GRAVES FAMILY BULLETIN
A
Free, Occasional, Online Summary of Items of Interest to Descendants of all
Families of Graves, Greaves, Grieves, Grave, and other spelling variations
Worldwide
Vol.
13, No. 4, October 17, 2011
===============================================
Copyright
© 2011 by the Graves Family Association and Kenneth V. Graves. All rights reserved.
Information
on how to start a free subscription to this bulletin and how to be removed from
the subscription list is at the end of this bulletin. If you received this bulletin directly, then you are already
subscribed.
Visit
the GFA web site at http://www.gravesfa.org
===============================================
CONTENTS:
**
General Comments
**
New Facebook Page for Graves Family Association
**
National Museum of the American Indian
**
Autosomal DNA Testing and the Probability of Finding Matches
**
Some of the Limits of Autosomal DNA Testing
**
Identity Theft and Genealogy Book Publishing
**
An Alert for Caswell Co., NC, Researchers on Ancestry.com
**
Book with U.S. Civil War Correspondence Now Available
**
To Submit Material to this Bulletin & Other Things
===============================================
GENERAL
COMMENTS
A
variety of topics are included in this issue. Keeping up with rapidly developing technology is quite a
challenge. In spite of my lack of
experience with Facebook and other social networking websites, I have the
feeling that it and other similar services will be of great help once we learn
how to use them effectively.
Some
general discussion of autosomal DNA testing is also presented in this
issue. Future issues will continue
to include examples of how autosomal testing is solving some of ancestry and
relationship puzzles.
===============================================
NEW
FACEBOOK PAGE FOR GRAVES FAMILY ASSOCIATION
The
Graves Family Association now has its own Facebook page. Thanks very much to Vann Graves for
setting this up. Now we have to
figure out how to make it most effective to promote the GFA and use it to help
us find other family members and to learn more about our ancestry. The URL for our new Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/groups/gravesfa/.
===============================================
NATIONAL
MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
This
museum is located on the National Mall in Washington, DC. There is also a branch located in New
York City. According to the
website at http://www.nmai.si.edu/, “The
National Museum of the American Indian is the eighteenth museum of the
Smithsonian Institution. It is the first national museum dedicated to the
preservation, study, and exhibition of the life, languages, literature,
history, and arts of Native Americans.”
There
was an article in the last GF Bulletin about Native American ancestry. As a follow-up to that, an article in
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter for Sept. 26, called my attention to this
museum and its programs. In the
outreach section of their website, they discuss a series of programs, all of
which are broadcast live via webcast as they occur, and at least some are
available via online video later.
A program on Oct. 7 is about Native American law as determined by U.S.
courts. A program on Sept. 16
examined the question of “Who is an Indian?”
The
discussion of Indian identity stated: “Unlike other ethnic minorities in the
United States, American Indians are defined not solely by self-designation but
by federal, state, and tribal laws. Blood quantum—originating from
archaic notions of biological race and still codified in contemporary
policy—remains one of the most important factors in determining tribal
citizenship, access to services, and community recognition. This concept, however,
is not without debate and contestation.” You can watch the video at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17314991
===============================================
AUTOSOMAL
DNA TESTING AND THE PROBABILITY OF FINDING MATCHES
An
autosome is a chromosome that is not a sex chromosome (i.e., not an X or Y
chromosome). There are 22 pairs of
autosomes plus a pair of sex chromosomes for a total of 23 pairs of chromosomes
in the human genome. A child inherits
random parts of each chromosome from each parent. Autosomal DNA testing is the testing of a limited number of
SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), presently 710,000 pairs of locations
for FTDNA. Good places on the
Internet to find more information about this are:
·
the FAQ pages of 23andMe
·
Go to www.23andme.com, click on
the “how it works” link at the top of the page, and then select the subject of
interest.
·
the FAQ pages of Family Tree DNA
Go to www.familytreedna.com,
click on the FAQ link at the top of the page, and scroll down to and click on
the “Understanding Results: Family Finder” link. There is also helpful information in the “Learning Center”
section at the bottom of the main page.
·
ISOGG (International Society of Genetic Genealogy)
Go to www.isogg.org
and click on Resources on left side of page. Also, the ISOGG Wiki can be accessed by clicking on the Wiki
link in the “What’s New” box.
A
good summary is also posted at DNA Testing Adviser at http://www.dna-testing-adviser.com/Autosomal-DNA-Testing.html.
