Archive for May, 2011

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As you may have heard, I recently made my 23andMe and Family Tree DNA autosomal testing results available for download online at “mygenotype,” and dedicated the information to the public domain (if dedicating DNA sequence to the public domain is even possible – I’m currently doing some research in this area and expect to write more in the future).

At “mygenotype” you can download the following:

My Family Tree DNA Results:

1. Affymetrix Autosomal DNA Results (2010)
2. Affymetrix X-Chromosome DNA Results (2010)
3. Illumina Autosomal DNA Results (2011)
4. Illumina X-Chromosome DNA Results (2011)

My 23andMe Results:

1. V2 Results (2008)
2. V3 Results (2010)
3. Y-DNA Results (2010)
4. mtDNA Results (2010)

You can also find my SNPedia Promethease reports:

• Promethease Report using an early version of Affymetrix Family Finder DNA Results

• Promethease Report using V2 23andMe DNA Results

• Promethease Report using pooled 23andMe and Family Finder DNA Results

In addition to my genome, Razib Khan of Gene Expression has a spreadsheet of approximately 48 other genomes that are available for download online.

A Challenge To YOU

Now that the information is out there, available to anyone who might be interested, it remains to be seen who might be interested in the information.

Indeed, as evidenced by Razib’s spreadsheet, while dedicating a genome to the public domain has only been done by a small handful of people worldwide, it isn’t as novel as it was just a few months ago.

So, I’m challenging everyone who reads this to download my data and analyze it to find the most interesting or surprising results.  For example, you could use my most recent 23andMe V3 data.

I’ve already done a fair amount of analysis myself, including the Promethease reports above (and see here), and a recent blog post about my vastly increased Type 2 Diabetes risk.  However, perhaps there’s a recent but relatively study that applies, or perhaps there’s a story you can weave with a handful of SNPs. Or, even better, what can you tell me about my ancestry other than mtDNA and Y-DNA haplogroups? Don’t worry about the strength of the study, reproducibility, etc. – I’m aware of the uncertainties associated with this type of research, and my goal here is to make people aware of possibilities.

Please post your findings in the comments below, and in two weeks I’ll pick the most surprising or interesting findings and make them the focus of a new blog post.

Can you surprise me with my own genome?

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

• The new iPhone app BillionGraves.com (1BGraves)
  lets you contribute to the site’s gravestone image database while on the road. Even
  without the app, you can add transcriptions to the site’s online database. On the
  site, you can search gravestone records by person or cemetery (it looks like few stones
  are recorded yet, but you can find cemeteries listed with maps showing their locations).

• The entire 1930
  Mexico Census is now complete on FamilySearch. This indexing project started
  in September2007 and encompassed 13 million records. 

• Here’s an update on a smaller genealogy subscription site you may not be familiar
  with: Family Tree Connection,
  launched in 2003, is approaching 2 million records. The names were transcribed from
  more than 5,400 documents including Masonic lodge rosters, military rosters, insurance
  claims, tax lists, orphanage records, club and society member lists, prisoner logs
  and mug shots, school catalogs, yearbooks, railroad employee information, rural telephone
  directories, church member lists and more.
  

• Ancestry.com has
  added new US WWII Navy Muster Rolls (1938-1949) and a US Navy Cruise Books
  Index (1918-2009) to its military records collection.

• Among the New England Historic Genealogical
  Society’s (NEHGS) upcoming events is Come Home to New England, a weeklong
  educational event featuring research opportunities, individual research consultations,
  lectures and more. It takes place June 13-18 at NEHGS’s Boston headquarters. Learn
  more on the NEHGS website. 

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—

The Civil War started 150 years ago in April, but the sesquicentennial actually stretches
over the next four years. So we’re starting a series of blog posts to highlight various
events in the war. Today’s installment:

On May 26, 1861, US Postmaster-General Blair issued an order suspending postal service
in the states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas as of May 31.

Mail for the shuttered offices was to be forwarded to the dead letter office, except
in Western Virginia, where mail was to be sent to Wheeling.

To cope with increased mail during the Civil War, says author Michael O. Varhola in Life
in Civil War America, the US Postal Service began dividing mail into first-class,
second-class and third-class.

Congress also authorized the use of postage stamps as change after the US stopped
issuing coinage. Due to hoarding, coins nearly disappeared from circulation. When
the gummed stamps proved hard to use and unpopular, Congress approved glueless stamps
called “postal currency.”

---

The book Life in Civil War America is available in print, as a digital download
and as individual chapter downloads. Browse
these items and our other Civil War resources at ShopFamilyTree.com. 

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If you have New Jersey ancestors, you may have noticed that none of the New Jersey
population schedules survive for the 1790, 1800, 1810 and 1820 US federal censuses.

Finding substitute sources is one of the research strategies you’ll learn in our next
webinar, New
Jersey Genealogy Crash Course: Find Your Garden State Ancestors, Wednesday, June
22, at 7 pm Eastern (6 Central/ 5 Mountain/ 4 Pacific).

