In early 2018 we made a series of posts on how to use the multiple “Shared Matches” in AncestryDNA to narrow down the DNA line that connects you to them. The challenge was that often they have no trees, or small trees that don’t come anywhere close to matching your (much more complete!) tree.
This strategy was a way to use mirror trees to match them to themselves, which should indicate a Most Recent Common Ancestor for them, and in all likelihood to be your MCRA as well. For this series we broke down a large set of matches (5000+) to Felice’s mother, to try and establish her first DNA link outside of the immediate family.
There were all of the challenges we all face with African American genealogy (fewer family histories to draw off of, smaller trees, difficulty with 3x/4xGGP’s due to the “1870 Wall”, etc.), and in this series we found the MCRA…but we failed to find the link between them and our family. However, about a year later we broke through that wall, and we’ll be following up on that shortly. In the meantime, here’s the complete series in one page:
In September we wrote about what is a common problem in the genealogy community: not enough time to balance work, family, and our research. We took a radical step and decided to stop working on our family tree, so we could instead focus on wrapping up other projects and to get our research, citations, and document/photo collections in order.
It’s been 7 months since wrote that piece (Link)…here’s how the plan’s going:
Keep blog posts to 500 words (Grade: F) – Our last post was almost 2000 words, our average since September is about 1000, AND we have been lucky to post 2 times a month instead of publishing weekly like we intend. Lots of work to do here.
Clean, scan, and store the 2000 glass plate negatives from the Home Studio Collection (Grade: B+) – We decided not to clean them, we have the storage taken care of with all of the proper archival products. However, we got to about 70 plates scanned in October and stopped. It was too much time per plate. In response, in the last 3 months we purchased a lot of equipment to scan these more quickly and we were able to process 225 plates in about 2 hours last time we tested. We are about to finish the first crate of plates (~440 images) in 10 days! We’ll publish more details when we’re done.
While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree.
Install a temperature/humidity control solution in our archive room (Grade: A) – It’s done! Our archives have spent the last 5-6 months at 62-65 degrees, and 42-45% humidity! There will be more work to do this summer, to cool/dehumidify the space, but we already have the controls in place.
Ensure each Source in our main, Public tree is properly cited and every Fact is supported by at least one Source (Grade: Inc) – To be fair, we started on this effort, beginning with 4xGGP Royal and Eliza (Jones) Morse (whom we’ve owed this documentation to the Morse Society for 2 years now!) 4 times, but the Family Tree Maker data corruptions kept setting this effort back (MacKiev’s Family Tree Maker is garbage). Once we got past that, we’ve made some progress, but we lost a lot of effort on this one.
Properly transcribe and index all family history interviews (Grade: C) – We’re half way there! But the last set of transcripts will be the hardest.
PUBLISH! (Grade: F) – Out blog posts are lagging, and we haven’t actually published anything outside of blogging. We’ve been reading some great family histories though, to get an idea of how others publish their stories, so we have good ideas once we’re ready!
Write our autobiographies, as well as begin to write out what we know about our family (Grade: F) – Yeah, so…we’ve written nothing. Looking back, this probably should have been left off the list…we were just setting ourselves up for failure.
Ensure that we’re printing out all electronic sources, so that our paper files are complete copies of our electronic files (Grade: A) – We’ve been pretty diligent on this one, and while we’ve had to redo a lot of electronic source citations, we did print them all out as we created them.
Spend a little more time with the family! (Grade: A) – We could have made a lot more progress on this list if sacrificed this one, but we’re spending more time together as family now than when we first wrote this.
While we are scoring a GPA just over a C, it’s mostly because of we failed at our primary approach of stopping work on our Family Tree. Instead, we shattered our largest brick wall (while adding nearly 40 new DNA matches) and made a huge dent in another brick wall. Much more on that will follow, but both efforts took a LOT of work, and those hours spent working on the trees directly slowed down the other work we hoped to accomplish.
That said, we’ve rededicated ourselves to getting these other tasks complete so we can finally turn our full attention to building our tree. Our properly cited and sourced family tree!