DNA
Testing Advisor has the following discussion about how genealogists can use
autosomal testing.
“Count out five generations to your great-great-great grandparents. You have 32 of them and most of the 16 couples probably had several children. Most of those children eventually married and had several more children and so on. Imagine those sixteen families all multiplying and branching out for five successive generations. You could easily have thousands of living cousins in parallel branches you know nothing about.
An autosomal DNA test can introduce you to those cousins who have taken the same test. Some of your newfound cousins will have genealogical information that you lack. By comparing notes and pooling your resources, you both win.
Genealogists also use this test to confirm suspected connections between deceased ancestors. For example, if you want to be sure that two men were brothers, you can test a great-grandchild of each man to see if they have the expected second cousin relationship.
Like all forms of genetic genealogy, having good paper trails will help you make sense of your DNA information. Yet even adoptees are using the test to get clues about their birth families and ethnic background.”
PROBABILITY
OF FINDING MATCHES
According
to a Family Finder FAQ on the FTDNA website, the probability of finding a match
is shown below.
Relationship |
Match
Probability |
2nd
cousins or closer |
99% |
3rd
cousins |
>90% |
4th
cousins |
>50% |
5th
cousins |
>10% |
6th
cousins and more distant |
Remote
(typically less than 2%) |
“For example, if you have 100 of your 3rd cousins test, Family Finder will detect about 90 of them as your 3rd cousins. It will not detect the other 10.
Family Finder only detects a small percentage of 5th cousins and relatives that are more distant. However, the number of such cousins in the population increases exponentially with each generation. This means that if 1,000 of your distant cousins test, you can expect to see a few of them in the Speculative Relative category.
For genealogists, it is best to use Family Finder to prove recent relationships (1 to 5 generations). However, after testing, you may discover distant cousins.”
===============================================
SOME
OF THE LIMITS OF AUTOSOMAL DNA TESTING
Autosomal
testing can allow us to find matches with our relatives, especially those
related within 5 generations. This
may enable us to find ancestors that we didn’t previously know about, and break
through “brick walls” in our research.
It can also give us some idea about our ancestral mix on all our various
ancestral lines.
The
two companies that presently provide this test are 23andMe and Family Tree DNA
(FTDNA). 23andMe emphasizes
testing for health and medical reasons, and FTDNA specializes in testing for
genealogy. Family Finder from
FTDNA currently tests 710,000 pairs of locations (SNPs). The program declares a DNA segment to
be Identical by Descent (IBD) if it contains at least 500 matching SNPs (Single
Nucleotide Polymorphisms) in series, and if the segment is larger than a
certain size. A DNA segment that
is between 5 and 10 centiMorgans (cM) implies shared ancestry, and a block that
is 10 centiMorgans or larger indicates conclusive shared ancestry. Segments that don’t meet these minimum requirements may just
match by chance and are considered to be Identical by State (IBS). (This last statement is usually true,
but occasionally a segment smaller than 5 cM can indicate a match that is
Identical by Descent.)
There
are limits to what autosomal testing can do, however. It will never be able to completely define our ancestry, and
it will never be able to tell us everything about our ancestors. Some of these limitations are discussed
in an article in The Genetic Genealogist at http://www.thegeneticgenealogist.com/2007/07/17/autosomal-genetic-testing/. Although this article seems to me to
overstate some points, it does point out that: “No autosomal test, now or in
the future, will ever be able to completely define a person or a person’s
heritage. DNA inheritance simply doesn’t work that way; it happens by chance,
and as a result we do NOT possess DNA from each of our ancestors evenly. Some
are highly represented, and some are gone completely.”
The article further states that it is misleading and even
dangerous to suggest “that autosomal tests can truly define who we are and
where we came from. The numbers only represent a few hundred sequences bases
out of an entire genome, and I do not believe that even full-genome analysis
- the entire description of our DNA - will ever define who we are
or where we come from, on an individual level. If I were to find a sample of my
great-great-grandmother’s DNA and analyze her entire genome, I could tell you
what color her eyes were, about how tall she was, and what diseases she might
have suffered from. I could not, however, tell you what made her laugh, or what
her hobbies were, or even how many children she had in her lifetime.”
