Herb’s family lived in the Bronx until he was 7, when they moved up to White Plains, NY. He majored in math at Columbia and obtained a Ph.D. in Statistics at Harvard. He then settled in the Boston area and pursued a career there as a biostatistical consultant. Herb has written three books about statistical methods and, more recently, a novel called Data Games. After moving with his wife Nina to Cary in 2018, he became interested in genealogy, mainly to fill a void in knowledge about his father’s family. This has led to a number of surprising discoveries and a deeper understanding of the role that genetic data can play in genealogical research.
Finding Semi-Distant Cousins by Mining Your DNA Matches
Herb Weisberg, Ph.D.
For Ashkenazi Jews, conventional advice about DNA matches is quite conservative. We are admonished to focus only on strong matches and to attribute most weak matches to measurement error or endogamy. Herb will start by walking through the basics of DNA matching and triangulated DNA segments. He will suggest suggest a surprisingly simple alternative to conventional DNA triangulation and an associated “data-mining” technique. This new method can efficiently identify the best DNA matches to pursue. To illustrate this approach, Herb will share some relevant applications from his own genealogical research.
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