Welcome, everyone. You made it. You got a chair. You have a badge. You have been scanned. You have won the lottery. Wave! Wave because--my daughter's going to say, "Yes!" We are so happy you're here. This is Miss Diane Southard. And Diane is amazing. She is your DNA guide. And any of you who have maybe listened to the Genealogy Gems podcast have heard her on the show. I know she's young, and she's beautiful, but she has been doing this professionally for 17 years. And as I understood it, back in the days when it was Sorensen Molecular--does anybody remember that name? They were the origins of DNA. They would literally fly her to events for genealogy, and she would, no spitting, draw blood.

Only this face could get that blood through TSA.

Well, and let me introduce you to Lisa Louise Cooke, though I hope all of you have been listening to her podcast for 11 years. She's been podcasting before--yes! [APPLAUSE] She really introduced the word podcast to many of you, and taught you what it is and how to use it. And she's still doing it today. And I'm lucky enough to be a part of it, and to be a part of the Genealogy Gems team. I think Lisa was dreaming of the Genealogy Gems team as long as she can remember. In fact, when she was eight, she was the one spending her allowance to purchase death certificates. [LAUGHTER] That's true. So together, we feel like this--it's just a blessing to work with someone that you love and that you respect and that can fill in the gaps of your own knowledge, right? Do you guys all have a friend like that? Good. We're lucky. And this is really going to be a lot of fun. Because if, by chance, you have a best match in your DNA list, and they don't have a tree, it's no problem.

That's what this class is all about. Well, I don't know. [LAUGHTER] I mean, I trust Lisa. Like I said, we are very good friends. And I know that she is the Google guru, and that she can answer any question by googling it. But I think when you see a DNA match that doesn't have a tree, it's actually a really big problem. How many of you have a DNA match that doesn't have a tree? Yeah. This is a big problem! It's a problem. OK. So it's a problem. But I do still think I can help. So what I want you to do is lay out for them what the challenge was that you were working on recently. Because she Google Hangouted me, and said, "Help!" Lay it out. OK. Let's see the problem. And let's see what I could do about. OK. All right. Here's my problem. Like many of you, I'm focused on a certain ancestral couple. After all, I figure that's the best way to really start in your genealogy, is to have a question. Otherwise we just wander around like chickens with our heads cut off. So this is my dad, and this is his pedigree chart. Now I'm lucky enough to have been able to test my dad. It's always better to test the oldest generation. You always want to capture their DNA, because after all, they have 100% of their DNA. And you, as their descendant, would only have a fraction of that. So I'm lucky. I've got my dad. And I want to focus on this ancestral couple, Joseph Butterfield and Mary Harding. Now like many young genealogists, when I began in my family history research, I inherited what other people had done. And I started at FamilySearch. Now we love FamilySearch. Thank you, FamilySearch, for sponsoring RootsTech. We love you. But it's a free-for-all. Anyone can add to the tree. And so when I came to this couple, and I saw all of these people, and all of these descendants, I was overwhelmed. And I thought, how many of these are real? And so I even looked at the source list. And as you can see, it's very short. There wasn't much documentation to really solidify these relationships. So I thought, well, I'm going to figure this out. I want to attack this problem. And being in the DNA field, I thought, what can DNA tell me about my relationship to Joseph Butterfield and Mary Harding? Well, as most of you know, when you get your DNA tested, you become extremely popular. Who knew, right, that you had so many cousins? We have thousands of DNA matches. So the problem, initially, is to find your best matches. You don't need to look at 1,000 people to figure out this problem. You only need to look at the people that have something to do with your problem. I needed to find my best matches, people who had something to do with the Butterfields. So just to put this in a little bit of perspective, it's important to remember, while you're focused on this one couple, that there are a lot of other ancestral couples out there. So if we look at my dad's chart, Joseph and Mary occupy this one green section, this one green couple. Look at how many other green couples there are. And if we go back another generation, look at how many other couples there are. And we go back and back and back, and there's so many ancestors that we're trying to connect to.

