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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.org

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.

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Staying Home

Mar24

As someone who has worked part-time from her house for some 20 years now, there is not much difference in my routines just because we are self-quarantined. Important for me is structure. Regular times I am in my home office and a time window where I will answer the phone (but I way prefer emails).

The new adventure is ordering grocery deliveries online. Planning many days in advance is best, since store deliveries are backed up. We just got our Costco order made about 5 days ago. So happy! Also you can get weekly deliveries of vegetables from various services. I just got my first vegetable order from Imperfect Foods and they all look fine to me. Slightly different sizes of onions and one broken stalk on a celery bunch but perfecty edible. [UPDATE 25-Mar-2020: my farmfreshtoyou box just came, what gorgeous produce! If you try them, please use my refer a friend code KITT4641 ]

Screenshot from kibbutzing a bridge match online at BridgeBase.com (BBO)

The other thing to get used to is playing bridge online at BridgeBase.com rather than in person at the weekly game at our club.

If you are a Beta tester at Ancestry DNA there is a wonderful new feature to play with where you can link your DNA relatives to your own tree. As soon as more people have that I will blog about it.

By the way I have been posting one flower picture a day from my garden on Instagram and from there to FaceBook.
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A Reading List to Stay at Home With

Mar14

Since you are all carefully practicing social distancing in order to do your part to slow this pandemic, I put together some DNA focused reading recommendations. I am very grateful to my kindle app which makes it easy to get books.

My favorite new book about DNA and genealogy is The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are by Libby Copeland which is as suitable for your less addicted family members as it is for you, my fellow seekers. I like the term seeker that Libby uses for those of us who are loving using DNA for solving family mysteries and genealogy puzzles. At the end of this article I have some notes about Libby’s own family discoveries from my interview with her.

Streaming movies is another way to stay in. You might watch the 2011 movie Contagion again. Click here for the NPR fact checking of it. In summary, except for the speed of a vaccine being developed, it is quite accurate. Thank goodness COVID-19 is not as lethal as the virus in the movie.

Here is more detail about each of the books I recommend.

The Lost Family weaves the Alice Plebuch story though out the entire book, a clever mechanism to keep your interest. It includes the very modern history of genetic genealogy interspersed with many stories of people discovering DNA surprises such as Daddy was not biological. From the cover flap comes this very apt quote: the book explores “what happens when we embark on a vast social experiment with little understanding of the ramifications.” Libby is an excellent writer and story teller. I found her book captivating.

The other books I have read recently about DNA are enjoyable for me, a DNA junkie, but I will not suggest them to my husband. Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes is dense and comprehensive – I have been reading a chapter a week in the bathtub. From Neanderthals to Eugenics it covers a great deal of ground and is both well researched and well written.

More fun, but still mainly for us seekers, is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. My brother loved this book. It explores the vagaries of genetic inheritance from the eyes of someone becoming a parent.

An oldie but goodie from 1999 is Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography Of A Species In 23 Chapters (P.S.) This is the book which reignited my interest in genetics in the early 2000s. He has written many interesting books on this topic, this one was written while the human genome was being sequenced. It has a chapter for each chromosome highlighting a known gene on every one.

If how to respond to a pandemic is on your mind you might enjoy The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. A nice thick book of almost 500 pages it starts with a really good history of modern medicine and continues with how the failings of various leaders let the 1918 Spanish Flu spread dramatically, for example, by not cancelling a parade in Philadelphia,

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