#GEDmatch Tier 1
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Find Family with X-DNA
Never forget the X factor. X-chromosome DNA - one of the most useful, controversial, and ignored sources of genetic evidence. The X chromosome, a sex chromosome, determines each human’s biological gender. The X chromosome also packs brick-wall-busting power for solving genealogy puzzles. X-DNA can even help adoptees and others with unknown parentage find their biological parents. To discern fact from fiction and make the most of X-DNA’s magical properties, read on.
A Few Simple Rules – On The Basis of Sex
· X-DNA for Women
o Women inherit two copies of the X chromosome – one from each parent.
o Women pass one X-chromosome to each of their children.
o The X-chromosome a woman gives to each of her children, in most cases, is recombined, a mixture of X-DNA from each of her own parents.
o A woman contributes an X-chromosome without recombination – an identical copy of one of her own X-chromosomes – to her children about 16% of the time.
· X-DNA for Men
o Men inherit one copy of the X chromosome – always from one’s mother.
o Men only pass their X-chromosome to their daughters.
o The X-chromosome that a man donates to each of his daughters is an exact replica of his own X-chromosome.
The rules regulating the X chromosome create a unique inheritance pattern that follows a Fibonacci sequence. Only a subgroup of ancestors can contribute to one’s X. Use DNA Painter’s GEDCOM tool to identify one’s potential X-DNA ancestors.
That inheritance pattern makes X-DNA an asset for adoptees and others seeking to identify unknown parents. Analyzing X-DNA can help sort and filter matches. Analyzing X-DNA can also help one build and validate relationship hypotheses. Since men only inherit X chromosome DNA from their mothers, any genetic relative with whom he shares X-chromosome DNA must be a maternal relative. Those maternal relatives may prove useful for identifying one’s mother or even more distant maternal ancestors. A woman seeking to identify her biological father should consider the amount of X-DNA shared with close relatives and other details (age difference, amount of shared autosomal DNA, etc.). While a woman’s grandmother, aunt, and half-sister will all share, on average, 25% of their autosomal DNA with her, only the paternal half-sister is guaranteed to share a completely identical copy of Chromosome X (approximately 196.1 cM of X-DNA). That paternal half-sister might prove useful for naming one’s biological father.
At AncestryDNA, genetic relatives sharing about 25% of their autosomal DNA appear in the “Close Relative-1st cousin” category. Many AncestryDNA users misinterpret the matches labelled as “Close Relative-1st cousin” as being first cousins. AncestryDNA’s “Close Relative-1st cousin” never refers to first cousins. These matches are grandparents and grandchildren. They are aunts and uncles. They are nieces. They are nephews. Half-siblings. Even double first cousins. Never expect or accept that these matches have a first cousin relationship. On multiple occasions, I have had to inform clients that their “first cousin” was an unexpected half-sibling. Adoptees and others with unknown parentage ought to closely examine the family trees of “Close Relative-1st cousin” matches and consider the X-DNA shared among them. Since AncestryDNA neither reports nor visualizes shared X-DNA, one must employ other genetic genealogy websites and recruit matches to do the same.
Optimize Opportunities
While 23andMe and Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder use X-chromosome DNA in addition to autosomal DNA (atDNA) to generate relative matches, AncestryDNA and MyHeritage DNA still do not. However, raw DNA data files from AncestryDNA and MyHeritage DNA include X-chromosome data. Transfer raw DNA data files from AncestryDNA and MyHeritage to GEDmatch.com and Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder to view X-DNA matches.
AncestryDNA’s raw DNA data files contain at least 28,892 X-chromosome markers (SNPs) – more than data files from any of the other commercial DNA tests. If one has the choice, choose to transfer the AncestryDNA raw data files for higher-quality X-DNA matching. Wherever you transfer your DNA data, transfer your GEDCOM there as well.
Beware of The X Chromosome Myth
“If someone matches you on the X chromosome and only on the X chromosome, then that someone should not be considered a true match.” Variations of this claim rotate in genetic genealogy circles – along with “4th cousins are really hard,” “DNA testing is just not useful for non-Europeans right now,” and “chromosome browsers are only good for ethnicity research” – and all are bogus.
Consider this example:
My paternal grandfather has two DNA matches (predicted 4th cousins) with whom he shares both significant autosomal DNA and X-DNA: Jason (18.5 cM atDNA and 37 cM X-DNA) and Sarah (17.2 cM atDNA and 30.2 cM X-DNA).
Grandpa Christmas, Jason, and Sarah all share the same segment of X-DNA.