So how do we find our best matches? How do we find just the ones that have something to do with this couple? Well, the first thing we do is we take advantage of what the testing company is offering us. Our testing companies are working hard to try to help you make these connections. And they have some great tools. For example, at Ancestry, you can click on this little shaky leaf hint. I like to call these low-hanging fruit. Just take what they're giving you at first, so that you can see how far along you already are. So a shaky leaf hint at Ancestry works like this. You click on that filter at the top with the leaf hints. It will bring up all of your matches that have leaf hints. A leaf hint is simply where Ancestry has looked through your family tree and your match's family tree, and they found someone they think is the same person. By clicking on your match's name, it'll bring up this pedigree chart--this chart to show you this is who we found that was the same in your pedigree chart and your match's chart. So you can see here I found a best match. This is someone who is also a descendant of Hartwell Butterfield and Josephine Murhard. Hartwell is a son of Joseph and Mary. And just like that, I found a best match. I found someone in my DNA match list who has something to do with the Butterfields. MyHeritage has a similar tool. They call it Smart Matches. So again, you just click on that Smart Match link, and it will show you the individuals in your match's chart that look to be the same or very similar to the matches in your chart. It's like a shortcut. It saves you a lot of time. So start with the low-hanging fruit. From there, you might want to just search by surname. Every company lets you search by surname. So I can just put Butterfield in the match page. And I can see other people who have Butterfields in their family history. These people become best matches. They're a great place to start my research. So after you do all of this, you look at the shaky leaf hints, you search by surname, you maybe go from company to company, if you've tested it multiple places. And in the end, this is what I have. I have a list of best matches, which is a lot easier to handle than 2,000 matches. So don't overwhelm yourself. Start small, and work with what you already know. Now some people maybe have spelled Butterfield differently. Or it's changed from Butterfield to Buttermore or something. And I know all of you have examples like that in your family history that you know of, where the surname isn't quite spelled the same or changed altogether. So searching by surname doesn't always work. So you also want to search using genetics. We search using genetics, using tools at our testing company. At Ancestry, it's called Shared Matches. This is the most powerful tool in your genetic genealogy arsenal. This is the tool you will use the most often to gather your best matches. So let's say my match that I know has something to do with the Butterfields is called Philip. Philip is a best match. I can see his connection to the Butterfields. I can see that it's documented and verified. We have a connection. Not just on paper though, we have a connection genetically. Philip and my dad have shared DNA. That shared DNA came from the Butterfield family, which means anyone else who's sharing DNA with my dad and Philip should also somehow be related to my Butterfields. And that's what the Shared Matches tool does. It takes Philip and my dad. And it essentially asks, OK, database, show me people that are only on my dad's match list and Philip's match list. And there they are. Best matches. Because I know my relationship to Philip, I know that these other people who are sharing DNA with my dad and Philip also have something to do with Joseph and Mary. I might not know what that something is, but their DNA is connecting us. It's telling us these people are important. So this is where the trouble comes, Lisa. Because you found these best matches using a genetic tool. And now you want to go look at their genealogy. You know they have something to do with your question. They hold the answers. And yet, no family tree. Now at Ancestry, be warned. Just because it says no family tree, it actually doesn't mean there's no family tree. Always click on that little green View Match button. That will bring up your match's profile page. You can see Alan here. He said he had no family tree. He was lying.

Actually, poor Alan. He just doesn't know how this all works. He doesn't know that you need to link your DNA sample to your family tree. Otherwise, it shows up as no family tree. Now Alan, down here at the bottom, you'll see, it says select a tree to preview. Alan has three trees in his Ancestry account. He just hasn't linked his DNA to them. So I can go in. I can look at these trees. And you will find a lot of trees that way. So make sure you're always clicking all the way through to the profile page, and checking to see--to make sure--they really don't have a tree. So with my three best matches, I really felt like their information was locked behind a vault. If I only had the combination, I could get out the information that I needed. And so I felt a little bit like this. Do you guys ever feel like this? I recognize that. You do? So I needed a plan. I knew that Lisa had some skills that I could use, or that she could teach me. But she's really busy, guys. She runs a very successful business, and she travels a ton. In fact, after this conference, like immediately after, she is flying to Australia to keynote at a conference in Australia. But you guys come first. Of course. So I didn't want to overwhelm her with requests. Because honestly, I had a lot of best matches that didn't have trees. So I wanted to find the best of the best matches and ask her just about those so I wasn't wasting her time. When you're looking for the best of your best matches at Ancestry, they make it relatively easy for you to gauge how important this match should be to you. They do it using a confidence interval. The confidence interval is found on your match page, and you can click and see that a confidence interval is measuring how likely it is that you and this person share a single recent common ancestor in the last five generations, six generations, seven generations. So you want to stick with matches who have a confidence level of extremely high, very high, or high. Don't bother with those that are good, most of the time. And definitely don't worry about those that are listed as moderate. They are not going to be worth the bulk of your time. And as we're going to learn, it requires a lot of effort to find a missing tree. So you want to make sure you're only focusing on best matches. So just to give you a preview, my three best matches that I gave to Lisa was Dan, who had a tree. And I clicked through, and then!

