Archive | April 2020

Super Large Numbers Do Not Work in my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM Tool

Alert, there is a bug in my tool to convert text files to GEDCOMs: very large Ahnentafel numbers like “46406041600” will cause it to hang.

I will add code to ignore large numbers by May (end of this week). If you are a regular user of this tool, check this post for the update when the new feature is released.

Something must have changed on the collection of trees because I had three emails in the last week complaining that my tool hung and did not complete the conversion. In all cases, the Ahnentafel went up to extremely large numbers, so eliminating those last few lines fixed the problem

Here is an example of the last several lines of a file that did not work:

Here are the last few lines of the same file after removing the lines with very high numbers. This version worked.

Do you really need these people born in the 1200s? What is the probability that they even are actually your ancestors?

This appears to be some sort of limitation in either the storage space for the program or the number sizes. Thus I propose to modify the code to ignore ahnentafel numbers with more than seven digits and to have it tell you that it did that.

Any other ideas out there? Remember I make almost no money on this, just the occasional small thank you donation, so I am not looking for a solution that will take lots of my time.

New Ancestry DNA Feature: Connecting Matches to Your Tree

Apr22

New Icon: Match connected to Tree

Ancestry has unveiled a new convenient feature: the ability to link a DNA match to their entry in your tree. No one can see the resulting tag but you or someone with whom you have shared your DNA results.

In the past, I would add the pathway to the relationship in the notes for a match. Below is how the match to my second cousin John looks now. The tree icon with a check next to his name means that I have connected this match to my tree. Clicking on that icon will take you to a view of him within my tree. On the right you can see how I explained his connection to me in the notes next to the notepad icon.

Over in your tree, each person that has been connected to a DNA match also has that icon on their image. Here is how my brother looks in the pedigree view in my tree now with the new icon next to a green leaf. People I have shared BOTH my tree and DNA with can also see that icon but not on the living unless they specifically have permission to see living people in your tree. Also they have to have turned on “connected DNA Matches” from the DNA icon at the bottom of the far left tower of icons. That icon is only there when a DNA test is connected to that tree. Clicking it slides in a panel on the right where you can select which DNA icons you want to see. For example, since I have turned on the ThruLines indicator, my parents and grandparents have the ThruLines icon showing in the image below.

Pedigree view of my brother, yellow arrow pointing to the DNA icon added by me

Why is this useful you may ask? Well for me it is most useful on those distant cousins with no trees whose relationship I figured out a while back and have probably forgotten the details of by now. Or maybe Ancestry found it for me and I added that family branch to my tree (click here for my post for how to easily do that).

Since I have shared both my DNA and my tree with my brother and a few interested cousins, they can look at my match list for those icons to see if I have already figured out how a newly found cousin connects to us.

The other time I have found this new feature to be really useful is when I have a research tree for an unknown parentage case and have built out the tree of a match as a floating branch within that tree to much more depth than they had in their own tree. Now I can connect those matches so that I can quickly click to see what I have built for them.

Here is the step by step of how to set up a connection with this new tool using my brother as an example.

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When the found father needs help understanding the DNA results

Apr13

image from a late 19th century Kunisada print owned by Kitty

Often when I help someone find their biological father with DNA it turns out that he never knew about the pregnancy. His reaction when contacted varies greatly, perhaps his memories of the 60s or 70s are quite faint… Frequently his first question is “How did you find me?” Or “What makes you think it’s me?”

Sometimes my answer is because a close relative of yours tested their DNA and helped us. More often I explain the basic methodology of pedigree triangulation that was used, as follows.

We look at the family trees of 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th cousin DNA matches to see what ancestors they have in common with each other. Sometimes we find two shared ancestral couples, then we look for the son of a person descended from one couple who married a daughter descended from the other couple.

Other times we just find one ancestral couple and some common surnames. We build that couple’s family tree downwards, looking for some of the other surnames we found until we find a descendant who was in the right place at the right time to be the missing father. There are a number of posts here describing specific success stories that are tagged Adoption Success Stories. Click here for my favorite and easy to understand story.

Click here for a more advanced explanation of pedigree triangulation with informative images from DNAadoption.or g

Next we ask the found possible father to take a DNA test. To encourage him to use the testing company that his probable child used to confirm the results, rather than a commercial paternity test, I send the following plus more details of how he was found including images of the family trees.
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New Numbers for the Shared cM Project

Apr3

All of us genetic genealogists are extremely grateful to Blaine Bettinger for collecting statistics on the actual amounts of DNA shared for known family relationships. He just updated his numbers for that project this past March. Click here for the details on his blog

This update is also included in the wonderful online calculator at DNApainter where you can input either the cM or the percentage shared and dynamically see the probabilities of various relationships. Click here to read what the programmer, Jonny Perl, has explained about its new features on his blog.

I refer people to this calculator all the time so that they can see the full range of possible relationships for a specific amount of DNA. In the above screen shot of that tool I have used red arrows to show where you would put the number of cM or the % shared.

An exciting new feature is that if you click on any of the colored boxes it shows you a histogram of the frequencies within the range for that relationship.

Let me demonstrate using this calculator by comparing a few of my family members.