However,
we know from experience that nothing is perfect. The ability to get autosomal DNA test results has provided
us with a tool that few of us would have dreamed possible a few years ago. And with the advent of low cost, whole
genome testing in a few years, the rapid growth in the size and complexity of
DNA databases, the discovery of proprietary STRs (single tandem repeats) for
Y-DNA testing, and other developments, we can look forward to a bright future
for genetic genealogy.
===============================================
IDENTITY
THEFT AND GENEALOGY BOOK PUBLISHING
Many
people have asked me over the years, “When are you going to publish a book
about my family?” From my
perspective, there are several issues that need to be addressed for me to be
able to answer this question.
These include:
·
Cost: Publishing a book the traditional way (in hardcover, bound
format) is very expensive, especially if you guess at how many will be sold but
sell fewer copies than you have printed.
·
Format: If a traditional, hardcover format is not used, what format
should be used?
·
Indexing: Indexing is a very time-consuming process. How complete should the index be, and
should there be a place index as well as a name index?
·
Content and scope: Some people have narrower interests than
others. So some people might
prefer a book that only includes their direct line from their earliest known
Graves or Greaves ancestor, and then all descendants of their
great-grandparents, whereas all the 6 books I have already published (excluding
Graves Families of the World) contain all descendants of the earliest known
ancestor. That, of course, also
makes the book much larger and more expensive.
·
Privacy and identity theft: With the increasing use of the Internet,
many people have become concerned about privacy and identity theft. There is the belief by some that it is
risky to put information about living people on the Internet or in a book, even
though all the evidence contradicts that.
What
I have decided is that I will not publish any traditional hardcover books in
the future, but I will continue to publish books in some format. They will be either print-on-demand
books or e-books (readable on your computer, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble
Nook, etc.). Initially, I will
probably publish an entire genealogy as a single book, although eventually I
may offer portions of genealogies for specific families within an overall
genealogy. There will only be
indexes of the people in the genealogy.
(I will soon be able to create these indexes automatically.) However, using electronic format will allow
the reader to search for any word or phrase of interest. Since costs will be much less, prices
will also be much lower.
Concerning
the issues of privacy and identity theft, these seem to me to be mainly issues
of perception and emotion rather than issues of logic. Concerning privacy, many people share
intimate details of their lives in emails and on social media such as Facebook,
Twitter, etc., yet some of those may not want their names to be included in a
genealogy. And yet, the genealogy
will only be of interest to relatives, whereas their Facebook page will be
there for the whole world to see.
Concerning
identity theft, I have never read of nor heard of identity theft as a result of
information in a genealogy, although it is not an absolute impossibility. The Better Business Bureau reports that
half of all identity theft is by family members, friends, in-home employees, or
neighbors. Most identity thieves find
it much easier to establish their own line of credit in the name of a relative
or acquaintance rather than digging through public records to create credit in
the name of a stranger. Perhaps
the most common method of finding credit card information is by “dumpster
diving” - going through someone else’s trash to find credit card bills,
etc. Most victims of identity
theft do not experience any financial loss because of fraud protection provided
by most banks and credit card companies.
If
you go to an FTC website at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/
and then click on “Learn more about identity theft”, you will see that it is a
result of a variety of practices, including dumpster diving, skimming,
phishing, changing your address, old fashioned stealing, and pretexting. These practices and definitions of the
terms are defined and discussed in the article.
According
to a page at http://darlene-vaillancourt.suite101.com/identity-theft-a21806: “Well, technically, yes we are offering
up somewhat valuable information for the taking. But the reality is that this
seldom happens. Most crimes deemed
as "identity theft" usually aren't much more than credit card fraud,
not the full creation of a fraudulent identity. In other words, thieves are far
more likely to steal your wallet, find bank statements in your trash or
intercept your email in order to steal personal information.”
One
solution to the possibility of information from online or printed genealogies
being used as part of the input to fraud is to not include anything about
living people or anyone born in the last 100 years in a genealogy. Other than the fact that doing that
wouldn’t do much to improve security, who wants a genealogy that doesn’t
include them and their close relatives?
What
do you think? Do you want any book
about your Graves or Greaves family to include living family members, or do you
think that is a bad thing? Would
you buy a book that excluded all living family members? Please let me know, and I will take
your desires into consideration.
