Search Results for: Ahnentafel

Using an ahnentafel and the DNArboretum tool

Sep11

There is a new tool, a chrome add-on called DNArboretum, that will generate an ahnentafel ancestor list from a Family Tree DNA tree or from the old format 23andme tree (not myHeritage).

An ahnentafel is a very clever and condense way to show all your ancestors. When trying to match up with a DNA relative it is particularly useful since you can quickly scan their ahnentafel for places and names in common. Obviously it would be better to automate that comparison but with misspellings and Norwegian names that has not worked well for me. However it might work for you, so click here for my blog post about how to use automation to compare GEDcoms.

MyAhnentafel

This is part of my ahnentafel as generated by DNArboretum from my tree at Family Tree DNA when logged into another account there. I clicked on my great grandmother Maren Wold and it bolded all her ancestors and descendants. Note that my parents are missing because they are marked private.

Sue Griffith of Genealogy Junkie has blogged in detail about how to install and use this tool at
http://www.genealogyjunkie.net/blog/dnarboretum-a-great-free-google-chrome-extension-for-viewing-trees-on-23andme-old-style-trees-and-ftdna

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This Blog Began Ten Years Ago Today

Nov2

On this date, ten years ago, I started this blog. I used to write a new post once or twice a week but I have slowed down since the death of my husband in 2020, to about once a month. At least I am still blogging.

I started this blog as a way to keep track of my own genealogy and DNA research so that I no longer needed to bombard my cousins with emails. Also I was hoping to teach them how to use DNA to assist their own genealogy research. My first post was about my Dad’s Y DNA test results.

Sample extract of my compact chromosome mapper at GEDmatch

It turned out that my articles were often helpful to others. My focus was frequently on unknown parentage. I even wrote a number of tools to assist people with that research. My most popular tool, Ahnen2GED, turns an ahnentafel list into a GEDcom. Another program, my compact chromosome browser was picked up by GEDmatch, a tools site I blog about frequently. An exciting moment for me was when a screenshot of it appeared on TV in an episode of CeCe Moore’s Genetic Genealogist 

When this blog became very popular (much to my surprise), I started to be asked to give talks about genetic genealogy, first at local groups and then important conferences like RootsTech and the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree. This month I will speak about unknown parentage for the North County DNA interest group on November 19. That group is close to my heart since it was there that I first heard CeCe Moore speak in 2012 and got inspired to do more with my family’s DNA test results.

Thank you all for reading my blog.

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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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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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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