Since my grandfather and Jason are men, they each only have one copy of the X chromosome; both inherited that one copy of the X chromosome from their mothers. The X-DNA segment that my grandfather and Jason share must have come from a common maternal ancestor. Comparing Grandpa Christmas’s family tree to Jason’s pedigree shows a pair of common maternal ancestors: Philemon Hawkins (1767-1856) and Mary Christmas (1775-1822) of Warren County, North Carolina and Franklin County, North Carolina. My grandfather and Jason descend from two of Philemon and Mary’s sons, Adam Hawkins and Brehon Hawkins respectively. The Hawkins brothers must have inherited this X-DNA from their mother, Mary Christmas. Remember: Men only inherit X-DNA from their mothers. Mary Christmas is the most recent common ancestor for this X-DNA segment.
Now, Sarah’s family tree shows that among her X-DNA ancestors are William Duke and Mary Green of Purchase Patent Plantation, Warren County, North Carolina.
William Duke and Mary Green were Mary Christmas’s maternal grandparents – and her X-DNA ancestors. William Duke and/or Mary Green passed this X-DNA segment to their twin daughters, Ann Duke (mother of Mary Christmas, maternal ancestor of Jason and Grandpa Christmas) and Thamar Duke (ancestor of Sarah). See the chart below.
Sarah and Jason share only this single X-DNA segment; GEDmatch found that Sarah and Jason share no autosomal DNA.
Despite only sharing X-DNA, Jason and Sarah have a verifiable relationship in a genealogical timeframe. Jason and Sarah likely inherited their shared X-DNA from their common ancestors, William Duke and Mary Green.
This example not only disproves the X Chromosome myth, but also demonstrates how chromosome browsers add value beyond ethnicity research and how 4th cousins are not “really hard.” In fact, repeating these steps - pooling our DNA segment data, comparing pedigrees, and using GEDmatch’s Tier 1 tools - enabled my family to reconstruct more than half of one 4x great-grandfather’s X chromosome, laying the groundwork for future research.
Collaborating with one’s DNA matches to map the X chromosome offers several benefits. Identifying the ancestors who passed down one’s X-DNA can help determine how other unknown genetic relatives sharing this same DNA are related. Mapping DNA segments can also reveal traits that one’s ancestors inherited and passed down. Among other things, Chromosome X contains genes associated with hereditary baldness and color blindness.
Use DNA Painter’s chromosome mapping tool to track which of your ancestors passed those genes to you.
To get the most out of your X-DNA:
· Transfer your raw DNA data file and your GEDCOM file from AncestryDNA and MyHeritage DNA to GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA’s Family Finder to access X-DNA matches. AncestryDNA raw DNA is the best transferable raw DNA data file.
· Upload your GEDCOM to DNA Painter to identify your X-DNA ancestors.
· Map your X-DNA and associated traits on DNA Painter.
Share this post to educate others about the probative value of X-DNA matches.
#DNA#genetics#genetic genealogy#genealogy#gedmatch#x chromosome#X-DNA#23andMe#family tree dna#family finder#MyHeritage#myheritage dna#myheritagedna#AncestryDNA#adoption#unknown parentage#DNA Painter#chromosome mapping#chromosome browser#GEDmatch Tier 1#DNA testing#ancestral genome reconstruction
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Gedmatch Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer (ADSA)
Gedmatch Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer (ADSA)
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Autosomal DNA Segment Analyzer (ADSA)
GEDMATCH Quick Start Guide ICW means In-Common-With were ever used To use GEDMATCH with ADSA you must be a Tier 1 GEDMATCH member. That means you must have, at some time, donated at least $10 to GEDMATCH. The GEDMATCH upload process for DNAgedcom.com depends…
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Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
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Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
0 notes
Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations https://ift.tt/2QPMXA0
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://ift.tt/2AaNHug |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
0 notes
Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
0 notes
Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
0 notes
Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
Image
Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
Image
“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
Image
Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
Image
Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
0 notes
Text
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations http://www.nature-business.com/nature-how-an-unlikely-family-history-website-transformed-cold-case-investigations/
Nature
Fifteen murder and sexual assault cases have been solved since April with a single genealogy website. This is how GEDmatch went from a casual side project to a revolutionary tool.
