Helping others with genealogy, groups sharing DNA genealogy, is it open? Is it a waste of time?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ancestryforall

I have been filling in some of my 4th to 6th cousin DNA matches in my tree. I find the common ancestors, then fill in the generations down to the match. The reason I do this is more matches come often where one DNA test exist. New matches often come from people nearby.

40-50% of my matches have no tree, 10% have unlinked trees. 10% are locked, 10% have a tree with no visible name. And most trees are not very useful when faced with manually finding common ancestors. DNA hints are very welcome. But they do often connect someone with a tiny tree or person with no tree at all through five or more generations to a common ancestor with a LOT of issues.

I spent 4 decades of paper genealogy that I could do better now in 4 days. I can build a full pedigree for someone with all records, wives, and children, all records, all related trees integrated, and some key DNA matches added – in a long day.

Because I can, and I know precisely how long it would take them, I have spent years almost full time building trees (pedigree and related branches and data and DNA) for others.

I am VERY good and careful and the free version of Ancestry is making it easy for people to make mistakes, in siduations where they suggest to just click and add a whole person or family, and there is no way to verify it unless going through ten extra steps.

I am putting a few issues into one message.

What I wonder. If I only have a finite live left (I am 75 and sich much of the time now). Should I help people by spending an hour building a tree for them? It takes days to contact someone and many times never get an answer. It costs me three hours effort to simply give a person what takes me an hour, and saves them 10 years.

I would like to teach the computer how to do what took me more than 12,000 hours of brutally hard focused work on many hard cases, plus sheer millions of clicks.

Have I been a fool to waste so much time on other people’s families, just because it is easy? I have entire trees sitting in my long list because the people do not know what to do with a tree (build an online community, help others).

I know this has no answer. At least I have thought about it and cannot find a way. I tired for many years to give detailed instructions and explanations to groups, and Ancestry and families and genealogy sites about making all DNA genealogy portable on the Internet. 26 years of the Internet foundation I spend much time looking at genealogy because I thought it was the oldest living example of global open collaborative research.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

There are regions and times in the United States and other place where a group will move to a new place, create a community that is large bu not infinite, and the later generations are all mixtures of the original group. My Mom’s family came to the US from eastern Europe in the 1860s, remained a closed community because of language and culture, everyone did not marry first or second cousins, but every one is related at 4th and 5th cousins. There were a lot of large farming families with lots of kids, and kids from one family would marry kids from the nearby farms. Not closely related but many marries from one family to the other.

I helped a few people who were adopted from Puerto Rico. One had 140,000 DNA matches with 40,000 closer than 4th cousins. An island. There are many ways to have legal marriages in a closed community (think about groups moving across early America)

The only true solution I found was to have everyone take full genome DNA tests (Ancestry has 700,000 snps and the full genome has 3,000,000,000 base pairs.. A snp is a “single nucleotide (base pair) polymorphism” So each snp refers to one basepair. So (3E9/7E5) = 4285.7 sets of Ancestry to make a full genome.

I bought a full genome test for my daughter a few years ago. It was $300. If a non-profit made their own tests an systems, then they could give whole countries full genome tests so there is NO ambiguity and everyone could be mapped in relation with DNA only. Over time all the people could know precisely how related and connect the records, stories, places and full genomes of people who have passed on. If it is a full genome, then dead people are fair game, so “are you related to a person in the past” dig them up, do the test, respectfully celebrate them and put them back. And all relations are one way comparisons .  Not “from one person back to common ancestors and back down to the other person”.. We get 10 generation from Ancestry and that can be 5+5 or 6+4 or 4+4 or any sum less than or equal to 10.

At scale any country in the world could give free DNA to everyone, use that for health with absolute privacy, give it in SNP format for any existing DNA service where all DNA groups put the DNA in a controlled store, NOT left to be bought by anyone rich enough to buy well intentioned companies and organizations.

The full genome DNA would be free or at cost for everyone, and the “genealogy workers and companies” paid according to their value added, reliability and service and sharing. A closely monitored and independently audited and monitored global open group would assure fairness, innovation and neutral moderation.

Sorry you were just asking about where a few ancestors show up in everyone’s DNA, and I roll out something I have thought of for many years. That countries with continuous war, poverty, bad education, sometimes no literacy or recorded spoken language. There are 5.4 Billion humans using the Internet, but 2.8 Billion not. And the ones not using it tend to have their lives controlled by ones using the Internet.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation