On the case:
"So with this case in particular the highest match we had was a second or third cousin and it was on the paternal side of the family and it went back to Italy. So that was a little difficult with mapping out/finding the common connections between matches because although there are Italian records online, they're not great for certain areas of Italy. So that was difficult. The maternal side of the family was really easy, we were able to get a lock on that quickly and and luckily because we got a lock on that we were able to get the birth certificate, which once we got the name of the father we were able to validate those paternal matches that we had."
On the genealogy itself:
"It was pretty straightforward. The maternal side of the family was really straight forward. So that took me, maybe a month or two? Just to map out those connections and figure out what I was looking at. The paternal side we were able to figure out once we got the birth certificate in."
On the DNA:
"The DNA was atrocious. So we got the case in 2019 and it was from a previous genealogist who had a sequencing sample done and it was "mardis gras" - that's what we call it - so you get your admixture on GedMatch, you can work out what your ancestral origins are, and it's like a pie chart. For the typical person it might be 2 or 3 different ethnic groups. You might be West Mediterranean, North Atlantic and Baltic for a Caucasian person. This one had like 15 different ancestral makeups in the pie, and for us that's a flag for bad data because there's no way that someone comes from all these ethnic origins. You might come from two or three different groups but you're not going to be Sub-Saharan, Asian, Italian, North Atlantic all on the same admixture. So the data was bad and I had tried working off of that originally to see if I could pull in some good matches but the matches were so distant and all over the place - we had Brazillian matches, Hungarian matches, Irish matches, African American matches, so we scrapped it. Dr Fitzpatrick, she had been in talks with a couple of labs that do Ancient DNA analysis and she had gotten some of the remains sent to those labs for a better extract so we could get a more precise sequencing done. That's what took so long in this case. We got in 2019 but it took until 2021 to get the actual good sample."