Image
Curtis Rogers enjoys helping people solve family history puzzles. He inadvertently created a database that can now identify 60 percent of Americans of Northern European ancestry. CreditCreditScott McIntyre for The New York Times
LAKE WORTH, FLA. — On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, Calif., handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month — two decades after the crime — the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The arrest marked the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, for the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch — Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent — the primary users of the site — will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Mr. Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Mr. Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington State to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Mr. Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
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Roy Charles Waller, right, has not yet entered a plea. He became a suspect in 10 rapes after investigators located a close relative in the GEDmatch database. CreditRenee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press
A visit to headquarters
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, Fla., is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Mr. Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Mr. Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Mr. Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
Aesthetically, GEDmatch.com resembles an internal company wiki in need of an update. But what it offers to researchers and criminal investigators is tremendous flexibility. There are now more than 17 million DNA profiles in genealogical databases, but most of the bigger sites restrict what can be uploaded, banning not only crime scene evidence but anything processed by an external lab. GEDmatch will take it all — blood processed by an obscure lab, spit processed by 23andMe — for free, so long as it’s in the right format.
The site is also useful for people building an extensive family history. The average person can find any number of cousins on existing genealogy sites. But the key, for a genetic sleuth, is figuring out precisely how those cousins are related to a person of interest, and to each other. The tools that Mr. Olson created — primarily because he found the math intriguing — enable users to see the precise genetic segments where cousins overlap. From the site’s one million or so profiles, a skilled genetic detective can often puzzle out an individual’s identity from a single third cousin match.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who used the site to help crack the Golden State Killer case.
Using GEDmatch in this way is not easy. Most investigators who upload crime scene evidence to the site still require the help of a highly skilled genetic genealogist such as Dr. Rae-Venter. The DNA is just the first clue; from there, the family tree must be filled in using other kinds of data, including social media profiles and birth records. Still, for those who know what they are doing, it’s sometimes possible to identify a murder suspect or find an adoptee’s biological parent in less than two days.
All of this is hard to fathom while watching Mr. Rogers “zap” customer service emails on his worn Toshiba laptop.
“I take off one day, I’d never catch up,” he said, settling his sneakers on the base of his faux-leather swivel chair.
He sent a 15-step guide to a user having trouble uploading a file, one of many basic tech support emails he responds to daily. Other common questions include: does this mean my father isn’t actually my father?
On his desk was a short stack of $10 checks — the monthly amount Mr. Rogers charges for “Tier 1 membership” to the site, which technically is free to use. So far, GEDmatch has 6,500 or so members, enough to cover basic expenses and pay its founders a little something.
Mr. Rogers spent his early career in business, growing an international consumer base for brands such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Quaker Oats. He knows he could charge more. But that wouldn’t feel right, he said, because the goal of family history research is to help people, a sentiment common among dedicated genealogists.
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“Surreal” is the word that John Olson, a transportation engineer who helped build GEDmatch, often uses to describe the last few months.CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
This goes back to the pilgrims
Mr. Rogers grew up hearing that he was related to Thomas Rogers, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. His dive into genealogy began when he decided to investigate it.
As it happened, there was no relation. But from there Mr. Rogers fell down a family history rabbit hole. Soon he was running an online genealogy project for people who shared his surname, and looking for a computer coder to make it easier to map out distant relations.
Another Rogers in the family-tree project introduced him to Mr. Olson, who was happy to help out the enthusiastic Mr. Rogers. Plus, Mr. Rogers’ coding requests were easy for an engineer accustomed to solving complex traffic-signal puzzles.
The pair worked well together, and in 2010 they decided to move beyond the Rogers name. They launched GEDmatch.com, a reference to a GEDcom, a type of family tree file used by genealogists, and an abbreviation for genealogical data communication.
Earlier reporting on genetic genealogy
Around this time, a number of genealogy companies had begun offering autosomal DNA testing, a type of genetic analysis useful for finding relatives.
Mr. Rogers asked Mr. Olson whether he could do something with all the data.
“I think it was a challenge for him and then he kind of got hooked,” said Mr. Rogers.
Before long, and with no advertising, they said, their database was doubling in size every year.
What convinced Mr. Rogers to keep investing in the site were “love letters for GEDmatch,” which were unlike any customer service notes he’d seen, and “people really like Hellman’s mayonnaise.”
Mr. Rogers’ ethical quandary
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Investigators began to suspect that Joseph James DeAngelo might be the Golden State Killer after finding his cousins’ DNA in GEDmatch. He has not yet entered a plea.
CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
On April 25, the Sacramento County district attorney’s office announced that there had been a breakthrough in the case of the Golden State Killer.
Mr. Rogers saw the news while sitting in bed watching TV.
“I’d never even heard of the Golden State Killer before they captured this guy,” he said.
But when one of the newscasters mentioned “a new form of DNA technology,” he turned to his wife and asked, “Do you suppose I was involved?”
It seemed possible; around six months earlier, two companies involved in criminal investigations had asked for his blessing to use the site.
