The Future of Genealogy - DNA and Artificial Intelligence

[@howarddantes]

I started watching your reaction vids... but now I'm staying because you make genealogy very interesting

[@LanceHall]

Ancestry has so many DNA kits and trees it could automatically generate Lazarus kits for more recent ancestors. They have already broken the automatic phasing barrier.

[@starventure]

It would be great if they could correlate matches with the phased ethnicities.

[@zeged34]

Same I have been binge watching his videos

[@marianking3773]

One thing I was left with when my mother passed was a suitcase of old photos. She had promised to get them all labeled a couple of years prior…as well as her will… but third husband may have found that before she mailed it to me. All I got was photos after her passing. Some are of her youthful church conventions, her mothers sufferage events, her fathers work many trolly drivers posed with a “car”. All folks that would be 100-200years old now. I can’t even pick out which is my grandfather!

[@coal.sparks]

I really love this idea, as a genealogist and as someone who watches true crime and as a the recipient of my family's box of photos. You know the box. The one where all the school photos go to linger and die. Yes, if you want to see my cousin's bowl haircut, I can help you out! But I'm betting that in the background of the camping photos or the anniversary celebrations, there are loads of people whose families would really treasure another image of their deceased loved one.

[@coal.sparks]

Somehow I had missed your Blaine interview. It just occurred to me that in the future, you'll be able to figure out exactly WHOSE hair was in your food at a restaurant. Granted, that's a long way away, but it's all these weird uses that we need to try and think up before we progress too far. Although, it'd be great to prove that it WASN'T my hair clogging the shower drain...

[@genealogyisfun5236]

Very interesting stuff. As a genealogist, I find the concept of artefact testing endlessly fascinating, and hope to someday be able to get a viable profile from a deceased ancestor of mine (via a letter or stamp or similar).

[@chaoking3119]

Something I don't think was mentioned enough was whole genome testing. This is common in the Y-DNA testing community, but isn't utilized with autosomal DNA. Before those snps can be used, they first need to be discovered, which is only possible with whole genome sequencing. The video says the opposite that smaller amounts of data will be used. This may be effective at reducing cost, and getting more people to test, but I think the field as a whole will go in the opposite direction. More data is always more helpful.

[@sabirsal]

One of your best uploads. Great work 👍 👍

[@marilyncarey7957]

Photo facial recognition. Been trying to do this about 15 years but the technology was pretty basic. From facial recognition plus other photos on the net, I was able to identify a photo of my great great grandmother that had been in the back of the wardrobe for 40 years. Even her daughter didn’t know who it was. I’d love access, either free or app or fee for service for more advanced tech to identify dozens of unlabelled photos in my collection.

[@michaelrochester48]

There has been talk about 30 years ago that Genealogy might be dead because of the fact so many women were getting artificially inseminated and adoptions were being sealed and states were making it tougher to get adoption records unsealed, I remember a couple of Genealogists said that Genealogy could be finished in a couple of lifetimes. Now it is possibilities galore

[@sl5311]

I was a lobbyist in Missouri for adoption reform. DNA testing pushed us over the edge.The legislators knew that people were going to find out anyway and that they would be banging down the doors to get birth certificates if they didn't provide them.

[@faganmichael]

OCR (and optical layout recognition) will certainly improve, and of course there will be more content digitized for that to work on. And if I was making negative predictions, of course more records will be lost or destroyed, as happens constantly. And no doubt there will be improvements to DNA testing; facial recognition will come to genealogy beyond the current hobby projects that are done now (most likely the big companies have internal prototypes already). Machine learning will be used in other ways as well - MyHeritage has been pre-announcing a date estimator for photos for a while. But I think you're missing some other things, many of which are not necessarily relating to technology... * massive collaboration aka crowdsourcing aka world family tree(s) - already happening, but the results aren't linear * more people doing or interested in genealogy, especially from communities that have not historically done so * more global integration. there are a tons of people in the world belonging to cultures who have very different genealogical traditions that still largely exist isolated from the "western" world's genealogy * more/better links between types of relationships (sperm donor, surrogates, etc.), FAN, owner-slave etc * note that the above ones are all interrelated * better storytelling and other ways of connecting to and using genealogical information that isn't just names/dates, e.g. via historical context, digital immersion in historical times and places, etc. - see for instance MyHeritage's recent DeepStory. I'm working on some things in this area myself

[@faithhowe6170]

These new advances sound exciting, I wish we had them now, but no doubt it won't be till after I'm gone until they're available. Excellent video!

