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I'm CC Moore, genetic genealogologist. I'm here to answer your questions from the internet. This is genealogy support. Air significant 2006 asks, "What's the most interesting discovery you've made through a DNA test?" One that comes to mind is, "I discovered that LL CoolJ's mother was adopted and she didn't know it. The DNA matches were not lining up with her parents at all. And so I was able to identify her biological parents through her DNA alone. And it was a huge discovery for them because Elj had been partly raised by his maternal grandparents. So it was very significant
to discover that they were not his biological grandparents at all. A Reddit user asked, "How did the police actually find a person just from a DNA sample?" What we are doing in investigative genetic genealogy, which is the term that refers to when we're working with law enforcement, is we are reverse engineering someone's identity from their DNA alone. And how can we do that? That is because autotoal DNA is inherited from all your ancestral lines. And so if we can identify your ancestors from who you're sharing DNA with, then we can piece your family tree back together little by little. And so even if we don't know who the DNA contributor
is, we can start piecing their family tree back together based on the family trees of the people they share DNA with. So, if you share DNA with four people who all descend from one set of great-grandparents, we know that's one piece of the criminals family tree, and he must also be a descendant of those common ancestors. A Quor user asks, "Can a person's innocence or guilt be proven through genealogy tests like ancestry.com?" Well, not directly because Ancestry.com, 23 andMe, and My Heritage, the three largest DNA databases, have barred law enforcement for using their services for criminal research. All of the genetic genealogy databases are owned by private for-profit companies. So, they get to
set their own policies, procedures, and terms of service. Their reasoning is that they built those databases and those services for people to learn about their family history, not for law enforcement to find criminals. But then the smaller databases have made a different decision. Family TreeDNA, Jed Match, and DNA justice have specifically decided to work with law enforcement and to help us identify violent criminals and also John and Jane Does. So John and Jane Doe's are people who have died without their identification who have not been returned to their families. Their families are out there still wondering what happened to them. And we're not even allowed to use the big
databases for those types of cases. Over 54 million people have taken direct consumer DNA tests, but for law enforcement cases, we are limited to about 2 million people to run these comparisons and try to identify the contributor of that DNA. Zach Out Loud 123 asked, "What is your craziest DNA matches story?" The baby switch ones are probably the craziest to me. When someone's DNA results don't match up at all with their family tree, there are only a couple of possibilities. One is they were adopted and didn't know it. But another one that we're actually finding many of is baby switches from the hospital. I've worked on dozens of those cases and am aware of hundreds of cases where people were switched at
birth and were raised with the wrong parents and lived a life intended for someone else. It's assumed that these are accidents, but we also have some cases where the theory is that a person was purposely switching out the babies. This sometimes happened when a rich couple had a very ill baby, a sickly baby that they didn't think was going to survive and a poor single mother for instance, had a very healthy newborn. Sometimes they would purposely switch those out to keep the rich customers happy. Siliana 999 asks, "What is genetic genealogy?" Well, genetic genealogy is the combination of documentary research or the paper trail where you're tracing
your ancestors back in time combined with DNA. So DNA has been used for genealogical purposes for about 25 years now. And that really has helped to inform our genealogy. Everybody has brick walls, which means they can't get further back on one branch of their tree. For instance, you might not know who your great grandparent is, and you're unable to find the paper trail records to identify that person. So, if you turn to DNA testing, you then may be able to fill in those spots in your tree that were formerly your brick walls. Mark Cuban 42 on Reddit asks, "What cases have been solved with the help of genetic genealogy?" Well, over the last eight years, over a thousand violent criminals have now been identified
through genetic genealogy. I have helped law enforcement solve over 400 of those cases with just my small team. One case that comes to mind is the little girl, April Tinsley. She was walking to her friend's house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and she was kidnapped and murdered by a man named John Miller. and I helped to identify him in 2018. He was the very first person to be convicted that had been identified through genetic genealogy. In December 2018, he plead guilty to the crime and received 80 years behind bars and he ended up dying in prison. Ron Dulfur asked, "Are Europeans really all descended from Charlemagne or anyone of that time period?" The answer to that is yes.
Charlemagne was the king of the Franks from 768 and he had at least 18 known children. That's not just true for Charlemagne. It's actually true for any person who lived in the 9th century in Europe who has descendants. And that is because our tree grows exponentially as you go back in time to the point where we would have more ancestors on our family tree than were alive at that point of time. A thousand years ago we would have had over a billion ancestors which is larger than the population at that time in history. So any person living over a thousand years ago in Europe that has descendants today is actually the
ancestor of all people who have European ancestry. And that would also be true for instance in Asia or any part of the world really because our family trees grow out like this and then they start collapsing in on themselves. It's called pedigree collapse. So as your tree goes back in time it looks more like a diamond. A user on Kora asked, "What are some reasons why it's often difficult to trace your lineage or family history?" Well, it really is dependent on your population group from where your ancestors lived because some places have much better records than others. For instance, if your ancestors are from Iceland, you might be able to trace your
family tree back 30 generations. Or Switzerland has records going back over 700 years. In my own personal family tree, I've been able to trace back to the 1400s on my finish lines, and that is because they have such fantastic records. But there are many other population groups that either didn't keep records or they had them and they were destroyed. For instance, in World War I, the Irish pulped their census records due to a severe shortage of paper, meaning they destroyed those and used that raw material for other purposes. If you have Asian ancestry or Indian ancestry, there may be scrolls that traced your family tree, at least the men in your family tree back thousands of years, but you have to be fortunate enough for those to have
survived and to be able to find those. And also, if you have ancestry from the southern United States during the Civil War, many courouses were burned. And so you might have family records that were housed in those burnt counties as they're called. Or if you have Ashkanazi Jewish ancestry, for instance, many of those records were destroyed during World War II. A user on Reddit asks, "Can someone explain the whole idea of ethnicity to me?" I was taught by scientists not to use the term ethnicity in the context of DNA. Instead, we use terms like ancestral origins or biographical ancestry. And that is because ethnicity really implies more about someone's culture or traditions.
Your ethnicity is really what's been passed down in your family. And so, ethnicity is more of a social term and ancestral origins or biographical ancestry is more of a scientific term. Now, ethnicity is used for these tests because it's easily understood by the public and it's good for marketing, for instance, but it's really not the most accurate term that should be used in the context of genetics. Potential stop 5998 asked, "My husband and I found out that my great grandpa is his grandma's uncle, and now I'm pregnant. Should I be worried?" No, you don't have to be worried about a relationship that distant. There have been many first cousin marriages
throughout history, typically without issues. I believe for first cousins, there's only about a 10% likelihood that it will have a negative impact on offspring of that couple. Unfortunately, I've had to tell hundreds of people that their parents were firstdegree relatives, which is parent, child, or siblings. Neural Stardust asked, "How far back can we trace using DNA?" For example, the family tree and the origin of life. Well, it depends which type of DNA you are utilizing. Mitochondrial DNA is passed directly from mother to child. Only women pass it on. So, you received your mitochondrial DNA from your mother who received it from her mother who got it from her mother and so
on back hundreds of thousands of years. If you're using the Y chromosome that only men carry, there is a similar concept called Y chromosomal atom. That is the most recent man that all of men descend from or trace back to. And he lived about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Now, there's a big misconception that mitochondrial Eve and chromosomeal Adam were a couple, and that's not true. They didn't know each other, although they both did come from Africa around the same time period. A Quora user asked, "How long does it commonly take to solve a case using high-tech soothing like genealogy websites?" The most quickly I've been able to help law
enforcement solve a case is in 30 minutes. And the longest it has taken is 8 years in counting. I've been trying to identify a little girl known as St. Louis Jane Doe for almost eight years now. And that is because she comes from the African-American population group of which we have less representation. And also we run into that genealogical brick wall at the 1870 census where formerly enslaved individuals were not enumerated by name prior to that. This one is from Royal Perp. I'd bite the bullet and take a DNA test. I want to see how far back they can trace my ancestry. Now, we're just talking about your own DNA, not
fossil DNA. It is the same as far as your YDNA can be traced back hundreds of thousands of years. Your mitochondrial DNA at least 150,000 years, but your autotosomal DNA is really inherited primarily from your closer ancestors. We have genealological family trees and genetic family trees. Genealogical family trees are all your ancestors as far back as you can go. Genetic family tree is just the people who have contributed to your genome. So, we receive DNA from all of our third great grandparents and almost certainly all of our fourth great-grandparents. But when you get further back in the tree, some of those ancestors start falling off your genetic family tree. And so now you're only inheriting DNA from a subset of your ancestors.
Engineering Lumpy asks, "Why do siblings get different DNA percentages?" So he's referring to the ethnicity portion of the DNA results. And the reason that siblings don't get the exact same results is because they inherit different DNA from their parents. We overlap with our siblings on about 50% of the DNA. So there's some portions where we inherit the exact same DNA from both parents. There's some portions of our DNA where we inherit the same DNA from one parent but not the other. And then there are some parts of our DNA where we don't inherit the same DNA from either parent. User Mando Monroe 00 asks, "I think I want to take the ancestry DNA test, but how accurate is it?" It's important to understand that
there are two different parts of the results you receive when you take a DNA test. One of those is to find relatives. And those are highly accurate. If they tell you that someone is your relative, they are. I see a lot of people who think it's a mistake when they get a match on Ancestry, for instance, that says it is a half sibling. And people need to understand that can never happen by mistake. If you share about 25% of your DNA with someone, that is a very close relative to you. But the other part of the test that gets a lot more attention is the ethnicity estimate that is less reliable in that it is a developing science. They're very good at telling you what parts of the world you
come from on a continental level, meaning the Americas versus Africa versus Europe versus Asia. That is relatively easy to do. But when they are giving you these very specific labels, very granular results, that's much more difficult to do. And that's because there's been so much migration throughout history. Psycho Venus asked, "Do you realize how much DNA you share with your cousin versus your third cousin?" So with your first cousins, you'll share on average 12.5% of your DNA. And your third cousins, you'll share on average less than 1% of your DNA, and you might not share any DNA at all with your third cousin. Well, that's all the questions we can cover today. I hope you learned something. Until next time.
