New tools are hints only
The buzz at this past week’s RootsTech conference was all about new tools for analyzing DNA results at AncestryDNA and MyHeritage DNA.
Ancestry announced its ThruLines: “ThruLines™ shows you the common ancestors who likely connect you to your DNA Matches—and gives you a clear and simple view of how you’re all related. When you link your public or private searchable family tree to your AncestryDNA results, new chapters of your family story may be revealed.”1
And MyHeritage announced its Theory of Family Relativity: “This unprecedented feature helps you make the most of your DNA Matches by incorporating genealogical information from all our collections of nearly 10 billion historical records and family tree profiles, to offer theories on how you and your DNA Matches might be related. If you’ve taken a MyHeritage DNA test or uploaded your DNA results to MyHeritage, this revolutionary technology may offer astounding new information on your family connections.”2
Both of these tools try to combine data from DNA tests, family trees and — in MyHeritage’s case — other record sources to provide clues to possible ancestral lines.
And despite their enormous promise, here’s the simple truth:
They are not magic wands.
No matter how much we want tools like this to be the end-all-and-be-all of family history research using DNA, there’s no such thing as a magic wand.
They are providing hints or clues only, and not rock-solid-take-it-to-the-bank evidence that we can use without question in our family histories.
We’re still going to have to work — and work hard — to analyze, verify, validate and, yes, often disprove and reject what these hints and clues are telling us.
Any time you combine DNA evidence — which can tell us, reliably, that we are related in some way to another person — with family tree data — which is self-reported and often speculative and undocumented — you’re going to end up with a whole bunch of hints and clues that are — let’s say it outright — often just dead wrong.
If the family trees are wrong, the suggested common ancestor is going to be wrong. It doesn’t matter if 500 family trees on Ancestry say that my Virginia Baker family descends from Alexander Baker of Boston. It’s still fiction. We have definitive YDNA evidence that the Virginia Bakers and the Boston Bakers are two entirely different families, and no fudging of the family tree data is going to merge them into one.
Sometimes it’s a matter that the DNA itself suggests a relationship that isn’t so. I’m not going to be descended from my third great grandfather’s brother and his wife no matter how many DNA matches I have to the descendants of my third great grandfather’s brother and his wife. The fact is, the wives of these two brothers were sisters and so all descendants of both of these couples share the same two sets of fourth great grandparents.
So let me repeat: these tools offer hints or clues only, and not rock-solid-take-it-to-the-bank evidence that we can use without question in our family histories. We’re still going to have to work — and work hard — to analyze, verify, validate and, yes, often disprove and reject what these hints and clues are telling us.
They’re giving us ideas and places to start. They don’t give us the end of the story.
There’s no such thing as a magic wand.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “No magic wands,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 3 March 2019).
SOURCES
- “Ancestry® Announces Coveted Content Releases and New, Game-Changing Family History Research Tools at RootsTech 2019,” Ancestry.com blog, posted 28 Feb 2019 (https://blogs.ancestry.com/ : accessed 3 Mar 2019). See also Judy G. Russell, “Ancestry advances at RootsTech,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 27 Feb 2019 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 3 Mar 2019). ↩
- “Introducing The Theory of Family Relativity™ — a Genealogy Game-Changer,” MyHeritage Blog, posted 28 Feb 2019 (https://blog.myheritage.com/ : accessed 3 Mar 2019). See also Judy G. Russell, “New MyHeritage DNA tools,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 28 Feb 2019. ↩
Amen!
I love that we have new tools, but do take the results as a hint only, not a conclusion.
I’ve always taken Ancestry member trees as info only. I write it down and then find the verifying info (or lack of) myself. Too many just assume it’s right. Had someone show up on the Member Connect feature that downloaded pictures & info on my great aunt and gg grandfather. When I looked at the tree, they had my great aunt married to someone on theirs. She was a NUN that never married. Luckily the person was nice & said she’d reinvestigate (since it was her husband’s family) – but that’s how it happens. Always verify yourself.
Agreed! The first thing I noticed were links to trees that I knew were wrong and too many trees that copied that wrong information!
