Give it to me!

Was I done? Not yet. The NGS test are notoriously hard to analyze. And FTDNA does not do a very good job. That is why everyone who takes Y research seriously goes one step further and orders detailed analysis of his BAM file for 49$ on https://www.yfull.com.
There are three milestones:

1. SNP results - this is the foundation of the analysis, finding any new terminal SNPs
2. STR results - this offers a more profound look at the STR landscape
3. new Tree being published - this finally offers the age estimate of your new terminal SNP

All in all, I am fairly advanced in terms of my Y research, that my son will carry.
Still, more things remain.

Persuading close matches to test BigY or my novel SNPs. I hope I will succeed with some of them (you).
Buying BigY for known distant cousins so that we can better define the older novel SNPs and the most recent one, as well as get the branch on various trees (YFull, ISOGG, FTDNA).

Another year, another step forward. I am looking forward to learning more in 2018.

23andMe move to the New Experience coming!

So 23andMe has finally gotten to transitioning foreign accounts WITHOUT health information - sorry UK, Canada or Denmark.

What will it bring? Worse ability to work with DNA relatives :( That's the biggest bummer, the new interface is more newbie oriented and does not offer as quick and outcome oriented  capabilities as the old one. Also, the 529andYou chrome plugin does not work perfectly (at least yet), that is going to be a big downside. I only like 23andMe most to work with, because of the powerful plugin 529andYou made work with triangulations so effortless.

On the other hand, we have a lot to look for.

1. Accepting invitations, yay! Yes I had my account bugged for maybe 4 months now, unable to accept any invitations from others.
2. Reading and writing messages! Yipeee!! Again, my account, due to it's size, probably, was no longer able to read new messages from people. Sorry everyone! 
3. Contacting Anonymous matches! Finally, we will be able to contact anonymous people again. They often do not know they are anonymous and are perfectly fine with sharing.
4. New In-Common-With functionality. Huge! I am so looking forward to learning where do my anonymous matches fit. And others as well.
5. All other little nice things like updated male haplogroups.

I want to take this opportunity to run one last invitation wave on the old site. Who knows how things will be, and one thing is clear. Any matches you have persist through the transition.
So clearly matches = good :)

If you are my match checking up here, I would love to help you understand genetic genealogy or be able to understand your Central European, or even Czech ancestry better.
Still, if you are not interested in any of that, and can just approve my sharing request, that will help me a bunch in my family research. It will enable me to better define triangulations, portions of my and my matches' DNA coming from a specific ancestor. This will only show me a very small portion of the DNA we share and poses no security risk.

I would also like to do an update to my matches series. Where did we get since January first?

Let me compare against the last blog series from December 28th:

	DNA matches	Anonymous	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	952 (+6)	214 (-25)	381 (+21)	40.02%
mother	854 (+9)	239 (-32)	311 (+25)	36.42%
father	918 (+2)	196 (-33)	391 (+30)	42.59%
m. grandma	1122 (+19)	293 (-9)	516 (+21)	45.99%
p. grandma	925 (+5)	241 (-34)	337 (+11)	36.43%
m. grandpa	957 (+14)	229 (-28)	357 (+23)	37.30%
wife	898 (+8)	224 (-50)	304 (+29)	33.85%

What is important to say, is that this was without any invitation messages being written. Nada.

And we're still breaking the magical 40% accepted on some kits already! Sweet.
Despite the negative sentiment everywhere (facebook, forums), I can still report number of matches growing on ALL of my kits.
WHILE, number of anonymous matches dropping, sometimes at a speed of light - 50 anonymous matches disappearing from my wife's list. WOW.

Simple observation. As long as you keep inviting your relatives to share, you should be good. See more and more cousins to research.

So where are we with unaccepted matches? Let's see:

Hm, 6 bugged invitations. Hope they stay for the TNE.

And over three and half thousands of unaccepted invitations. Including some of the closest ones. I sure hope this invitation round will reach to some of these cousins. Getting down to 3000 would be awesome ;)

So let's look forward to the New Experience with positive attitude. There are some great new features in there. As well as a renewed possibility to connect with anonymous matches.

And last but not least, I am working on my tree hard (as time permits) so I can find a connection for all of these new matches :)

Goals for 2017

First and foremost: Happy New Year! 🎉🎉🎉 May you all have a very successful 2017 with lot of genealogical successes, uncovered DNA cousins and healthy family members.

A new year is a great time for tidying up and starting afresh with new vigor.