[@samuelvink1482]

The next thing I reckon will be that facial recognition will combine with DNA so that your dna kit will predict what your face will look like and vice versa. Then you could also use this with the lazarus tool and recreate people’s faces.

[@AngelavengerL]

This was super interesting! The solving of the coldcase file especially is so cool.

[@Chaotic_Pixie]

I like the idea of specific databases like the civil war soldier database you mentioned. I think by having specific databases, you reduce the risk of photographs of living individuals show up. We could see one for WW1 soon and eventually WW2. I think a database for ellis island and other immigration ports would be a move we'll see as well. What I'm really excited for is for more data to be made searchable and I think AI signature recognition would be amazing and invaluable, especially in eras and spaces where basic literacy was common. People bought land, signed contracts, made wills, went to court... the lists go on of the places signatures may show up that could help piece together holes in a time line, especially since the census is only every 10 years. Great... I can see this person with known court records and a signature on file in 1918... they're on the 1920 and on the 1930 censuses but not on the 1940... well, what happened? With the known signatures from the court records, how cool would it be then to maybe find their signature in an old hotel register that proves they were living in 1932... and a bill of sale for something in 1935... witnessing a will in 1936 in a state 4 states away from where you'd been looking and now you have a whole new area to scour. I feel like the signature matching could open up SO MUCH for people with brick walls because official documentation has failed...

[@1789Henrique]

I always wonder if you can train an AI using results from people who took 2 or more ancestry tests in order to understand better the admixture discrepancies between companies, and then making a better prediction using these data. Maybe with a big enough database we could understand more about, for example, MyHeritage results - because, you know, they don't release white papers - comparing via AI their output with other companies, such as 23&Me and Ancestry. Maybe, from there, you could upload your MyHeritage results and get what 23&Me would say about that ouput - without having to take another expensive test yourself. I don't know if it would work, though.

[@josephinevera9966]

24 and Me and Ancestry both have me at 55% European. My heritage was me at 27% European. Huge difference.

[@TheAlexSchmidt]

The thing I've wondered about with facial recognition is that there are photographs of things like lynch mobs where people's faces are clearly visible that I doubt most people would want to know their ancestors took part in.

[@mcnation96]

I like that idea

[@liav4102]

If people haven’t come to terms with the fact they have at least one ancestor who has committed an atrocity or two that’s on their naïveté.

[@cathyc6725]

Artifact testing is exciting for those of us with ancestors who have unknown parentage. I would love to be able to combine that was Lazarus to get a better recreated kit for my grandmother to compare her to her daughter’s matches.

[@DovidM]

Local newspapers can be a good source for finding information on recent ancestors. Unfortunately, newsprint is often difficult to render accurately from a scanned image. This means that a search for a particular string like “Jane Rubin” may miss news items mentioning the ancestor.

[@nancypparsons2818]

Super interesting! I am often skeptical of accuracy however. Ancestry continues to place my immigrated ancestors in Louisiana, for example, even though I have complete family trees going back to the 1700s where no one ever lived there. Sometimes the algorithms are just wrong.

[@marilyncarey7957]

Photo recognition, or possibly signature and handwriting recognition, is the only way I can think of to find my non practicing Jewish great great grandfather who was born in Silesia, Prussia (Poland), went to England for a while but changed his name somewhere along the way so I have no way of finding how, when or where he came to Australia before 1860, or the town where he was actually born, which I believe is so vital for European research. All I have is a poor photo copy of a photo and his splendid signature. Photo recognition might also confirm or deny the paternity of his last child - who looks remarkably like those from his wife’s second marriage.

[@jamesvejvoda2659]

This was a fascinating discussion. I hadn't known about some of these companies and services. Thanks for this.

[@anna_in_aotearoa3166]

Really interesting rundown of current state of the field & some probable next directions! Fascinating to see the tech pipeline from forensic science to genealogical research, & how far that's come even fairly recently. Would LOVE to see a dedicated video on the ethics of genealogy and DNA tracing, going into rather more detail there...? Not just the privacy of living individuals as briefly touched on here, but issues around who owns uploaded info (companies/governments/ individuals), what ideological trends personal DNA testing results might feed into, culturally-specific taboos around handling & viewability of pictures of deceased ancestors, etc....? Potentially also any ethical considerations of making family-tracking results public where a person's ancestors may have fled to escape abusive relatives, political persecution, & other dangers that might still have implications today that they're unaware of...?