Before we get into the amazing connection we’ve made recently, here’s a quick update on the broader collection of 2500 glass plate negatives we were able to rescue that comprise the surviving images from the Home Portrait Studio. We talked about how saved these plates earlier, and about how we intend to scan and share all of these images publicly (Our project to save a piece of Racine, Wisconsin history, Part 1 – Getting Started), but in the months since our last update we found out it would be nearly impossible to use a flatbed scanner to capture those thousands of images without it taking years to complete. Fully processing 50 negatives was taking about 8 hours. We’ve since bought a bunch of equipment to instead photograph each negative digitally, and invested in software that allows us to now fully process those same 50 images in just under an hour. We expect that with this new process we’ll the entire first box up and shared next month (440 images), and we’ll provide much more detail as soon as they complete.
In the meantime, through an amazing set of coincidences we determined the name of the man in the WWI uniform we posted originally, met his grandson, and learned more about Frank Stritesky who owned the Home Portrait Studio.
The photo is William H Rastall (born in 17 Jun in Racine, Wisconsin) and who served in the US Army from December 1917 to January 1919. William was the brother of Frank’s wife Anne, and lived in the same neighborhood.
Other pictures of Willam H Rastall (from the collection of Michael Rastall)
Just days after we first shared these images on the “Racine History” Facebook group, and on this blog, William’s grandson Michael began searching the Internet to buy an original or reproduction of the patch on William’s uniform. The photo of William with the 119th patch was a family treasure that had been passed down.
Michael’s first search turned up our scan, posted to a military insignia message board that we’d used to try and narrow down the timeframe that image was taken. Michael has prints of this family heirloom, and figured that the negatives were in the home that housed the studio which was owned by Frank’s daughter Betty, so he was floored to see a full-frame version of the picture randomly by a stranger on the Internet!
He reached out the next day, and after exchanging texts and phone calls, it turned out we were close enough for lunch, and got to meet and exchange stories. Michael was able to share many of the family pictures that were taken by Frank over the years.
The image we first published of William was almost certainly taken in 1918, at a time when Frank was just getting Home Portrait Studio up and running, and during that time he’d often take photos of family to practice/build his portfolio. William married after returning home from his WWI service, and he and his wife Alice had one son, Patric who had a life-long interest in photography owning back to his Uncle Frank. Frank had let Patric work the cameras from time-to-time when he was younger, and Patric’s interest eventually rubbed off on his son Michael, who works as a professional photographer in the Chicago Suburbs (Michael Rastall Photography).
The Rastall Family, ca. 1918. William is center (in uniform), and is flanked by his sisters Adeline (Rastall) Noble and Anne (Rastall) Stritesky. (from the collection of Michael Rastall)
Patric and his wife had visited Betty decades ago hoping to salvage the remaining negatives and maybe some of the studio gear, but Betty wasn’t interested in letting anything go. Given the condition they were being stored in there was little hope they survived after Betty’s passing, so it came as a complete shock to the family that they were seeing the light of day. With any luck, as we continue through the 6 boxes we saved they we’ll find more of those family treasures.
William’s son Patric Rastall, ca. 1944. (from the collection of Michael Rastall)
We’re also hopeful we can eventually reunite many more families with these amazing images of their ancestors, but for now we’ve at least made that first link!
In this installment we’re going to walk through a key tool to help narrow down where to research when you have AncestryDNA tests that match your family, but despite your research you’re not sure where they match. DNA Painter has a great tool called What are The Odds that gives us the probability of where these unmatched lines link up with our own.
We’re using a real set of unknown matches for this example. Emma Kupps (1879-1953) is a one of our favorite ancestors. She was born and raised the various logging communities that sprang up in North Central Wisconsin in the late 1800’s, but her family settled in Antigo where she graduated from Antigo High School. Within a few years she would married a logger Daniel Leonard (1868-1924), who would soon become Antigo’s Fire Chief, and years later be elected Sheriff of Langlade Coounty, Wisconsin. During his term Dan became ill with cancer, and succumbed with a significant portion of this term remaining. The governor of Wisconsin appointed Emma to the position of Sheriff to complete her late husband’s term, and she became the first woman in Wisconsin to hold the office. (Langlade Co. Historical Society)
DNA Painter has greatly narrowed down where we’re targeting our on-going research to finally break down this brick wall.
But, to family historians, she’s also near the end of a line that is a classic brick wall. Her father died young, and there’s nothing but a couple of records that indicate only the names of his parents. Plus, they are the only lines in our family that come from Bohemia, so it has the combined brick walls of classic genealogy and DNA results.
