Being able to group my cousins from different lines into colored “tag groups” on the GEDmatch site is a wonderful new feature. It makes it easy to quickly see which line a new cousin fits into because the new Tier 1 one-to-many display uses those colors to highlight the kits belonging to a group. See the image below for a colorful example of my own one-to-many.

Tag Groups

Tag groups are for everyone, not just tier one members,. They can also be used to select what to look at in the “Multiple kit Analysis” function. However they are not yet included in any of the other functions, like the people who match both kits, triangulation or matching segments and of course not the regular one-to-many.

UPDATE 26 Jan 2021: Both Beta One-to-Many Tools include tag groups but you have to check the box for them, either one or all.

Here is a quick example of how a new close cousin can be visually assigned to a line when you use the tier 1 one-to-many on their kit. My tag groups use yellow for close family, aqua for paternal first cousins, shades of blue for my Etne lines, green for my Munson line, and purple for my Wold line. Which line is this cousin on?

Right, she is a Munson.

Other New Features

I love that the newest pages at the GEDmatch site include a top menu. and use tabs to make for a more compact display

Also the new Tier 1 version of the one-to-many is outstanding. In addition to showing those colored tag groups. it has search boxes at the top of every column for just that column. The form to invoke the one-to-many is gone, instead the selection is neatly across the top so you can change it dynamically. The long details that used to be at the top of the page now only show up as a pop-up window if you click the tip button.

Yesterday I did a presentation on all of this, click here for the slides which show many of the details of these new features.

Making a Tag Group

There are two ways to make a tag group or add kits to an existing one. One way is by manually adding the kits from your profile management page. You can get to that page from the home page by clicking on View/Change your profile.  On new pages that have a top menu, just click on Profile Management which gets a drop down menu that includes Manage Profile. Click that.

When you get to the profile management page there are three tabs. Click on the Tag Group Management tab. To make a new group, give it a name (my red arrow points to that box) and then select a color.

Once you have a tag group, you can add kits to it by clicking on the Display/Edit Tag Group button. That gets you a simple form where you can add kits in the boxes.

 

An easier way to make or add to a tag group is to check a bunch of kits in the one-to-many (or the People who match one
or both of 2 kits) and then click the tag group tab on visualization options page. This gives you a page where you can add these kits to a new or old tag group. The red arrows below are my additions to show you where to add the kits to the new or old tag group.

Visualization Options

Visualization Options is the new more descriptive name for the page for multiple kit analysis which gives you many options for working with the kits you have chosen. This new version of that page not only has tabs and a top menu but will make a new window or browser tab for your selected function so you can try lots of them without losing the original page of options.

There are lots of slides illustrating these functions in my presentation. I particularly like the tables you get with the 3-D chromosome browser.

By the way the i4gg.org site has the videos from last fall’s conference which includes my Gedmatch talk. That presentation has some basics plus a lot about the multi-kit analysis.

Kudos to Gedmatch for these new great features and pages!

UPDATE: Don’t get confused by the “X with this offset” at the top of the Tier 1 one-to-many, although they look like they are meant to be together, they are not. The X is for the checkbox for looking at just X matches. The with this offset is used to move through your matches since that page only displays 500 at a time, by using an offset you can start at your 1000th match for example.

UPDATE 23-Mar-2017: There is a nice post about tag groups over at the Quotidian Genealogy blog along with a number of other GEDmatch posts see https://quotidiangenealogy.com/gedmatch-tag-groups