I’ve been playing with Ancestry’s “Thrulines” for a few days. I was truly surprised to discover that one of my gg-grandfathers was born in Vermont, married a woman in SC, his children were born in SC, but he lived his entire life in Vermont and died there. None of this information is suggested by DNA, but by someone who is randomly adopting an ancestry. Yes, the DNA does support a relationship to the children of my gg-grandfather through their descendants, but that is information that I already knew based on extensive research in documents. No documents suggest he ever lived in Vermont. At the moment, I am skeptical of the value this innovation provides.
For some reason I cannot access the Ancestry ThruLines tool at all. Is it, like DNA Circles and the ability to view your matches’ public family trees, not available to people who buy their test kit from AncestryDNA unless they pay extta to subscribe to the Ancestry.com site as well? This is one of the things I hate most about Ancestry. It feels like a rip-off. Customers who buy their test kit directly from AncestryDNA should get access to all the tools designed to help them analyze their results. It’s not like we paid some other company for the test and took advantage of a free transfer offer to get access to the AncestryDNA database. Even companies that permit free transfers offer full access to all the tools for a modest one-time fee, and do not require customers to pay in the neighborhood of $100/yr for a smorgasbord of birth and death records, census returns, passenger lists and other documents in order to use the DNA tools.
Well said. I’m playing with ThruLines and they have a woman, younger than my mother, as her 4x great grandmother. Don’t think that is possible.
Neat trick… 🙂
Your warning/encouragement is on-point.
But my mind and heart is telling me that something more sinister (perhaps too harsh a word) is at work here with all these latest tools.
The desire to sell one-click trees is too strong for companies. This is what their goal is after all (as for-profit organizations.) The more DNA tests they can flip the more money they will make.
Hyper-charging poor genealogy practices with automation is not going to help I’m afraid. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I see many errors being made because people believe a DNA test is telling them something (when the conclusion is premature or just wrong.)
I have 50 year old hand-drawn trees that have errors… but they have no more errors than the latest computer-generated trees. And certainly fewer errors than the initial ThruLines output.
If I may use an analogy from electronics: simply turning up the volume knob does not help improve the S/N ratio. If you start with static you’ll just end up with louder static.
DNA testing is great – I’ve used it to much success. But my primary concern has been near-generation questions, in which DNA testing can be definitive and undeniable.
As we look deeper into our pedigrees, I think many people may not be aware that DNA testing becomes much more challenging to use to reject many hypotheses. Yet I fear that is exactly what is happening, or worse – people are just going to add an ancestor because something like ThruLines gives them “proof”.
Every automated system has its downsides, and the click-and-attach folks will always be a problem. That’s no reason not to try to automate research hints; it’s more a reason to work to educate the click-and-attach folks.
I tested with Ancestry and so far did discovers second cousin I had No idea about. But not many other matches that I could place given there’s limited info once you stop paying. I checked out thru lines and they put a random Mexican woman as my mother and all their ancestors. Not only I’ve never been to Mexico and my 4+ generation paper trail has NO Mexican relatives and of course, my mother and father are my biological parents (and yes confirmed by DNA) so this was pretty useless. But who knows it may improve in the future. Theory of relativity was much better but haven’t found anything new yet. Clusters provides some leads that I will follow up.
The system is in beta and surely will have glitches to begin with. Hopefully the worst of these will be fixed!
I have discovered that “ThruLines” are a waste of my time because out of the six I have looked at they are WRONG (caps for emphasis). My five favorite laughable incorrect ‘potential ancestors’ my rear are Robert Welborn Baskin & his wife Temperance Hargrove via their daughter Charity Baskin who was supposed to have married my third great-grandfather William Taylor Pittman. These three are incorrect because William Taylor Pittman married Charity PRESLEY which I can prove via their marriage record & census records where Charity lived with her sister but because some cousin entered Charity BASKIN (despite having the accurate marriage record attached) & other cousins just copied this information into their tree Ancestry has decided (so to speak) that my research is incorrect. Oh & Charity BASKIN married James L. Phillips 07 November 1858 Pulaski County, Georgia,
The other couple that are incorrect are Thomas Shields & Sarah Coleman who ancestry have determined are the parents of my fourth great-grandfather Samuel O’Shields. I know for a fact this is incorrect because his mother Teresa “Tracy” O’Shields had three of her four known children with a man whose surname is WOOTEN which Y-DNA has proven.
I fear these ThruLines are only going to add to all the false information in trees spreading because you have too many ‘weekend researchers’ who do not actually RESEARCH but just slap information into their tree(s) simply because “I saw it in a tree so it must be true”!