Tag Archive | 23andme

Time to send your last 23andme invitations

It is time to cancel and re-invite all your closest anonymous matches at 23andme, letting them know that this is their last chance. After November 11 they will disappear from your relative lists as will all your pending introductions. Anonymous users will no longer be allowed to participate in DNA relatives. They can change their status in settings. Warning, if you are using a nickname rather than a real sounding name or initials, your profile will automatically be changed to anonymous (this does not include the nickname you had to specify for posting to forums). This proviso is still a little unclear to me, presumably when you are switched to the new 23andme, you can make changes to your profile then.

Another big change is that Countries of Ancestry is going away ,so download that spreadsheet now.

The good news is that the cap of 1000 matches is being raised to 2000. Also another good thing is that you can set yourself to “Open Sharing” which lets other open sharers compare matching DNA segments to you without the cumbersome introduction system

23andme has provided a page that maps old features to new (click here or on the image above):
A number of bloggers have written detailed posts on the changes coming to 23andme. Here are several good ones. You can also click here for the thread in the community section at 23andme.

Blogger Reports:

Shannon Christmas: http://throughthetreesblog.tumblr.com/post/131724191762/the-23andme-metamorphosis

Judy Russell: http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2015/10/25/the-changes-at-23andme/

Roberta Estes: http://dna-explained.com/2015/10/21/23andme-to-get-a-makeover-after-agreement-with-fda/

Now to get back to cancelling and sending my new last chance messages!

Big changes coming at 23andme, Health is back

Oct21

Excerpt from the 23andme Reports Overview at Youtube

The price has gone up but so has the amount of information you will receive. Those of you who bought kits after the FDA shut down the health information at 23andme will now get the new improved reports. All of us testers will receive an email once our accounts have transitioned over.

I received 12 emails today announcing this! As soon as any of the accounts I manage transition over to the new software, I will write a report here on my blog. The accounts that already had health reports were promised in the email that they will “continue to have access to [their] current health reports. The new experience will include redesigned versions of many of the same health and ancestry reports that you currently have.”

Blogger Andrea Badger published the following report on the DNA-NEWBIE mailing list:

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Triangulation: Proving a Common Ancestor

Feb26

The same question seems to come up over and over again among those new to autosomal DNA testing. If I match A and B on the same segment why is that not enough to prove they match each other and we have a common ancestor?

The reason the ancestor is not proven is that you have two strands of DNA on each chromosome (remember there are 23 pairs of chromosomes) and the testing mechanism cannot differentiate between the two of them. So A could match the piece from your mother and B could match the piece from your father or one of them could even be a false match to a mix of alleles from both parents (see my post on IBC for more on that concept)

The way to prove the common ancestor is to see if A and B match each other in the same place that they match you. This is what we call triangulation.

Kristine’s shared DNA with other Wold descendants, relationships are to her (to me in parenthesis)

About a year ago I blogged about how, after many years, a change in spelling on the paper trail had led fellow genealogist Dennis to think his wife Kristine was perhaps descended from my great-grandmother’s brother Carl. To prove this I suggested he test her autosomal DNA.
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MyHeritage is now doing the family trees for 23andme

Jan19

So what is the impact of MyHeritage doing the family trees for 23andme? We can all agree that the previous family trees at 23andme were difficult to use. So this has to be an improvement, right? Maybe not.

To try it, I connected my own 23andme account to my existing MyHeritage tree and then looked at it from my aunt’s account, after logging out of MyHeritage. It was hard to find it on my profile. All the way at the very bottom were the words Family Tree next to which were the linked words View Kitty Cooper’s Family Tree. When I clicked on it I saw this:

Oops. My Dad is set as the home person. Maybe Google can help me figure out how to change that. Clicking on the image above will take you to my tree so you can judge for yourself how well you like it.

MyHeritage is an excellent site in many ways, but to take advantage of the record matching you have to buy a premium membership. Also if you want more than 250 people in your tree, payment is required after those first free 6 months for 23andme folk. The premium or data membership gives access to many European records not on ancestry and also some newspaper articles I have not seen elsewhere.

For me, the biggest issue with MyHeritage is having no pedigree view on the family tree. When generation after generation had eight or more children, their tree view is very unwieldy.

In the rest of this post I will walk you step by step through setting up your 23andme tree at MyHeritage which you must do by May 1, 2015 to take advantage of the offer.
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Figuring out a DNA relative’s shared DNA with 23andme’s “Countries of Ancestry”

Mar31

Maybe you have had great luck with people responding to your shares on 23andme but most of us have at best 30% of our share requests accepted (of 1800 DNA relatives my Dad has 338 shares and 40 introduction accepted so just under a 20% acceptance rate). This is especially frustrating when someone is clearly a close relative and does not respond. Of course some of the reason for the lack of response is that the default setting on 23andme is to not send emails when there are messages in the inbox. Fortunately the occasional email from 23andme about new relatives or news does get some of them to log in and see the invites. I always get several acceptances from old shares after one of those broadcast emails.

Yes I can hear those of you who have tested at familytree DNA laughing and say well we can see the shared DNA. But you also may never hear back from some of the most promising leads who do not have much of a tree posted and more importantly you cannot compare people you match with each other which we can do with our shares. There are pluses and minuses to each testing company.

Below are a few of my closest non accepting DNA relatives. S M is public and accepted contact but not sharing. G S is public and responded to a message asking if he was related to my S family from Etne with a no, but has not shared. I made an error on the 3rd introduction to one relative and now can no longer contact them, at least from this account.

So for those of us using 23andme I will use these matches as a case study on how to find the DNA segments where they match my Dad using “Countries of Ancestry.” This only works if your relative has entered the countries of origin for their parents and grandparents.

First a little known trick, you can download a CSV of all your DNA relatives by clicking the Download button on the top right of the page when on the DNA relatives page.