Many people have questions about Lazarus kits on GED
Match. What do you use them for? Why would you want to do
that? How do you make them? So today I'm going to go over how
we can make a Lazarus kit. Now the really easy question to
answer is what is a Lazarus kit? And in this essence a
Lazarus kit is a kit that is creating the DNA of a deceased
person. In other words we don't actually have their DNA but
we're going to use their relatives to recreate their
DNA. Now, knowing that that is what a Lazarus kit is, it
really helps answer one of the other questions. Why would you
want to use a Lazarus kit? Pretty easy because we want to
find relatives of our ancestors and if we can actually recreate
a DNA kit that somewhat resembles one of our ancestors,
then, hopefully, we can find other relatives of that
ancestor. So, it is a nice way of being able to combine a
bunch of DNA kits to hopefully have another kit that is useful
somewhat. So, let's go over the process of creating a Lazarus
kit. Now, on GEDMatch under the Lazarus tool. It has a lot
of information about how to create a kit. There's an upload
button. There is information about who this is for, what the
sex of the new kit is, this thresholds, how processing, and
then we get into these groups. Zero, group one, group two,
group three, and this can be really daunting because it
looks like there's a lot of information to fill out but
there isn't. There can be if you happen to have a lot of
information but not every kit is going to have all that
information. So, let's go over the basic groups of what is in
a Lazarus kit. First off, is group zero. Now, in group zero,
you are going to to have the spouse or the relatives of the
spouse and in particular, they're not related to the
target person. So, you wouldn't have the children of that
spouse but you would have their brothers and sisters, their
aunts and uncles, their parents, or any other relative
that is related to the spouse but not related to the target
person. Group one then is we want to have the descendants of
the target person. This is usually going to be children
but if you don't have children, you can also use grandchildren
or great grandchildren. The key here is we're talking about
descendants. We're not just talking about relatives but
we're talking about descendants of that target person. Now,
with this, there's a principle to understand. The more that we
have and the closer related that they have, the better our
results are going to be and that's just because we're going
to have more DNA to be able to pull from to create our Lazarus
kit. In essence, if you have one child. You have 50% of that
target person's DNA represented in that one child. If you have
two of their children, you actually have 75% of that DNA.
With three children, you have 88%, four children, 94%, and
five children, you have 97% of that DNA represented within
those children. You want to pull together as many
descendants as possible. Recognizing that if you have a
child's DNA, you don't need that child's children. In other
words, those grandchildren from that line's DNA because you
have all the DNA represented with that child but if somebody
had multiple children, you want to get as many of those
children's DNA as possible. And then we come to group two and
group two is the important one. We want to ask ourselves a
question, well, what does GEDMatch do with these? Let's go
through a little graphic example to see what is
happening with this DNA. So this big circle here represents
group one. Represents the DNA. All of the DNA that group one
has. Now group two is the other relatives of our target person
and so they have some DNA that is shared with group one. In
other words this is the DNA that is potentially going to go
into the Lazarus kit. So if we overlap these two groups we can
then draw a little outline of what that DNA is that we are
hoping to get. Now, you might have noticed we haven't talked
about group zero yet because what we need to do next is we
actually need to subtract out group zero because group zero
is the spouse or the spouse's relatives. They're going to
share a lot of DNA with group one because they are also one
of the parents of group one and they might share some DNA with
group two as well depending on relationship is. So, we want to
subtract out that DNA and then what we are left with is we are
left with this little representation of what that
Lazarus DNA is going to be made up of. Let's go over what you
need to fill in on the form now. We can skip this first
part about uploading a file. We need to put in the name of the
deceased person. If we want to put some comments as far as how
we're building this kit, we can put some comments in there and
then, we want to list the sex of the new person. For the
threshold, I leave that where it is at. You can always play
around with the threshold with some different kits but to
begin with, we're just going to leave that threshold at that
six centimorgans. Next is the processing. Whether we want to
just do a trial run and I recommend that you do a trial
run of any kit before you actually do the full processing
of it. So, I'm going to click on the trial run and what that
means is it's not actually going to create a kit. It's
going to go through The analysis of what that kit would
potentially look like as far as total centimorgans and what the
segments are. Next on this list is this generate button and we
don't actually want to press that button yet. We want to
fill in our groups first. Group zero remember is the spouse.
