A DNA cousin who just uploaded his ftDNA results to GEDmatch asked me what he could do with them, so I decided to write a blog post to answer this question. Here are my favorite things to do there:
- make pretty pictures of your populations ancestry – called the Ad-Mix page
(see more on that below) - get a list of possible relatives who have tested with other companies as well as the one you tested with, that is the “One to Many” option on your home page. Email addresses are shown but you cannot just click on them, you can cut and paste the first part but then you have to retype the ISP (prevents spam)
- look at a specific area of one chromosome to see who else matches you there – “Find people who match
with you on a specified segment” - compare your GEDcom to one other to see of you can find that elusive MRCA
- compare your GEDcom to all your DNA matches that have uploaded GEDCOM files
I wrote a previous post on the Ad-Mix tool. My preferred calculator is the Eurogenes 12 since I have so many Scandinavian ancestors and I am 100% European in my ancestry. I would love to hear what other calculators people like for their ancestral roots.
So far the GEDCOM utilities have not been all that useful for the Norwegian names since they are not very consistant in people’s genealogies and there is the problem of the non English characters. Not everyone includes the farm name so there are too many Lars Larsens and Ols Olsens.
Here are a few other suggestions from someone in the know:
The server where GEDcoms were stored crashed quite a while back and isn’t online at present. But there are other tools…
You can discover which of your tested SNPs are rare, and how rare.
You can determine if you parents are related.
For a while this summer they had something where you could discover which of your SNPs matched Neanderthal or Denisovian DNA. It may reappear again if they’re just recallibrating the tool.
A few updates:
Barton Lewis’ guide to gedmatch is now in our downloads area
“Find people who match
with you on a specified segment” is disabled – it had too much overhead
There are improved triangulation tools and chromosome pictures so another blog post is needed soon!
I have been trying to upload a GEDCOM to GedMatch for over a week but when I click on Uploading a GedCom, I get a blank white page. Am I doing something wrong, or is this part of the site not working..anyone know?
It was a bug which is now fixed, thanks for letting us all know
I have been trying to load my GEDCOM to GEDmatch. It never completes, leaving me with:
Email: apjackman@ucdavis.edu
Donor Name: Alan\’s ancestors
Filename (IN): combined_2014-11-28.ged
Your GEDCOM file has been successfully uploaded. Processing milestones are listed below…
Size: 330184 Bytes
Building name table… Please wait…
The file is small. What could be causing this.
I have this response from the GEDmatch folk