We’ve identified a group of AncestryDNA matches that have strong Bohemian roots and match descendants of Emma. We used Michael’s Great Uncle as our target DNA match, since he’s the oldest generation tested on that line, and we built a master tree that links as many of the unknown DNA matches as we could. We ended up with 8 AncestryDNA matches that we could link together in a cluster.
The cluster all share Jacob Haasl and Dorothy (Johannek) Haasl as their MCRA, but we haven’t been able to build a link between Great Uncle Leonard and the Haasl’s. So, we’re going to turn to DNApainter’s “What are the Odds” tool, to help identify where we’re most likely linked to the cluster.
When you open “What Are the Odds?”, it will present a box for the most recent common ancestors (MCRA). The options are to “Edit Names”, “Add Child”, or “Add Parent”. In this case, we’re going to edit the name, and add the cluster’s MCRA, Joseph and Dorothea Haasl. When we enter that information, we’re presented with the same 3 choices, but this time we’re going to start building a line to one of the DNA matches but selecting “Add Child” and entering the name of the child that makes up the first step to our DNA match. At first we were surprised how quickly we built out a tree, but it’s because we’re not entering all the data we’d need for a regular tree, just the names!
The first line of our unknown DNA matches, with the amount of cM they match us entered
When we reached a DNA match we entered the cM value that matches our known DNA test. We repeated this step for as many matches as we’ve identified. This works well with a single match, but better with more. In our case we identified 8 matches, so we’re built them all out. Now we’ll really see the power of this tool.
All 8 of the AncestryDNA matches mapped out, with amount of matching cM
Now that we’ve entered what’s known, it’s time to start mapping out our guesses. In fact, the entire purpose of this tool is to compare the likelihood of at least 2 hypotheses matching the entered cM, and from those likelihoods we can focus on where it’s most likely we all share a most MCRA.
The most likely connection for Jacob and Mary Keips’ line is her parents. We don’t know her maiden name, or birth date, but if we guess that she was born in 1820-1825 it’s reasonable to guess she is a sibling of either Jacob Haasl or Dorothy (Johannek) Haasl, so let’s build that out as option 1. We’ll add an “Unknown 3xGGP” to Joseph and Dorothy, and add a child called Jacob/Mary (because it could be either!). From there we’ll build down to the Great Uncle that is the known DNA match, and select “Use as Hypothesis”.
All 8 matches, and a hypothetical link to our known DNA match
It shows us a probability of “1” because DNA painter doesn’t show you raw percentages, it shows you comparative probability of one match vs. another. For example, if you enter two hypotheses and one returns “1” and the other returns “2”, we’ll know the second one is twice as likely as the first. In this case, we have no other hypotheses entered, so it shows just a 1.
Given the cM match, it’s most likely that we match the cluster with Great Uncle Leonard’s 3x to 5x GGP’s, so we built out the same line as above, but this time with one more unknown ancestor above Jacob/Dorothy Keips, which would then make Uncle’s MCRA a 4xGGP.
When we built that out, and selected the second “Great Uncle Leonard” as a hypothetical, it soared to a whopping score of “1174” vs. the first “Great Uncle Leonard!! Given that we have 1174 for one possible link and 1 for the other, DNA painter just told us that while not impossible, we’re looking for a 4xGGP as our MCRA, not 3xGGP. Not great news, since now we have to go at least two more generations back, and to build this match back further we’re going to have to dig deep into 18th Century European genealogical records. That’s not our strong suit. But, at least now we have a clear picture of where we’re looking to link these groups.
It’s looking 1174 time more likely that our MCRA is a 4xGGP than a 3xGGP!
Since the range of likely Great Grandparents is 3x-5x, we then built this hypothetical out to our match’s 5xGGP, and we see the same score of 1174 from a hypothetical 5xGGP. That means it’s equally likely that our link to this cluster of match is through our Great Uncle Leonard’s 4xGGP or this 5xGGP, but it’s almost certainly NOT through his 3xGGP.
