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.

No related posts.

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.

For the days leading up to Black History Month, I will do a cursory Family Tree for any African-American folks that ask me. The only caveat? You have to be willing to post your tree somewhere (blog, FriendFeed, Facebook, twitter, etc) during Black History Month.* Why? I think AfAms need a better understanding of who we are and where we come from. Interested? Email familytreeme@ericabaker.com.

To expand, I define cursory as “as many generations I can go back without having to jump over many hurdles”. This normally gets me back to the 1870s for most African-Americans and if the data is good, I can go further.

To get started, I’ll need the names and if possible, birthdates and birthplaces of your grandparents. The tree I generate will work backwards from them.

Once done, I’ll give you a list of all the people in the tree, the actual tree itself, and the GEDCOM format file in the case you want to upload and continue working on the tree in Geni or another family tree tool. If applicable, I’ll also provide interesting supporting documents (Freedmen’s Bank Records, Draft Registration cards, wills, etc).

Please feel free to pass this on to others.

*Why the necessity to post during Black History Month? Reminding people that Black History is more than just remembering the efforts of civil rights activists and celebrating African-American inventions; it’s our history.

A while back, I told you all I finally spent the money and did the 23andMe thing and I promised I’d report back with results. Well, better late than never right?

Applicable Ethnicity? Mostly European.

While the 23andMe health data is pretty good and comprehensive, unfortunately, the research in that area has been focused mostly on people of predominantly European heritage (more on this later in the post). African Americans like me will still show results in this area but I’m taking the reports with a grain of salt.

Aside from the health data, 23andMe has added quite a bit of really interesting Ancestry data. For example, apparently my maternal haplogroup is L2c1, a haplogroup common among the Mandenka of Senegal, according to 23andMe.

They also do this really interesting thing called Ancestry Painting. It basically matches each little bit of your DNA to where it most likely originated. Based on my Ancestry Painting (in the image below) I’m 20% European. The history of slavery makes this entirely unsurprising.

100% Mutt

23andme recently released a new Ancestry feature in Beta called Relative Finder.  The feature will be released to all users in early January and from what I’ve seen of Relative Finder so far, this could be a complete game changer for those of us interested in Genealogy. Check out the portion of my Relative Finder results pictured below.

Hello European relatives of mine.

As an African American, this is Huge. Think about slavery for a moment. Those European roots included in my Ancestry Painting will never be documented anywhere and up until now, there was almost no way to find out who was tipping to the slaves quarters at night. Once released to all 23andMe users, putting together the puzzle pieces of Relative Finder matches and family history will make it possible, maybe even easy to figure out the unknown branches in family history. Knowing who was a slave owner could lead to knowing where a slave originated, which could lead to finding out EXACTLY where I or any other AfAm came from.

Clearly Relative Finder would be highly beneficial to most African-Americans. There is one small problem. The cheapest 23andMe service, the Ancestry edition, costs $399.00. The median annual income for most African-American families is $30,134 before taxes. Factor in taxes and one 23andMe Ancestry kit will cost a family 20% of the average AfAm families gross monthly income, nothing at all to scoff at.

What does this mean? Sadly, this groundbreaking tech will remain out of reach for many of the people who could use it most. When I asked 23andMe about this on Twitter, their response was mostly vague but leads me to believe their pricing model isn’t about to change anytime soon.

Long story short? Price changes unlikely in the short term.

Sucks right? The genealogy isn’t even the half of it. Remember earlier in the post when I mentioned that a lot of the health data is based on studies of people with European ancestry? Yeah. That’s not going to change anytime soon unless a) some researchers decide to focus on African-American DNA or b) the cost barrier is reduced, allowing for more AfAms to participate on their own.

If you can’t tell, this is a pretty big deal to me. A big enough deal that I wrote to the Oprah show to try to get her to cover the subject. I don’t think any of the AfAm “moguls” have devoted any cycles to the subject, save the brief run of the African-American Lives series. In a perfect world, the Oprahs, the Diddys, the Shaqs, and the Jay-Zs of the world would take some interest in all this but thats not likely to happen. Other than that, frankly, I don’t have a real solution to any of the issues I’ve written about here. Maybe one day the price of DNA testing will be low enough that cost won’t be a barrier for those people that don’t have an extra $400 laying around. If you are an African-American with that kind of disposable income available, I encourage you try out the 23andMe service. If you do and you get some Relative Finder matches, I’ll be more than happy to do a cursory building of your Family Tree on Ancestry.com for you. The more you know, etc.

Disclosure: 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. I paid full price for the 23andMe service and have not been offered any future discounts  for the service.

I’m still around, contrary to what this blog might lead you to believe. Sorry about the lack of posts but I seem to spend all my words on FriendFeed and twitter these days. I’ll try to do better but no promises. Before you continue, I request that you excuse the typos in this post. I’m working with new (cramped!) hardware that is affecting my typing but more on that later.

So!

What have I been up to of late? Let’s see, went down to Richmond, VA to visit with family and do some genealogy research. The visit was actually quite fruitful as there is stuff hidden in microfiche in the Library of Virginia that I would have never found elsewhere. <slight tangent>Why this data is locked away in microfiche format, I will never understand. Why hello 2009, you’re full of wonder and technology, surely this stuff should have been digitized by now. Alas no, and I’m fairly certain the Library of Virginia is not the only place that has treasure troves of information that can’t be found unless you visit.</slight tangent>

My trip led me to find out something I find quite important though. Up until then, I knew my grandmother died in her late 30′s but I had no idea my great grandmother also died very young. That knowledge freaked me out enough (I do have a fear of dying young you know) to finally bite the bullet and do the 23andme thing. I ordered the test last week, I should be getting the kit next week. I don’t know whether I’ll find out something reassuring or depressing but at least I’ll know. Perhaps I might hit the HIV resistant gene lottery too! Hey one can dream and if I do, I promise to share my DNA with my future kids.

Post Virginia trip, I drove up to Baltimore for the boyfriends birthday. I kind of arranged a nice get together/party thing for all his friends, with the help of his brothers and his best friends. He had a great time but people who get to bury their faces in cake-y cleavage usual have fun. I’d post the picture of him nose deep in cleavage cake but then you’d never hear from me again because I’d be dead. While I was in Baltimore, he got his condo on the market. The quicker it sells, the quicker he can move out here, finally. Then we can escape my current spider infested hellhole of an apartment and move in to someplace decent.

Post Baltimore, we flew back to the Bay area together and of course, we had the worst flight in the history of flying. I think the turbulence map that day showed nearly 60% of the contiguous 48 states covered with turbulence. I will be glad when I only have to fly once or twice a year. When we got back, his birthday present arrived; a Terps red Lenovo S10. It was so perfect and great that the next week, I blew my Amazon Associates money and got a pink one for myself. Look at the precious:

If you look closely at that picture, you’ll see my cute little S10 is running OS X. This is because I love OS X but the Macbook Air is far too expensive and doesn’t come in pink.

My eyelids force closing themselves tell me that I have stayed up later than they will allow. I’ll press post on this and come back with another post in 4-6 weeks when I have my 23andme results.

Today I went on another genealogy kick. Fueled by one of mom’s bombs (“You know your grandma was married once before she married your grandpa don’t you?”) that she likes to drop every now and then, I went on a tear looking for links in my family tree that weren’t obvious to me before.

After a few hours I’d made little headway into fitting the new information into what information I already had. I decided that I needed to comb through census records manually (looking at pages of information laid out before me, sorry trees) to find non-obvious links between people and families (See those people next door with the same last name? Turns out you’re related!).  Unfortunately using the most well transcribed census database on Ancestry.com is an exercise in frustration.

