Social Networking & Mother-in-Law’s atDNA Results

I was out of town last week for personal business and didn’t have a chance to do any genealogical activity while gone.  I’m back now and am putting the final touches on my Social Networking for Genealogy presentation which I give this Saturday to the Greater Portland Chapter of the Maine Genealogical Society (GPS-MGS).  See https://www.facebook.com/events/1613563462253782/ for details. 

I decided to add a couple slides regarding Family Me and We Relate because both of them focus on sharing your family tree and then incorporating a Social Media element in order to allow for collaboration. Once I’ve given the presentation at the GPC-MGS, I’ll try my hand at recording a voice-over and making it a “canned” presentation and then posting it to my website. 

This week I received the results from Ancestry DNA for my mother-in-law’s atDNA test. The good news is my wife is genetically her daughter so she isn’t a hospital changling/mix-up.  (We never thought she was.) Not many surprises. 

It also interesting to note that most of my wife’s matches do not match with people her mother matches with, so the matches my wife has must relate through her father’s DNA.  Lots more about the matches once I can get to working that project. Again, more paternal matches makes sense because my mother-in-law’s ancestors tended to have smaller families than my father-in-law’s family did.

Finally, when I have time, I’ll export my mother-in-law’s Ancestry raw data  and import it into GEDMatch and see what connections I can find through them. GEDMatch is a great service, one that I highly recommend.