Law enforcement agencies have their own database for criminal investigations: Codis, which contains more than 16 million DNA profiles. But forensic profiles contain only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of genetic markers that genealogy sites rely on. If investigators are unable to find an exact match there, a site such as GEDmatch is better for tracking down suspects through their relatives.
The site’s privacy agreement had always been vague, essentially stating that its owners had no control over how any individual’s genetic or family tree data would be used. But explicitly sanctioning a law enforcement presence felt different.
“There’s probably no way I could stop you,” he told Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, and the DNA Doe Project, an organization focused on identifying bodies. “But we can’t give you permission. I have to protect the site.”
Why Mr. Rogers changed his mind
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Mr. Rogers, left, and Mr. Olson during a rare in-person meeting in Texas in October. Mr. Rogers calls himself the “business” side of operations and Mr. Olson calls himself the “science side.” CreditScott Dalton for The New York Times
Mr. Rogers was furious when he confirmed that a third set of investigators, without first telling him, had involved GEDmatch in the Golden State Killer case. It seemed inevitable that the news would drive thousands of people off the site.
While giving his house tour, Mr. Rogers handed over a stack of emails from that first week. On top, an expletive-filled note accused him of violating users’ privacy. But underneath it was email after email of congratulations, including one woman’s request to make sure that her profile would be easy for criminal investigators to find. She suspected that her father, who had been in and out of mental institutions after killing her grandfather, had taken other lives.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Olson hadn’t expected such an outpouring of support. Neither did they anticipate 5,000 new uploads to the site shortly after Mr. DeAngelo’s arrest — a daily record, Mr. Olson said.
Two weeks later, Parabon announced that it was joining forces with CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to use GEDmatch to solve crimes.
“This simply would not be possible without the courage of John and Curtis to allow law enforcement to use this database,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped identify more than a dozen suspects in murder and sexual assault cases using the site in the past five months.
As praise has flowed in, both men began to relax. By May, they had tweaked the privacy agreement to explicitly mention that users’ profiles might be used in a homicide or sexual assault investigation. By September, any lingering doubts they had were gone.
“I have absolutely no concerns that a person’s privacy is violated, because there are so many people whose DNA helped get to a capture,” Mr. Rogers said.
But many observers disagree. When any one person’s DNA can lead investigators to hundreds of a suspect’s relatives, the standard model of individual consent does not hold up, said Rori Rohlfs, a professor at San Francisco State University who has studied familial searches. She finds it ironic that police in California must get approval from a judge to search criminal databases for a murder suspect’s brother, but can upload DNA to GEDmatch to identify cousins without any restrictions.
The excitement around cases that have not yet gone to trial also risks reinforcing the notion that a DNA match is proof of guilt, some researchers warn.
Recent developments have led numerous African-American customers to quit the site out of concern that criminal investigators might abuse the data, several genealogists said.
“Because so many African-Americans have been falsely accused, and because genetic testing is not a perfect science, law enforcement should not be allowed to use GEDmatch,” said Tony Burroughs, the former president of the Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago.
The exit of those users is particularly tragic, said Teresa Vega, a family historian, because the site had been one of the best tools for connecting families separated by slavery.
As more law enforcement agencies have begun experimenting with genetic genealogy, the GEDmatch database has grown by about 1,800 profiles every day, Mr. Olson said.
“I don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” said Mr. Rogers’ wife, Janet Siegel Rogers, an artist. It was happy hour, and the tour had moved to her studio.
“What don’t you like?” Mr. Rogers asked.
As it turned out, she didn’t like her husband’s email habits.
“He’s at it 24-7,” she lamented.
As she spoke, Mr. Rogers took a sip of wine.
From the trace of saliva he left on the glass, a skilled genetic genealogist could use the website he created to reveal his name and a dozen close relatives. It would also be possible to determine that while he is not related to any pilgrims, he is in fact the descendant of Vikings.
Heather Murphy is a science reporter. She writes about the intersection of technology and our genes and how bio-tech innovations affect the way we live. @heathertal
Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealogy-cold-cases.html |
Nature How an Unlikely Family History Website Transformed Cold Case Investigations, in 2018-10-15 12:42:49
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Gedmatch To Triangulate Matches
Gedmatch To Triangulate Matches
Gedmatch is a very useful tool, but you need to be a Tier 1 user. You must have an Autosomal DNA testing.
If you are looking for a family using DNA results you are probably using GEDMatch or one of the other website to help compare your DNA kit results. Triangulation is comparing A to B, then A to C, then B to C, etc. You might match B and B might match C, but that doesn’t mean you match C.…
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