[@gwae48]

Fascinating. Thnx. 🙂

[@trinaroe5132]

Fascinating video! I have two old photo albums that date to the last half of the 19th century and know that one came from my paternal great grandfather’s side and one from my paternal great grandmother’s side, but most of the photographs are not identified and some that are appear to be friends or old beaus. It would be so interesting to see if the facial recognition could at some point identify which of these are relatives and who they are!

[@drippiemikk]

Well put-together video, very interesting, wish I could make this on my own channel! Therefore, I subscribed to your channel, keep the quality up! Greetings from Denmark!

[@grimadelmoral]

Hello! I would like to know what is the future of this technology in paleogenetics. What information could we get in prehistoric genetic samples?

[@jamieja9452]

Fascinating

[@sl5311]

Yeah, I've been trying to nail down a 4th great grandmother thru DNA. I have found 3 people in the generation above me but they are too old and don't return my emails about loading their DNA to Gedmatch. So frustrating. And then Ancestry will not do segments and they up their CMs and that is so frustrating. I am wondering if it will be possible to match up ancestors from 4th generation onward with whole genome... and will that be dependent on Ancestry or 23 and Me creating a database for that? Also, from what I read, the facial recognition he is talking about where they take pictures of people on the street already exists within the US and its security apparatus. I like your enthusiasm regarding photos but if I get one more email from a historical society or a state archive that says, "we have many more files you can search by visiting us" I think I will scream. I can't see how photos are going to be uploaded to a large enough number that will outpace the documents that are still sitting in archives and as I understand it, exist at such a number they will never be digitized because of the labor involved. At least in our lifetimes. It is the biggest Achilles heel in genealogy. We all his this wall sooner or later.

[@thomholbrook7286]

I've done some facial recognition work on a very personal level. Google Pixel phones used to come with unlimited photo storage and it does facial recognition so you can hunt up all the pics you took of X person. I also have been scanning and cleaning insane amounts of old family photos back to the early 1900s. Stored them on Google and it would've start saying, "These are all X person." Wasn't always right but sometimes I'd start realizing the same person would be in these different photos. And who they were photo'd with would give me clues, etc. The negative us that the unlimited free storage is now nixed. And Google as an assistant is flawed. In addition to not always being right, sometimes I would have X group of pics marked as Person A and Y group as Person B and the damn program on its own would decide they were the same person and merge the groups. OR sometimes it would just forget faces. Got pics labeled as Gramma Betty? Now she's unknown person 1. Annoying to have to re-ID people but on the whole it has been a help. And even it's screwing up has made me have to really learn old family faces.

[@thezfunk]

I have done the same thing. I am growing more and more concerned with the loss of ownership and rights by uploading your photos to these types of services. I won't put anything on Ancestry anymore because of how they have hoovered up records and pictures and other websites and then put all that information (some of which YOU provided) and pay wall it. I am also not a fan of the Genetic Genealogy cooperation with law enforcement. It sounds great to solve old missing persons and old cold cases but nobody has addressed privacy rights enough in these situations.

[@joycefields3166]

What would you do about doppelgängers?

[@mybackHurtzz]

Thanks for this I saw your video on the whole genome sequencing kit and I bought one similar because I really wanna see more matches 😂😂😂

[@HowWeGotHere]

Would love if it could find possible relations by comparing current populations. Thinking of the Polish town if they could take pcitures and analyze current photos and see where they have matching traits since often we inherit looks from ancestors, I know wouldn't be accurate until you started matching with DNA matches ie you and your 3rd cousin on your mother's father's mother's mother's side have enough matching tratts to photo of person x there is a high probability they are related in that line.

[@temag345]

hi this is Scott Genzer. Good question - in fact this is something I am actively working on. It would be amazing to give facial recognition two photos and have it return a likelihood that the two people are siblings, cousins, etc. Unfortunately right now the false positive rate (i.e. saying two faces are siblings when they are not) to glean any meaning behind it. Same even with the same person if there is too large an age gap. But I continue to work on this in my spare time and if I find anything worth publishing, I will certainly do so in the public domain as I did before.

[@leiapeison]

Is it possible that we can make a DNA test that can go back thousands of years in ancestry?

