Revisiting 23andMe’s Family Tree - Thu, 9 Jul 2020
A very exciting day for me today, as most of you reading this will relate to. A second cousin of mine who I know showed up on my 23andMe match list. She matched me with 3.1% = 234 cM on 19 segments, which is exactly where she should be according to The Shared cM Project tool.
I have 9 other cousins who have have tested at 23andMe and match me. What makes this newly tested cousin different from the other 9 is that she’s on my mother’s side! All my previous known matches at 23andMe were on my father’s side.
So now I can finally get some maternal information from my 23andMe matches. A second cousin is perfect because we share great-grandparents and she will allow me to cluster my maternal matches into my mother’s father’s side, the side she is on.
23andMe’s Family Tree
I last looked at 23andMe’s Family Tree last September in my article: 23andMe’s Family Tree Beta.
My tree as calculated by 23andMe back then included 13 of my DNA matches. It placed 8 on my father’s side and 5 on my mother’s side.
My automated tree today has two more of my matches included, so there are now 15. The 8 circled matches at the left are on my father’s side. The 7 circled matches at the right are on my mother’s side. The people circled in blue are the 5 relatives in the tree that I know how I’m related to. One is a 1C1R who is the granddaughter of my uncle, so she shares both my paternal grandparents with me and I show her above the “F”. The other 4 are all on my father’s father’s side, and they are in the “FF” section. I do have a few relatives on my father’s mother’s side that tested, but 23andMe decided not to include them in my automated tree. There are 10 matches that I don’t know how they are related to me. But the tree hypothesizes that 1 is on my father’s father’s side, 2 are on my father’s mother’s side, and 7 are on my mother’s side. (Click the image below for a larger version)
23andMe has not yet included my new mother-side match on my tree. They only recalculate the tree from time to time and I’d have to wait until they do it again to see if they add my cousin to it.
Of those 7 people hypothesized to be on my mother’s side, 3 are with one parent and 4 are with the other. So once my cousin is added, presumably the group of 3 or the group of 4 would be with her on my mother’s father’s side and the other group would be on my mother’s mother’s side.
But then I saw that I don’t have to wait for 23andMe’s recalculation.
At the top left of the tree is this symbol: 
When I click on it, it brings up this box with unplaced relatives:
I have 5 people shown at the bottom. You have to scroll to the right to see the other two. The person on the left is my newly tested cousin. The other 4 are people I don’t know how I’m related to.
Clicking on the little info symbol next to the “Unplaced Relatives” text gives:
Clicking on the “Learn more” link gives:
Well 5 minutes doesn’t sound so bad. Let’s see what happens when I reset my tree.
Recalculating the 23andMe Family Tree
I press the “Yes, delete my edits and recalculate my tree” button, and it gives this:
Okay. 5 to 10 minutes isn’t so bad either. Back at the tree, they actually show progress:
Now it’s saying less than 1 minute. Sheesh! After about what turns out to be 3 minutes, I get this message:
I’m doing this on a Thursday evening at 7 p.m. CDT. Is this a busy time?
I wait a couple of minutes and of course I don’t believe them and don’t want to wait until tomorrow, so I go back up to the 23andMe main menu, and under Family & Friends, select “Family Tree”
Sure enough, I didn’t have to wait a day. It displays my new tree:
Now it only shows 6 of my DNA matches. Pressing the symbol in the top left, it now shows this:
So it moved 9 of my previously placed matches into the Unplaced Relatives list. That list now has those 9 plus the 5 that I had before I had them recalculate the tree, plus the 8 non-tested relatives (e.g. my parents, grandparents, uncle, cousin, etc.) that I had previously manually added to my tree.
