How I Lazarus’ed My Dad

According to the Gospels, Lazarus was a man who died and Jesus raised him from the dead.

Lazarus is also a program on Gedmatch to recreate the DNA of those who are no longer with us. You won’t see this unless you kick in $10 for the Tier 1 Utilities. The Link says, “Lazarus, Create surrogate kits to create close ancestors.”

How I did it: first I practiced on my wife’s family.

Fortunately, my wife’s dad has 2 first cousins and one second cousin on his mother’s side who have had their DNA tested. This came in handy. So I went about to create my father in law’s mom, Estelle LeFevre. Lazarus takes Group 1 people who are descendants of the target person to be Lazarus’ed, Estelle. In my case, the descendant was my father in law. I had him tested a while back at FTDNA. Then the program takes relatives who are not descended from Estelle. In this case, Pat and Joe who were the 1st cousins and Fred the 2nd cousin of my father in law. Those three are Group 2. Lazarus takes Group 1 and Group 2 and mushes them together to recreate Estelle. Actually only a part of Estelle is recreated. That is the part of Estelle that was mushed together from Group 1 and Group 2. If I had all of Estelle’s children and all of her relatives, I would’ve had a much more complete result. The trick is to get a Lazarus result that is over 1500 cMs. Then you can use some of the other utilities at Gedmatch with that kit such as the One to Many. It’s OK to create a Lazarus kit with less than 1500 cMs but it’s not as useful. Well, Estelle came out at about 1700 cMs, so that was good news. Buoyed with these results, I thought it would be a good idea to try to recreate my dad’s DNA.

A Slight Detour

I followed the Gedmatch directions. I took two Group 1 people. That was me and my sister. Then I took for Group 2, the only relative of my father that I had tested, his 1st cousin. I ran the program and came up with only about 700 cMs. Very disappointing. Then, as I’ve been working on my father’s mother line, the Frazers, I thought, ‘my father’s cousin isn’t related to the Frazers. He’s only related to my Hartley side’. Duh. What I had created was a Lazarus of my father’s dad, my Grandfather.

Sometimes I don’t mind making mistakes. Especially when they lead to the right answer.

How I did it the right way

Well, how was I to get up to 1500 cMs, when all I had was 700 cMs from my grandfather’s side? I only had 2 people for Group 1. I’m too cheap to have other siblings test. I noticed that Gedmatch had room for 100 people. Hmm, where to get 100 people? From working with my distant Frazer relatives, I knew I had their results, but this wouldn’t get me the numbers I needed. So I decided to use the phased matches of my sister and I. What is phasing, you may ask? Phasing is another utility that Gedmatch has. If you know the results of one parent, Gedmatch will subtract those out from your whole results and create 2 kits. One is a maternally phased kit of matches on your mom’s side. The other is a phased paternal kit of your matches on your dad’s side. Fortunately my mom is still alive at 93 and I had her tested. Based on her testing, I had already created phased maternal and paternal kits for myself and my sister. Now all the gedmatch matches are marked either P for Paternal or M for Maternal on a spreadsheet that I keep. I have one spreadsheet for myself and one for my sister. So I took a bunch of the top paternally phased matches from my matches and my sisters matches. I put in 100 of those top matches into the Gedmatch Lazarus Utility under Group 2. I ran the Lazarus program and got just over 1500 cMs for my dad.

Is This the Best Way to Create a Lazarus Kit?

I don’t know. It was certainly much more difficult than when I Lazarus’ed my father in law’s mom. For her, I only used 4 people and got better results. However, if you are cheap like me, or aren’t, but just don’t have the people to test, you might want to try this method and see if it works for you.

Joel Hartley