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Before I begin this post, an important note: Most, if not all content on this blog is CC-BY-SA licensed. This particular post is © Erica J. Baker, All Rights Reserved.

I found my Uncle on Facebook.

Sounds pretty mundane, run of the mill right? Many of your family members are on Facebook, I’m sure. To grasp this, let me back up for about oh, 50 some odd years.

My grandma went down to Saint Petersburg as a young woman, I’m not sure why but I know she ended up working at a local business. There she met a man. They conceived my father. The man then went…somewhere. My dad was born and never knew his father or who he was.

Fast forward to 1997, as my grandmother knew her days were getting short. She told my dad the circumstances of how she and his father met and also his fathers name. My grandmother passed away shortly thereafter.

Fast forward again to 2005 or so. I started becoming extremely interested in my family tree and history. I asked my dad what he knew of his father and he told me his fathers name, as told by his mother. I immediately did a search on Ancestry.com for the name. No matches. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I hadn’t known my grandfather for 25 years and it wasn’t that big deal a that I couldn’t find him. I assumed either my grandmother remembered the name incorrectly or my grandfather didn’t tell her his full name.

Fast forward again to 2010. I had my dad do the the Big Spit (23andMe test) and he’s got many Relative Finder matches. His paternal haplogroup is one of great interest to several people in said haplogroup. These results reinvigorated my interest in trying to find my paternal grandfather. Once again, I turned to Ancestry.com. Once again, nothing. This time though, I decided to be a bit more persistent.

Let’s rewind to 2005 again for a moment. The internet was still all about search and finding information useful to you. Facebook was still private. MySpace was being purchased by NewsCorp and was still for music artists and teenagers, for the most part. Friendster had a brief explosion of interest and use but was fizzling out. In 2005, the concept of  social networking just hadn’t yet reached the masses.

Things have changed here  in 2010. Facebook has just reached 500 million users and I can easily strike up a conversation with both my future mother-in-law (hi Lynne!) and my dad on the site if I so desired. Social networking is not just an idea a few sites are toying around with, it has permeated the internet.

Message #1 and what I thought was the most promising.

That was my thought process when I decided to take a pretty drastic (for me anyway) step on June 12, 2010; I searched for every person with the last name Anderson (of course this is not the real name) on Facebook and emailed anyone that looked to be any parts of African-American. The first person I emailed was also the first person to respond and he was who I thought I was going to get the best response from. I mean, he looks like my dad looked 20 years ago albeit a little shorter.

I sent him a message and got a response that I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, he knew a David Anderson! On the other hand? This David  was from Georgia and everything my grandmother told my had to do with a David from New Jersey. I decided to wait for other responses before chasing down his since it seemed unlikely to be a match.

I’d also sent a message to a person also named David Anderson. He didn’t have a profile picture (well he did but it wasn’t of himself, it was an inanimate object) but I decided to take the chance that he may be related in some way. He responded to my message with the following: “Lol ha Yeah i know him very well, thats my dad call me 555-555-5555″

"That's my dad. Call me..."

Pause.

What? Wait what? This guy is my uncle?! But…he’s younger than me!  Composing myself, I asked more questions and eventually called. We compared details about his dad and my Dad’s dad. Lived in New Jersey? Yep. Lived in Florida? Yep. Born around the same time? Yep. Throughout the conversation, I was the one providing details and he was the one corroborating so my guard was up. Maybe he just responded positively to mess with me. Then he added his aunt (my great-aunt) into the mix. She was as skeptical as I was. Wouldn’t you be? Who just randomly pops up out of the blue like “Hey! I’m your brothers 30 year old grand-daughter! Holla!”  She and I spoke on the phone and told me she’d talk to her brother about the situation.

She was true to her word. The next day, she called me back. She spoke to her brother. He remembered my grandmother. He’d like me to call him.

…

No way. I was still in disbelief and shock. I took down his number and never called. I did speak to the other David again and while we were talking, he put me on hold. When he came back, his dad, my supposed grandfather was on the phone. A month later I still shake my head at this. I talked to this man who we thought to be my grandfather but I was still skeptical. I asked him how he knew and met my grandmother and he called her his girlfriend. Said they worked together in Saint Pete. Said where they worked in Saint Pete. Highly interesting because I had no idea what my grandmother did down there. Once we got off the phone with him, I called my dad. Asked him what my grandmother did in St. Pete. He confirmed what the man on the phone said. The man who was supposed to be my grandfather. The man who is my grandfather.

Still on the phone with my dad, I asked him if he was sitting down. He was, watching some show on the Discovery channel. I asked him if he’d like to know his fathers phone number. The line was silent for what felt like 5 minutes but probably was only 30 seconds or so. He said yes. I asked him if he was shocked, he said yes. I gave him his fathers number.

The next day, I called my dad back and asked if he’d called his dad. Yes, he said, but they were going to have talk again later. Talk they did. 3 weekends ago, my dad went to meet his father for the first time. At the same time, he met the rest of his family at their family reunion. 3 days ago, he and his younger (by 25 years) brother had lunch.

My dad now knows his dad. Sorry if this is a bit dramatic. I’m all weepy-eyed as I type this because it still floors me. I can’t even begin to imagine how my dad feels right now.

All because of  a search on Facebook.

The internet is a powerful tool. We truly live in the information age and it is remarkable, yet only in its infancy.

Truly remarkable.

Hi Dad!

