Archives

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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Automation to Find the Common Ancestors in the Trees of your DNA Matches

Oct28

Recently I gave a presentation on many of the great new DNA tools that have come out this year. The talk focused on how both Ancestry and MyHeritage figure out the likely ways in which you are related to a DNA match from the other trees on their sites (click here for my slides). This left very little time to go into the details of my favorite third party tools that can do similar magic, so I promised the attendees a blog post…

The three tools I use the most for finding common ancestors are:

They all have their strengths but none are free. Think of the endless hours professional programmers have spent making these tools and be grateful.

Mainly I use them for unknown parentage cases where the tree is not yet known. However they are also useful for your genealogy. For example, Genetic Affairs will look at the trees on Family Tree DNA and show you any common ancestors it finds with the path to your matches:

My Dad shares DNA with many descendants of this couple as shown by Genetic Affairs from his FtDNA results

There are many other tools I could not do without, like the online relationship calculator at DNApainter (click here) but this article is about automation to find common ancestors. Read on for my summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the tools that do that.

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Talking About Many New DNA Tools

Sep22

Tuesday I will be presenting the latest version of my talk on solving unknown parentage cases in a virtual conference hosted by the Utah genealogical society (click here for more information). In the past, I relied heavily on the tools at DNAgedcom, but now there are several new tools that are even more exciting.

The basic methodology for unknown parentage searches is to DNA test everywhere. Then look through the trees of your matches to see what ancestors are in common. Build trees down from those common ancestors looking for where the different families meet in a marriage. Then find a child of that marriage who was in the right place at the right time to be the missing parent or grandparent or …

A major difficulty is that many people test DNA without providing a tree. Usually you have to try to build trees for them. Another problem is that building trees down from those common ancestors is incredibly labor intensive when the families are large and the matches are distant. My latest strategy for difficult cases is to recruit several search angels to build the different trees.

There are now tools that automate building trees!
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Creating a GEDCOM from a text file

Aug17

The purpose of this post is to announce new features for my Ahnentafel list to GEDCOM Conversion Tool. The link for this new version is: https://kittymunson.com/dna/Ahnen2GEDv2.php
Once I am confident that it works as it should, the previous version will be replaced with this one.

So why would you want to use this tool?

One way to look for any ancestors you might share with a DNA match is to take a GEDCOM of their pedigree and add it to a copy of your genealogy database to see if there are any duplicate profiles. Other ways are to use DNA2Tree or GWorks (click either for those posts). Often I just visually scan a compact list of my match’s ancestors using the new feature at 23andme, WIKItree’s compact tree, or an Ahnentafel list. Unless, of course, Ancestry‘s ThruLines or MyHeritage’s Theory of Family Relativity have found the common ancestors for me already.

This is the Ancestry tree for the grandmother of my new South African cousins with Pedigree Thief

Did you know that you can get an Ahnentafel list of a person’s ancestors from almost any online family tree displayed in pedigree format via a Chrome add-on called, appropriately, Pedigree Thief?

Better yet, did you know that you can make a GEDCOM from an Ahnentafel list via my tool, Ahen2GEDcom. Click here for my old post about that.

Although my program was originally written to turn the output from DNArboretum and Pedigree Thief into a GEDCOM, some people have found more uses for it.

For example, you might have a document that your Uncle Fred made and you would prefer to use ‘replace all’ in a word processor to cutting and pasting each bit of information into a genealogy program or website. Or you might be collecting information from relatives via spreadsheets or google forms (which can make spreadsheets). Any plain text file can be used as input to my tool, including a CSV file, as long as it is formatted the way the program expects it.

Debbie Parker Wayne is using an online form to collect information for a project of hers, so she asked me if I could enhance my tool to add marriages and sources. I said, “Sure but it is not trivial and I charge more for programming than DNA work.” She said that her book was doing well and she could pay for this. So we did it.

A computer program like this needs the format to be exact in order for it to work. So here are the details.
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More Automated DNA Match Clustering!

Dec30

Have you been wondering why are all your favorite bloggers are going crazy for automatic clustering? Well it is a fun visual technique to see which matches belong to which family line by making a chart with your matches across both the top and side, grouping them by who matches who, and then coloring those boxes in. This creates visual clusters which will roughly correspond to your great grandparents or their parents.

My perfect cousin has many matches on all her great grandparent lines (green is my Munson side) so I used her to showcase the new DNAgedcom clustering above. Notice how similar it is to her cluster from Genetic Affairs shown in my previous blog about that site and tool.

Here are all the new ways to cluster our DNA matches:

  • DNAgedcom now has a clustering tool in their client (DGC) which uses your ancestry match list and ICW files (described in detail in the read more below)
  • Genetic Affairs has Ancestry clustering working again
  • DNApainter created a tool to create a CSV from the Genetic Affairs html cluster file. Some of us love to use spreadsheets.
  • Andy Lee of Family History Fanatics figured out how to take an autosomal match matrix from GEDmatch and cluster it in a spreadsheet program, Click here for that video – the explanation starts just after 42 minutes and this is really fun!
  • Rumor has it that GEDmatch may add automatic clustering sometime in the new year…

All of this is based on the method developed by Dana Leeds to organize your matches which is easy and simple to do. Click here for her blog about that.

Read on for how I used the new DNAgedcom clustering tool for myself and my brother, where I know all our great grandparents.

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