#family history

I’ve just finished a three‑month deep‑dive project that merges high‑density SNP data from the Illumina Infinium Global Screening Array v3.0 with a custom GEDCOM export of my 12‑generation family tree. The goal was to produce a Bayesian phylogenetic model that can resolve branch points down to the 17th‑century parish level.

What I did

• Ran the DNA samples on the GSA v3.0 platform (≈720k markers) and filtered for autosomal SNPs with call rate > 99 %.
• Exported the pedigree from FamilySearch using the API (v2.0) into a GEDCOM 5.5 file, then cleaned it with GEDCOM‑Cleaner 2.1 to remove duplicate X‑ref IDs.
• Mapped each individual’s sample ID to the GEDCOM @I‑record using a lookup table generated in Python (pandas 1.5.3).
• Built a haplogroup assignment for Y‑DNA (using Y‑Full haplogroup predictor) and mtDNA (Phylotree Build 17) and added them as custom tags ("_YHG" and "_MTDNA") in the GEDCOM.
• Ran BEAST 2.6.5 with a strict clock model and a coalescent Bayesian Skyline prior to infer the time‑scaled tree. Calibration points were set using documented birth dates from the 1881 England Census.

Results

• The posterior distribution converged after ~10 M generations (ESS > 200 for all parameters).
• Visualised the tree in FigTree 1.4.4, highlighting branches where the autosomal ancestry proportion exceeds 0.85 for a single lineage – those correspond to the documented “founder” families in the parish registers.
• Exported the final tree back into GEDCOM as a set of "_TIME" tags, which can be read by CousinTree 3.0 for interactive browsing.

Why it matters

• Most hobbyist genealogists stop at a simple DNA match list. This workflow shows you can actually place those matches into a calibrated temporal framework.
• The approach is reproducible: I’ve uploaded the full pipeline (scripts, config files, and a sample dataset) to a public GitHub repo (https://github.com/ComfortableParrotfish302/gedcom‑dna‑pipeline).

Open questions / feedback wanted

• Anyone tried integrating the newer Illumina OmniExpress‑24 v1.2 data with a similar pipeline? I’m curious about marker overlap issues.
• Thoughts on using a relaxed clock model instead of a strict clock for families with known migration events?

Feel free to clone the repo, run the pipeline on your own data, and let me know if you hit any snags.

so i've been digging through my family's history for years now and i've kinda developed this habit of tracking every single lead no matter how small, even if it's just a remote possibility. like i'll spend hours going down this rabbit hole of census records and newspaper archives just to find one tiny piece of info that might be relevant. is that normal? do other people do this too or am i just crazy? i feel like it's helped me find some really important stuff but at the same time it's also led to a lot of dead ends. anyone else have this problem?

After weeks of hitting dead ends, I finally found the missing 1880 census entry for my great‑grandfather, Thomas Whitaker. I had been stuck on a vague location—just "near Springfield"—and every record I pulled seemed to belong to a different family.

I decided to go back to the land deed I found in the county clerk's archive. The deed listed a neighboring farm owned by the McAllisters, and a note about a shared well. That tiny clue led me to a microfilm of the 1880 census for that exact township. Scanning the pages, I spotted a Thomas Whitaker listed as a 32‑year‑old farmer, living with his wife Mary and three children. The ages matched the family Bible I have at home, and the occupation matched the later city directory I uncovered.

What really sealed it was the neighbor's name—James McAllister—appearing on the same page. It was the exact connection I needed. I uploaded the image to Ancestry, added the source to my family tree, and finally felt that elusive piece click into place.

Has anyone else had a tiny clue like a neighbor's name or a shared well that unlocked a whole branch? I'm eager to hear your stories—maybe I can return the favor with a tip for someone else stuck in a similar loop???