It looked like this. It's like, Dan, that's right. You've got two parents. You've got one set of grandparents, but-- Good job, [INAUDIBLE]. --they're all private. I also had this woman here. And she had no tree. And I had this match, Parkenher, who has a tree. It's only 10 people. But it's locked, private. So this is it. This is what I handed to Lisa. I said, "This is all I have. I have three people. Find their trees for me, please." Of course. I hope everybody in this room has linked their tree. Have you? Yes. Let's talk about the challenge. Because we don't let this just get us down right off the bat. I think we have something here to work with. We have Diane, right. She's got a public tree. She did it the right way. Your mystery match, Diane, has no public tree. That's where we're at. And, of course, her initial thing was, oh, but Lisa, I can't do anything more with this. And my answer is, there is another door. And that's the door we're going to go through right now. And what I love about this process is that it really nails the head on the fact that we don't do genealogy and DNA in vacuums, separate from each other. This is an integrated process. And that's what I want to do today. So here's the concept. Your family shows up in multiple trees. Have you noticed that? Yes. You have lots of different trees that you can tap into. Some people even let you contribute to their tree. So that means that your best match, his family is most likely also listed in several trees. Yes, he has probably a little tiny tree. And it's locked. He's not sharing it. But we know, by just odds, his tree--his family shows up probably in other family trees. But here's the problem. Who is he? You have to identify who he is. And then you have to figure out, OK, so which tree would that be? And this gets harder with living people, correct? Because living people are masked. So what we're going to do in this kind of unique methodology is we're going to identify her best match. And we are going to attempt to see if we can find a tree that's online at Ancestry, and then, at the end, find that shared ancestor. You ready to get your hands dirty? OK, the first thing I want you to know is that not all seeds that are planted grow. So we're just going to set expectations here. So that means that sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. But it surprisingly works a lot of the time. And I would say, if you could get 50 percent of your best matches who don't have trees public, would you take them? Yes. Here's the other thing. In one hour, I cannot possibly show you all of my sources and my citations and everything else. But trust me, we did our due diligence. And I know that I'm pretty conf--I'm very confident, actually, who we end up with. So step number one. Identify your match, the guy without the public tree. We're going to fill in his name. So here is the best match. And I'm going to take this one on. Excuse me. Now the reason why this person is a good candidate is he's a man. And we can tell he's a man, because we can see in his profile picture he's a male. Why is that a good--well, we still can. So the thing is a male doesn't change his surname, correct? Women do. So this makes him a very good candidate as one of the best matches to go after. And I also think while he didn't just give his full name, I'm guessing this Parkenher--and names have been changed to protect the innocent kind of thing--this name probably has some kind of name in it. Have you noticed that you tend to pick usernames and passwords and things that you can remember? So there tends to be always a little grain of truth in these. So is the profile name a name, or does it contain a name? That's what we need to figure out. And you probably recognize our first example here, Cjones67. Let's take a wild guess. First initial starts with a C. Last name is Jones. I'll bet she was born in 1967. [LAUGHTER] Just guessing. OK. If this is how you do your passwords, people, change your process. OK. And Parkenher could be an actual last name I've just never heard before. Or it could contain part of a name. So I'm going to go to Ancestry and search for it as a surname. Great place to see, is this a surname or not? So what I did was I did a search, but I filtered to only family trees. Does this name show up in any family trees? Might as well just go right to the source. And it didn't. It said there wasn't a--not a one. So the next perfect place to go when you are looking for people is Facebook. The genealogy central. No it's not. Even though sometimes they do say, is this your mom? Is this your friend from high school? But they have more people than any other website. So what I want you to do is when you go to Facebook--and you could sign up. If you don't use Facebook, sign up. You don't do a Visa card or anything like that. Put in a fake name, and just get access into it. And you're going to use the search box. You're going to click the Home button, not from your profile page, from Home. And we're going to go in, and we're going to type in this name into the search box. But don't just take those results. Click People. That's going to filter it down to people. And what the fascinating thing here was is that it showed me not one single Parkenher, but it said, we're going to show you results for Parker. And I'm like, oh, that could be a name in this name. Maybe that is a clue. So I feel pretty confident this is probably not a surname. But it's probably a combo kind of a username. So I'm going to use quotation marks. And I'm going to do some Googling. And you all know I know of which I speak. I've read a whole book about this. Because Google is your friend. If whatever you're looking for is online, this is the tool to use. But you want to talk to Google the right way. So