Category: DNA

How To Use Reverse Genealogy With DNA To Identify Living Descendants: Step 3

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Without making a connection with potential second cousins or their descendants, you won’t be able to get the full benefit of collateral research to have a chance at breaking through your genealogical brick wall. Instead, you’ll continue to be stuck.

Let’s Get Started

The best way to get started is to determine which of your DNA matches would be the best candidates to contact.  Remember that spreadsheet I created back in Step 2?  This is when you can really make use of it!  At a glance you can see who is related to who, who is alive and how best to make contact.  

Start with contacting your DNA match at the site where they got tested.  I discovered that Ancestry’s user profiles show when a user last accessed their account and how often they do. A match who uses Ancestry daily is more likely to see your message than one that hasn’t been online for months.  If that site is the only way to make contact, then go for it.  

Keep your message brief.  Don’t elaborate a lot about yourself.  Start out telling them it’s good to meet them there at the testing site.  Share that you have been working on learning more about a certain ancestor.  Let them know you think they could help.  

Then, just simply state you are looking for anything on a particular surname and location.  If you have a particular question, just simply ask it.

To get them to respond, just end asking them to let you know they got your note even if they don’t know the answers.  

Be sure to make note of this contact.  I enter this information on the Google sheet.  I include the testing company website name and date I sent the note.  

Sometimes, I take this one step further.  If I find that the match is on Facebook, I drop them a Facebook messenger chat note.  I only do this if I have the match’s full name and I have enough info on the match to know I have the right person.  

I’ve also reached out to a match’s child or sibling on Facebook especially if I see that the match isn’t that active on Facebook either.  I’ve been fortunate that the responses I get are positive.  

I briefly introduce myself as a DNA match from the testing company, letting them know I left a message.  You don’t have to do this.  But, it may be helpful if the match doesn’t check their testing company’s account often.  

If you don’t get a response, then know you didn’t miss an opportunity to reach out.  Sometimes, a match will respond months later.  That’s why it’s important that you don’t just settle for one match to connect with. 

In Conclusion . . .

Applying reverse genealogy to DNA using collateral research is helpful for:

  • Determining which cousins beyond first cousins can provide useful information for busting through a brick wall.
  • Figuring out how DNA matches are related.

How To Use Reverse Genealogy With DNA To Identify Living Descendants: Step 2

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After you evaluate records and sources that provide names of the ancestor in question’s relatives, the next step is to do some online research.  You may have names of relatives who may be alive.  But, you need to find out where they are in the present.  They could have moved from the location listed in an obituary, for example.  

You can try out online resources listed below.  But, do not fall for prompts on some of the people finding websites for you to purchase information.  These websites are created by data brokers who make money off of selling information.  Details from a search can give you information like a name, birth year and age, other names associated with the person, people’s names who may be family or acquaintances, addresses and phone numbers.  

Be cautious with pop-ups from websites and fill-in blanks created by BeenVerified.com on some of the websites.  Just get what you can for free and move on. 

Online Resources

  1. Google https://google.com/ 

A great place to start by typing in the person’s name in the search bar.  This may lead you to other online sites like online directory pages listed below.

  1. PeopleFinders  https://www.peoplefinders.com/

Though you can find public records from websites dedicated to genealogy, you can find them on this website if you have a name and some idea of location.  

  1. White Pages https://www.whitepages.com/

If you have a name and location, WhitePages.com is a good resource.  You may be able to find out contact information like a phone number or email address.

  1. Intelius  https://www.intelius.com/ 

This website claims that it is “your go-to resource for finding people.”  Intelius claims that it updates their “people search engine in an effort to provide you with accurate and robust information.”  

  1. FamilyTreeNow https://www.familytreenow.com/

This website is known as a free option to finding living relatives.  Their mission is “to create the best free genealogy site in the world.”  They claim to have living people records in their database.  Just click on a surname.  You can pull up records of various types including those for the living.

  1. Cyndi’s List 

Check out the Finding Living Relatives list on Cyndi’s List for telephone directories https://www.cyndislist.com/finding-people/telephone-directories/ 

  1. Facebook

This is a wonderful place to look for living relatives.  I’ve discovered that it validates I’m on the right track with who is related to whom and if I have the right person.

As you explore these online resources, be sure to record your findings.  You can do that in a research log, but I created a tool to help me visualize what I found better.  

I created a Google sheet in my Google Drive to record match information as I worked through this step.  Here is what it looks like:  

Regardless of how you record your findings, it is important that you take the time to do it.  You will need this documentation for the next step. 

In Conclusion . . .

Finding living relatives using the resources listed above takes you one step further in collateral research.  Read about the next step, making connections, in the next post.

