Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

The layout of the DNA match summary by Nancy Jarman-Dunn in a Facebook post in the Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques group caught my eye.

I think I’ll summarize my results this year using Nancy’s layout and update it every year in the future to see my progress. I keep track of this information in a page for that purpose in OneNote. But I haven’t summarized it until now.

Not counting my uncle, who I had tested, these are my numbers:

Ancestry – I have figured out the exact connection to 8 people
Ancestry – I have communicated since the discovery with 3 of them.
Ancestry – I have 27 people who Ancestry says are 90 cM or closer.
Ancestry – Of the 27, I’ve connected 5 and the other 22 should be possible.

23andMe – I have figured out the exact connection to 5 people
23andMe – I have communicated since the discovery with 2 of them.
23andMe – I have 15 people who 23andMe says are 1.3% or closer.
23andMe – Of the 15, I’ve connected 4 and the other 11 should be possible.

FTDNA – I have figured out the exact connection to 1 person.
FTDNA – I have communicated since the discovery with him.
FTDNA – I have 43 people who FTDNA says are 140 cM or closer.
FTDNA – Of the 43, I’ve connected 0 and all 43 should be possible.

MyHeritage – I have figured out the exact connection to 0 people.
MyHeritage – I have 37 people who MyHeritage says are 90 cM or closer.
MyHeritage – Of the 37, I’ve connected 0 and all 37 should be possible.

LivingDNA – I have figured out the exact connection to 0 people.
LivingDNA – I have 3 people who LivingDNA says are 90 cM or closer.
LivingDNA – Of the 3, I’ve connected 0 and all 3 should be possible.

GEDmatch – I have figured out the exact connection to 2 people.
GEDmatch – I have communicated since the discovery with both of them.
GEDmatch – I have 155 people who GEDmatch says are 90 cM or closer.
GEDmatch – Of the 155, I’ve connected 1 and the other 154 should be possible.

I picked 90 cM which is 1.3% as the cutoff which has a 90% chance of being 3rd cousins once removed or closer. For FTDNA, I used 140 cM (2.0%) because they include small segments in their totals that the other companies don’t.

I expect that a year from now, the numbers of matches I have at these thresholds should go up because of new testers. But more importantly, a year from now, I hope/expect I’ll have figured out the exact connection to many more of my close DNA matches through research and using new tools that appear during the year (including Version 3.0 of Double Match Triangulator). When it comes down to it, these new connections are the important results you want from your DNA matches.

DNA Tools

There were many new DNA tools made available during 2018. The ones I found most interesting included:

• DNA Painter by Jonny Perl
• The Leeds Method by Dana Leeds
• Borland Genetics by Kevin Borland, and
• Genetic Affairs by Evert-Jan Blom

The latter program, Genetic Affairs, among other things it does, gave my most interesting result of the year. It produced the following genetic network for my Ancestry DNA matches using a Leeds-type of methodology:

Despite my endogamy (all the grey squares), I was able to assign about 90 of my Ancestry DNA relatives to a particular ancestor in about 12 of the clusters. That was very useful information that will very much help me identify how those matches are exactly related to me.

I also tried and found some use out of the following DNA tools this year:

• Ancestry DNA Helper by Jeff Snavely
• DNAGedcom – by Rob Warthen and others
• DNA Kit Studio by Wilhelm Halys
• DNA Match Analyzer by Bret McKee
• DNA Match Labeling – by DNA Central (Blaine Bettinger)
• DNA Match Manager – by Heirloom Software (Lillian and David Mann)
• Genome Mate Pro by Rebecca Walker
• MapS Converter by Hendrik Wendland
• MapS Phasing by Hendrik Wendland
• RootsFinder by Dallan Quass
• Overlapping Segment Mapper by Kitty Cooper

All these genetic genealogy programs and more are listed at GenSoftReviews, awaiting your review and rating of them.

Genetic Genealogy Facebook Groups

Prior to 2018, there really was no one place to go to discuss your genetic genealogy problems with others. But this year, that all changed, and many useful independently run Facebook groups came into being.

Other than the pages of the DNA companies themselves, in 2018 I joined and started participating in these Facebook groups:

• Genetic Genealogy Tips and Techniques, 50,585 members, run by Blaine Bettinger, Paula Williams, Leah LaPerle Larkin, Drew Smith, R S Vivs Laliberte and Angie Bush
• International Society of Genetic Genealogy, 17,308 members, run by Katherine Borges, CeCe Moore, Mags Gaulden and James Lick
• DNA Tools, 4,257 members, run by Rob Warthen, Don Worth and Karin Corbeil
• DNA Software Programming, 251 members, run by Rob Warthen, Svetlana Hensman, Edmundo Diana Edmundiño Nerea Alicia, Keven Borland and Jason Porteous
• DNA Detectives, 103,719 members, run by CeCe Moore and 29 others.

These are all closed groups, but they’ll let anyone in who has an interest in what they discuss.

I also joined a number of groups related to my own genealogy research as well as some Facebook groups created for some of the DNA tools I use.

It seems with the impending closure of Google Plus next year and the problems at RootsWeb since it was taken over by Ancestry, that Facebook Groups have become the go-to place for your genealogical discussions.

Genealogy Questions and Answers

I should also mention that the Genealogy & Family History Q&A site is still the go-to place for your genealogy and genetic genealogy questions and answers. The site now has 260 excellent questions tagged DNA. I personally have participated in asking or answering 84 of those questions.

This site is a tremendous resource for genealogists but is not well advertised and much under-utilized.

I’ve been working on DMT version 3.0 for the past few months and was hoping not to have to release anything before it’s ready.

Unfortunately, a few file format changes at some of the companies have caused DMT 2.1.1 to no longer recognize their files.

In October, I noted that Family Tree DNA made significant changes to the format of their Chromosome Browser Results file. But DMT was still able to handle it … until a month later when they made an additional change and added a space after the comma before the chromosome number. That broke DMT:

Also it was reported to me that MyHeritage Shared Segment files weren’t being recognized by DMT when including them as Folder B files.  As it turns out, that was such a dumb error of mine. In DMT, it was looking for “segements” in the file name instead of “segments”. If you changed, the file names to include the extra “e”, then they’d be recognized, but DMT wouldn’t read them because at reading time DMT was looking for “segments”. Catch-22.

The coup de gras was just this week when DMTs GEDmatch button no longer was able to handle the Segment Search report in GEDmatch Genesis. It turns out they added a checkbox to that report:

So at this point, DMT was having trouble with FTDNA, MyHeritage and GEDmatch files. I had created private versions (2.9.1 to 2.9.3) and sent them to people who reported these problems to me. But there was now enough needing fixing that an intermediate version for everyone was necessary. Thus, 2.9.4 is now available from the DMT homepage.

2.9.4 includes a few other fixes as well. But if you have not encountered problems with DMT, have not downloaded new FTDNA files, don’t use MyHeritage files or Tier 1 of GEDmatch Genesis, then there’s no need to upgrade and you can wait until 3.0 is released.

During the summer, I took a DNA test with @Living_DNA. In addition to testing, I also took advantage of their free uploads, and uploaded both my 23andMe raw data, and my Family Tree DNA raw data.

I already posted about my results from my test, but at that time, their “Family Networks” which is what they call their list of people that you match to, was not available. Living DNA has become the 7th resource to offer genealogists access to the list of people they match to. 

About a month ago, on October 26, I received an email from Living DNA that my beta family matching results were available. I took a look. I believe I had 10 matches at the time, none of whom were very close, said to be 4th cousins or further, and none of whom I recognized.

Today, I received another email stating that I was in the “next group of users to gain access to our Family Networks beta.” I took a look and now, not only does my test result has matches, but one of my uploads, my 23andMe upload, also has matches.

I thought I’d take a more detailed looks and record my observations. This is what my matches now look like:

I now have 30 matches listed. None of them are known relatives. I believe I have seen a few of them in my match lists from other DNA testing companies, so that is good verification.

The first match is with myself, because it is picking up my 23andMe uploaded kit. It says that I share 3572.89 cM or 98.54% with myself, which tells me they are using 3626 cM as their 100% basis. They say my predicted relationship with myself is “Identical twin” and if I click the “i” info button next to that, I get a cute description that says maybe it is another test, or else I found my clone.

The other matches are all either predicted 4th cousins or predicted 5th cousins. The closest I match is 97.43 cM (2.69%).  The info box next to the cM value describes what a centimorgan is, but does not give any additional information such as number of matching segments or largest segment.

My 30th match is 63.4 cM (1.75%). All 30 matches are on the one page. There is no pagination. The “Export Results to CSV” button currently pops up a message that says: “Coming soon.” 

The “Message” button next to each match also tells you that it is coming soon.

Clicking on the “View Profile” button of my closest match (other than myself), gives mock ups of what will be a Map of my matches, a Chromosome Viewer and the Messages area, all of which are marked as coming soon. Currently there is no additional information about the match. Only the match’s name is given and nothing more.

But the profile does give something very useful now, and that is the shared matches. For my first match, it lists 23 shared matches. And each can be clicked on to bring up their profile. Unfortunately, they list your shared matches with the furthest one first to the closest one last. I’m sure Living DNA will see this and correct the order before too long.

But what is interesting is that the lowest 12 shared matches were between 39.19 cM and 60.69 cM. The other 11 shared matches were higher than 63.4 cM and were on my own match list, but these 12 were not. 

So what happens when I take a look at my shared matches with my upload from 23andMe? It gives me a list of 58 shared matches, all on one page, that start at 38.43 cM and go up to 97.43 cM (since it is lowest to highest). This gives me 29 additional matches that were not among the 29 on my own match list.

For fun, I also compared my matches from my DNA test versus my matches from my 23andMe upload. Of the 30 matches each showed, 27 were in common. 6 had the same cM. 14 of my test matches had larger cM and 7 had lower cM than my upload. The average difference was 3.3 cM and the largest difference was 11.68 cM (72.71 cM in my test and 84.39 cM in my 23andMe upload).

Living DNA has a few details to fix, pagination to add, and features to finish. But the framework looks very good and it’s nice to see their matches working.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting until Living DNA loads all their matches for everyone so that they give thousands of matches, like the other companies do.

For comparison, here are my current match statistics at the various companies:

The Database sizes are from Leah Larkin. It is interesting that AncestryDNA has so few people matching me with at least 50 cM, likely due to their Timber algorithm that filters out many matching segments. At the opposite end of the scale is Family Tree DNA that includes segments down to 1 cM in their total count.

I must say that I have found more traceable cousins among the 49 matches above 50 cM at Ancestry DNA than I have at any of the other companies. The next best company for determinable matches for me was 23andMe.

The above table gives you the 7 DNA pools where you can now get matches. Remember, you can only catch your DNA relative if they’re swimming in one of your pools.

Update: Dec 11, 2018:  Leah Larkin posted a quick poll on Facebook asking people how many matches they have on Living DNA. I checked at Living DNA and entered my current number of matches which is 65 and that exclude my match to myself. 

Over 70% of the people had zero matches. About 20% only had 1 match. The other 10% all had up to 10 matches. I am the extreme outlier with 65 matches.

I do notice that Living DNA has added pagination with 10 matches shown per page. They also seem to have fixed the problem of additional matches that I earlier was able to find through shared matches. Now all the matches I have seem to appear among the 65.