Genetic genealogy

It's been just a gong show.

So speaking of fast and free as trends, so we just got back from Boston a few weeks ago where we were both doing the Friday night keynote at the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference in person in Boston.

Great conference.

Awesome people.

I mean, genetic genealogists, I find, are geekier than the average genealogy bear.

They tend to be analytical by nature.

They're often mathematical because you have to be a little bit mathematical in order to go deep into the genetic genealogy end of the pool.

And so, like in a typical room, we would see... 30% adoption of like, you know, people who already maybe had an account, you know, much fewer who had a paid account, about 85% adoption of AI, of the people in the room and the people who are actually doing stuff, like, I mean, push the boundaries of genetic genealogy, about 80% of those were real serious.

Yeah.

genetic genealogy all of these things are things that we talk about on this show on a regular basis when you're identifying a person to get a positive identity and it's one of the most important things we've done shows about people being misidentified and now we're talking about 1100 people who haven't been identified joe where do you start How do you do it?

Well, first off, you take it in a very broad sense.

And I'm talking about in those days,

Now, if you did have fresher tissue, you capture that tissue and you freeze it quickly.

Because if you can, you can sequence that for DNA.

Back then in 2001, did we have investigative genetic genealogy? No, we didn't.

It wasn't even on the... horizon yet.

[tense music]

In the years since the murders, a new technology has emerged called genetic genealogy.

It's the use of public ancestry databases to trace a family line from the DNA left at the crime scene.

News media was talking about the Golden State Killer crime having been solved with, uh, DNA and, uh, genetic genealogy.

So I ended up contacting Parabon Nanolabs, and we ended up submitting our DNA sample to them.

Initially, Parabon's investigation was not productive.

A newborn baby was found dead in a laundry bin in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1988.

Now, nearly four decades later, thanks to genetic genealogy, the cold case has ended with a guilty plea.

Tammy Sue Kearns, who now lives in Atlanta, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and faces up to life in prison.

The baby boy was found August 4, 1988, in a laundry bin in a laundromat wrapped in linens from the U.S. Air Force Regional Hospital at Shepherd Air Force Base.

It wasn't until 2009 that the next major development occurred in the Summit Meadow case.

That year, the NPS had DNA testing done on the hand and skull to figure out if they belonged to the same person.

And sure enough, when the results came in, the findings proved the remains were for sure from the same woman.

Unfortunately, though, that's sort of where things stopped.

Me, personally? Never going to happen.

The use of investigative genetic genealogy to solve violent crimes has overwhelming public support, she said, but privacy concerns are still an issue in cases like the University of Idaho student murder suspect Brian Kohlberger's where the FBI accessed two databases that purport to exclude law enforcement from their services.

As a result, unwitting users could be submitting clues that lead detectives to their own relatives without knowing it.

I don't think that's a good enough argument, honestly.

Yeah.

Genetic genealogy.

All of these things are things that we talk about on this show on a regular basis when you're identifying a person to get a positive identity.

And it's one of the most important things we've done shows about people being misidentified.

Because if you can, you can sequence that for DNA.

Okay.

And now back then in 2001, do we have... investigative genetic genealogy.

No, we didn't.

So Misty, would you like to tell our audience what exactly you found out about Kaylee's birth father?

So I, you know, performed the genetic genealogy analysis and I was able to identify him as George Frederick Gangarelli.

And usually when we identify biological parents, the next step is for us to kind of do some investigative work on who they are, try to figure out as much information about that person so we can present it to the client so we can give them a picture really of who their biological parent was.

Well, when I started doing my research on him, I did find out that he had actually died by suicide in prison because he was convicted of sexual assault and homicide.