How To Create A DNA Match Tracker

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In my post about using reverse genealogy with DNA (Step 2), I told you about a tool I created to record DNA matches discovered during online collateral research.

I will share with you how I created this tool that I call a living family tracker.  The tracker lives in my Google Drive as a Google sheet. 

Here’s How

Step 1:  Create and name a new spreadsheet

  • Open the Sheets home screen at https://sheets.google.com/ 
  • Click New +.  This will create and open your new spreadsheet.
  • At the top of the page, click Untitled spreadsheet and enter a new title.
    • Surname Living Family Tracker or 
    • Surname DNA Match Tracker

Step 2:  Create column titles on line 1.  This will serve as your header row with columns.

  • Column A:  Name
  • Column B:  Cousin Type
  • Column C:  Parent
  • Column D:  Status of D or L
  • Column E:  Contacted
  • Column F:  Resource Info

Step 3:  Freeze line 1 to keep it in the same place when you need to scroll through the spreadsheet.  On the menu bar, click View > Freeze > Up to row 1.

Step 4:  Record your descendants and/or DNA matches.

  • Name:  Name of descendant (first and last)
  • Cousin Type:
  • Parent:  The name of the descendant’s parent.
    • Example:   Name is Jean.  Her cousin type is 1C1R.  Her parent would be Erin, who is your first cousin.   
  • Status D or L:  Indicate D if person named is deceased or L if person named is living.
  • Contacted:  Indicate Yes if you contacted the person named or No if you didn’t contact the person named yet.
  • Resource Info:  Indicate where you found the person named online.  You can add other comments to it like how the person is related to someone else.
    • Example for living:  23&Me & Facebook; half sister of X X.
    • Example for deceased:  GenealogyBank obit; DNA match.

In Conclusion . . .

You can create the same spreadsheet if Excel is what you’re comfortable using.  If you prefer an offline approach, creating a chart on paper will work too.  What matters is that you have a place to record your findings as you do collateral research online.

How To Use Reverse Genealogy With DNA To Identify Living Descendants: Step 1

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It was May 2023.  I had just finished the DNA Skills Workshop.  I figured out who the main players were of my DNA matches from Ancestry and a few from 23&Me.  But, I was eager to bust through a genealogical brick wall that my newly found first cousins were trying to break through for years.  

I came up with a strategy to identify DNA matches beyond first cousins formally known as reverse genealogy.  These matches had to be second cousins, since the brick wall was the inability to identify the parents of a great-grandfather.  

I thought reverse genealogy, which is doing a search for descendants of a person, dead or alive, would provide me with some clues.  With the brick wall where it was, I couldn’t dig any further into the past.  I decided to start digging toward the present.

If you really want to get technical, doing reverse genealogy leads to what is called cluster research.  The goal of cluster research is figuring out which descendants may have records or information you don’t have.  In this case, “which descendants” were second cousins or the children of the children of the great-grandfather. 

There are 3 steps to my reverse genealogy/cluster research approach:  

  1. Evaluating records and sources that provide names of people related to the ancestor in question.
  2. Doing some online research based on findings from the record/source evaluation.
  3. Making connections any way I can to see if a live one can be contacted to get the information I need.

The First Step

We’ll start off in this post evaluating records and sources that provide names of people related to the ancestor in question.  It’s important to “do the genealogy” first with this step.  

Here are the records and sources I use:

  • Census records.  Go back as far as you can, working your way to the most recent census released.  It’s helpful if you have an ancestor’s arrival date to the country they emigrated to.  You may find a census after that date.
    • Record all of the children’s names of a family unit connected with either the ancestor or the ancestor’s adult child.  These names can be added to a working tree or on a working family group sheet.
    • As descendants of the ancestor marry and have children, add them to a working tree.
    • Continue this process until you can’t find any more census records.
  • Newspaper websites (www.newspapers.com and/or www.genealogybank.com) or a Google search for obituaries and marriages.  Obituaries will often provide names of children and others related to the deceased.  
  • Sources that provide death dates and names of relatives.
    • Social Security Death Index – sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, GenealogyBank, MyHeritage have this index available from 1962 to 1988, 2014 the latest.
    • State death indexes online are helpful for deaths before 1962.  FamilySearch and https://www.deathindexes.com are good sources to start to check for these.
    • Though www.findagrave.com can be helpful, dates may not always be accurate. 
    • Deeds through a county register of deeds.
    • Death certificates.

In Conclusion . . .

When you’ve determined who your first cousin DNA matches are but need to identify other cousins for an unanswered research question, the reverse genealogy strategy can be implemented.  It’s even better to apply cluster research to gather more detailed information that could give you specifics like names of people who could be on your DNA match list.  

Evaluating records and resources to get those names is an important first step.  Read about the second step in the next post.