After doing my video about Lazarus kits, I had one of the viewers that actually told me about a way
that they could make a Lazarus kit with just one parent and the children of that parent. Howdy, I'm
Andy with Family History Fanatics, where we help you understand your DNA climb your family tree,
and write your ancestor stories along the way. We do that through our YouTube videos through online
education, and through the books that we write. So check out our other offerings. Lazarus kits are
a way that you can recreate the DNA of somebody whose DNA you don't have. Now in order to do this,
you need to have DNA from several relatives. One of the ways that somebody told me is that if you
have one parent and their children, you could make a really good Lazarus kit for the other parent.
So I decided to try it out. Now the concept behind this is you're comparing the DNA between
Group one, which is usually the children of that person that you're trying to create the DNA for,
and group two, which is other relatives of that person. And then you're subtracting out any DNA
that is shared with the spouse or with relatives of the spouse. So Group one and group two,
where they join together - the group 0 that's really the formula that the Lazarus kit is doing.
So with one parent and their children, what you have in group 0 is you have the spouse. Then in
group 1 and group 2, you actually put the children both times, so you're comparing the children to
the children subtracting out what the parent has and that should give you a Lazarus kit for the
other parent. Now I'd like to say that this worked perfectly but when I put it in a shed match here's
the results that I got. You can see that hey, there's a couple of places where they match,
but for the most part, it's considered a no-match across all of the chromosomes. Now I thought that
well maybe I made a mistake and I put the wrong parents who I compared it to the other parent,
and it's also the same thing. There's so much red there, so I created the kit again,
doing the exact same thing making sure that I copied the right numbers. Now, this is what it
is. Now while it gives enough snips to create a full Lazarus kit, you actually get 3,500 or
so centimorgans over this, and that's creating it with four siblings. It didn't match the original
person. So, for instance, here I have both of my parents, and I have me and my three brothers. So
I used one parent and us four brothers, and this is the kit that I got. Now in comparison to some
of the last ones that I did, if I look at the best kit that I was able to create, this involved one
parent. It involved me and my three brothers. It also involved three siblings of the target person.
It involved the two parents of the target person as well as some other more distant relationships.
You can see as I go down here it's at least a half match almost everywhere on all the chromosomes. So
this was a good representation. At least half of the DNA of this person. Now that had a lot of very
close relationships, so then I also looked at one of the other kits that I created again—same thing.
I'm trying to recreate the DNA of my father, and on this one, I used my mother, and I used me and
my three siblings, and then I only used about a hundred very distant relationships. So I didn't
use the siblings of my father. I didn't use the parents of my father. I didn't use any of his
cousins, first cousins, I should say, but I just used more distant relationships, and this had
about the same amount of total snips. Now that my simplified kit had, but you can see there's a big
difference. This kit still has a lot of half-match on almost all of the chromosomes. So it's a much
better kit than the one that I made just from a parent and the four children of that pair. So
what's the takeaway from this while creating a kit with just a parent and their children?
To get the other parents will give you a lot of centimorgans like I said. It gives you a full 3500
centimorgans. It doesn't actually match the other person's DNA. And so there might be another trick
to this I'm gonna have to research it some more. But just putting in the spouse and the children
on the children on both groups one and two is not going to give you a good Lazarus kit. Now,
if you have any questions about Lazarus kits, you can put it in the description below, be sure to
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