Search Results for: gedmatch

All My GEDmatch Articles

Apr7

GEDmatch is one of my favorite sets of genetic genealogy tools but it can be hard to get started with. I have done many presentations over the years attempting to help people master the basics there, most recently for Family Tree University (click here). Plus I wrote a GEDmatch Basics article for their magazine (click here) which explains all the column headings on the one-to-many report. [UPDATE 15 Apr 2024: Click here for the interview I did for the FTU podcast.] Impact-Site-Verification: d124adea-1323-4f60-a2fb-f1fdf846aa56

Over the past 12 years I have written many posts about GEDmatch, most of which are still useful. So I decided to make a new tag – GEDmatch tools – which brings up just my posts that explain a specific tool. Now I can see which tools I still need to write about!

Here is the list of my articles in reverse chronological order (click any title to go to that post):

GEDmatch: What’s New and my Basics Talk

Mar6

The people behind the current GEDmatch have been working hard to improve its usability and its appearance. Tom Osypian, the QIAGEN GEDmatch Product Manager, gave a talk at the recent Rootstech about what’s new there. I hope some of you went to that! I was sad not to make it this year, other than virtually.

Meanwhile on this Thursday March 7, I will be giving an updated version of my talk on GEDmatch Basics for Family Tree University.  This webinar is designed to help the new user understand how to use the terrific tools on that site.

Now to list the main new features.

  • Most every function now has a drop down list of your kit numbers
    (cut and paste still works)
  • You can import your family tree from the FamilySearch website if you have an account there
  • You can click over to the People who match both of two kits function from the one to many.
  • Emails are now partially concealed.
  • Use of computerized collecting will shut down your account.

Personally my favorite new feature is the click point called Match on each match in the one to many tool. That takes you to a pre-filled form for the person you did the one-to-many for to compare them to the person in the resulting list. This gives you a quick way to see which of your relatives on GEDmatch match the new match, and thus what family line they are likely from.

I also tried the import of our family tree from FamilySearch for my brother’s kit and it worked beautifully. One small problem was that my Norwegian grandmother has a foreign character in her middle name so she came over as ? Lee (just her surname). I have reported that problem.

Showing the first three characters of the email plus the provider seems a good compromise to increase privacy while allowing you to see when kits belong to the same person. Clicking on that partial email address takes you to the user lookup page for that user which gives you the pseudonym or name of the kit owner, their email address, and their GEDCOM numbers if there are any

As to computerized collecting, if you are a programmer, it may seem efficient to write yourself a script to scrape the information you want but computers are too fast and that bogs down the GEDmatch servers and thus affects everyone else’s response time.

What’s new at GEDmatch and i4GG

Jan25

Every year genetic genealogists gather in San Diego in February for the i4GG conference founded by CeCe Moore and Dr. Tim Janzen. This year is the tenth anniversary and I am honored to be one of the presenters again. Click here for the i4GG web site.

In past years I have talked about the new features at GEDmatch. In 2022, this was a particularly dense lecture. (click here for the slides), as there were so many new and enhanced features. Clustering was taking the community by storm and GEDmatch has two versions of that, one of which even includes tree building.

{UPDATE 9 Feb 2024] My talk for i4GG this year is about how to use Ethnicity to solve DNA cases. This year, I will talk about GEDmatch yet again, but as there are fewer new features, I will include some of the ways that site has helped me solve DNA puzzles.

One nice new feature is that the site now sends you an email when you have a new match. You can select both the frequency of those emails and the match size which triggers an email.

Whenever I get a new match on the One-to-Many, the first thing I want to see is who else they match among my relatives, so it has always puzzled me why they did not include a button to do that. Needless to say this was a feature I requested. Now it is finally here! There is a column called ICW tool which has the word Match which when clicked takes you to the function People who match both, or 1 of 2 kits with the kit numbers filled in, ready to use.

One-to-Many image showing new ICW tool

middle section of the free version of One-to-Many limited version

 

Come to my lecture to hear more!

When GEDmatch says your Parents are Related but they are not …

Sep18

GEDmatch.com has a wonderful free tool called Are Your Parents Related which I have previously blogged about (click here). This function looks at your raw DNA results for long stretches where you have the exact same DNA on each side of a paired chromosome, known as Runs Of Homozygosity (ROH). In other words where you got the exact same DNA from each parent. I always check this for unknown parentage cases.

When you have ROH segments, it is expected that your parents are related. However there is one other way this can happen: in very rare cases, you can get a whole or partial chromosome from only one parent. This is known as uniparental disomy (UPD).

An example of UPD on chromosome 6  from the Are Your Parents Related (AYPR) tool.

How can you tell that this is the case? Likely it is UPD when you have only one ROH segment and it is for the whole chromosome like the image above or for one arm of a chromosome (from or up to the centromere). In the less than one hundred cases I have looked at, I have seen UPD only twice. Once a whole chromosome as shown above and once the long arm of chromosome 14.

UPD can result in some dangerous medical conditions as per Science Direct (click here). Please see a professional genetic councilor if you suspect you have this.
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My talk about GEDmatch and more about GEDCOMs

Jun6

Finally! The video of the GEDmatch basics talk I did on May 26 for Verogen is now available. Best to view it full screen at youtube in order to see the images well.

Click here for the slides for that talk

GEDmatch, a DNA tools site, was originally created to compare GEDCOMs, a function you can still use it for. A GEDCOM is a plain text file of your family tree formatted so that any genealogy program can understand it. Click here for the wikipedia entry explaining this in more detail.

In my talk I emphasized that it is best to upload a privatized GEDCOM with no more than 10 generations of ancestors then connect it to the DNA test for that person. This will help you use the relative matching tools. I promised in the presentation to explain how to create a GEDCOM. So here are a few of the many ways.

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