[@vloggingwithsam4811]

I’m replying here so i get a notification when there’s an answer

[@sachielangel]

I wonder. But i think its not a good idea if ever possible. To do dna tests on deceased people. I mean from old graves and from there, if possible, doing dna matching with at first probabilities, later when technique advances, more closer to more realistic dna matching in big dna ancestral data bases. So that people doing genealogy can get further back and discover more ancestors.

[@magicgiggles1287]

Think when they combine DNA phenotyping with facial recognition.

[@starventure]

Are there any companies doing rootless hair testing for public use yet? Astrea forensics is doing it for law enforcement only so far.

[@terrygunn6723]

computer's will play a lot in the future

[@TheEnabledDisabled]

Wondering, so you reconstruct the dna of an ancestor using matches, how do you convert that to a dna-file?

[@GeneaVlogger]

Right now, the only straight-forward way I know of doing this at the moment is by using the Lazarus tool at Gedmatch. Family History Fanatics actually just put out a video on how to use that tool just a few days ago - kzbin.info/www/bejne/gXWUg2x3fqt1ZsU

[@TheEnabledDisabled]

@@GeneaVlogger I saved the video, money is an issue sadly, and am worried I cant convince relatives to use gedmatch, or even get into contact with them again, we will see. I have a good candidate, that have many descendants and relatives

[@cefcat5733]

I always think of unknown soldiers when I hear about the possibilities. There should be no more of those cases now. Cameras were put up in a train station here as a 'test.' There were 'warning' signs outside. There were also protests, of course. It was all done because an elusive criminal had been spotted there. I suppose that they are also face recognition cameras by now and not merely video or observation cameras. Let's hope that these tools will be used for positive, reasonable reasons because this snowball is rolling at a good speed, down this hill. ⛄ It is not so nice if you are a 'good guy.'

[@TommyAlanRaines]

Rootless Hair genetic testing; there is a few hair locks in the family that could be tested.

[@TheEnabledDisabled]

data learning technologies, need to understand context, to fully go forward

[@marcusradu9695]

Hello Jarret Ross my name is Marcus Radu and my dads mums sides relatives moved to from Romania to Argentina a census record I found on ancestry said that that relative married a Afro Argentine does that mean that I have some African ancestry or partial African ancestry

[@zeged34]

Both

[@CitizenTurtleIsland]

So exciting. I'm tired of guessing what is a false match... is this match really just from imputation, etc, etc. Also... my mom (who died in 2007) always told me that we had a Jewish ancestor. Well... given that I have a lot of Jewish matches (typically around 15 cM, some between 20-25 cM) I think she was correct... but based on what I inherited, probably pre-Napoleanic era. Eventually, I will test her DNA via a lock of hair clipped. One generation closer to the past.

[@nillyk5671]

The Kitty 😂😂

[@KGTiberius]

Update? 1 yr later

[@karmagal78]

I really need to ask my mom if she has anything that was her mom’s. A letter or anything. I know that she has recipe cards, but who knows who has handled those.

[@gaylecheung3087]

I want to know my Haplogroup, grrr AncestryDNA doesn’t provide this. I’m 100% Chinese made in Canada 🇨🇦 ♥️🌏🇺🇦 Looking for my Maternal grandfather born in America 1895/1917ish any help would be awesome, mother born 1929 China, thank you

[@jessicalippe1]

I want a DNA test to prove my aunt wrong. We are NOT related to Erick the read or Leaf Ericsson! I have worked on my tree 26 years now from Norway. She started 5 years ago. She keeps going down the wrong rabbit whole. I need one for my husband and his father. 😂 I have debunked so much of his family story now I need to find the conecting pice in Germany. That would be so awesome.

[@TheDanEdwards]

"I want a DNA test to prove my aunt wrong. " - there are no DNA tests that will show you are NOT related to Erik The Red or any other Viking. That's not how DNA works. Also, *if you have European ancestors then you likely do have Viking ancestors from a thousand years ago.* There are no Norwegian records that far back and only a handful of family histories date from the 12th century.

[@Okamikurainya]

If I was in charge, with every DNA test you'd have to supply a mugshot. Rather than facial recognition, an AI would be used to match faces to DNA as a training set and to then create all new faces of unknown individuals just from DNA and vice versa, create artificial DNA kits from faces.

[@ruthking7884]

I have locks of hair from my deceased sister and father....I would do that if it was offered.

[@zeged34]

I am skeptical of people for using dna for crimes