P.S. The person in message #1 is actually related. The real last name (no, not Anderson) turns out to be fairly uncommon. Also? Hate finding typos where my fingers skipped over a word because my brain was moving too fast. I do that a lot, as evidenced by the typos in the messages in the images above and likely in this blog post.

P.P.S. Thoughts expressed in this post are mine alone and not my employers, blah blah, etc etc.

Update: If you’re a 23andMe member, please consider making Relative Finder more useful by visiting www.23andme.com/user/edit/privacy/ and checking the box next to “I want to make my profile publicly visible in Relative Finder and the Ancestry Finder Lab.”

It seems like 23andMe is firing on all cylinders lately. They published some results from the 23andWe research program shortly after knocking out the bulk of the massive amount of DNA day orders in record time (most people I heard from got their results in less than 4 weeks). Of course there were a few outliers taking the full 8 weeks for processing and the unlucky 96 who got the wrong results but for the most part, 23andMe has been working at a furious pace from what I can see.

Following in the fast paced trend, they’ve recently released a new tool in Ancestry Labs called Ancestry Finder (currently in closed beta). I sent them a message asking to be included in the beta and they kindly added me. I spent some time testing out the tool and from what I can see, this is going to go far in increasing the amount of sharing between distant family members. Enough text, time for pictures.

The first thing I saw in Ancestry Finder

When I first opened the Ancestry Finder tool, my initial thought was “meh, this is going to be another of these things not applicable to African Americans.” As you can see in the image above, the information presented just wasn’t compelling…well non-existent really. Unimpressed but undeterred, I clicked to show the Advanced Controls. (Yes, I saw the big blue “how does this work” button but who reads directions?)

Advanced Controls

Advanced Controls revealed some settings that shouldn’t be hidden and shouldn’t be deemed “Advanced”. Why? Because this is where all the magic happens.

To explain the Advanced Controls, I have to back up a little bit and share how the Ancestry Finder works. On 23andMe there is a feature called Relative Finder (RF). RF basically compares your DNA to other members of 23andMe participating in RF and if a significant chunk of your DNA is identical, they can determine (to some degree) your relatedness. There is also a voluntary survey on 23andMe called “Where Are You From” that  asks you to detail your families ancestral origins to the best of your ability. Here is where Ancestry Finder comes in. If one of your Relative Finder matches has completed the “Where Are You From” survey, their answers are presented to you in a graphical format on Ancestry Finder.

Back to the Advanced Controls, there are 3 controls that can adjust what results you can view. I’ll go through each and kind of explain what they do.

Results from toggling the "Include matches primarily from US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand & South Africa" checkbox

The first thing anyone using this thing should do is check the box to Include matches primarily from US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. To be honest, I am not sure why 23andMe includes the option to hide those results. However, the option is there and the default is unchecked, which has the potential to hide a large portion of your matches.

Results from changing the "Number of grandparents from the same country" option to 1+

The second highly important option is the “Number of grandparents from the same country” dropdown. This allows you to choose which results are displayed based on how many of your matches grandparents are from the same country. The default is 4 so that if one of your RF matches has grandparents who are all from say, Ireland, that match will show up. Again, this default highly limits the amount of data that shows up for a reason I can’t yet discern. To see all the matches, I chose the 1+ option. This allows me to see all my matches responses to the Where Are You From survey, even in the case of people who don’t know where their grandparents are from.

Results from moving the "Minimum Segment Size" Slider down to 5cm.

Finally, there is a slider in the middle that changes how small a segment can be for it to be shown. I adjusted mine all the way down to 5cm from the default 10cm. Unlike the other two options, I can understand the default setting for this option. At 5cm, the RF match is probably in the Distant Cousin range and knowing where their grandparents originate probably can’t provide much insight into recent ancestral origins.

Those are the Advanced Controls. Again, I can’t figure out why those would be called “Advanced” as adjusting them is the only way to see anything of interest in the tool.

Hovering over individual segments.

One of the coolest things about Ancestry Finder is what happens when you hover over one of the colored segments. On hover, a small box pops up explaining each portion of the segment. In the example image to the left, I captured a couple results of what happened when I hovered over a segment. You can see the breakdowns for each color (in the top segment, Navy for Canada, Purple for Iceland, and Lime for the UK) as well as the Segment Length for each result.

I think Ancestry Finder is huge. Game changing huge. Paired with Relative Finder, its going to make 23andMe one of the most useful tools for Genealogy researchers. Of course, there are some tweaks I’d like to see. Like I mentioned above, the Advanced Controls definitely shouldn’t be hidden and some of the default settings should be changed. I would also like to see those “Your relative’s…” pop ups become clickable with the link going to the RF match’s profile.

I am interested to see if Ancestry Finder encourages more people to use Relative Finder. Right now, my RF response rate (matches that respond to initial contact) is about 33% and based on messages posted in the 23andMe community, that is fairly high. If other 23andMe members are anything like me, they’re going to want to see what all 23 chromosomes look like filled up with Ancestry Finder data. That, of course, requires increased interaction in Relative Finder so there is a good possibility RF usage will increase. In any case, Ancestry Finder is definitely a very useful addition to 23andMe’s tool belt. I look forward to seeing how the community responds once it comes out of beta.

Update: Looks like they took Ancestry Finder out of Beta today and now it is available for use by all 23andMe members. Nice!

My employer is an investor in 23andMe however, the views reflected in this post are mine alone and do not reflect the views of my employer.

…Commenter #31

…Joel C!

Thanks for your participation everyone!