ThruLines at AncestryDNA Warning: Some of this requires prior knowledge. Come to our meeting to ask questions.
In February AncestryDNA announced the ThruLines feature in beta. This means they are still testing and they would like your input. Many people responded with fixes and suggestions. There was a big problem with adoptions and stepparents so some people got turned off right away.
A big change they made is that “What is in your tree takes priority”. So if you see something wrong, try adding to or changing your tree and that may set your ThruLines straight. You can also change your tree to explore new possibilities.
Sylvia has written a separate guest post about her experiences with ThruLines that will appear today also.
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I have been telling people that one of the best new features in ThruLines is that you can see inside private trees. They have been having trouble finding the information. Here’s how that works.
If you have a ThruLines card that says Private rather than a name, click on it and you will see this:
Click on the Private box and you will see this:
You can’t see inside the private tree but you can do your own research on this new name or you can contact the person knowing that there are 9 attached records. Try this out. It’s amazing!!
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Sylvia writes: There's a fascinating article in the Bellingham Herald about a very cold case in which CeCe Moore used dna to find a killer from 1967 in Seattle. She describes how she was able to use dna from the suspect's clothes that were kept, found two very distant cousins (less than 2%) who both shared dna with the suspect dna, traced their trees back to common ancestors then forward all the way to the 20th century. She used both common family names and ethnic estimates as clues. It gives me hope! I have smart matches with common names and locations, and with far more dna shared with me. If she can do it with so little, so can I with much more to go on!
At the Herald you can search on CeCe Moore and get five hits. Also there are many articles nationwide about DNA and Law Enforcement.
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Claudia Breland is regular speaker at the Whatcom Genealogical Society so some of us subscribe to her short blog which arrives about once a month. Her archived blogposts here: https://us5.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=acbeb161893473d69c0877083&id=ac3f7cef28
This month she mentions the GedMatch recent opt-in changes that we talked about at our meeting. She has links to a few blogs and also published this statement from CeCe Moore:
I am not interested in debating GEDmatch's decision to go to opt-in and the reasons behind it. I will say that it is easy to sit on one's high horse and pass judgment, arguing semantics, very narrow interpretations, and privacy extremism, when it is not you and your family who are victimized. There are no real victims created by GEDmatch. As always, my focus is on the families who are searching for answers. "Whatever one thinks about this decision, it is inarguable that it is a setback for justice and victims and their families."
You can see discussion the Law Enforcement use of GedMatch has really heated up and divided our community. The significance of this to those of us who use GedMatch is this: If you want your DNA to be used by Law Enforcement to catch perpetrators of violent crimes, you need to go to GedMatch and opt-in.
It’s a topic I didn’t want to talk about it sure keeps coming back.
Blaine Bettinger also writes about it. https://thegeneticgenealogist.com/2019/05/22/facing-dna-privacy-concerns-head-on/
My position about DNA and Law Enforcement: Cheryl and I both agree that the use of DNA by Law Enforcement serves an important public service to provide clues to violent offenders and unidentified victims. Know that no one is convicted by the use of our DNA data; just identified as a possible suspect. Our responsibility is to read the Terms of Service at the websites we use and to opt-out or remove our DNA data if necessary. Currently when you log on to GedMatch you will be sent to the page to opt-in for Law Enforcement use. Please consider this.
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Lastly, Sylvia sends this article about ethnicity estimates which reinforces the caveats we have discussed about ethnicities.
Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her identical twin sister, Carly, bought DNA ancestry kits from five of the most popular companies in the industry. Find out why some of the results they received left a team of computational biologists at Yale University baffled.
The End.
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