Sunday April 25 is DNA Day. Every major company is having a sale to celebrate. Family Tree DNA is even having sales on the upgrades to their various Y tests. This is a great opportunity to get that done. Click here for their price list.
Click the image below for a very interesting post on the history of DNA day from the 23andme blog.
There has been much exciting news in the genetic genealogy world while I was away (I still am on a break). So here are some of the announcements you might want to read about.
- GEDmatch has collaborated with Genetic Affairs to improve their clustering tools and to include auto-tree building. Click here for that news release. The next blog post I intend to write will evaluate these.
- DNApainter is sending out a free monthly newsletter, the most recent had information about a couple of new releases. Go to that site and click the green banner at the top of the homepage to sign up if you’re interested.
If you haven’t tried Deep Nostalgia, the new tool to animate family photos at MyHeritage, maybe click here to read all about it.
Ancestry has reorganized their Match list page. More of your notes will now show up since they have been moved to be below each match.
Here is how your matches now look at Ancestry:
Here are the same matches (plus one extra) from a 2019 blog post:
Hmmm, these tree sizes haven’t changed sizes in the past two years. I guess these are not active users which explains why I have not heard back from them …
As always in my articles, links to the major companies are affiliate links.
Ancestry has a long way to go to make customers happy. Over the years they have taken away some good and important navigational tools, as well as page numbering. Some of us oldtimers will put up with some of this, but the younger group who are accustomed to working with sophicated IT in their workface, find Ancestry’s lack of tools laughable. Ancestry does not get it!
Caith –
I think you are misunderstanding Ancestry’s objectives. They are trying to make this DNA information understandable to hobbyists working on their family trees. They seem less interested in providing tools for the serious genetic genealogist. Still their matching DNA to family trees is quite impressive (ThruLines).
Kitty
My wife recently received her Ancestry DNA results. Her ethnicity profile made no sense. I called Ancestry support hoping for some assistance to understand them.
The support tech talked in simplistic circular ways about basics that I’ve understood for years. He seemed incapable of grasping the issues I was communicating— or perhaps simply stonewalling me. Finally he said he would refer my inquiry to “upper management “ and they would be in contact with me. So far I have not heard from them. Is this typical of Ancestry’s service experiences?
No it is not typical. In the past I have asked to speak to the person’s manager when it was clear I knew more than the representative did and that often worked.
Ethnicity is far from accurate beyond broad continental outlines. Try uploading her results to the other sites, gedmatch (free), myheritage, and family tree DNA, and see what they say
Sometimes when ethnicity is far off, it reveals an unexpected parentage event. Grandad not the actual grandad, etc., so look at her matches to see if they fit the expected family tree.