On this channel, I've told you about what one of the best
tools that I have found for doing genealogical research and
that is the WATO tool on the DNA Painter website. Now, if
you have never used this tool before, it is extremely useful
in taking information about matches to a single person and
being able to use those to figure out where your person
fits in that family tree. And that's why it's really powerful
is because you're leveraging the information not from one
match but from several matches in order to figure out where this
person may fit. So, let's go through some of the basic steps
that you need to know in order to get started using the WATO
tool. The first thing with using WATO is you need to
identify who your target person is. Now, some people get
confused on this but what the target person is is who you
don't know where they fit into a family tree. For instance, if
you are adopted, this could be yourself where you've taken a
DNA test. Now, you have all these matches you want to
figure out who your biological father was or your biological
mother was. So, you're going to use these matches to find that
out but it doesn't have to be you. It could be another
relative. Let's say that you might have tested with an aunt
and you're trying to figure out where she fits into another
family tree because she's really not your full aunt.
She's a half ant that you found from this. So, there's lots of
ways that you can use this but the first part is to identify
who your target person is and understanding who that target
person is. Basically, you don't know where the target person
fits. So, I'm going to start off in the WATO tool and name
my target person as Jane Doe. And it has you enter in a birth
year if you know the birth year. And if this is yourself or
somebody else close to you, you probably do know what the birth
year is. This can be very helpful in narrowing down where
the target person fits into the family tree. Because you know
when they were born and if you know when some of the other
people were born, that can give you a clue besides just the DNA.
So now that you have your target person set what you need
to do next is you need to identify a group of matches
that are related to that target person and probably related to
each other. Now these matches can have any amount of shared
DNA but you want to have matches that have more than 40
centimorgans. So if all you have is matches less than 40
centimorgans it's not going to work out very well. But if you have
some that have more than 40 centimorgans and maybe a couple
with than forty centimorgans and that's fine.
So, in my example here, I'm going to use these people, Steve,
Roberta, Don, Sarah, Jean, Darla, and Harold all share DNA
with Jane Doe. And they happen to all share DNA with each
other as well because they are somewhat closely related. Now,
how do you find these group of matches? Well, that is going to
be through some different methods. Maybe you're doing a
Leeds chart and you find a that's related together. Or you
do one of the auto clusters and you're looking at those people
that fit within one of those auto clusters. The key here is
is that you need to find this group of people that is all
related together and related to your target person. So then we
get to I guess the really fun part here and that is building
the tree of those matches. Now we're not going to build the
tree of the target person. Because remember the target
person we don't know where they fit into this tree. Because the
target person matches all of these people and if you have
the tree information for all of these people back to a recent
common ancestor then your target person should probably
fit in that tree somewhere. Alright so, on what are the odds
we are going to start building the tree. And for that we need
to start basically here with the most recent common ancestor.
And you can actually go backwards if you want but I'm
going to start with the most recent common ancestor because
I found that from researching these different people. And we
can children to that and of course name them. And the nice
thing here is we can continue to add children down the line
however many generations we want. Now typically for most of
these WATO trees I found that you're probably going to have
maybe five to seven generations unless it is something that is
really close. And so we can add multiple children to the same
people. We can go back and add children to people we've
already added. All of these things to help build tree that
you've already created or already researched in order to
find where this most recent common ancestor is.
So in WATTO you build a tree actually sideways like this. And
you can see here that I've gone through and I filled in
everybody that I know. And there's Steve and Roberta and
Don and Sarah and Jean and Darla and Harold and they all
relate back to this ancestral couple Philip and Mary Ann Schnell.
Now this worked because I happen to have found trees for all of these people.
And there was some other people I added to this tree some other siblings that were not their trees.
But because of some other tree information I was able to
add that in. And so now I have a WATO tree that is ready to do
some analysis on. You'll notice here that Jane Doe doesn't
appear in this tree. And that's the way it's supposed to be
because Jane Doe is who we're trying to find. We actually
want to find out where in this tree Jane Doe fits. The next
thing we want to do is we want to add in the shared DNA that
each one these people have with the target person. Now, if this
target person is you, that's going to be really easy to find
because you just simply go down your match list and see how
much DNA you have with these people. If this is somebody
else, then you may have to do some more searching. 23andMe
and MyHeritage will actually give you this information
although you have to just dig down a little bit further to in
order to find it. On GEDMatch, you can find this information
as well because it is an open database where anybody can look
at any of the people that are in there in the public side.
However, if you are looking at Family Tree DNA data or
Ancestry DNA, if you don't have access to the target
person's profile, then you may not be able to get all of that
DNA information. So, what can you do is really contact these
different matches to see how much they share with this
target person. Next, what we want to do is add the shared
centimorgans for each one of these people. Now, this amount
of shared centimorgans can come from any of the websites. The
key here though is is you're looking for the amount of
shared centimorgans with each one of these people to your target
person.