you're going to put quotation marks around the name, so that it's telling Google, I want it exactly like this. Don't give me this, do you mean this? Do you ever get that? Do you not know what you're doing, and you really meant this? I get that a lot. And we want it to spell it exactly the way we did it. Is this user using this name anywhere else? Bingo! Yes, he is. He's on Pinterest. And on Pinterest, it tells you his name. His name is Jon Parker. Pinterest, folks, even if you don't use it, it is the second biggest traffic driver to my website, which just floors me. Because I don't spend that much time on Pinterest. I have an account. Most people at least have an account. Usually you'll have your name on there. There is a mass amount of people on Pinterest. But this was not the only one. The golden rule though, here with this, is that people often use the same username on multiple sites, OK. They're hiding in plain view. And you're probably doing the same thing. So if you look at more of my Google searches, you will find that Parkenher is busy over on Pinterest. He is on eBay, one of my favorite places for family history goodies. And he's on Live Rock Reef Central, which cracked me up. Because when we moved to Dallas four years ago, there was this big saltwater aquarium in the rec room, of which I know nothing about that kind of fish. So we went to Reef Central. And that's where you sell stuff like that. So I have this connection. I'm--it's seven steps from Parkenher, I guess. I don't know. [LAUGHTER] So here's what you can do. Now you could go to Reef Central, and there could be 500 pages. And you don't have time for that. You can still use Google. I want you to put Parkenher in quotation marks. Again, exact, and it also tells Google, this has to be on every page. Don't give me pages where you're just putting some of the words and not all the words. This word must be on every page. But instead of searching the entire web, we are searching only Reef Central. So you do Parkenher in quotes, space, site, S-I-T-E, colon, and I put the home address for reefcentral.com. I've just told Google, skip the rest of the web. Look for this guy only on this website. And it did. You know what I learned about Mr. Parkenher, Jon Parker? He lives in Lincoln, California. And he's been busy over there since 2009. This is all public, out there online. So I just made note of it. OK, I'm getting to know who this guy is. Over at eBay, he was trying to sell a car from Lincoln, California, in 2017. So where is Lincoln? You go to my other favorite, Google Earth tool. Anybody who has listened to the podcast knows I'm obsessed with Google Earth. And you just type in Lincoln, California. It's going to zoom right in. It's going to tell me, oh, northern California, just outside--it's kind of a suburb of Sacramento. Which I kind of know. I was born in Stockton, just south of there. So great. I'm going to make note of that. So other people in the family, hopefully, if I can track this guy down, I'm going to find there. So there he is. So step number two is, I know Jon Parker, I'm going to research his tree. I need to find his dad. And I'm hopefully going to find his grandpa. And there's a possibility that Grandpa might be deceased, or born before 1940. If I can get him before 1940, I can get him in the census. So go back to Facebook, and I'm going to do a search for Jon Parker. Now again, Facebook still thinks I'm inept and not spelling Jon correctly. But it's skipped the Jon Parkers. I didn't notice this until the second time I looked at the page. Actually where it says "Click this option," it had Jon spelled the way I said it. And it did that because there were so few of them. And it's linked. Just click it. When you click it, you get the seven Jon Parkers in the whole world that are on Facebook. Now I went through them. And I don't know, but Jon didn't friend his father as far as I can tell. So I mean--and I'm not totally sure which one it is. I suspected this first guy, because it says Napa Know How. Now that is a company, I think. But Napa is northern California. There wasn't enough on Facebook--I spent some time on this--to really confidently say, "Oh, I know that's him." And nobody seemed to obviously have their father friended. So you're going to go to the other great people-finding websites, next to Google, on the web. And some of them, like mylife.com--so you went to mylife.com. It's a free site. They make money by putting advertising on their pages. And lots of people go there. It's kind of like the white pages of the internet. So I did a search on Jon Parker, found he's 31, Roseville, California. And I've got a birth date, November 22 of 1985. Go search yourself on mylife.com. Turns out when I looked up Spokeo.com, which is one of my top favorite people-finding websites. I call it Spooky-o, because of how much it knows about you. And Jon Parker is there, and he lives in Roseville. Guess what? Roseville is just on the other side--it's another suburb of Sacramento. So I think I'm looking at the right guy here. Now on these people-finding websites, you're going to see that there's relatives listed. So we're going to try to find Mom and Dad for Jon Parker. Now Jon is a male. So this is just the logic of how these sites work. If the first person listed is a male, it is probably his father. If it's a female, it's probably his wife. Now we have Douglas Parker, Nancy Parker, and Nick Parker. I'm guessing-- I'm almost seeing a family here, aren't you? Now here are some clues. The truth is names have popularity during different generations. The year I was born, Lisa was the number-one female name. I was Lisa M. because there were five Lisas in every class I was in. And do you know why? Because on As the World Turns, the new vixen