===============================================
AN
ALERT FOR CASWELL CO., NC, RESEARCHERS ON ANCESTRY.COM
In
searching records for Caswell Co., NC, I have recently been finding people who
were in Caswell Co. but were listed as born in Catawba Co., and sometimes the
same person was listed as being born in both counties. That obviously didn’t make any sense,
since the two counties aren’t even close to each other. I discussed this problem with Rick
Frederick of the Caswell County Historical Association, and he gave the
following explanation. (This is
more detail than most of you want to know, but at least it will be here for
your reference if you need it.)
“The
Ancestry.com
North Carolina Birth Index, 1800-2000 database has a serious coding problem
that Ancestry.com
refuses to address. I brought this to their attention several years ago and
continue to inform them of the need to correct the corrupt database, all
without success. Thus, until this is resolved, be wary of any search of this
database that shows Catawba County as the county of birth. The person may
really have been born in Caswell County. Look at the actual record and check
the township. If you see the following abbreviations, the birth county is
Caswell: P (Pelham); DR (Dan River); M (Milton); LH (Locust Hill); Y
(Yanceyville); L (Leasburg); SC (Stoney Creek); A (Anderson); and HT
(Hightowers).
The
problem for those researching Caswell County (CO 20) apparently is in the
1913-1956 period. When you go to Roll Number NCVR_B_CO20_66001 (see above under
Caswell County) you are taken to the Catawba County births index.
The
problem for those researching Catawba County (CO 21) apparently is in the
1960-1979 period. When you go to Roll Number NCVR_B_CO21_68003 (see above under
Catawba County) you are taken to the Caswell County births index. Some records obviously have been
incorrectly indexed either by Ancestry.com or by the North Carolina State
Archives.
The
position of Ancestry.com
is that this is how they received the records from the North Carolina State
Archives, and that it is not Ancestry.com's problem. I recently brought the
matter to the attention of the North Carolina State Archives, but have not
received a reply. The work-around described is effective, but does require a
researcher to view the actual record, which is recommended in any event.
I
have adopted the convention of showing the record abstract as created by Ancestry.com
but adding [Caswell]. To do otherwise would be very confusing to anyone using Ancestry.com.
That is how I approach all errors made by genealogical research services -- to
show exactly what is found online, but to add corrections.”
===============================================
BOOK
WITH U.S. CIVIL WAR CORRESPONDENCE NOW AVAILABLE
In
the Graves Family Bulletin of June 17, 2011, I announced that Nancy Dana Wilson
was in the process of publishing a book containing the U.S. Civil War letters
written by her great-grandfather, Darius D. Priest, to his wife, L. Emeline
Graves Priest. Emeline Graves was
a child of Lyman Graves and Rosetta Richardson of genealogy 135.
Nancy
has since told me that the book, called Shouts & Whispers: The Civil War Correspondence of D.D.
Priest of Mount Holly, Vermont is now available.
It is for sale at Northshire Books in Manchester. VT, at Red Fox Books in
Glens Falls, NY, or by contacting Nancy D. Wilson, 27 Arbor Drive, Glens
Falls, NY 12801. The price is $20.
===============================================
ABOUT THIS BULLETIN:
This
bulletin is written and edited by Kenneth V. Graves, ken.graves@gravesfa.org.
TO
SUBMIT MATERIAL TO THIS BULLETIN:
Send
any material you would like to have included in this bulletin to
ken.graves@gravesfa.org. The
editor reserves the right to accept, edit or reject any material submitted.
TO
JOIN THE GRAVES FAMILY ASSOCIATION:
If
you do not already belong to the GFA, you can join by sending $20 per year to
Graves Family Association, 20 Binney Circle, Wrentham, MA 02093 (more details
on GFA website). Payment may also
be sent electronically via PayPal by going to www.paypal.com
and sending payment to gfa@gravesfa.org.
COPYRIGHTS:
Although
the contents of this bulletin are copyrighted by the Graves Family Association
and Kenneth V. Graves, you are hereby granted permission, unless otherwise
specified, to re-distribute part or all to other parties for non-commercial
purposes only.
TO
SUBSCRIBE OR UNSUBSCRIBE TO THIS BULLETIN:
To
subscribe to this bulletin, send an e-mail message to
ken.graves@gravesfa.org. Please
include your full name. Your
postal mailing address and information on your Graves/Greaves ancestry would
also be appreciated, although not essential.
To
remove your name from this subscription list, send an e-mail message to
ken.graves@gravesfa.org asking to be removed.