Organising My DNA Matches : - Trying Out RootsFinder

Organising My DNA Matches : - Trying Out RootsFinder

I am sorry, but if you are a beginner to Genetic Genealogy a lot of this wont make much sense, but I do not have time right now to do the basics. I promise I will write a beginners blog at some stage.

I have been exploring the DNA tools of RootsFinder.com and I am pretty pleased, and slightly annoyed about what I have found so far. Why pleased and annoyed? Because it seems to be able to do in minutes much of what I have spent hours and hours, for days and days, over the last 3 1/2 years! LOL!

I have only done the GEDmatch.com tie in part so far. RootsFinder itself is another Utah based online tree service that is mostly free, and ties in with Family Search, but can also be linked to Find My Past, etc.  (I think?). But it is a good, well laid out, and easy to use site as a family tree site. But it is the new DNA tools that attracted me. 

I had recently spent a lot of time on Ancestry making sure I had all known matches in my tree that also had a GEDmatch kit, and marking them 'DNA Marked' with their GEDmatch user kit name for another program which turned out to not really do what I wanted it to (I hadn't noticed until then that there is a 'DNA Marked' option in the event drop down list of burials, etc.). I also have all those in my tree that I know I have a DNA match to, whether GEDmatch or not, with 'DNA Match' in the title(?) part of their name. 

I then imported my family tree as a GEDcom, to RootsFinder and then imported my current GEDmatch 'One-to-Many' list, which was an amazingly simple 'select all', 'copy and paste'! RootsFinder then sorted it out into a proper list that ties in with them. I was then able to mark people from the 'One-to-Many' list that were in my tree, and it colour coded them and you can see their relationship to you in a fan chart too! I did this for my Mum and aunt too.

The next two phases took a little longer, but not due to RootsFinder. On GEDmatch I paid $10 for access to the 'Tier 1' tools for a month (which I do occasionally anyway, not only to get access to these advanced tools, but also to support GEDmatch). I then ran the 'Segment Matching' tool and the 'Triangulated Segment' tool (the really slow one, as there is a lot of data to churn through). Make sure you save a copy of the results anyway for other purposes, but all I had to do when the runs had finished was to 'select all', 'copy and paste' into RootsFinder.

I was then able to see graphics for the shared segments, and a spectacular 3D cluster diagram of triangulated matches, and one of those circle diagrams with all the matches round the outside, grouped by close relationship, and a maze of lines looping between clusters.

It will take some time to really see what I have got, and how to import my AncesrtyDAn matches (using the 'AncestryDNA Helper' chrome add on tool), and my MyHeritage matches, and FTDNA matches too; although I am not sure what results I can get from each of the other sites data.

There is a friendly Facebook group on here called 'RootsFinder DNA Tools' and the developer is one of the admins and is keen for feedback and suggestions (he is already working on ways of combining all the results from the different companies together).

I am really pleased so far.