The recalculation placed some of my paternal cousins at the wrong generational level. But that’s no problem. Since the beta 10 months ago, 23andMe has added the ability to move people in the tree, and even move a whole branch of the tree:
The link the often show that says “View our guide:” takes you to 23andMe’s illustrative guide of How to build and edit your Family Tree, which is worth a read. In there, you’ll see that you not only can add people to your tree, but you can include their date and place of birth and death and add a photo. I’m not sure why entering the birth and death information is currently useful, since that information doesn’t show up in the tree. But maybe 23andMe has planned a use for it that they’ve not implemented yet.
Unfortunately, the one person I really wanted automatically added, my new DNA testing relative on my mother’s side, was not placed. That would have separated out my maternal sides. But now it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because the 7 people they previously placed on my maternal side were now all with the Unplaced Relatives. So placing my 2nd cousin without those 7 on the tree no longer will allow me to divide them up into my MF and MM sides. 
My New 23andMe’s Family Tree
I can easily add my new cousin, because I know where she goes. But I can’t add the people that the recalculation removed from the tree because I don’t know how I’m related to them. It would have been nice if 23andMe could have left them in. The algorithm must have changed somewhat. Maybe those people were previously placed inaccurately.
So be aware. You may lose some of 23andMe’s theories if you recalculate. Make sure you record how everyone is connected before you get it to do the recalculation.
Now my tree has 6 DNA relatives whose relationship I know. There is only one theory remaining. My tree now looks like this, with my father’s side now being on the right side.
I’ve circled in green the 6 relatives I have that I know are placed correctly. Circled in red is the one relative that remains as 23andMe’s theory.
23andMe has left me with 13 people in my Unplaced Relatives that I cannot place.
I also have 5 relatives among my matches that I know how I’m related, but 23andMe’s Family Tree chose not to include them. I could add them to the correct place on 23andMe’s Family Tree. But they would not be connected to their DNA match information. It would be nice if 23andMe would allow you to select people from your match list. I think I’ll suggest that to them via their survey at the bottom of Your Family Tree page.
Updating My Double Match Triangulator 23andMe Results
I last tried DMT on my 23andMe data last October: Using DMT, Part 1: My 23andMe Data. Since I only had paternal matches back then, DMT couldn’t do much with my maternal side other than classifying which matches it calculated were maternal. What it gave me back then was this:
So now I’ll just do this exercise again. I’ll use DNAGedcom Client to download a new set of segment match files from 23andMe (see DMT’s help file for how to do this).
The segment match files I’ll download will be for myself and the 10 relatives I know how I’m related to. Each takes about 10 minutes for DNAGedcom to gather, so I’ll do them while I’m working on something else.
Two Hours Later
I put the 11 segment match files into a folder. I start DMT and select my own segment match file as File A. I have DMT create my People file with all my matches. Now I go through and add the MRCA for my 10 known relatives (9 of which are shown below):
Now I set Folder B to the folder containing all the match files and I let ‘er rip.
Double Match Triangulator clusters my matches into these groups. Compare this to the table above:
I have 199 more matches than I did last October. The percentages are about the same as they used to be with the exception that DMT was able to pick out 201 of the maternal matches and associate them with my mother’s father’s cluster, due to their segment matches with my newly tested cousin.
Also, last October, I was only able to paint grandparents or further over 46.1% of my paternal DNA and none of my maternal side. Now with my new data including my newly tested cousin, I’m able to paint 46.8% of my paternal side and 25.6% of my maternal side as well.
Uploading the DNA Painter file that DMT produces with this latest run into DNA Painter now gives this:
This is very similar to what I got 10 months ago, but now a significant amount of my maternal grandfather’s side (MF, in red) also gets painted. That’s a nice chunk of additional painting that DMT was able to add.
That one person whose relationship that I don’t know that 23andMe added to my tree (see the last tree above, red circle, far right) they included as a second cousin once removed on my father’s father’s mother’s side. DMT puts that person in my FF (father’s father’s) cluster. DMT cannot work this any further back because I don’t have any cousins tested who I know are on either my FFF or FFM side for it to use. So 23andMe’s estimation of FFM is a good theory and could be correct. Now I’ll just have to trace his family tree and see if we can connect. 
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