was Lisa. And all our moms were eating bonbons and naming their children Lisa. Pregnant out to here. So I don't know about you, but not that many people are naming their son Hal these days. You hear Nick, right? Justin is kind of a younger-sounding name. You might hear a Hal as an older-sounding name. This is not, like, tried--this is not always the case. But it's close, folks. So chances are, Douglas, I'm guessing, is a dad. A little older than Jon with the J-O-N, the new cool way to spell it. And Nancy, probably a mom. And Nick, probably his brother. So you're going to go through. And in the handout for this class, you've got all these listed, Facebook, Google, people-finder websites. Pipl.com is another one of my top, top people finders. The more, the better. Get yourself an Excel spreadsheet. Get yourself a legal pad, whatever. Evernote. And start listing out what you're finding. So here we are. At Pipl.com, what I love about this is that the relatives' names are clickable. Which means, with one click, you could go from Jon's profile over to Douglas' profile. And they've linked them for you. So if I click that, at Pipl, I see, for Douglas, Catherine Parker and then Nancy Parker. Now my suspicion is you don't typically see a daughter before a wife in these listings. I'm guessing that's a second wife. So I headed over to FamilySearch. And I did a search on Douglas J. Parker. And not only did I find Douglas James, but guess what? He was married to Nancy in 1983 and Catherine in 1997. So it proved out, through genealogical records, that I've got the right person. And we're kind of making sense of the relatives' names. So at FamilySearch, I continued to do my searching on Douglas J. Parker from California. Put in a time frame. I got where he was living. He's in New Castle, California. And he has a father, Delbert. How many kids--how many people name their kids Delbert? [LAUGHTER] No. I'm guessing Delbert is Douglas's dad. That's a little bit older-generation name. He's a little bit further down on the list, after the wives. So we're going to try and find who we think is Grandpa. Back to those people-finder websites. We're going to keep redoing the process. At Pipl.com, Delbert Parker, born 1928. Yes. Prior to 1940, we've got him in a searchable census. And over at Ancestry, we have Delbert E Parker. There were lots of listings for him. I just wanted to show you this one. Shows him in a city directory in Gold River, California. And born in 1928. Where was Gold River? Now I've never heard of that, and I lived in northern California for a long time.

I did a little happy dance on that one. Because I was like, oh, I don't want to get this far and find out I'm barking up the wrong tree. Yep, it's just outside another area of Sacramento suburbs. so we are good--as was New Castle. So I want you to search all of the genealogy giants' records websites. That's FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, Findmypast. The big guys have lots of records. Go find as much as you can. And I spent a couple of hours, because by this point I'm completely hooked. And everything's gone out the window, because I have to do this for Diane. I accumulated as much information as I could. And it was really fun. And I also made note of incorrect spellings. And I searched for those as well. So here we have, at FamilySearch, Delbert E Parker, born in 192--December 27. And he's lived in different places in California. Check out the one over at Ancestry. Now this one had Ewell, Delbert Ewell, or Cowell Parker. Now I know his middle name at this point is Ewell. And I looked at this and went, oh shoot, because--now, wait a minute. He's got the same exact birth date. And he lives in the same places. And this one's got a mother's maiden name, so I really want it to be him. So let's just keep that in mind. Cowell, Ewell, I could see that happening at a late-night genealogy session to somebody, don't you think? Getting a little bit wrong. I did a search specifically for Delbert Cowell Parker on Ancestry. And guess what? Jenny says, "Uh-uh. His name is Ewell. He's not a woman. Somebody had a really late night. He's not a woman. He's a man. And he has Pauline Pins--oh, it's--Pansy Pauline Pinson Parker is his mother. The quadruple P. I like that, because it's really unique. And I could find that. So in one afternoon/evening, I got our best-match Mr. Mystery Guy, his parents, their marriage, Delbert, and his wife, Betty, who was born Margaret. But she goes by Betty. I've gotten to know her quite well. OK. So step number three is we've got to find Grandpa, Delbert, in an Ancestry public tree. I think there's a good chance. And thereby finding your match on his tree. So I went to Ancestry. And you can search just public trees. So I said Delbert E Parker, born 1928, California. I even threw in Pinson for mother's maiden name. And children, Douglas. And then I made sure to filter only to family trees. There were 27, 27 other diligent genealogists who thought that they had him. So I clicked through my Bill's tree. So that takes us to step number four. Search your match's found tree for related surnames from your tree. Do they go together, like Butterfield and Harding? So Diane sent me the list. Butterfield, Murhard, Harding, Marsh, Loveland, Howes, Bacon. You've got some interesting names in there. And we're going to go search in the tree that I found. So when you click through to a public tree, you have the little search button thing at the top. And I just started putting in the names. Started with Parker. Lots of Parker's were in there. In fact, Ethel Mary Pinson is in this tree. So I'm feeling very good about that. And in fact, this tree includes Butterfield, Harding, Loveland, and Bacon. And I could do that in just a few minutes.

Just a few minutes. I mean, this has got to be it, right? I'm feeling really good about it. So step number five. Locate your common ancestor in your best match's found tree. We fol--but who is it? Who is the common ancestor? So I went to the pedigree chart, and I found--there's Delbert Parker. Remember he's married to Margaret. And so that would make Private Douglas and Private Jon. Guess what? You're not related to Delbert at all. It's Betty. It's Betty, who Jon has some of her DNA. So if you follow Betty, you get to--Butterfield was her first name. She has to get her glasses on, because it's so small. Butterfield Ost Dunisk. And then her father was Henry Butterfield, and his father was Hartwell Butterfield. Do you remember Hartwell? This is Diane's shared ancestor. You're welcome. [APPLAUSE]

It's a genealogy--yes, ma'am? Would you like kind of a fun thing on top of this, Diane? Of course. We love fun things. My son lives in Rockland, California, and was in Roseville, and knows the Jon Parker that you-- Nuh-uh! [LAUGHTER] But names have been changed to protect the innocent. They have. [LAUGHTER] Well. That's very cool. A celebrity in our midst.

OK. So when Lisa came back to me with this tree, obviously I was very, very excited. Because-- Oh, you are so underestimating what you were doing. Oh, please! I did a little bit of screaming. Just a little bit. Let's remember what the goal was here, though. So the goal was to find out about Joseph Butterfield and Mary Harding. That was our goal. So what Lisa found for me was another connection to Hartwell Butterfield and Josephine Murhard. Now that wasn't my initial goal. But I'll tell you, as I began to gather all of these best matches, other descendants of Joseph and Mary, I actually got a little bit nervous. Because the genetics weren't lining up exactly how I expected. Now we don't have time to go into all that cool genetic stuff. We'll be talking about that a lot this week. But trust me when I say I was nervous. I was actually starting to wonder if I was actually a descendant of Hartwell and Josephine or not. So I was really, really encouraged to find this match who connected me to this ancestral couple. So I wondered, then, were these other two matches leading me to the same conclusion, or not? And thankfully, Lisa taught me how to do this amazing people-finding, digging into the internet and public records to find information. I love that her method actually found a tree through someone who wasn't even related to me. It doesn't really even matter how you find the tree, just that you're able to locate your ancestors within whichever tree it is that you find. And she had a lot beyond the Hartwell. Oh, yeah. I mean, boy, she'd been doing her homework for a while. Right. It was a really robust tree with lots of sources too, which is what I was missing before. So what I need to do is, now that I know, or have an idea of, the genealogical connection between me and Parkenher, I need to make sure the genetic connection fits with the genealogical connection. I need to make sure the DNA is telling me the same thing that the family tree is telling me. So again, we don't have time to go into all of this right now. And I put our booth on here. This is my booth, 1306. So if you have questions about, especially about this chart I'm going to go over right now, you can come to my booth. We're open tonight in the exhibit hall from 6:00 to 8:00. So come and ask all your questions there. But I want to give you a preview about how to do this. It's really important that the genetics and the genealogy are matching up before you go any further. So here's my dad on this chart. He's at generation zero, OK? But if we look at how Parkenher is a descendant of Hartwell, we see he's actually removed, twice removed from my dad. So if Hartwell and Josephine are our common ancestors, my dad and Parkenher would be second cousins twice removed. Do you guys see that? How that all works? So for me, mapping it out like this--and I use Excel because it's easy for me, but if you want to just write out on paper, it's just so important to visually understand your generation versus your match's generation. It's very key to actually using this data in your family history. So, remember Jenne? The one who was like, "Hello? Delbert is not a woman. And his middle name is not Cowell. It's Ewell." How do you say that? Ewell. Ewell. Ewell. See. I don't even know how to say it. She knew her stuff. Alright. And I thought, wait a second. She seems to have a lot of information too. I want to go take a look at her tree. And I did. And she had a lot of good information there. And can I mention that where she made the comment about the correction, her user name was clickable right there. I actually looked at her tree too. Because you could just click it, and there-- And there it is. It's amazing. And when--now see, Lisa couldn't see this, because she was logged in as Lisa. But when you log in as me, and you click on jenne916, you get Jenne's profile page, where Lisa found her family tree. But on the profile page for every person on Ancestry, if you are a DNA