Fun with the relationship calculator at GENI.com

Aug3

My favorite feature at GENI is the relationship calculator. Often when I find a new Norwegian cousin via DNA, I can look them up at GENI and it will tell me how we are related. Plus a fun way to fritter away a few hours is to use the calculator to find out how you are related to various famous or historical figures. Norwegian records are good and thus many of us can trace back to early Nordic aristocracy which means we are related to all kinds of interesting people.

When I go to my 19th cousin 4 times removed George Washington’s profile, it shows me our relationship at the top. If I had not looked at the profile before then instead there would be a big blue button saying “How are you related” which I would have to click on to get GENI to find the relationship.

On George’s profile, if I click on the green button that says “Show 41 relatives” it will show me the names of all the ancestors on the path from me to George. Plus every name can be clicked to go to that person’s profile. Click the image below to see the names relating me to George over at GENI.

Geni George Washington Continue reading →

Angie Bush reports on a new DNA ancestry.com sharing matches feature

Aug1

Ed note: My friend, genetic genealogist Angie Bush, the author of this post, is an expert user of the DNA functions at ancestry.com so when she excitedly reported this new feature on the ancestry group at Facebook, I asked her to do a step-by-step explanation of it for my blog. Thanks Angie!

AncestrySeeMatchesSmllAncestryDNA launched a new feature today that allows DNA test results to be shared in much the same way that family trees can be shared with other Ancestry users.

So if you have family members that have taken a DNA test, and you want to see the DNA matches you have in common with them, you finally can! In order to find this new feature, go to “Your DNA Home Page” and click on settings.

Continue reading →

IAJGS conference and talking with Greenspan

Jul29

If this were a financial blog you would assume a different Greenspan than Bennett and in fact they may be related, but since Alan won’t do the DNA test, we may never know. Today at the annual IAJGS conference I spent some time chatting with Bennett in the Exhibition Hall.  I asked him if they could implement a triangulation feature where when two people match me on a specific segment I can check if they match each other on that spot. He said yes but gave me no time frame …

Selfie with Bennett Greenspan

Bennett Greenspan and Kitty Cooper

Bennett Greenspan is the founder of Family Tree DNA, one of the big three in personal DNA testing. This came about because a newly retired Bennett wanted to prove that the possible Argentinian relatives he had found were related when there was no paper trail showing this. He had read about Dr. Michael Hammer’s work with DNA and the cohanim Y chromosome marker and wondered why that sort of test could not be used for his case. Dr. Hammer laughed at him and said something like “If you knew how many crazy genealogists have been calling me … someone really ought to start a company.” The rest, as we say, is history.

Tomorrow at 1:45 Elise Freeman is going to speak about  “Understanding Your DNA Results in the Context of Ashkenazi Ancestry.” I can’t wait to hear her.

Continue reading →

GEDmatch is back up!

Jul21

GEDmatch.com is back up at last!

GEDmatch.com is the site where you can upload your DNA results from any of the three main companies and compare them to other people’s results uploaded there. I have numerous articles on GEDmatch on this site, just click GEDmatch in the tag cloud on the right or click here. There is also a guide to using GEDmatch in my downloads section.

Also for anyone in the San Diego area, I will be giving a talk on using GEDmatch on the third thursday in August for the Carlsbad group of ISOGG members. More details on that soon.

Having that site back is great news for those of us who love it!

You can now separate your source images from family photos at WikiTree

Jul11

I am very excited that WikiTree now lets you tag uploaded photos as sources so that you can separate family photos from source material. This makes it easy to look at just one group or the other. I had asked for this feature and am delighted that my request was granted. WikiTreeImageMenuSmllThis was one of the things that I had felt that GENI did better.

I like to upload sources in order to share them with family. Marriage certificates, death certificates, draft cards, emigration lists, among many. One of the things I particularly like about WikiTree is that my relatives do not have to log in to see public information like these documents and family photos.

There is also a very nice feature where you can scroll through all your photos. The pull down menu under “My WikiTree” has an item called images. Click on that and you can look through all the images you have uploaded, ten at a time. Plus at the bottom of that page you can select different ways to sort them. I just used this feature to go through all my images and mark those that are sources as such.

Continue reading →