Genetic Genealogy — Ronan Rooney

When I was 25, I learned that my biological father was a sperm donor, with no existing record of who he was. I resolved to find him. That’s where I combined my love of technical solutions with the exploding field of genetic genealogy.

PROCESS: Genealogy has been around a long time. It’s the process of reconstructing family trees from oral histories, records, newspapers, and more. With the advent of popular DNA testing sites like 23andme, Ancestry, and FamilyTreeDNA, anyone can take a swab test and have their DNA uploaded online for anyone to see. For genealogists, it’s a revolutionary new point of information.

DNA websites show you who’s related to you, how closely, and the ethnicities you share. For most people, they log in and see immediate family and cousins they already know. In my case, I saw hundreds of distant relatives through my father. I spent a decade reaching out, making connections, and digging into the family trees of my paternal cousins, in order to find the common link.

NETWORK ANALYSIS: I needed a way to visualize the relationship between me and all my paternal cousins. I turned to Gephi, a network data visualizer. I exported my DNA relatives from several websites as raw data and reconstituted it inside Gephi as a chart with hundreds of points.

This swarm of data points is all my paternal cousins and the relationships between them. The dominant blue color is all my cousins from Finland, who are highly endogamous, meaning they frequently share common ancestors.

Zoomed in, you can see how Gephi weaves together the relationship between data points. Each point corresponds to a name. You can tease apart data points and create your own groupings based on relationships.

DNA SEGMENT VIEWER: While Gephi allowed me to see the relationship between my paternal cousins, I was still left with questions. In order to find our common ancestors, I needed to understand not only who was related to who, but how.

You and all your DNA relatives share strips of DNA code, along chromosomes 1 through 22 and on the X chromosome. I envisioned each strip of DNA as simply being a box, with a starting point and an ending point. I wrote CoffeeScript code in Framer to draw a box showing where the segments began and ended, along with the relatives’ name. This tool allowed me to learn more than ever before about my DNA relatives. I could quickly see how snippets of DNA code from common ancestors survived through generations, becoming smaller as the genetic relationship became more distant.

WHAT I LEARNED: This project came to define 10 years of my life. I learned that I am a ferocious researcher, willing to go to any lengths to solve a mystery. This challenge pushed me to learning new technology and utilizing old tools for new purposes. I’m happy to say that after 10 years, I found my biological father, and it would not have been possible without this research.