So what are the goals I want to achieve? I have already mentioned some of them in my last two blogs, but I will incorporate those into the overall list with order by importance.

1. Have a healthy son introduced into the world. Yay! This is not strictly genealogical, nor strictly genetical, but taking care of my newborn son will be a great experience in 2017. It will take away some of my free time - so excuse in me in times of silence. Importantly, here comes a huge thank you to my wife, for being such an excellent person and mother. Love you, honey 💖
   
2. Improve the family tree. This has subgoals as per the latest 2016 balancing blog.
   
   2.1. Identify 40% of my own overall ancestors up to the 10th generation. This means identifying 818 ancestors of mine (out of 2046). I currently [think I] know 512 of them. This means identifying 306 new ancestors of mine in the new year 2017.
   
   2.2. Identify half of my paternal grandfather's 7th generation. I.e. 64 ancestors. This is an ambitious plan, as I have not reached 64 ancestors on this level for none of my other grandparents. But it is important to aim high.
   
3. Run a Czech series for newbies in genetic genealogy. (This will probably be Czech only - there is a lot of existing English material and maintaining bilinguality costs a lot of time and energy).
   
4. Break one or both of my closest brick walls. One of my paternal grandmother's great-grandfathers is unknown, as well as one of my paternal grandfather's great-grandfathers. Attacking them with autosomal DNA was the goal from the beginning, so identifying one or both of them would be a tremendous achievement.
   
   4.1. This includes a sub-goal of gathering as much relevant samples from those sides of the family as possible.
   
   4.2. Work on recombination map and chromosome ancestral coverage on my paternal side.
   
5. Test my own children. We have agreed with my wife to test the children, so looking into what's the best option and going through with it is one of the topics of 2017.
   
6. Start an "Ancestor of the week" feature - were I blog about one of my ancestors. I expect only a few of these throughout the year
   
7. Keep working with my genetic genealogy matches (this includes 23andMe matches and the relevant goal mentioned in the recent 2016 balancing blog).

I have more on my mind, but let's keep it at 7. I will try to address each and every one of these goals, with the priority going top to bottom.

How did I fare with my family tree research since starting the blog?

So the very first post on this blog wisely talked about family tree being the number one resource and prerequisite for a genetic genealogists work. We have stressed out how most of our DNA matches are probably 8th followed by 7th cousins. And we need a deep tree for that.

Well, the sad truth is I was more distracted elsewhere (e.g. 23andMe sharing series) and haven't done the progress I hoped for, when writing the initial blog post.

Here comes the comparison table:

gen#	rel	match	#anc/gen	#idd me	#idd mgm	#idd mgf	#idd pgm	#idd pgf
2	gp	1C	4	4	4	4	4	4
3	Ggp	2C	8	8	8	8	7	7
4	GGgp	3C	16	16	15	16	14 (+3)	14
5	3Ggp	4C	32	30	30	32 (+1)	22 (+4)	26 (+1)
6	4Ggp	5C	64	59 (+3)	49 (+1)	38 (+4)	27	32 (+7)
7	5Ggp	6C	128	110 (+6)	21 (+5)	31 (+6)	18 (+3)	4 (+1)
8	6Ggp	7C	256	146 (+11)	6 (+2)	46 (+19)	11 (+4)	0
9	7Ggp	8C	512	74 (+15)	4 (+3)	43 (+15)	10 (+4)	0
10	8Ggp	9C	1024	63 (+25)	1 (+1)	8 (+2)	6 (+4)	0

Thankfully, we have made some progress since the first post, signified by the little + numbers in brackets.

Let's first look at the number of my identified ancestors in the light purple (#idd me) column. Our final goal is to have all of the ancestors identified - for this light purple number to be equal to the darker purple number. Up till 7th generation, we're faring well, but then, the numbers fall of extremely rapidly.

We said most of our matches are likely 8th cousins (blue column) and we have still only identified 74 out of 512 possible ancestors. This clearly shows working with DNA matches is going to be frustrating! We need to improve our tree tree further!

Also, I was only talking about my own numbers, but in the 4 white columns, I have included my grandparent's point of view. This is because I am mostly working with DNA matches from the point of view of my grandparents. Here we can see the 8C level is abysmal. We just can't expect finding any common relatives at all, with the trees being so sparse.

Clearly, while I like the DNA work, it is time to sit by the parish records again, and do some serious heavy lifting. I need to call the target for my paternal grandfather (pgf in the table) again, and focus on it this time.