Since I was not permitted to dump entire portions of transcribed census, my choices were to print the raw pages and transcribe myself or just work directly off the raw pages. Neither of these choices were very palatable to me so I went off searching for other sites that had transcribed census data. I happened to find the USGenWeb Census Project. This is a volunteer effort of people manually transcribing pages of census data so that others may freely use and search it. In theory this is a GREAT idea. In practice, there just aren’t enough people in the world who would bother doing this sort of manual labor. Thus many pages sit in their database, untranscribed and unsearchable.

If you think like I do, you’re probably reading this thinking about the obvious solution to this problem; OCR technology. Though it’s out there free for use by anyone and being applied by big companies to big things, nobody has bothered to apply this technology to the genealogy problem, which has been around longer than any PDF you can dredge up. Sure Ancestry has their crippled, for-profit, search engines but this limits what is otherwise public data to the set of people with the means to pay for it. This, though by no fault of Ancestry.com’s, is the heart of the matter.

IMO, technical people have this desire to always always move forward and do New Things. This is not a terrible thing because this is how innovation occurs. However this means that if a problem is solved in one way, nobody wants to be the one to return to that problem and solve it better. For example, if Ancestry.com were never invented someone would see all the problems that Ancestry has solved as new and challenging and would be applying all these newer technologies and ideas to the problem. Instead Ancestry exists and there doesn’t seem to be anyone anxious to revisit the problem except people who aren’t super technical for the most part. This leads us back to the people manually transcribing census data.

These problems that can be solved better or differently exist all over the place. See Brad with his proximity based garage door opening phone. See robotically cleaned floors. See all sorts of everyday activities that can be improved upon with the application of fairly common technology.

Take your laundry for instance (sorry people who subscribe to my FriendFeed, you’ve heard this one before). Right now most of us complete the task of separating clothes, measuring out detergent, starting the washer with the right settings so that the result isn’t shrunken sweaters and bleached jeans. If you’re over there thinking like me again, you can see the solution to the laundry “problem” fairly simply. Sorting based on detected colors built into the laundry unit. Programs that run based on the color detected. Detergent/Bleach/Fabric Softeners containers that disperse based on the program being run. Water temperature determined by the same program. All these problems have been solved but it will take someone to go back and apply and implement them properly so that people no longer manually do laundry when they don’t need to.

I suspect most of the people who read my blog are involved in tech in some way shape or form. I have a request for you. When you see something in the world around you and think “That could be done so much better/easier…,” try to devote even the smallest amount of time to resolving the problem and making it much better/easier for the folks that come after you. Meanwhile, I’m going to return to figuring out how to apply all the OCR tech out there to census pages and you’re welcome to join me. Here’s hoping some freely searchable census data comes of our efforts.

No related posts.

Sorry I’ve not been coming with the posts lately my dear, loyal ~24 readers. Unfortunately I’ve been sick and haven’t felt like doing much of anything that requires any sort of effort. I’ve never lost my voice before now so this is a new experience for me. How does one get sick in the middle of the summer though?

I’m still recovering so I’ll make this post very brief.

- I got some new schwag as you can see in the picture. Thanks Valleyschwag.

- I’ll be in Cali during the last week of July. Hopefully I’ll get to meet Liz while there…hi Liz!

- My mom got mad at me today because I asked her not to sell my books that are in her garage. Does she not understand? Meanwhile, what’s the best way to ship 2 very heavy boxes of books across the US?

- I did not vote for Ted Stevens when I lived in Alaska, TYVM.

- The Dave Chappelle show would probably be funny if Dave were actually there. Right now its just sad.

- Genealogy gets really sticky when you factor in burned census records, name misspellings, nicknames turning into given names, etc. By the grace of God, I’m back to my 7th generation on my moms side. Somebody needs to web 2.0/Ajaxify PhpGedView so its a little easier to use.

Okay that will be it for this entry. Time to go lay back in bed and cough up a lung.

Tags:

• genealogy
• schwag
• sick
• Ted Stevens