Now if we don't have the spouses kit then we can put in
some spouses relatives as many as we can. Next is going to be
group number one. Now, group number one are the descendants
of our target person. So, we have a child. We maybe have
another child. We might have a grandchild and another
grandchild and any other direct descendants of that person that
we can have. Now, GEDMatch allows us to put up to ten
people in groups one and group two. So, with group two, these
are going to be other relatives of the target that are not
necessarily their descendants, a brother, a sister, an uncle,
maybe a cousin, maybe even a distant cousin that you've
actually just found as far as a match on GEDMatch. This DNA
from all of these people here is going to be compared to
group one to figure out what DNA we can put into a Lazarus
kit. Now, in group two, we can actually add up to 100 people
in this group and then of course there is another
generate button at the bottom now we can actually generate
our Lazarus kit so if you have multiple children of this
target person then I would recommend that actually a
little hack that somebody taught me on how to make a
really good Lazarus kit we're going to start again with the
name of the person so this will be my grandfather this will be
a good kit sex of that person. I'm going to leave that
threshold the same. I'm just going to make a trial run of
this one. Now for group zero I happen to have my grandmother's
DNA so I'm going to put that in. And for group one I have a
daughter his second child. I have a son as third child. I
have a grandson through his fourth child. So I don't
actually have her DNA but I have her son's DNA. I have a
son which was his sixth child and I have a daughter, his
seventh child, I have a daughter, his eight child. He
had eight children, that's ten, eight children and I have five
of those children's DNA plus another grandson of his through
one of the other kids. So, I actually have six lines of his
descent. So, there should be a lot of DNA available for this.
Now, remember I said in group two, we're going to put the
other relatives of the target person. In this case, I'm
actually going to repeat all of the people that I had above and
that's because I have multiple people so the comparisons are
going to be between each of those people so I just list the
daughters the son the grandson the son the daughter and the
daughter and the son again so I'm listing the same people in
group one and group two because I have several children of this
target person now if you only have one child as target person
this isn't going to necessarily work very well if you just have
grandchildren of the target person this also won't
necessarily work as well you might want to use other
relatives for this but the nice thing is you can as many
Lazarus kits as you want. So feel free to play around with
them. So let's see the results of this Lazarus kit. Now this
like I said is actually a pretty good Lazarus kit by
doing this technique. We can scroll down here and we can see
hey actually it honestly doesn't look that good there's
not that many matches there's a little segment there there's
some other bits here and there but it doesn't necessarily look
like this is that good of a Lazarus kit but in all honesty,
this is a pretty good Lazarus kit. You may be wondering,
well, why or how is this a good Lazarus kit? Remember, we are
only putting in here what we definitely know from the group
one and group two comparisons subtracting out the group zero.
Let me go and let me look at this at full resolution so we
can actually see how much of this is actual matches. Okay,
so this looks a little better. As we're looking at this now,
we can see that there's actually quite a bit of yellow
or green even in many places and here's you know, the it's
not calling it a segment because there's no blue there
but there's actually is a sizable part that is a match
that's being created from this. Here is that segment that it
was showing before and we can see this out all of these
chromosomes. So this is what a good Lazarus kit actually is
going to look like compared to the real person. So this is a
Lazarus of my grandfather compared to my grandfather's
DNA. So next what I want to do is I want to tell you how to
get the best Lazarus kits. Not everybody is going to be able
to get the best Lazarus kit simply because you have to have
some specific information. And in that case let's go through a
graphic of what we want to do. First off with group one. We
are going to actually not just use his children but we're
going to use the phased kits of his children because remember I
have my grandmother's DNA. So because I have the children
plus I have one of their parents I can use the phasing
tool on GEDMatch in order to create phased kits. So now I'm
going to use the phased group one and I'm going to the phase
group 2 which is going to overlap it and you'll notice I
have group zero outside of here because I'm using the paternal
kits for these children. Now, there's going to be some DNA
that just one child has which is why you don't see a complete
overlap between these two groups and so that DNA can't be
added into the Lazarus kit because we need to actually
compare it to something else but what we are able to get
from this is we are able to get a really large amount of DNA
between these two groups. Because we've really taken out
all the noise by phasing these two kits. So, let me show you
what this is going to look like in GEDMatch. Here we have my
grandfather the best kit. Now, this is the best possible kit