match to them, it tells you right there on the page. So cool. So all I did was click on Jenne right there in Delbert's profile page. I click on her name. It takes me to this page. And it says jenne916 is on your DNA match list. And of course she is. If she's also related to this Butterfield family, and she's had a DNA test done, then she also has DNA from this family that matches my dad. Now be careful. If you have multiple DNA tests in your account, when you come to this page, it will default to show you your default DNA account. Even if you are messing around in a different account, when you come to this page, it resets. So my dad is the default for my account. But I've got lots of other relatives in there. So if I was researching someone other than my dad, I would use this select DNA test dropdown to see if jenne916 is matching a different relative. So make sure you're making note of that. So that means I can add jenne916 to my match list, to my little Excel spreadsheet here. It turns out Jenne and Parkenher and another match, Crystal Parker, are all descendants of the same couple. They're first cousins to each other. And all of a sudden, it was like the vault unlocked. And I was able to piece together my relationship to Hartwell Butterfield and Josephine Murhard. So I want to make sure you understand that we're not advocating cutting and pasting other people's trees onto your tree. We've done a lot of searching for trees on Ancestry and other websites, and we know they have flaws. We know that people make mistakes and put up things that aren't right. The goal is not to reinvent the wheel. The goal is to find a lead, to find a hint, when you don't have a tree listed for your best match. So let's be clear on that. We're not advocating just blatantly copying and pasting. This is a finding tool, so that we can find people that will help us answer our family history questions. So in the end, after all of this, after I took all my best matches that I could find, I found the trees that I could find, I had 12 descendants of Hartwell and Josephine in my match list that I was able to identify. And because I had so much data, I was able to get a much more clear picture of my genetic relationship to them. And I reassured myself they really are my ancestors. And that's the thing about DNA. We share such different amounts with different people, that if I look at one cousin--and this is what happened--I found a couple of cousins who our shared amount of DNA was really low. And it really made me worried. But when I had 12, I can take the average. And I understand, OK. They're just not sharing that much, but I'm sharing the right amount with all these other people. It's OK. So having a lot of data on a lot of known relatives can then help us address the unknown. This is another best match. This is another individual who was sharing DNA with my Butterfields. But when I looked at his pedigree chart, he didn't have any Butterfields, and he didn't have any Hardings. What he had was a Hardin. Amaziah Hardin and Hannah Spencer. And I'd looked at that, and I thought, hmm, that's awfully close. They were in the same county as my Hardings. And because of DNA, because I was able to amass all of these descendants of my known relatives, compare them with the DNA of this match, I was really able to finally say, "I think that Amaziah is actually Mary Harding's father. This is something I did not know before. It took all of the unknown and all of the known, and you mix them together. That's what DNA is all about. It connects us in a solid, traceable way, allowing me to take Mary and reunite her with her parents. And isn't that why we're here? To reunite families, our own and those that have come before us? That is the power of family history, and certainly DNA. And then being able to see the trees of your matches can lead you in that direction. What's next for me? Well, now I actually have to do genealogy, guys. Because really, all I have is my DNA's word for it that Mary is Amaziah's daughter. I need to now find the records. And I think they're out there. And there's hints of them out there. But it's work now. I have to go and prove it. I can't just believe what I see. So if--we even have time for questions, which is amazing. Yes, awesome. I'm proud of us. This is a really, really important part of your job here at RootsTech. It is to let RootsTech know what you like and you didn't like. Now I'm sure you're going to say a little something about how frustrating it was to get a seat. But that's OK. What we really want to know is what you thought of the class. So on your app, you get it out, you click on this class, and you click the little clipboard. And that lets you rate the class. RootsTech pays a lot of attention to these. And if you want us to come back, you need to give us five stars. [LAUGHTER]