Presenter Thomas MacEntee, New Jersey genealogy expert and founder of GeneaBloggers,
gave me a sampling of other New Jersey research challenges the seminar will help you
with:

• Before New Jersey was a state or even a British colony, it was part of the New Sweden
  and New Netherlands colonies. That can make locating records a challenge, so the webinar
  will address early records for each of these colonies and where to find them.

• Did you know that many New Jersey couples traveled to other states to get married?
  You’ll learn which states and counties were most popular and how to search for those
  marriage records.

Thomas also will tell you how to access New Jersey vital records and other resources,
share the best websites for researching ancestors from the state, and more.

Register
for the New Jersey Genealogy Crash Course now to get our early bird price of 20 percent
off.

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—

Last night, rapper 50 Cent traveled to his family’s South Carolina hometown to trace
his roots for the VH1 Rock Doc “50
Cent: The Origin of Me.”

You can watch
the show on VH1’s website. If you watch, there are some bleeps in a rap at the
beginning, but the rest of the show is clean. And good.

In the show, 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson), who grew up in New York City, travels to
Edgefield, SC, where his mom’s family came from. At a reunion, the family talks about
what the segregated town was like in the 1950s.

50 visits Edgefield’s genealogical
society. The librarian (who had to have been briefed ahead of time, but did such
a good job of being nonchalant that I wondered) pulls the WWI draft card of 50′s grandfather
Will Jenkins from a “Jenkins File” (the society keeps surname files on local families).
She also helps 50 use the census on microfilm to find Will’s father Peter, and Peter’s
mother Jane.

In the 1870 census, Jane was living with a local prominent citizen, probably her former
slaveowner. 

50 also visited the Old Edgefield
Pottery museum, with vessels created by “Dave the Slave,” who incorporated sayings
and dates into his work. The proprietor refers to Dave as the first rapper.

The show didn’t shy from a bit of confrontation: At Oakley
Park Museum,  50 and a woman identified in a caption as being from the Daughters
of the Confederacy discuss the symbolism of the Confederate flag.

She also tells him about the Red Shirts, a precursor to the Klu Klux Klan, and advises
him to study history to learn about “Mongolian slaves” in South Carolina. Interesting.
There’s some uncomfortable giggling when 50 gently challenges her about these slaves
and how slaves were treated.

Later, at the Edgefield
County Archives, the archivist shows 50 the slave inventory for Jane’s owner,
R.G.M. Dunovant, son-in-law of prominent citizen Whitfield Brooks. The archivist finds
a reference to Jane, daughter of Adrene, in Whitfield’s will. If that’s 50’s Jane,
Adrene is his fourth-great-grandmother. 

The archivist introduces 50 to a woman who’s researching what she calls the brutal
side of slavery. In contrast to the woman he met earlier, she acknowledges the treatment
of local slaves and gives an example from a coroner’s report detailing the death of
a slave.

50 next meets a Dunovant descendant, who asks 50 about his career, compliments his
song “In Da Club”
(the one that says “Go shorty/It’s your birthday”) and gives him a piece of Edgefield
pottery. 50 says it’s a turnaround from the days his family talked about, when black
people always used the back door at whites’ homes.

You don’t have to be a fan of rap or a member of VH1′s typical demographic to like
this show. 50 Cent has a tough image as a rapper, but you don’t see that here. To
me, the show feels a little younger and a little less refined than ‘Who Do You Think
You Are?” which makes it very approachable. You learn about both one person’s genealogy
and how it ties into what was happening locally and across the country.

For some behind-the-scenes insight, here’s
a Vanity Fair article by David Kamp, the writer who did the genealogy research. 

Did you watch “50 Cent: The Origin of Me”? Let me know what you thought.

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May 24 is Customer Appreciation Day at ShopFamilyTree.com.
Today only, enter code THANKU at checkout to receive 15 percent off and free standard
shipping within the United States. 

Now would be a great time to register for next month’s New
Jersey Genealogy Crash Course webinar or pick up the Family
Tree Magazine 2010 CD. 

Are you also into gardening, woodworking, quilting, collecting, painting, writing,
driving old cars or any number of other hobbies?

You can get the same deal today in our publishing company’s other online bookstores—GardenersHub.com, NorthLightShop.com,
(that’s our artists’ store)  ShopWoodworking.com, Collect.com (books
about antiques, stamps, coins, etc.) and more. Click
here to see F+W Media’s shops for your favorite hobby. 

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Got a burning question only an archivist could answer? Here’s a great opportunity
to ask it: On Ask Archivists Day, a worldwide Twitter event taking place June 9, you
can pose an archival question for archivists to address.

Start by following @AskArchivists
on Twitter (you’ll need a Twitter account, of course). Then on June 9, tweet your
question and include the hashtag #AskArchivists. You can direct your question to any
archivist who’s joining in, or to a specific participating archive—for example, including
@USNatArchives in your tweet directs your question to the US National Archives.

Participating
archives in the United States and Canada are listed here (the list is still growing).
So far, they include the National Archives, Library of Congress, New York Public Library,
North Carolina State Archives, Association des archivistes du Québec, Nova
Scotia Archives and Records Management, plus many college and university libraries.

Get more Ask Archivists Day details on the Ask
Archivists blog, and of course, by following
@AskArchivists on Twitter.