While in some ways this is disappointing, and we’d hoped to come through with a match, this is actually a huge piece of this brickwall puzzle. When we started the work on this DNA cluster we knew that John Keips/Kupps had migrated from Bohemia and, at the time of his death, his wife thought his father was Jacob D. Kupps when she filled out her husband’s death certificate. From their marriage certificate we knew John’s mother, and Jacob’s wife, was Mary. We also knew we had a large cluster of DNA matches who came from the area of Bohemia.
Just by going through that cluster, building out a central tree that links them all, we found a great lead that likely shows John’s arrival information, along with approximate birth years for Jacob, Mary, and John…as well as John’s previously unknown siblings who seem to have a long history together in the US, and left many records. That means instead of having exhausted all the on-site research we could do on the John’s line, we now have a large number of leads to follow and see if we can push back another generation from both Jacob and Mary. We now know enough to start targeting death certificates for both, which may contain critical names, as well as 6 more marriage/death certificates to look for Mary’s maiden name, as well pieces of evidence that link our Jacob to the arrival Jacob. And, DNA Painter has greatly narrowed down where we’re targeting our on-going research to finally break down this brick wall.
We also have about 20 trees integrated into the master tree, and all of their owners are likely working towards the same goal as we are. As they do their research, and new DNA matches are added to the mix over the years, it’s likely one of us is going to have that piece of the puzzle we’re missing, and finally put it all together.
(A quick note, we’re using the newer version of GEDmatch called “Genesis” for this walkthrough. It’s soon to be the only GEDmatch, but if you’re not familiar with it, please use GEDmatch Genesis for this example.)
Back in our 1st installment of this series (Link), we suggested that you upload your AncestryDNA results to GEDmatch. We’re hoping you’ve done that, and we’re going to walk you through why this site is so powerful.
GEDmatch is a private site that is run out of Florida, for the purpose of allowing genealogists to upload their tests from all commercial DNA providers, with a complete set of tools to help us make matches between different tests. The key to GEDmatch is both its great tools, as well as it being open and public with all of the tests that are uploaded, but that’s also the warning that goes with GEDmatch: your tests are searchable by anyone. Your raw data is never shared, but your match information is openly shared to anyone that joins, including law enforcement. There have been a lot of stories shared about how GEDmatch was used to solve nearly 30 cold cases (so far), and reunited 10,000 adopted children with their birth families. There is a real chance your uploading of your DNA data is going to unearth secrets that your family doesn’t want unearthed.
At first GEDmatch was bewildering and confusing to us…and most of the walk-throughs we saw online were so detailed, it only further confused us.
We’ll be honest, at first GEDmatch was bewildering and confusing to us…and most of the walk-throughs we saw online were so detailed, it only further confused us. So, we’re going to focus more on the functionality GEDmatch than the technical details. This is still rather advanced, but when you practice with your matches, and then search for the more the technical details, you’ll find it makes a lot more sense.
Each test uploaded to GEDmatch is assigned a kit number, and most of the tools will require you to enter either your or your target match’s kit number. Especially when you have multiple kits you’re working with, it will be helpful to have your main page with all of your kit #’s open while you work in other tabs. It’s easier to cut and paste.
One-to Many Comparison
On your home screen you will see all of your kits, and if you click a kit # you’ll be taken to the first tool: One-to-Many Comparison. When the first box comes up, to start with we suggest you filter on only those matches that are 20cM and up. A whole list of names and numbers will pop up, and this is the list of everyone who’s uploaded a kit to GEDmatch that matches your kit. Let’s walk through what each of the boxes mean:
Select – You can pick at least 3 kits here and shortcut several of the tools by clicking on the “Visualization Options” button on the top header.
Kit #, Name (Alias), Email – This the information for you match, including a REAL email address! No more sending an Ancestry message, never hearing anything, and wondering if they ever log into Ancestry. Some people (and we recommend this for everyone managing someone else’s kit) use an alias for their testers name.
GED/Wiki Tree – You can enter a GEDcom-format family tree, or a link to your WikiTree, to help your matches find that MCRA. We’ll walk through this later.
Age – How long has the kit been on GEDmatch
Type – The chip version your test was from. Ignore this, it won’t matter for what we’re doing
Sex – If the GEDmatch uploader didn’t select a Sex for their tester, this will be U
Haplogroup – Shows which group you’re line is in if you took a mtDNA (mothers) or YDNA (fathers) DNA test. Ancestry doesn’t offer these tests, and if there are values in this for your matches, ignore them for now.
Autosomal – This is the type of DNA test Ancestry offers, and it’s what you think of when you think of DNA tests (ie: 50/50 inheritance from mom and dad). This is the area we’ll most care about, and it lists the total cM’s you share with the match and the largest piece of match in your samples. The “Gen” value gives you an estimate of how many generations separate you and this match.
X-DNA – We won’t cover this much, although it will get at least a mention in later post. X-DNA won’t be of much value, except in one very specific way.
You can click the header of each column to sort the results, but in this case let’s take a look at one of the higher cM matches on my list that I don’t yet know who they are.
One-to-One Autosomal DNA Comparison
For our example we’re going to select kit #M717701, especially since they have a family tree shared for this match. Clicking on the “GED Wiki” link in the GED column opens a link to their public tree on wikitree.com, but reviewing all of the surnames there, I don’t see any that jump out at me. I’m going to copy the kit # and go back to the home screen, to check out our next tool: One-to-One Autosomal DNA Comparison
Here’s where you actually confirm your matches to other kits, and start to get a view into the actual DNA segments that all of these matches are built off of. In the Ancestry tool, you take their word for it that you match someone, but this tool will actually prove you’re related.
The blue indicates that I match the target match on Chromosome 14, and it indicates the position of the start of the match and the end. Above the blue, the yellow show that it’s a match to half my chromosome, which would be expected if I inherited that bit from just my mother or just my father.
Entering our kit # first box, and pasting in M717701 in the second, we get a picture of exactly where we match, or if we actually share no significant DNA (it happens!). In this case, we match the sample on Chromosome 14, and the exact start/stop positions of the match are listed. (We’ll come back to that in our next post, about DNApainter).
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom there’s more detail about this match, the most important info showing the estimated number of hops to our Most Common Recent Ancestor (MCRA). In this example it shows as 4.4 between us and the GGP that we share, but it’s best to double that number and use it to estimate the number of people between you and your match. 4.4×2 is 8.8, so we’ll round up to 9, and when it comes time to build out the link between us we’ll expect that it’s likely 4 or 5 ancestors up to the MCRA, and 5 or 4 ancestors back down to the match. Without even going to the “Shared cM Project” graph, we can guess that it’s most likely the MCRA we’re looking for will be a 3xGGP (4 ancestors from me) or 4xGGP (5 ancestors from me). But, we need to narrow down which side of the family this match is on, which brings us to our next tool: People who match both, or 1 of 2 kits.
People who match both, or 1 of 2 kits
This tool is very powerful, and where we do most of our work, and make most our matches. This is especially true if you have more than one kit in GEDmatch, because you can quickly narrow down target matches to either being on your mother’s or father’s side of the family. For example, I have my mother’s and a paternal uncle’s kits uploaded, so if I use GEDmatch to show me all of the kits match my test and my target test, I can pretty quickly see if it’s on my mother’s side, or my father’s. Plus, I have many known matches that we don’t manage, so we can usually get pretty lucky on narrowing it down further.
For our example, we ran this test on our target user from above and we see that they match my mom’s test also, so we’re looking at a MCRA on her side. We just cut our search in half! Looking more closely, her cousins on her father’s side have maybe a dozen tests in GEDmatch, but none of them are listed here. It’s very likely then, given the volume and closeness of the paternal cousins’ tests that if this was on my mom’s father’s side, they would show up in this list…so we’re going to assume this match is on my mom’s mother’s side. We just took the total number of potential MCRA’s down in half again, so we’re really narrowing in! Given that we already have 21 of 32 5xGGP’s identified in that branch of the tree, odds are pretty good we’re going to find a common surname.
5 minutes on GEDmatch and we’ve narrowed the search for our MCRA down to this narrow section of our tree!
In this case, we’re going to have to do what we did in our last post (Link), which corresponds to DNA secret #2: we’ll spend most of our time building out other people’s trees! Looking at the GED Wiki tree they have up, there’s a decent 4 generation tree on the match’s father’s side, but only a mother’s name and birth/death. Since nothing on the father’s side jumps out, we’ll build out their mother’s side first.
The other huge advantage at this point with GEDmatch is that we have the direct email address of our relative immediately, and so, once we’ve validated we’re a match with the 1:1 tool, we can reach out to what’s likely their regular email account and see if they have more information.
DNA Triangulation
Triangulation is confirming that not only does your test match the target’s kit, but that another known ancestor’s kit matches as well. In the above example we confirmed I matched with the “One-to-One” tool, and we linked my mom with the “People who match both” tool, but technically we’re just guessing my mom’s kit also matches the target kit. I’ve never had it be wrong, but to really prove the match it would be best to confirm the matching segment for myself, my mom, and the target all match. There’s a GEDmatch “Tier1” tool for Triangulation (and we find it VERY worth it to donate $10/month to get the Tier1 tools!), but it’s just about as easy to do a One-to-One test between my mom and the target to do a full triangulation.
Going forward
Once we prove out the family tree link to our “Cake” ancestor, and we have our MCRA, we will have really narrowed down how we’re linked to everyone else on the “People who match both” list. There’s nearly 50 matches on that list that we now have very solid evidence on who the MCRA is. Even if we have to build out most of those trees manually, it’s likely we already have pieces of those trees built out when we made the first match.
That being said, it’s one of the reasons it’s so frustrating that Ancestry has such weak tools. If we could combine Ancestry’s strong base of Public Trees with GEDmatch’s tool set, our effectiveness when making DNA matches would be extraordinary! It’s also why it’s so important to upload/link a GEDCOM file to your GEDmatch tree. It doesn’t have a great interface, but even ugly tree’s make this search much, much easier!
Using just these 3 simple tools you can build out many matches using GEDmatch. Just keep practicing, and quickly it’s like you’ve been using it for years. And, as your skill in the tool grows, those overly technical online walk-throughs will help further unlock the power of AncestryDNA tests!
In our next installment, we’re going to use DNApainter to narrow down those matches were we have no data on how we’re connected to a verified match, so we know where to focus our traditional genealogical research, and we’ll talk about some of the more advanced topics we won’t dive into too deeply in this series.
Just by going through that cluster, building out a central tree that links them all, we found a great lead that likely shows John’s arrival information, along with approximate birth years for Jacob, Mary, and John…as well as John’s previously unknown siblings who seem to have a long history together in the US, and left many records. That means instead of having exhausted all the on-site research we could do on the John’s line, we now have a large number of leads to follow and see if we can push back another generation from both Jacob and Mary. We now know enough to start targeting death certificates for both, which may contain critical names, as well as 6 more marriage/death certificates to look for Mary’s maiden name, as well pieces of evidence that link our Jacob to the arrival Jacob. And, DNA Painter has greatly narrowed down where we’re targeting our on-going research to finally break down this brick wall.
(A quick note, we’re using the newer version of GEDmatch called “Genesis” for this walkthrough. It’s soon to be the only GEDmatch, but if you’re not familiar with it, please use 
require you to enter either your or your target match’s kit number. Especially when you have multiple kits you’re working with, it will be helpful to have your main page with all of your kit #’s open while you work in other tabs. It’s easier to cut and paste.
but it’s best to double that number and use it to estimate the number of people between you and your match. 4.4×2 is 8.8, so we’ll round up to 9, and when it comes time to build out the link between us we’ll expect that it’s likely 4 or 5 ancestors up to the MCRA, and 5 or 4 ancestors back down to the match. Without even going to the “Shared cM Project” graph, we can guess that it’s most likely the MCRA we’re looking for will be a 3xGGP (4 ancestors from me) or 4xGGP (5 ancestors from me). But, we need to narrow down which side of the family this match is on, which brings us to our next tool: People who match both, or 1 of 2 kits.
For our example, we ran this test on our target user from above and we see that they match my mom’s test also, so we’re looking at a MCRA on her side. We just cut our search in half! Looking more closely, her cousins on her father’s side have maybe a dozen tests in GEDmatch, but none of them are listed here. It’s very likely then, given the volume and closeness of the paternal cousins’ tests that if this was on my mom’s father’s side, they would show up in this list…so we’re going to assume this match is on my mom’s mother’s side. We just took the total number of potential MCRA’s down in half again, so we’re really narrowing in! Given that we already have 21 of 32 5xGGP’s identified in that branch of the tree, odds are pretty good we’re going to find a common surname.