Maybe you have had great luck with people responding to your shares on 23andme but most of us have at best 30% of our share requests accepted (of 1800 DNA relatives my Dad has 338 shares and 40 introduction accepted so just under a 20% acceptance rate). This is especially frustrating when someone is clearly a close relative and does not respond. Of course some of the reason for the lack of response is that the default setting on 23andme is to not send emails when there are messages in the inbox. Fortunately the occasional email from 23andme about new relatives or news does get some of them to log in and see the invites. I always get several acceptances from old shares after one of those broadcast emails.

Yes I can hear those of you who have tested at familytree DNA laughing and say well we can see the shared DNA. But you also may never hear back from some of the most promising leads who do not have much of a tree posted and more importantly you cannot compare people you match with each other which we can do with our shares. There are pluses and minuses to each testing company.

Below are a few of my closest non accepting DNA relatives. S M is public and accepted contact but not sharing. G S is public and responded to a message asking if he was related to my S family from Etne with a no, but has not shared. I made an error on the 3rd introduction to one relative and now can no longer contact them, at least from this account.

So for those of us using 23andme I will use these matches as a case study on how to find the DNA segments where they match my Dad using “Countries of Ancestry.” This only works if your relative has entered the countries of origin for their parents and grandparents.

First a little known trick, you can download a CSV of all your DNA relatives by clicking the Download button on the top right of the page when on the DNA relatives page.

A box will come up asking you where to save it on your computer. Note that the default file name is relative_finder_Your_Name_digitaldate.csv

In order to get to the page called “Countries of Ancestry,” where we may find the overlapping DNA, first click on “Ancestry Tools” in the menu that appears when you put your cursor on “My Results” in the top bar, as shown below:

Then on the Ancestry Tools page, select countries of ancestry.

 

This will take you to a fun page where you can mouse over the colors on the chart to see more relatives. Some of whom may not be on your DNA relatives chart. You can use the 23andme search feature to find their profiles and send them an invite.

But that is not the topic of this post. Scroll down that page and click on the big blue button with your name on it as shown in the image below.

 

This is the graph from my Dad’s Countries of Ancestry with an example of a mouse over showing an anonymous relative. But it is that big blue button at the bottom that gets you the CSV file that we want. It will have a list of all your DNA relatives who have answered their ancestry questions. You may need to answer that survey also but I am not sure.

After you click that button a box comes up asking where to save this on your computer. The default file name is ancestry_finder_Your_Name_digitaldate.csv –  after this file is saved, open it in your favorite spreadsheet program; double clicking on it will typically accomplish this on a PC.

Once you have the ancestry finder file open in your spreadsheet program (openoffice for me)  sort it by “Match Name.” Make sure the whole file is selected before you sort it and indicate that the columns have named headings.

I searched for G S nor S M by name and neither was there. Not surprisingly neither of them has filled out the ancestry information. I will try asking them to do so by messaging them. Now to the anonymous puzzles. I have 3 people with 3 segments shared and .54% shared DNA. I may not be able to tell them apart but I can find them if they have done the survey. I also have one person with .52% and 5 segments.

Since I am not interested in Ashkenazi DNA for Dad’s ancestors, I deleted those four columns in the spreadsheet, made the other columns narrower, and shortened the column headings so that it fit on my screen. Then I looked at just the anonymous matches. I eyeballed them for any that had three or more entries, summed their totals, deleted the others, and used colors to better read the important columns. Below are my findings. Looks like I found the woman with five matching segments.

Only two of the people with three segments have enough DNA to qualify for .54% and no I did not do the math. I just looked at a known relative who has .48% and 35.4 cMs and since these two have more made the assumption. I am going to assume the one with Norway ancestors is the one who indicated Norway in their profile and the other is the one who indicated Northern Europe. I am guessing that the one who did not indicate ancestry is the one who is not in this sheet.

Now I can add their segments to my spreadsheet. If they overlap with other relatives who triangulate with another of my family’s kits that I control, I can go through the same process in the other account and see if a person with the same information and similar segments (exact not necessary, boundaries are fuzzy) is there.

Perhaps if I find which family line they are related to and reinvite them with more information they will at least accept contact and share genealogical information. I also plan on sending a link to Roberta Estes’ blog post on what genome sharing at 23andme really means, I am hoping it will make them more comfortable with this process!