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—

You’ve probably heard about President Obama’s big visit this week to Ireland, which
will include a stop in Moneygall, County Offaly, where his third-great-grandfather
was born in 1830.

Fulmoth Kearney (“Falmoth Cainey” on his passenger list), age 19, arrived in New York
March 20, 1850.

This Irish
Times article explains how the connection was made to Obama’s Irish roots through
professional researchers in the United States and local church officials in Ireland. 

There’s even a song about the president’s ancestry: “There’s
No One As Irish As Barack O’Bama” by Ireland’s Corrigan Brothers. 

The song is the soundtrack for a documentary called Barack
Obama’s Irish Roots,  which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. You
can see a promo clip here. 

You can get Irish genealogy tips from the articles in Family
Tree Magazine‘s Irish Research Toolkit or download our $4 Irish
Genealogy Guide.

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

As you may have heard, I recently made my 23andMe and Family Tree DNA autosomal testing results available for download online at “mygenotype,” and dedicated the information to the public domain (if dedicating DNA sequence to the public domain is even possible – I’m currently doing some research in this area and expect to write more in the future).

At “mygenotype” you can download the following:

My Family Tree DNA Results:

1. Affymetrix Autosomal DNA Results (2010)
2. Affymetrix X-Chromosome DNA Results (2010)
3. Illumina Autosomal DNA Results (2011)
4. Illumina X-Chromosome DNA Results (2011)

My 23andMe Results:

1. V2 Results (2008)
2. V3 Results (2010)
3. Y-DNA Results (2010)
4. mtDNA Results (2010)

You can also find my SNPedia Promethease reports:

• Promethease Report using an early version of Affymetrix Family Finder DNA Results

• Promethease Report using V2 23andMe DNA Results

• Promethease Report using pooled 23andMe and Family Finder DNA Results

In addition to my genome, Razib Khan of Gene Expression has a spreadsheet of approximately 48 other genomes that are available for download online.

A Challenge To YOU

Now that the information is out there, available to anyone who might be interested, it remains to be seen who might be interested in the information.

Indeed, as evidenced by Razib’s spreadsheet, while dedicating a genome to the public domain has only been done by a small handful of people worldwide, it isn’t as novel as it was just a few months ago.

So, I’m challenging everyone who reads this to download my data and analyze it to find the most interesting or surprising results.  For example, you could use my most recent 23andMe V3 data.

I’ve already done a fair amount of analysis myself, including the Promethease reports above (and see here), and a recent blog post about my vastly increased Type 2 Diabetes risk.  However, perhaps there’s a recent but relatively study that applies, or perhaps there’s a story you can weave with a handful of SNPs. Or, even better, what can you tell me about my ancestry other than mtDNA and Y-DNA haplogroups? Don’t worry about the strength of the study, reproducibility, etc. – I’m aware of the uncertainties associated with this type of research, and my goal here is to make people aware of possibilities.

Please post your findings in the comments below, and in two weeks I’ll pick the most surprising or interesting findings and make them the focus of a new blog post.

Can you surprise me with my own genome?

News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

Did you know that you can share your member tree with friends and family for free? Send them an email invitation and they can see your tree once they register for an Ancestry.com account. A subscription is not required for them to see your tree.

A new and easier way to share your tree

With our release last week, we’ve made it easier to invite people to your tree. You can now import your contact list from Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL accounts to quickly select people you want to send an invitation to. You can still type in individual email addresses if you’d like, but by importing your contact list you can save a little time and effort trying to remember your cousin’s email address.

How to invite friends and family to see your tree

From your tree, click on the “Share your tree” link in the “Tree pages” menu next to your tree name.

From the share pop-up window, you’ll have several options for inviting people to your tree. From the left hand column, you can choose to type in email addresses one-by-one, invite Ancestry.com members if you know their username, or import your contact list from your email account.

Selecting people from your imported contact list

When you choose to import your contact list, you will be asked to connect to your email account. Once you log into your email account and give us permission to access your account, we will import your contact list so that you can choose who you want to invite to see your tree.

To protect your privacy, we never store your username or password. And we only save the contact information for people you have invited to your tree. Once you finish sending your invitations, your entire contact list is erased (unless you invite everyone on your list).

Once your contact list is imported, select the people you want to invite to your tree. We don’t send an invitation to your full contact list. We only send it to the people you’ve selected from your list.

Setting roles before you send your invitation

You can choose roles to control what you will allow your friends and family to work on in your tree. Each person with whom you want to share your tree will have a drop down menu next to their name.

• Choose “Editor” if you want to give your cousin full access to add and edit people in your tree.
• Choose “Contributor” if you want your cousin to add photos but not change any facts in your tree.
• Choose “Guest” if you don’t want your cousin to have any rights except to see your tree.

When you’re finished, click the orange button to share your tree and we will send your friends and family an email invitation.

Managing your invitations

To go back to the list of people you’ve invited to your tree, you can visit the sharing tab in your tree setting page. You can find this link under the “Tree pages” menu.

Sharing your tree is a great way to get your family involved and have them help you fill it in!