I have a new DNA toy! What are the odds?

It is a tool inside a website called DNA Painter. The tool is called WATO or What Are The Odds. You can register at DNA Painter for free and there are two versions of WATO, I’ve used version 2 beta.

WATO calculates how you might connect to a cluster of your DNA matches when you can’t figure it out – exactly my problem with all of my mystery Collman and Weston DNA matches.

What I’d really like to know is how am I connected to them and are they connected to dear old MG (Mystery Great Grandfather)?

Before I could build a WATO tree I first had to do a bit of genealogy work, because first I needed to know where the mystery match fits in their own family. (*If you’ve done an AncestryDNA test through ancestry.com, this is where their ThuLines tool comes in very handy).

Then I built a tree in the WATO tool and plotted my cluster of matches on the tree. (**A little note, at least one match must be 40cm or more for WATO to be able to do the math).

Here’s the tree I built in the WATO tool using my cluster of Weston matches. (***Some names have been omitted for privacy reasons).

The white boxes are my mystery matches. The lovely E has a spot in the tree, down at the bottom on the right. Still helping me even though we have never met. Thanks E!

And that is it. A simple little tree, not much to it really.

All I have to do now is click on the ‘suggest hypothesis’ box, the tool will perform amazing magical mathematical gymnastics. It will use the strength of the DNA match and the birth year of people in the tree to generate tree branches and tell me the odds of me belonging to any branch of this family. The higher the score, the higher the odds of that box in the tree being ME.

So I held my breath, clicked on the ‘suggest hypothesis’ box and there was whizzing and popping…

Before I could say ‘DNA’ the tool created the magic, somehow adding in probable siblings and possible half siblings all by itself and then making suggestions of where I could fit, mathematically speaking. Its a hypothesis, not a fact ok.

hypothesis – a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation

Remember, the higher the score, the higher the mathematical odds that any particular place on the tree is where I belong.

Although I have a good match with BP and WP, WATO says the odds of being closely related to them is low, with scores ranging from 1 to 118. Of course, if there were more mystery matches in this small cluster, WATO would have more data to work with.

What about my closeness to E? What does WATO say about that…

E is my strongest mystery match and WATO says the odds of being closely related to E are high, with scores in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Based on the few mystery matches that I was able to place in the WATO tree, WATO says the hypotheses with the highest likelihood are boxes numbered 29 and 33…

Hypotheses are mathematically possible but may not be genealogically likely

While I was on the hunt for MG I found out a lot of details about this family. For a range of genealogical reasons that I won’t bore you with, me being hypothesis 33 in the WATO tree just isn’t genealogically likely, perhaps even impossible.

But… if hypothesis 29 is me, and if this pathway leads to MG, then my father is hypothesis number 28, Edna is the box named ‘unknown half-sibling’ and therefore her father… MG… is…

What are the odds???