February 1, 2020 – DNA: Members Talk about Challenges

“DNA: Members Talk about Challenges with
Sorting out their DNA Results”

Many of us have “spit in the tube” and wondered what those DNA test results actually mean. Many of us have also attended all-day seminars on DNA that filled us with scientific knowledge bordering on gibberish. How do we move beyond the gibberish and figure out what it means for our DNA story? Where do we even start? What do we do with all these so-called matches?

We thought it would be helpful to have SGSC members tell how they made sense of their DNA results. Our three presenters will share how they discovered interesting stories in their family line after taking the DNA tests.

  • Bev Harbourt presents “DNA Testing: I took the test, now what?”
  • Karen Rademacher presents “How I Filtered DNA Matches on Ancestry.com and Found Interesting Family Connections.”
  • Megan Miller presents “Skeletons and Secrets: Handling DNA Surprises”

Beverly Harbourt grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and attended the University of Nebraska. She is the past President of SGSC, an SGSC mentor, and an avid researcher of her Swedish and German roots. Bev is also involved in the indexing project of digitized Swedish Church records from some Colorado churches. She is the custodian of her family’s historical photographs and some of the family heirlooms, has been researching her ancestors for over 20 years, and has visited Sweden three times. She joined SGSC in 2009 following her retirement and subsequent move from the Washington D. C. area to Colorado.

Karen Rademacher Karen has been interested in genealogy since the late 1970’s, when an aunt on her mom’s side of the family self-published a book about her Swedish and Scottish/English ancestry. Karen took this as a challenge to research her dad’s side of the family (which is all Swedish) and add more content to her mother’s side too. In 2013, she traveled with her husband and parents to Sweden and visited all of their ancestral villages and churches. Karen joined SGSC in 2014 and is currently the SGSC webmaster. Karen grew up in Arvada and graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in Civil Engineering. Karen and her husband Dale have four grown children and live in rural Weld County. She is the Director of Administration at Northern Water in Berthoud CO.

Megan Miller was born and raised outside Rockford, IL and has been in Denver for almost 7 years. She and her husband of 14 years have two elementary-aged children. She has been doing genealogy research for 17 years. Her maternal ancestors are mainly Swedish, having emigrated from Sweden in the 1880 – 1910 wave of immigration. Her great grandparents immigrated from Friel and Borås, and her great grandmother’s parents came from Kyrkefalla and an unknown village in Västra Götalan.

Meeting presentations and handouts available here.

 

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