Day 5 - The first day of the SLIG courses

DNA Class - Day 1 

I’m enrolled in Course 13 - A Practical Approach: Establishing Genealogical Proof with DNA.  Karen Stanbary is our instructor and we are all ready to go!  First thing I do is bust out Scrivener and create a new project for the DNA course.  Halfway through the morning session and I’m LOVING everything about Scrivener.  I can tell this will organize all my research during this week and will help me to write my reports in such an efficient manner.  #BestSeminarEver

In the DNA course, we jump right in headfirst talking about our research question.  I have three research questions that I have in mind but I’m bouncing back and forth between two of them.  I know the identity of my paternal grandmother’s biological father, I found him through DNA, but I would love to put that into a proof argument.  I affectionately call him The Scoundrel and I’ve written a blog about him a few years back (which needs to be sourced and updated since that was written before any formal genealogy education).

The second research question is finding the identity of The Scoundrel’s father.  I have a name and location.  That’s it.  But I know I will be able to find out his identity through DNA.  This week will be a journey to find The Scoundrel’s biological father.  

The afternoon was spent going over GenomeMate Pro (GMP) and downloading DNA data from all the different companies that you’ve tested with.  I’ve tested with all the major three: Ancestry, 23andMe, and FamilyTreeDNA.  GenomeMate will take ALL your matches from each of them and put them in one big database so you can look at ALL of them at once.  This is all so much fun and so technical!  This kind of DNA research just took me to another level!!  

Fast forward to 9:15 pm and six of us are still in the conference room uploading our kits to GMP and doing the other part of our homework.  When we are in, we are ALL in!  Until the hotel staff finally kicked us out of the room....  That’s probably a good thing, I think Jen and I are delirious!   

#SLIGExperience

#DNA

#KeeperOfThePastGenealogy