that could be made from my grandfather based on the DNA
that we have. He's male. We're going to leave it at that six
centimorgans. I'm going to start with trial runs but
again, after I've done a trial run and I'm happy with what the
results are which I'll show you here in a second. Then, we can
go to the full processing. In group zero, still going to put
my grandmother even though I'm using these phase paternal kits
I want to make sure that I have any segments that belong to my
grandmother taken out of that group then I have the phase
daughter the phase son I just still have the grandson because
I don't have his phase data because if I did have his phase
data I'd actually be using his mom for this rather than him I
have the phase son and then the other two phase daughters so I
have five phased kits plus one unfazed and I'm doing that for
group one and group two. So, it's basically going to cross
compare all the DNA between these six people in order to
come up with this Lazarus kit. So, I can go down all the way
to the bottom because I don't need the all hundred of these
kits, just the six, I can click on the generate button. So,
when I put the actual kit numbers in, here is what it is
going to be looking like. One thing to and this is why you do
the trial runs here is the Lazarus kits are not going to
be useful unless you can get at least 1, 500 centimorgans now
if you only have one child and a couple of relatives you're
probably not going to get to 1500 centimorgans but if you
have two or three children or you have a lot of relatives
that you can add in then you might be able to get not only
to that 1500 centimorgans but even more as you will see next
on the results here is the list of contributions and this is
just comparing the people to the other people and you can
see that there are a lot of these because there's a lot of
comparisons because these are all children or the one
grandchild. Now, from this, it is going to actually go and
pull out the Lazarus segments. In other words, the bits of DNA
that match enough that we can call it a Lazarus segment. At
the bottom that you can see, hey, there's 3, 560
centimorgans represented by this kit and then, here are
different contributing ones to it. Now, at the bottom, there's
some information that might be informational for you. It tells
you how many single alleal snips there are and that means
that there's just one letter on them instead of the two letters
like you would expect. How many biolylic and this is really
what we want is we want to maximize the number of biolylic
snips because that is going to be a real true comparison with
other people. So, I got four hundred and four thousand
biolic snips and one hundred and 11000 single olylic snips.
So, this is actually really good kit in the number of snips
that it has as well as the total centimorgans. Now,
depending on what kits are being used, this was all made
with 23andMe and Ancestry kits. If you are using some of
the newer 23andMe kits or the newer I think it is
My Heritage and Family Tree DNA that use a new chip set, you're not
going to see as high of snip counts as you see here just
because there's not as much that is already used for the
database that GEDMatch uses. It's going to give you a kit
number which is going to show up on your front page and tell
you that, hey, you're going to have to wait 24 to 48 hours
before you can actually do the one to many comparisons but
there's some utilities you can use right of way. Let me show
you on the homepage where all are popping up. So here you can
see I have several Lazarus kits that I've created for different
reasons. And I know that because they have this Lone at
the end of them. So they get a new kit number. You can see
each one of these kit numbers is different but then they have
an Lone put on it. And so that means that this Lone is a
Lazarus kit. Now you can use these kits with any of the
other tools in GEDmatch. So if you want to do one to one
comparisons if you want to do a one to many if you want to use
em in the multiple kit analysis or other things like that, you
can use these kits just like you can use any other kit. So,
let's take a look at how different the phased kit that I
used was compared to the other kits. So, here are the results
of this phased kit. That's a big difference. By using the
phase kit, I've already separate out what I know is
just the paternal information and so it is able to actually
put together a lot more of the snips in line than it was
before and what that ends up doing is it ends up making most
everything a half match at least and there might be a few
places where there is a full match let's just scroll down
and see I think most of this is just going to be half all the
way through Which is okay because before I had nothing.
Yeah there's a few little spots where I'm getting a little bit
but not enough to actually have a full match segment by the
definitions that they use. But the other thing you can see is
all of these chromosomes. We are matching all the way
across. So this is the difference of using phase data
as opposed to unphase data when you're creating your Lazarus
kit. Now like I said to make that based Lazarus kit you have
to be able to have one parent in order to create that phase
data but if you don't have that, you can still create
Lazarus kits. Yes, they're not going to be as good as the best
but they're better than nothing because before you had no DNA
for this person as far as in one kit to be able to look at.
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