Archive by Author | Kitty

The new clustering tool at Ancestry

Ancestry has been rolling out its clustering feature this past week to those of us with a Pro Tools subscription. If you have it, there is a new button at the top of your list of matches with an icon that says “By Cluster.”

The purpose of clustering is to create an easy-to-use visual way of organizing DNA matches that are related to you and to each other. The graphic sorts the matches who share 65 cM to 1,300 cM with you into groups who also share at least 20 cM with each other. Each match is listed in the rows on the left as well as by initials at the top for each column. In a perfect world, you would get four colored boxes, like in the image below, where each box represents the line of one of your grandparents.

The image above has actually had the top box truncated and two additional boxes removed for illustration purposes. The left side would have the full name of the match while the top has just the initials.

Some matches will also have additional matching that does not fit the groupings. Those are shown in gray.The darker boxes on the diagonal are where the same person meets themself. Note that all the boxes, even the ones that are not colored, are clickable to show who the two people that intersect there are, with all the details of that match. Plus the names can be clicked to go to those match pages. Clicking a square brings up a box like in this image.


Below the diagram there is  a list of the clusters. Click on any one to see the members of that group. Notice that each member has all the information you would see about that person in your match list. Another nice feature is that you can add everyone in a cluster to a colored dot group by clicking on the “+ Add All” button.


While this sounds like a wonderful new tool, for many of us it needs the ability to specify the range to include in order to get the best boxes. Below is what a Jewish friend of mine gets; lots of clear small boxes, but everyone is related to everyone else outside of the clusters, except for her middle box. This is what endogamy looks like!

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A Breakthrough in my German DNA

Modern day Germans do not seem to do DNA testing. I have one German grandparent born in Munich, with several generations of Bavarian ancestors, whose line I never get any matches to. Since this is my mother’s mother’s line with the paternal lines proven, the lack of matches is not due to an NPE (non parental event). For example, I have one German half 2nd cousin on my maternal grandmother’s father’s side who tested at my request (click here for that post).

Ancestry has a nice new feature where you can filter your matches by Journeys (where your ancestors came from); see image to the left. I was disappointed not to have any German journeys, but my brother has something called Franconia. When I used that filter I found a good match at the top of his list. Richard, from Pennsylvania (think Pennsylvania Dutch aka Deutsch), with an Italian surname, shares 72cM with my brother, 62 cM with me, and 25 cM with our first cousin Margaret. Richard’s tree had no ancestors listed, but his closest shared match to us, a great nephew, did have a small tree. One thing I like to do with my Pro Tools is to change the way matches are sorted to be by the best ones for the match I am looking at, rather than the usual sort of those closest to me (see image below). Their close matches often have better trees or have notes I wrote to myself when I figured them out long ago.

That nephew has all but one person showing as private in his tree. Luckily the one person whose name shows has the same surname as Richard. Next I clicked over to her profile page and used the Ancestry search function to find a more complete tree for her, which included her parents. Her mother Frances had a surname, LANG, that I knew was in my tree. She was even born in the same town, Eslarn, Bavaria, as my great grandmother Margaretha Wittman! Another search at ancestry found Francis’ Eslarn grandparents’ names in yet another tree, whose owner was also a distant DNA match.

There is a useful German website – https://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/ – which has genealogy information from many German town lineage books, including the one for Eslarn. You can list everyone with a specific surname in your town to search for an individual. Be sure to check alternate spellings. Armed with the names of Frances Lang’s grandparents, I went to that source and traced her mother back to my great grandmother’s grandparents. This was not easy because the same names were used over and over again. Frances’ mother had the same name as my great grandmother. Also their fathers, who were uncle and nephew, had the same name, Joseph Widmann/Wittman. Complicated to figure this out, but birth years helped.

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Finding the Fallen with DNA

Guest post by Wesley Johnston

On Memorial Day Weekend, GEDmatch announced a hugely important “Fallen Warriors-The Unknowns” initiative (click here for the details ).

Image by Jed Henry, from the documentary “Honoring a Commitment – The PFC Lawrence S. Gordon Story”, video on youtube and embedded below.

Family members of soldiers still missing in action from World War II and Korea can upload their autosomal DNA (aDNA) results to GEDmatch no matter what company did their test. And they can obtain the very important Individual Deceased Personnel File for their soldier. Plus everyone can upload their aDNA to increase the probability of matching with the DNA of an Unknown soldier.

GEDmatch’s initiative will bring the DNA of family members of those still missing into a database with which the DNA of any Unknown remains can be compared, easily, quickly and at minimal cost. In fact, GEDmatch probably already holds the DNA of family members of the Unknowns.

This is a wonderful thing for GEDmatch to do!!

Genetic genealogy readers may know me from my work in genetic genealogy: my analytical tool articles in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy (JoGG), the many Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) projects I administer, the conferences I attend. One of the many other hats I wear is Historian of the US 7th Armored Division Association; another is Founding President of the American WWII Association Historians Consortium.

This is what led to me present “When John Doe is a WWII Unknown Soldier at the 2024 East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference (ECGGC).

In our modern era, when law enforcement and the DNA Doe Project have embraced Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) to solve cases in far shorter time and a far smaller cost, it is difficult to understand that the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), whose mission is “fullest possible accounting” relegates DNA to the last step of their years-long identification process of anthropologists examining remains, instead of the first step.

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Come celebrate DNA day with me!

This Friday is DNA Day; a day we honor the discovery of the structure of DNA. To mark this occasion, most of the personal DNA testing companies are having sales. There are also special events all over this country at museums, schools, and web sites. GEDmatch has a sale on for its premium tools plus I am doing a presentation there at 2 pm Eastern time on Friday.

Click image for the page at GEDmatch about its DNA day. At the bottom of the page is a link to register for my talk.

My last talk at GEDmatch was an attempt to make it easier to use the site by explaining the main tools and how to use them. That talk is still available — just click here. Of course, by now, the home page has changed and new features have been added.

Friday’s talk is focused on how I myself use GEDmatch when trying to understand a new match. In other words, why I ask my matches at other sites to upload to GEDmatch! I will also discuss some mysteries that the tools at GEDmatch have helped me solve. Last, but not least, I will answer questions from the audience. Hope to “see” you all there.

UPDATE: The presentation will be posted on the GEDmatch YouTube channel soon. The slides are available online at https://slides.com/kittycooper/advanced-tools-at-gedmatch-using-segment-data-and-more

Nice New Features at GEDmatch

I love the new notes feature at GEDmatch; it helps me keep track of which matches I have figured out. Plus it even works for all the kits I have there. For example, if I make a note on a match to my own kit, that same note is available when I run my brother’s or my Dad’s one-to-many. Here is how it looks on my one-to-many listing:

One-to-Many with some added notes (gray boxes in middle) – click image for a larger version


Clicking on “Add” in the notes column lets you give it a title and then put in some text
. Only the title shows on the list so I use it for the surname of the line the match is related on. Warning, on my iPad the old text for title does not disappear when you type over it; however it is gone once the note is saved and retrieved again.

Another benefit for me, with the long list of kits I have uploaded on my dashboard, is that I can use the notes feature on that list to make the ones I want to use stand out. Personally, I have several DNA test results for myself and other family members which I have combined into one master kit (click here for that post). Now I can easily see which one I want to use as per the image below.

I am less delighted with the new tree presentation, although I am grateful that I can click “Classic View” to get the old text heavy version.
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