So in WATO here, I have now added in all of the DNA for
these target people and you can actually see that this has some
people that are pretty close related. They share 900
centimorgans in one case with the target person or 1, 147
centimorgans in another case. So, this is actually going to
be a really simple wattow tree just because I have all these
matches that share a huge amount of DNA with my target
person. Every WATO tree is not necessarily going to be this
easy. But I've gone in and I've put all that DNA information
in. Now one of the things that you may see here is you may see
that Sarah is the daughter of Don and in that case, I really
don't need Sarah's information. Since all of her DNA that is
shared came through Don, I could actually leave Sarah off
this. I've left it in there for right now but when WATO does
its calculations, it's going to ignore Sarah in this case. So,
if you have a parent's DNA, you don't need that child's DNA.
Now, the next step then is to generate hypotheses. These
hypothesis are where Jane may fit into the tree. They are guesses
based on statistics of which locations she could be in. So
if I take a look at my WATO tree and I hit on the generate
hypothesis. You can do this automatically with this button
or you can manually put them in if you want to. Now this
automatic one is taking into account not only how much DNA
is shared but also the age of the person. So for instance we
know that if somebody died before let's say 2010. It's very
unlikely that there's going to be any DNA information on that
person. So all of these people that we have DNA with they are
still alive or they at least were alive sometime after 2010.
That gives you a rough idea of when they possibly could have
been born which the computer is then comparing with the birth
year that you've put in your self. So, you can see from
this, it has come up with four hypotheses that it thinks might
be where this person is, our target person, Jane Doe. Each
one of these hypotheses has a score attached to it. This is
where people start to get a little bit confused. You are
going to be looking for the highest number on that score
but that is just in relation to this tree. It is not in
relation to any other tree. So, for instance, the high score
here happens to be sixty-three. I have seen trees where the
high score is in the thousands or even in the tens of
thousands and that all has to do with what matches you have
and where they fit in the tree as far as the possibility of
your target person for it. What it doesn't mean is that a tree
that has a high score of 10,000 is not necessarily better than
this tree with a high score of sixty-three. What you want
to look at actually is the relative values between the
scores on a particular tree and that goes to our next step,
which is we want to research the highest possibilities. So
let's pull up these hypothesis here. Now these hypothesis can
be found by just scrolling down on the page. And give you an
idea about what this means. So first off we have hypothesis
one which is that Jane Doe is the child of Walter and the
grandchild of Cora Fay. We also have hypothesis 3 which is Jane
Doe is a child of an unknown sibling and the grandchild of
Cora Fay. You notice there they're still both the
grandchild of Cora Fay. The score on both of these is
sixty-three. Now since the score is 63, you'll notice
that what it says is it's a similar likelihood to the next
hypothesis. So these are each equal. And it's really because
we're talking about a grandchild of this person. So if
Jane Doe is a grandchild of this person well whether
they're a grandchild through one sibling or a grandchild
through another sibling that is not represented on the tree
those are equal equal amounts there. So that is the first
place that we're going to want to. We're going to want to
research any children of Cora Fay and see whether or not Jane
could have been the grandchild than of Cora Fay. Now next we go
down to hypothesis two and this is that Jane Doe is the child
of daughter and the grandchild Now this is through a
different line. The daughter is unnamed here but it is a
daughter that we have some DNA from another of that daughter's
children. You'll notice though that the score is 3 and
compared to the hypothesis right above it says it it's
about 21 times more likely than the next hypothesis. And
this is what I mean about looking at it in relative terms.
63 is 21 times three and so really you'd have to have about
21 examples of this to just have one example that you that
actually is where the hypothesis two falls in. So it
doesn't mean that hypothesis two is not possible. What it
means is that it's 21 times more likely it's one of the
other two rather than this one. And then finally we have
hypothesis four that Jane Doe is the child of Cora Ray. And
you notice that as a score of one. So it's actually 63 times
more likely that Jane Doe is the grandchild of Cora Ray
through either Walter or some other unknown person who is not
put on the chart. Then that Jane Doe is the child of Cora
Ray so to me that tells me that yeah this one at the bottom I'm
not really going to worry about until I've eliminated all
possibilities from the other ones and in particular I'm
going to be focused on Walter and any other kids that Cora
Ray might have had now if you happen to have enough
information you might have it so that all hypotheses except
for one are eliminated if that's the case, there's an
extremely good chance that that hypothesis is the actual
location of where your target person fits but you're going to
need to have a lot of DNA data in order to get a WATO tree
like that. For all these other trees and really for 99% of the
trees that I have created, you're going to have to go and
then do some more research on these highest possibilities.
WATOis not going to tell you exactly who or that person is
but WATO can tell you where to be looking that is most likely
where you're going to find your answer. Now if you'd like to
learn something else about DNA then you can watch this video
up here. But if you'd like to learn something else about
genealogy then watch one of Devon's videos down below. But
be sure to subscribe and if you'd like to join FHF Extra we
have even more videos for you