And we really appreciate that, because we love coming back. And it floors me that every year there's something new. That, you know--she's coming up, and she's digging into worlds unknown of DNA. And I love that this time around--and we've got a couple of other things we've been working on together, Google Earth and things--that you can see the dovetail with the genealogy. So speaking of working together-- Oh, yes. --I don't know if all of you got one of these handouts. I just want to mention it really quick, since we were talking about working together. Lisa and I are coming back to Salt Lake in October. So if you're local, we're going to be in Sandy. So if you've got one of these little flyers, it's really exciting. Because we feel like we kind of get to run our own show. Yay. And it's really fun. Lots of [INAUDIBLE]. It's going to be really, really, really fun. So make sure you look at that. They have a booth there in the exhibit hall. You can talk to us about it in our booths also. What's our booth number? You have better eyes than I do. Oh yeah. So-- What's your booth number, Wood? What's your booth number, Wood? Just come to our booth, he says. And we're-- Come to our booth. --right in the front. Just come into the exhibit hall, and you'll see us. But it's half price here, also, at the conference. We'll be coming back and doing more of this in a concentrated two-day format. But let's take a few seconds now, because we did good. And we got done on time. I want to know, do you have any questions? Yes. How do you go through this to identify with that person's name? It's a female. You do not know whether or not the last name is maiden name or married name.

For the best-match person? Yeah. If you're looking for someone that's a female, and the surname. That's really challenging. To look for a woman. Honestly, I've been tackling the men. Because it's just easier. They don't change the name. You could, and I think essentially the process is the same, I would say budget double the time. Because you're going to need to be able to follow a couple of different routes. And you may not end up with trees where some of those names show up. And that's your clue. When you look in on the people-finder site-- Yes. --you find a list of people, are they going to be able to interpret parents versus spouse? You might need to repeat the question. So her question was if you go to a people-finder website--and I'm sorry I didn't repeat the first question. If you go to a people-finder website, and you're looking for a woman, and you see the name, and you're not sure, chances are, if she's old enough to have been married for a while now, then that's probably her married name that you're seeing there. And I'll bet you you're going to see relatives listed with a completely different, separate name. That's your maiden name. Yes. Absolutely. Great question. One more. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, absolutely. Can you find people outside the United States? Yes. Facebook particularly is going to be a key there. It's worldwide. I would even do--if I were searching in Germany, I'd go Google.de. And maybe do some--you'd have to do some translation. But most of the people-finding websites I showed you are US-centric. But there are equivalents in other countries as well. I've seen them over at the UK. So we know that they're out there. For Ancestry DNA, it doesn't look outside the United States. Is that correct? For Ancestry DNA, he's asking does it look outside the United States. And absolutely, it does. Your DNA match list contains anyone who's tested at Ancestry from any place in the world. OK. One more. Yes? Can we meet with you about how to make up a spreadsheet? So he wants to know can we get together and determine how to make a spreadsheet. And absolutely yes. But I've also written a quick sheet called Breaking Down Brick Walls With DNA and a companion guide called Organizing Your DNA. And everything that I talked about here is in those two guides. And I'm confident that you can do this on your own, with a little bit of help from those. And if not, I do have consultation services also, where we get together online and we go over whatever it is you want to go over. And in fact, at our booth, at 1203, let's see here, tonight we'll be there. I'll be teaching the Google for genealogy methodology. If you found yourself going, whoa. I did not realize I could do this much with Google. Like the site search, I wonder if that was maybe new to you. That you could search just a single site using Google. I'm going to actually show you a solid methodology that works for all family history and related types of search. Those are free. And you walk right in. We're right next to Findmypast. Right. So when the exhibit hall opens at 6:00, run in. At 6:30, I'll be teaching-- We don't have this many chairs. --about beginning DNA. At 6:30. I think we have time for one more question. Yes, back there? So this is great. But first, you message the person, seeing if they want to share their tree. Right. So she says, "First, you should reach out and ask the person if they're willing to share with you." Absolutely. Yes, this is after you've tried that. Thank you for mentioning that. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I hope this busts a few brick walls for you. Yes. Thank you for coming.

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