I love to dig into my genealogy.  It’s like solving mysteries.  It’s about discovering and honoring our heritage.  And it’s just plain fun.  As many of you know, I recently had my DNA tested for genealogical purposes at AncestryDNA.  Well, then someone told me about another tool that’s pretty cool.

So What’s GEDmatch?

GEDmatch allows you to upload your raw DNA file — from Ancestry, or from one of several other genealogical DNA sites.  Then you can check for matches against anyone in their database, and make use of some other pretty cool tools, too.  One of my favorite things about this is it will “catch” matches I would otherwise have missed, because the matches tested through other sources.  I’ve found a number of Ancestry-based matches, too, and it makes it easier to verify these matches.

When I got started, though, I had no idea what I was doing.  I’ve only been at this a couple of days, so I’m nowhere near an expert, but there are a few things I’ve learned that I wish I’d known before I started.

What to Tell Them

The primary tool most people join GEDmatch for is the One-to-Many tool.  This just runs your DNA kit against all the others in the database and returns a list of those that are likely to be matches.  The list of results provides some basic information, like the kit number, an estimated number of generations back to the common ancestor, etc. — and the email address of the kit’s manager, if that user provided it.

Of course you’re going to want to email many of these matches to exchange further information and see if you can identify this common ancestor.  But I had no idea what to tell people when I emailed them, so I got a lot of questions in return.  That means that now I know what I should have told them. 🙂

1. Of course it probably goes without saying that you should tell them why you’re emailing them.  So tell them that they came up as a match in GEDmatch.
2. But what might not be as obvious is that you need to tell them which kit (or kits) showed up as matches.  Because I only administer my own test and my husband’s, I forget that many people administer many more than that.  That means if you don’t give them the kit numbers, they’ll have no idea who you matched, and they’ll have to ask you for kit numbers before they can tell you anything useful.
3. It also helps to give them your own kit number.  This helps them find you in the list, or make use of the various other tools on the site to potentially locate further information.
4. If you have a family tree posted publicly somewhere, this could be helpful to share.
5. If the other person tested at the same site you did (as evidenced by an initial letter that matches yours in the kit number), it can also be beneficial to provide the information he needs to find you there.  With Ancestry, this means he needs your username (and the ID associated with the kit, if you have more than one there).  But you also have to provide a surname from your immediate family tree.  Otherwise, he may never find you.  (For whatever reason, Ancestry does not offer the option to search your results by username, so he’ll have to search by surname, and then recognize you by your username.  Heads-up, Ancestry; this capability of searching by username would be greatly appreciated!)

Other Tips

• The number of generations to the common ancestor is a rough estimate only.  The exact distance of the relationship varies depending on which DNA was passed down.  I’m also told that GEDmatch is overly generous with this estimate, and a reported “4 generations”  is probably closer to 6 in most instances.
• Although some of the material copies a little strangely, most of the information generated in these reports can be copied to Excel.  To do this, copy the whole page (Alt-A is a shortcut to select the whole page), then right-click on the top left cell in a new Excel sheet.  Choose “paste special,”  then HTML — and be prepared to wait a few minutes for it to process because it’s usually a lot of data.
• Go ahead and play around with the tools.  You won’t hurt anything.  And working with one tool will, in many instances, help you understand the other tools better, too.  (Most of the interfaces are fairly similar.)
• If you’re running into matches you can’t find the common denominator for, but you’re pretty sure you know which basic branch of the family they connect to, keep a list of their major surnames for that branch.  It may be that you’ll find the commonality between your several matches to the same branch, and that will be the key you need to unlock that piece of the puzzle.

(And just in case you might’ve been wondering why multiple siblings would bother being tested…it’s because of the quirky way DNA is inherited.  According to GEDmatch, in one particular instance, I match to two of three siblings who were tested.  If only that third sibling had been tested, that connection would never have shown up — for them or for me.  Just a little extra point of interest.  🙂 )

This post is being shared at Works for Me Wednesday.