My First Royal Connection....Sort Of

I've never tested at FamilyTreeDNA, but I've uploaded my Ancestry DNA results there, and I've linked to my MyHeritage profile. After seeing some posts today about the updated haplotree and newly added haplogroup reports, I went to take a peek to see if I could find any new and exciting information on FamilyTreeDNA.

I already know my maternal haplogroup is T2b4 from my 23andMe DNA results. Once I was signed in, I selected "Discover Haplogroup Reports" from my Home page. I selected the drop down for mtDNA and entered T2b4. When I submitted, I got a form asking if I was a FamilyTreeDNA customer or not. At the very bottom of the screen is a link for "Already Registered? Sign In". Clicking to sign in again (slightly annoying since I already signed in to the site) took me to the beta platform page. I had to reselect mtDNA and put my haplogroup in again to fianlly disply the mtDNA Discover page. Given this is beta, it's possible the information displayed may change or some features may become unavailable in the future if you haven't tested at the site. But for now, I was able to view information totally new to me. (Y-DNA is also an option for male testers who may have this data available.)

There's quite a bit of information displayed, but I'm a sucker for "Notable Connections", so I clicked straight away since it was the most interesting to me. While I know from 23andMe I have many historical Viking matches, I was very excited to see I'm related (through a common maternal ancestor) to Virginia Eriksdotter (1559– 1633) a Swedish noble. She was the recognized illegitimate daughter of King Erik XIV of Sweden and his official royal mistress Agda Persdotter. She was born at Kalmar Castle in Sweden. Althought I asked ChatGPT if it was able to find any paintings of Virgnia, it was unable to locate any. But I was able to find the above image of the castle (Image credit: Image By L.G.foto - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link)

I'm not sure how true it is, but this is listed as a "rare connection" at 1 in 146 people. Only 1,841 other FamilyTreeDNA customers are this closely related to her. Given how far back this is, I don't know if I'd call this "closely related", and it's unlikely I'll ever prove the connection on paper, but it's my first known match to anyone remotely royal. I should point out the following notation is given: "Her detailed mitochondrial haplogroup was determined by mtFull Sequence testing of a descendant and reported in the Sweden DNA Project. The lineage is documented at WikiTree. It has not yet been confirmed by a second test result." 

As of now, I'm not inclined to take any more DNA tests. While I'm sure there's far more to reveal in my DNA, I've thousands of matches I'll never get through as it is. For now, I'm happy with this new "sort of" royal connection. For more on the new features visit the FamilyTreeDNA Blog. 

Image By L.G.foto - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

AI and Ancestry Hints

While AI and OCR recognition have been used for quite some time, it's only been in recent months I've seen an increase in inaccurate hints on Ancestry. It seems to correspond with the widespread increase in the use of AI across the board. While I absolutely appreciate more possible records for my relatives and ancestors, you never know when an "ah ha!" hint will appear, I can't help but notice how many new hints are not relevant. AI considerably reduces the necessity for human intervention and indexing. Combined with the magical algorithms, one would certainly expect many new results as this technology takes hold. But it's far from perfect. 

In the past, I'd estimate 95% of the hinting was pretty accurate for my tree (not including user uploaded media potentially appearing more than once). There were always a few scattered incorrect records suggested, but by in large, I was quite happy with results I received. I suspect many of those incorrect hints were the result of the algorithm picking up on records attached in other trees. Now, I'm finding more inaccurate records than ever before, especially in the hints pulled from newspapers and yearbooks. It seems like the combination of AI and algorithms may not be filtering as well as I've been used to. Now, I have a "reject rate" of closer to 15%.

I've found numerous newspaper hints where the person in my tree would have been a youngster, far tooo young to be the subject of a newspaper article. And many appear to be picking up on a spouse (showing a Mrs. [fill in the blank]) when the person being researched is not female (and most often has no tie to the article referenced). I've also noticed the algorithm seems to combine names (example: Mr. Bill Jones went to the home of Mr. Wayne Smith might produce a hint for Bill Smith in my tree). When it comes to yearbooks, the algorithms are often pulling women's married surname instead of their maiden surname (and while it's possible these women might have been married while still in school, it's unlikely.)

I'm a big fan of AI overall and I use it daily as my "assistant", helping me format, translate/transcribe and extract data. I absolutely believe it has a very valid use when it comes to scanning large data sets to provide us with new hints. I just wish they'd tighten up some of the parameters, or perhaps run a second scan of the potential records to weed out some of the inaccuracies. I fear click-happy new researchers (I was one of them back when I started!) will attach anything and everything without proper vetting, causing inaccuracies to populate even faster.

Of course, it is (and always has been ) the responsibility of each researcher to determine if records apply or not. This is not new! Only you can determine if you believe a hint is accurate or not. Over time, I suspect we'll see the inaccurate results decrease as people reject irrelevant hints, and algoritms are tweaked, I believe we'll ultimately see overall improvements in hinting. But for the short term, we may need to be a little more careful evaluating new hints. 

One final thought...it's important to note, correlation is not necessarily an indication of causation. I could be totally wrong in my observations. Perhaps it's simply the addition of new newspapers and yearbooks. Perhaps I've been underestimating my previous "reject rate". Have you seen any trends in Ancestry hinting since AI has become more widespread? I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay