GEDmatch: A free website to compare and analyze your DNA results

GEDmatch.com is a tremendous free membership website for analyzing your DNA data. Although I have previously blogged about the terrific ancestry composition tools at GEDmatch, I never did a step by step tutorial.
GEDmatchLarge

So I am pleased to announce that Barton Lewis from the DNA-NEWBIE list has contributed the documentation he wrote for his family to the downloads area of this website. Thank you Barton!

I added lots of pictures and we worked together on the presentation and wording. Let us know if you find it useful and what else we should add to it.

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91 thoughts on “GEDmatch: A free website to compare and analyze your DNA results

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    • Thank you for posting this! I wasted two sheets of paper and heavy printer ink trying to use the Print button above. Instructions always came out fuzzy. So thanks again for seeing the problem and fixing it!

  1. Hi Kitty, I am curious about what is going on with the GEDMATCH site. I has been reporting this past week and today the following: “GEDmatch has had a server failure.
    Until it is restored, I have been able to make very limited
    service available so that latest batch run results will be available.” Do you have any inside knowledge on what is going on with their servers?

    Mary Neal

  2. They do not know, they have not figured out the server problem
    Any really sharp techies in Houston area who want volunteer to help please contact me!

  3. Gedmatch seems to be down again for a week or so now – is it the same problem? Such a fantastic site and such a pity – hope this is not long term.

  4. GED match is not working again. Is there any other reliable websites to upload my 23andme data to?

    • Breanna – GEDmatch is a volunteer site and free. I initiated some help via a cousin in Houston area to assist them in getting more reliable service and in a few weeks this should come to pass. Send them a donation to help with this!

    • I have spent two hours with a new registration, reset of password etc and I keep getting error message “WRONG PASSWORD” Is the site working Oct 16 2014 ?

      • I have forwarded your complaint to the support team. The site is working fine for me.

        The email for support at gedmatch is gedmatch at gmail … it is at the bottom of every page once you are logged in, click on the company name next to the copyright notice

        • Is there any contact information for those running this site? I uploaded my 23andme results last week but nothing is showing up

          • The new 23andme results do not work at GEDcom. You can only upload it to their GENESIS beta site.

            Also there is a support link if your click on the GEDmatch inc at the bottom of any page – goes to gedmatch at gmail

  5. I’m new to all this DNA testing and don’t really understand it. I’ve been using PAF (Personal Ancestral File) from the latter Day Saints for years. If I just create a gedcom file in that and upload to it GEDmatch, will that work the same?

    • You can certainly upload your GEDcom file made with PAF and use it to compare to other GEDcoms there but it is more useful to also upload the results of your DNA tests as well. If you are new to all this then try reading my DNA basics page which also has links to more places to learn about DNA testing.

  6. mskitty: I have downloaded and uploaded my DNA information through the process required to gedmatch, several days ago. I have not received the “Analyze Your Data” nor have I seen the ‘Edit or Delete’ button I am supposed to select. I do have my Kit number: A714498. Thanks. Aubrey Ted Parrish

  7. Aubrey – Your kit works fine, I just checked it. You have to log into GEDmatch using the username and password you set up there to see those and look at your kit results. Are you having difficulty logging in?

  8. Hello, I followed instructions to upload my raw date from 23andme in the zip file it came in and it seeming did so. Took quite a while, BTW. Anyway, after it was finished I look for my Kit Number and all I found was a line saying: you appear to have kit v4. Now I know that can’t be my kit number. It’s just the upgrade that 23andme did to its raw date files.

    I searched the page like a hawk for the kit number – it just was not there.
    What should I do?
    Thanks

  9. Hello,

    I have uploaded my raw data to Gedmatch a month or two ago. I have been able to log in and use the site many times before. Today I was able to log in but when I tried to do a one-to-on match using my kit number, the results never appeared, the site just kept running and running. I have been able to view on-to-one comparisons before. Do you have any idea what might be happening? Thank you.

    • Clarissa – Try again. If it fails again, clear your browser cache and try again. Then wait and try again later. If all fails, send an email to their support – gedmatch at gmail – or send me your kit number and I will have a look

  10. Richard –
    That kit is not there. Perhaps you uploaded when they were having troubles? Do you see the kit number on the left when you are logged in?
    I would recommend uploading your DNA data again now that the site is working well.
    If the new kit is not working after in a few days then contact support gedmatch at gmail
    Kitty

  11. I was asked by some to use gedmatch to upload my DNA results from ancestry.com. I go to the site and all I see is a required log-in screen. There is nothing else about this site that explains anything. There is no use statement no privacy statement or any instructions on who, what why and how to use this site.

    Why would anyone use this site? It states that it is free. There is no such thing as free. Many sites get your log-in information then share and or sell the database registrants with other marketeers.

    Can someone please tell me what is up with this “Free” site?

  12. Herb –
    The site was founded by two genetic genealogist hobbyists and was an outgrowth of a family project at family tree DNA. It gives us the ability to compare the autosomal DNA tests from different companies. You can read all about that here: http://v2.gedmatch.com/gedwiki/index.php?title=GEDmatch:About
    But you may need to be logged in to read it. They have a privacy policy page in the works.

    What many people do is create a new gmail, hotmail, or yahoo email account for just DNA and use that. By forcing you to register they protect your email address from being picked up by automated spamming tools.

    I have worked with these dudes regularly and they will not be selling your information so stop worrying. I have lots more posts on GEDmatch and the wonderful tools there, just click on the tag
    Kitty

  13. Pingback: Tuesday’s Tip: GEDmatch.com | Copper Leaf Genealogy

  14. In the Admixture (Heritage) Oracle results of the different studies, what does “distance” mean? For example, Primary Pop. 75% Hungarian, Secondary Pop. 25% Yemenite Jew Distance 0.80.

    Also, in the same type of results, they give 20 results. Are each of the results reflective of the person’s ethnic mixture? Or are only the ones with smaller distances more reflective of the ethnic history?

    Thank you! God bless you! Jeanne

    • Jeanne
      I apologize for the delay in responding. I do not know the answer. I tend to ignore that. I think that it is from the answered ancestry of the folk in the databse being used. It may be a few weeks before I can research this more thoroughly but I will do that.
      Kitty

  15. Hi… Apparently 😉 I have GedMatch but I don’t know how to retrieve it. Thanks. Best regards, James Drew aka J. W. Drew Whitaker

    • Drew
      You used a different email address at GEDmatch so use the password reset and check your fuse email address
      I deleted your kit number comment for privacy reasons. Probably no need too …
      Kitty

  16. Hi, I have tried numerous times to download to GedMatch.com and each
    time I get a different error.
    Latest one: rs84353 1 9057480 t c
    don’t know how to correct this. Can you help? thanks

    • Dorothy –
      Sounds like you are not uploading the zipped file. Are you on a Mac? sometimes Macs unzip automatically. Be sure you read the instructions carefully. Which company are you trying to upload from?
      The support email for GEdmatch is gedmatch at gmail dot com
      but if you send a message through my contact form here I will try to help you
      Kitty

      • Not on a Mac. Trying to upload from Ancestry.com. My
        son just got his Ancestry results and uploaded to GedMatch
        the first time and it processed perfectly.

        Will read instructions and check on zip again. thanks

    • Edward, have you changed your email address? You need to use the email address you registered with to log in. Else try clearing your cache.
      There is a password reset option on the login page which you can use to try to log in again.

      Gedmatch is working fine for all of us.
      The support email for GEDmatch is gedmatch at gmail dot com

  17. mskitty, Thank you so much for this blog. I am new to this and I like the way you explain things. I tried to find an appropriate place to ask this but I couldn’t so I decided to write it here. I have a world membership on ancestry. I have so far tested 5 family members, and just tested an additional 2 members. I am mostly bewildered and wondering if anyone has encountered this touchy subject.
    It is common knowledge in my family that my maternal Grandma does not have the same Father as the rest of her siblings. My Grandmother is the first born, she was born illegitimate in 1935. (Christened under her Mother’s last name and illegitimate is written in German in her Christening book under ‘Father’s name”). In an effort to find my Grandma’s line of descent, I tested both my Mother and her brother. (my Mother is first born, her brother is second born).
    As it turns out, my Mother and her brother are not full siblings, either. They share 1455 cm’s on ancestry, slightly higher on gedmatch at a little over 1500. My Mother has 3rd cousin matches on ancestry that do NOT match my Uncle (her brother), at all. Is it safe for me to assume they most likely come from my Mother’s Father?
    I only told my sister about this. I asked my sister for her dna so we could have 2 sets to compare with my mother against my uncle hoping it would make the path more clear. (we both swore to never tell my Mother) I am also testing my known half brother. (my mother’s son with a different father). Oddly, my Mother was not receptive and tried to talk my sister out of the dna test, saying it was a “waste”, “your sister already did it”. My sister and I will be sisters no matter what comes back but our Mother’s reply just creeped me out even more. ( I am and have been paying for everything, not my Mother, so her reply wasn’t based on a financial reason)
    This started out as super fun and I am just wondering if anyone else has been given multiple surprises and how they tried to figure it all out without telling anyone or being able to ask questions :/

  18. Dear Mrs S,
    The problem with DNA testing is uncovering these family secrets. For me the key is not judging, we do not know the back story. Of course the issue is who to tell what. Just because I think honesty is the best policy does not make it so. Ask at a few other places.
    There is a facebook group, DNA detectives that might be a good place to ask some of the ethical questions. Other helpful facebook groups are ISOGG and Ancestry-GEDmatch-FTDNA-23andMe-Genealogy-DNA. If you prefer mailing lists, there are a number of them at yahoo like DNA-NEWBIE and DNAadoption
    Great that you are testing your sister. My brother’s DNA has been very valuable for me as so often he got a different piece than I did from our tested Dad, so I can use that “phased” piece to figure out which family line a third person matches. The fact that a number of first and second cousins have tested is also a big help. So test as many cousins as you can. I talk mine into paying for their own tests in return for doing a family tree for them (half is already done anyway!)

    This IS super fun for those of us who love puzzles so enjoy the process and I am glad my blog has been a help.

  19. mskitty, Thank you so much for the suggestions. I have not heard of many of those groups and I will look into them today. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you so much!

  20. I had my dna downloaded today on ancestry, being very new to all this, I donot know how to upload my dna to gedmatch, so my dna is just sitting, even after listening to the how to do it videos, could someone assist me, thank you, alice

    • Alice –
      Have you created a user id on GEDmatch? Do that, then log in. Be sure you know where on your computer you put your DNA data. Important that it stay zipped (on a Mac it may get automatically unzipped) – i. e. be a zip file.

      I have some step by step slides here: http://slides.com/kittycooper/gedmatch-10#/1

      However they have just created a generic DNA upload so try that, it should be faster

  21. Kitty, I get a Chinese website when I go to Gedmatch. It was up, then I could not access, with messages like my computer was doing it. Then it came up again. Now it is Chinese. I read a Chinese guy hacked it before. They need to know if they don’t know and I have no way to contact them.

  22. Gary –
    Either your computer is hacked or you have the wrong URL. Gedmatch.com is just fine still. Don’t know where you read that. Never happened.

  23. Well, maybe it is my computer, but two things are curious. First, a friend uploaded a Family Tree kit and said it did not take. Well, I uploaded my son’s kit yesterday and Ancestry said it timed out. But it didn’t. It took. I just don’t want to go to all that trouble fixing my computer which goes to every other site correctly on the net, if there is something wrong. My friend said he talked to a Gedmatch administrator who said, and I quote: :I created an account on GedMatch and tried and it error out. I spoke a couple of times with the system administrator and he said FTDNA was not compatible with their system.”

    Now, I never knew that. It took my FTDNA. Something is wrong, IMO.

    • Glad you resolved your issue.

      Your friend must have misunderstood. FtDNA is fine, MyHeritage is not compatible yet.

  24. Just FYI, Kitty. Gedmatch was down this weekend. Some people, including me, saw a Chinese website. I thought they were hacked. Here is their posted explanation on the home page:

    Mar 6, 2017: Issues with the domain name service (DNS) IP change should be resolved. If you still are seeing a chinese web page you may need to clear your cache on your browser and/or restart your browser/computer.

    Mar 5, 2017: There was a domain service name (DNS) IP change – some users experienced between 0 and 4 hours of loss of service. During that time the old IP was assigned to a chinese site so some users were under the impression the site had been hacked – that was not the case. Sorry for this disruption.

  25. I am waiting for my Ancestry DNA results to be available. When they are will I be able to load the Ancestry results to GEDmatch? There are various posting which are not clear.

  26. GEDmatch seems to be totally down today. I keep getting a message:

    This site can’t be reached
    v2.gedmatch.com took too long to respond.
    Go to http://gedmatch.com/
    Search Google for gedmatch login1
    ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

    Then when I try “http://gedmatch.com/”, I get the message:

    This page isn’t working
    http://www.gedmatch.com is currently unable to handle this request.
    HTTP ERROR 503

    If I search Google for “gedmatch login1”, I get the following message:

    404. That’s an error.
    The requested URL was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

    What’s up with GEDmatch today?

    • Mary –

      maybe gedmatch is having redirect issues today, that has happened before

      try
      ​https://www.gedmatch.com​

      that works for me

  27. I am unable to log in to Gedmatch even with the code provided by you. I am trying to upload my DNA from 23 and me, so it is frustrating! Please tell me how I can remedy this problem.

    • Debbie, your username is your email address not your kit number. If you continue to have problems contact gedmatch at gmail to get help.

  28. I have tried several times today to upload my AncestryDNA zip file. Each time I attempt to do so, I get the message below. Please let me know what I am doing wrong, so that I may correct my actions.

    GEDmatch raw DNA file upload

    Upload Time: 2017-Jun-13 00:38:13 UTC
    Software Ver: 2017-Mar-06 16:49:03
    Email: rick78626@gmail.com
    Donor Name: Richard Wayne Malley
    Your IP: 47.220.190.82
    Your Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36
    Upload Filename: dna-data-2017-06-13.zip

    Upload File Size: 471 Bytes

    Your DNA data file has been successfully received at the server. Processing milestones are listed below.
    You should see the word ‘Finished’ at the bottom of the page when processing is complete. If you leave this page before it is finished, your data may be lost.
    Processing normally takes less than a minute.
    If you see the word ‘ERROR’, then your file did not complete processing, and you will need to try your upload again.

    ERROR: File appears to be too small.
    Make sure you are uploading the correct file.
    Please check it and try again.

    • Angela, apologies, I missed your comment. why delete your account? Anyway send your request to support at gedmatch which is the email address gedmatch at gmail

  29. I can’t seem to enter my info from FamilyTree.com. I might be just me, but none of the instructions have worked for me.

  30. I successfully uploaded my DNA data from familytreedna nearly 6 months ago but it still has not been tokenized. I have an assigned kit number and can log in but always receive the red asterisk warning. Thanks for any help you can offer.

    • It should tokenize within a day or so therefore something went wrong.

      Delete it and try again. Perhaps download it again. Be sure to read the GEDmatch instructions carefully so you get the right build version and so forth.

  31. I was uploading a friend’s raw data to Gedmatch, and when they asked for haplogroups, I accidentally typed in mine for one of them. Is there a way to reach out to Gedmatch to correct this error? I don’t want them to publish the wrong haplogroup for him. I cannot find a phone number nor email address for Gedmatch support. Thank you!

  32. If a MyHeritage ethnicity estimation has returned results which appear totally bewildering ie., 0% English when 25 years of research documentation shows 7,8,10 etc., generations all English, is it worth uploading the raw data in case something different shows up? Not sure if it is possible for an error to have occurred between the raw data and the ethnicity results – I suppose I mean does Gedmatch show its own form of ethnicity estimation in case there is a mismatch between MyHeritage raw data and the ethnicity listing we were sent?

  33. Thanks for replying Kitty – I understand that this sort of testing is changing all the time but am still trying to get my head around that with a thousand direct English ancestors my husband has 0% English in the ethnicity estimation! I think I better get a DNA for dummies to try and understand all this as our tests, (my results are still to come as first swab no good), were really done for the ethnicity estimates rather than finding new connections but am now intrigued by the DNA matches so need to learn about cM segment sizes etc., (and Eurogenes). Will search through this great blog of yours which I can see will help. Off to upload to GEDmatch – Many thanks.

  34. Hi Kitty,
    I have been trying to break down the “brick wall” of my wife’s paternal line. There are no living males to submit their dna. I have submitted my wife’s dna to FTDNA on the autosomnal test. Her kit is in my DNA account file. I am not a techie so I wonder if we could learn more about her paternal line if we upload her test kit to gedmatch? If so, just how do we go about doing this. I sort of understand the basics but need a step by step way of doing this so I don’t screw things up. My f-i-l died in 1979 and is buried in Potter’s Field, NYC and his father is buried in an unmarked grave in Pennsylvania. He died in 1918. His death cert had no genealogical information as it was completed by a hospital employee. We know nothing beyond her paternal grandfather and would like to learn more if possible by connecting to others who are related. Thanks for your interest.

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