Let me try to shoot for two goals in 2017:

1. Identify half of my paternal grandfather's 7th generation. I.e. 64 ancestors. This is an ambitious plan, as I have not reached 64 ancestors on this level for none of my other grandparents. But it is important to aim high.
2. Identify 40% of my own overall ancestors up to the 10th generation. This means identifying 818 ancestors of mine (out of 2046). I currently [think I] know 512 of them. This means identifying 306 new ancestors of mine in the new year 2017.

All in all, I will try to keep active with the blog but focus on tree building efforts.

State of the year - 23andMe matches

So here it is, yet another calendar year ending. A great time for balancing!
Let's continue with our 23andMe matches series. Please, allow me to present the end of year numbers.

Let me also mention one great tip I got as a reaction to my blog(s).
Do not forget to explain / stress out how sharing with you can be beneficial to the other party! We are not a world of altruistic beings after all, but everyone has their own agenda and goals.

So where do we stand with our 23andMe matches?
One big change happened on my account since November. Now I have both of my parents as part of this same account. This definitely helps in many aspects of genetic genealogy. To remind you, I already had 3 of my grandparents on the account. One might think that the grandparents supersede parents, but the truth is simply the more the merrier - more matches, more IBS uncovered, ...
From now on, we will start including my parents numbers to the table.

Let me compare against the last blog series from November 18th:

	DNA matches	Anonymous	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	946 (+20)	239 (-20)	360 (+30)	38.05%
mother	845 (+1)*	271 (-16)*	286 (+38)*	33.85%
father	916 (+7)*	229 (-13)*	361 (+18)*	39.41%
m. grandma	1103 (+26)	302 (-21)	495 (+21)	44.88%
p. grandma	920 (+18)	275 (-11)	326 (+21)	35.44%
m. grandpa	943 (+32)	257 (-22)	334 (+38)	35.41%
wife	890 (+8)	274 (-21)	275 (+16)	30.90%

*mother and father differences are since Dec 10, few days after I merged them into a single account.

So what can we see here? Wow, what numbers! The effect of adding father and mother's kit and inviting (no letter apart from generic 23andMe message) everyone is much better than a hand prepared message! Such a positive end to 2016 here.

I newly included anonymous numbers, because many people were commenting on them based on the previous instalments of the series. You can clearly see, anonymous people are disappearing - either making themselves public or disappearing altogether after opting out on TNE ("the new experience" of 23andMe).
I will try to create a short article just covering the anonymous shares in a near future.

The disadvantage of the two additional accounts is more unaccepted outgoing invitations overall:

Will I be ever able to dwindle the number down significantly? Unlikely :( I am still clearly increasing my overall amount of matches, increasing my accepted shares and decreasing the amount of anonymous matches. So that's the most important thing.

Also there is a bug, disabling me from accepting the two pending invitations. Aaaargh. 23andMe know about it, though and are trying to fix it...

I want to create a single 2017 goals article, but let me state some bold goals relevant to 23andMe:

1. Transition to the TNE - this will increase number of matches, introduce open sharing, which should both significantly help with number of known triangulation groups...
2. Move over 40% of accepted shares on all accounts. Ideally breaking 50% on my kit.

Let me wrap it up here, wishing you all a great 2017.

Narrowing down my Y heritage

You can call me a cheapskate, but I just like to get my money's worth ;) Seeing a sale on yseq.net in October, I jumped on it, to finally get closer to present than I-M423's ~14000 years (I had from 23andMe).
Well what I say is not completely true, by looking around, I strongly suspected, I will belong to I-S17250 when tested (https://www.yfull.com/tree/I-S17250/).

This may seem like a heresy to the old-timers, but I still have no STR markers tested on my paternal line. Should change next year, with my first 27. So I only have SNPs to utilise in my Y-research so far.

So what have I learned at YSeq?
I was true, I am actually I-S17250! Good job figuring that one out.
But downstream, it was all miss, no hit. Based on other Czechs, I suspected I-Z16971 or I-Z16983.

What was my surprise to learn, I am actually I-Y4882! (https://www.yfull.com/tree/I-Y4882/)
This seems to be an East Slavic SNP, where I always saw my Krchaks as West Slavs till the last week. Time to change the family history :D

So far, I am A1328- and A811-. Next week should bring us results for A7358 and Y16473.
Based on that, if I am all negative, I still have a new A12505 to check.

Almost regardless of the result, I need to start saving for that NGS Y test though. None of the Y-4882 sub-branches is much explored, so either being placed in one of them or being an original one still leads to the same solution - NGS.

