Are Your Parents Related?

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Are your parents related? Well, Genesis has a tool that can help you find out.

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Howdy, I’m Andy Lee with Family History Fanatics, and this is a segment of dna. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and click on the bell if you wanna be notified about upcoming episodes. This is a series of episodes about how to use different tools on the Genesis system of the GEDmatch website. And today we’re talking about are your parents related? Now, most people might think, well, my parents aren’t related, but if you go back three or four generations, you might actually find that your parents share a common great, great grandparent, great, great, great grandparent. So let’s see how this tool works. When you log into Genesis, you can find the tool down in the DNA applications, and this is the tool called Are Your Parents Related. When you click on this tool, it’s going to have you enter the kit number of a child.

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Now, let’s just go over real quick how it can tell whether or not your parents are related. There’s a little paragraph at the top here that explains how this tool is working, what it’s looking at, but in essence, since you got one set of chromosomes from your dad and one set of chromosomes from your mom, if there are locations that are long enough that match on both of those chromosomes, then it’s likely that they might have inherited that from the same ancestor. Now these sections are called runs of homozygosity and all you need is you need the kit of a child to be able to tell whether this is the case or not. So I’m going to add in my kit right here, and when I click on submit, it’s gonna go through and it’s gonna tell me what this is looking at specifically. So in other words, specifically it’s looking for an area that has at least 200 SNIPs in a row that are the same between my two chromosomes.

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It’s also looking for that segment to be at least 7 centimorgans long and it gives a map for each one of my chromosomes. And you can see that yeah, there’s some places where it’s green indicating that it is the same for a little bit of a distance. But overall I look at the bottom and it says that there’s no indication that my parents are related, and that just means that in the last, you know, five, seven generations, they probably don’t share any common ancestors. Now if you go further and further back, I think everybody’s family tree begins to collapse in on itself as you find that there was people that you share in common through both your mom and your dad. Now, if you want to learn more about this runs of Homozygosity, you can actually go to David Pike’s website and read some more about it.

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But, I will tell you it is rather technical. So if you are not into this technical aspect of DNA, then this website’s probably not going to interest you. But you can see that this tool ran really fast and it is something that you can do on every single kit. Now, particularly if you know that you are adopted, then this might be good to do to find out whether or not, hey, is there some common ancestry between both of my parents that I might be finding in a genealogical timeframe? If you are part of an endogenous population, I would highly encourage that you run this because most likely you’re going to find that there are a lot of places that you actually had DNA inherited from both parents the same. So what does somebody who has parents that are related look like on this tool? So here’s somebody that actually has their parents related, and you can see that it looks a lot different than what mine did.

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It still has mostly red, but there are some bigger sections of green all interspersed within here. And in those big sections it’s also been highlighted blue underneath, indicating that these are a match. They meet that threshold of 200 snips and of 7 centimorgans now going through this person’s chromosomes. You can see on several of the chromosomes there are these runs of homozygosity. That’s a really hard thing to say. As we scroll all the way down to the bottom, we can see that hey, the largest segment was actually 30 centimorgans. That’s actually a really large segment and there’s total of 242 centimorgans that are part of these runs of Homozygosity. It gives you an estimate of the number of generations. So there’s about four generations between one parent and the other parents. So that’s I think, the great great grandparents. So these parents might share a set of great, great grandparents or great great, great grandparents in common.

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So I would encourage everybody to actually use this tool really is one of the first things that you do. It is a quick tool. It doesn’t take too long. Probably for most people it’s gonna come up with not being related in the last several generations. But for those of you who do, then that gives you a clue of what you might find. As you’re searching your family tree, you’re going to see that those trees from both your mom’s side and your dad’s side actually intertwine together at some point in the last few generations. It’s really exciting to see a lot of the different things that DNA can tell us. Just with your own kit, you don’t always need to have other relatives kits in order to use some of these tools effectively. And the are your parents related tool is one of those. So if you haven’t tried the Are Your Parents Related, go and try it today. If you have any questions about this tool, put it in the comments below and I’ll try to answer it. And if you like this video, be sure to give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends.