About the Talk:  

How to Use Genetic Genealogy: Enhancing the Family Tree (and much more!)

Genetic genealogy can help you learn more about your ancestry by using DNA testing to complement your traditional genealogy research. You will learn the basic ideas of genetic genealogy and how it can help you find potential relatives that are not in the historical records or whose connection to your family was unknown.

However, there are also important ethical issues to consider when using DNA testing to find unknown relatives, such as: privacy and security, participation in medical research or criminal investigations, and the possibility of discovering hidden relationships.

After discussing these ethical issues, I will explain the three kinds of DNA tests: Y DNA (passed down from father to son), mtDNA (passed down from mother to her children), and autosomal testing (passed down from both parents). There are different companies that offer these tests and various software capabilities to help you interpret the test results. We’ll talk about a flow chart for deciding the order of testing with the different companies. The websites also give you information about your ethnicity and the historical movements of your ancestors along your father’s and mother’s lines. The websites can also provide some limited health information by looking at the genetic patterns in your DNA.

Genetic genealogy results can be hard to interpret sometimes. For example, it was common in the Pale of Settlement for families in small towns to marry each other.  As a result of these historical marriages, two people who have ancestors from these towns may be related in more than one way. This situation, called endogamy, is why you often see thousands of possible relatives when you first look at the DNA analysis websites.

About the Speaker:

Lawrence Fagan, PhD - JewishGen Volunteer Instructor

Dr. Fagan’s career began in the early days of computers applied to medicine and biology.  He held teaching and research roles as this field developed over many years.  During the last ten years, he became interested in the field of traditional genealogy and especially genetic genealogy.  He has met many relatives through these efforts and for the last four years has taught the JewishGen Introductory and Intermediate courses in Genetic Genealogy (please see more information about classes at https://www.jewishgen.org/Education/ ).