Blaine's 20 genetic genealogy questions

Blaine T. Bettinger - who recently published a genetic genealogy book and keeps a blog at http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/ - posted a 20 question list on the ISOGG Facebook Group - I specifically wanted to bring that to the Czech mutation of the site, but will keep bilinguality.

1. First person you DNA tested?
All living grandparents at once.
2. What was your own first test?
Autosomal at 23andMe.
3. Year you took your first test?
2013
4. What was your most recent test?
SNP pack at yseq.net
5. Have you done full mtDNA genome?
Nope.
6. What is your mtDNA Haplogroup?
T2b
7. Any exact mtDNA matches?
Do not know.
8. Max Y-DNA markers you/male relative tested?
37
9. What is your father’s Y-DNA Haplogroup?
I-Y4882 (downstream I-S17250)
10. Any exact Y-DNA matches? 
No
11. Tested at all of the Big 3 Companies? 
Yes
12. Have you had a whole-genome test?
No, waiting for the price to drop some more ;)
13. About how many tests do you control/administer? 
15
14. Do you use GEDmatch? 
Yes
15. Favorite GEDmatch tool? 
One-to-one comparison.
16. Were you able to test any of your parents? 
Yes, both.
17. Were you able to test any of your grandparents? 
Yes, 3.
18. Age of the oldest person you’ve tested? 
89
19. Are you all done testing relatives? 
NO!
20. If you could ask ANY one ancestor to test, living or dead, who would it be?
Perhaps my nearest ancestors, fathered by unknown person - Antonin Sula and Anna Chrencikova, both my great great grandparents.


Looking forward to read yours :) Here is the empty list (by Blaine):
1. First person you DNA tested?
2. What was your own first test?
3. Year you took your first test?
4. What was your most recent test?
5. Have you done full mtDNA genome?
6. What is your mtDNA Haplogroup?
7. Any exact mtDNA matches?
8. Max Y-DNA markers you/male relative tested?
9. What is your father’s Y-DNA Haplogroup?
10. Any exact Y-DNA matches?
11. Tested at all of the Big 3 Companies?
12. Have you had a whole-genome test?
13. About how many tests do you control/administer?
14. Do you use GEDmatch?
15. Favorite GEDmatch tool?
16. Were you able to test any of your parents?
17. Were you able to test any of your grandparents?
18. Age of the oldest person you’ve tested?
19. Are you all done testing relatives?
20. If you could ask ANY one ancestor to test, living or dead, who would it be?

23andMe matches update

  Thank you so much to all my cousins that accepted. It was not a total win, but I think combined with the blog, the campaign was a success. I am sure we will have more accepts in the coming days and weeks.

  So last week, we started at 2793 outstanding invitations, and we were able to bring it down to

2718. Not too bad. But I would prefer 1900 or 900 or 0 :D

Well, it is, what it is. We'll just have to live with this inconvenience of not tapping into the whole 23andMe DB.

So how did we fare on the individual accounts? Let's see.

DNA matches	Accepted	%
926 (+8)	330 (+22)	35.63714903
1077 (+1)	474 (+13)	44.01114206
902 (+4)	305 (+14)	33.81374723
914 (+3)	296 (+17)	32.38512035
886 (+4)	259 (+31)	29.23250564

We did not quite reach the goal of 20/20/20/20/40, but we did not land too far from it. Additional matches over the next week might close the gap for some of the kits.

Again, my kit here is the effect of double dipping - we invite some of these matches twice (my account as well as the grandparent's account) and it can help.

One interesting thing to note for people not aware of this - getting your matches to accept reveals you new matches that are not recent. In the last week, I got between 0 and 2 new recent matches per account, but most of the kits got a few more new matches in their list. Accepting is good for increasing the amount of visible cousins.

It's not only numbers, I got my closest cousin from paternal's grandfather side to accept. Likely a 3C1R of my father. She did not react to follow-up questions and internet searches/ancestry searches ran dry. But I have a nice 5 segment match I can utilize in the future. 

I still have a large backlog of messages to work through, and I am going for that after finishing this blog. That could yield more accepts as well as more identified common ancestors.

The final conclusion is, that even for a European ("Eastern" one at that), you are able to get close to 50% utilization of the 23andMe database, without Open Sharing taking in the account (none available on the old experience). With some basic work, you're able to get around one third of your cousinship to engage (this was only my second invite wave on my wife's account).

New Y haplogroups at 23andMe

What a nice and useful update from 23andMe. We now have SNP-based haplogroup info! As expected, this feature only made it to new experience (yes, as a European, I am still at the old one).

The blog: https://blog.23andme.com/ancestry/updates-to-23andme-paternal-haplogroup-assignments/
What do we have here?
David Poznik, great Y chromosome researcher, is working hard to bring us some improvements.
He has updated all the results to recent (January 2016) ISOGG phylotree.

Now everyone will have a small image representing his position in the tree:

First and foremost, this will help reduce confusion, as unexperienced users often didn't understand the old notation, it's relation to the new SNP one. (People were coming to my FTDNA project of Facebook group with misunderstandings from 23andMe all the time.)

It will be also easier to jump to SNP panels at FTDNA or YSeq based on this info.

All-in-all great work from David, and I hope to see more from him!
(For tech savvies, you can check out his utility they used for this haplogroup update.)

FTDNA sales

It's holiday season! Hope you will have a great great time with your family all.

At https://www.familytreedna.com they're giving us some lowest prices in history, to celebrate with some family research.

You can utilize a crowd sourcing document https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CgXRKz2TySvRqSInveSIYoslO7yexAc9d-BzpNhaY1c/edit#gid=1338933495 - where everyone is sharing the coupons they do not need.

I can definitely recommend to grab a bunch of those 59$ autosomals, if you're still missing some family members. It will only bring more order in your testing.

If you still miss your mtDNA haplgroup at phylotree.org, I suggest you fix that. An uploaded full mtDNA will guarantee your group being used in any future scientific articles, for great satisfaction and clarity. And if someone with your mtDNA haplogroup is still missing autosomal, go for the combination, easy 10$ :)

And finally BigY. Except of (more expensive) Y Elite at FGC, this is the only possibility to map your paternal line all the way to present. If you have those 400+$ in your genealogy budget, this is one of the most interesting genetic options today. You will create a path for your cousins to follow and your paternal lineage will be researched so much better, than one without NGS testing.

Can I get any more people on 23andMe to accept?

So in my first blog, I talked about the need to work on our family trees as the basis of successful genetic genealogy. And I have been doing just that. Working on the trees, studying the parish records and had some success, given the invested time.

For the purpose of this blog, I would like to return to my "home" DNA testing site - 23andMe.

Out there, I have almost 2800 unaccepted requests for DNA sharing. Yes, TWO THOUSAND, or rather close to three. This is frustrating. Very.

I want to do an invitation wave - send messages to my unaccepted matches, urging them share (hello, if you're actually reading the blog). And I want to measure the impact and share it with all of you.

So where do stand we with matches on 5 of my most interesting kits?

	DNA matches	Accepted	% accepted
me (Kuba)	918	308	33.55119826
m. grandma	1076	461	42.84386617
p. grandma	898	291	32.40534521
m. grandpa	911	279	30.62568606
wife	882	228	25.85034014

As you can see, I have worked most on my maternal grandmother. I have not particularly worked less on my wife, but I tested her year and something later then my grandparents (and I owe my numbers to the work on the grandparent matches).

What can we realistically expect? I would be happy if we get 20 matches per my grandparents (this could lead to more than 20 for my kit, if we're lucky) and perhaps 40 for my wife.

What will do? Write a common message to everyone.

Hello, 

my name is is Kuba Krchak and I am living in the Czech republic. I work as a computer scientist, with huge interest in genealogy, genetics, population genetics, next generation sequencing et.al. 

I maintain a blog bgengen.blogspot.com, where I just wrote about the struggle with matches on 23andMe. Please, check it out if you have a little bit of time. http://bgengen.blogspot.cz/2016/11/can-i-get-any-more-people-on-23andme-to.html

I am trying to work on the project of creating a recombination map for me and my family and eventually mapping the DNA to ancestors. 

You are one of my unshared matches and you accepting my sharing request would tremendously help me in my efforts.

I am eager to talk to you about your ancestry, but that is optional. Just accepting my sharing request is very valuable to me. 

Here is my basic public tree: www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Krchak-1/5 

My most up-to-date tree is http://krchak.myheritage.com

I also do have an ancestry tree: http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/82403601/family

My gedmatch ID is M240291. 

Best regards, 

Kuba 

kuba.krchak@gmail.com

We will slightly change it when writing to the match of a grandparent/wife, to include their information (tree, gedmatch, ..).

Let's do this and hope for the best. I will try to follow-up in a week with details how successful this campaign was. If you have any ideas, how to improve this approach, I am all ears.