Ancestry DNA has revolutionized the way
that we research and climb our family tree and
they have a new DNA match tool that I want to talk about.
Now ancestry allows you to take your DNA kit
and attach it to one tree so DNA can only be attached to one tree.
However one tree can have more than one DNA kit attached to it,
but what happens if you want to have DNA that is attached to a different tree
linked to your tree? The new tool
on ancestry makes that possible. If this is your first time here
welcome! My name is Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics
and if you're new to DNA research I want you to grab this
free guide 'The Answers to the Five Most Common DNA Questions'.
The link will be found in the description box below and in fact
all links that I mention to other videos and other resources
will be in the show notes that you'll find in that box. What this
new linking tool for your match-list does is allow you to go and find your
relatives and tell yourself I know that
this person on my DNA match list matches a specific person on my family
tree that I have built on Ancestry. And the advantage of this
little icon besides allowing you to visually see the
progress of your research, it allows you to click on this icon
and jump to that person's tree. And in short
what happens is now you can link your tree to the DNA of other people
without bumping into the rule that DNA can only be attached
to one tree. So here we have my DNA match list
and I have started to tag a number of my relatives.
As i'm scrolling down I find one of my relatives who is not in
my tree so we're going to go to David Geisler. If I click on his name
in this view you can see this icon that allows me
to link this person to someone in my tree,
but first let me see how we are related who is our most recent common ancestor?
Well our most recent common ancestor is Henry Joseph
and Margaret Magdalena and that is where on his tree he has
them and then I have them one more
generation back because i'm actually younger than this man
and my generation's a little bit one generation below, but this is our most
recent common ancestor. So I actually have my
distant cousin David in my family tree and I can come over here and start
typing David and my tree and when I click on that
name all of a sudden this icon changes color
and I can view in the tree if I ever need to break the link. Like I don't want
them in my tree anymore for whatever reason
or it was a mistake then I can click remove right here.
So if I view in the tree then ancestry takes me right to where he's
located on my family tree. I can also see that there's a DNA
icon right there and we can go back and forth between the two profiles.
So I can go to my match-list and I can go to
the view profile and we're right back here to the shared match list.
Now back on this profile page we can see that David's
name has been updated to have the icon right beside it that I have connected
him to my tree. Do what happens when you have a DNA
match that did not have a tree online
like this Eric. I've actually met Eric and he doesn't have a tree online, but
you have added them to your tree. Well what happens then? Well let me walk
you through the process. So we're going to click on their name
and we're going to click on that icon and once again we're going to start
typing their name and there they are and we can go back
and forth between their tree. And he has the icon updated.
Now what happens if they are not yet in your tree and you
discover that they should be in your tree, what do you
do then? Well in that case let's scroll up to
Jeffrey Howard Merritt. Now Jeffrey recently
took a DNA test and he has an unlinked tree.
So if we go click on him on link tree you can tell I already know how he's related.
So he has a public tree and he is the grandson
of Dorothy Ann einsteinium and Dorothy is very
instrumental in getting me started in genealogy because she shared a lot of
data with my mother in 1975 and everything I've
inherited from my Canadians I got from Dorothy Ann Zumstein. So she's
really awesome and i'm glad that Jeffrey does have
his tree this little partial tree online. So what
do I do in order to get the link to work i'm
gonna have to build out from Dorothy to Jeffrey. Now
I need to come down and add a relative for the purpose of this video i'm just
gonna add there was a sign and we're just gonna
say anonymous and then below
the anonymous I know who it is, but i'm not letting you know who it is.
I'm going to add the son Jeffrey yeah not a spouse a son. So i'm gonna add Jeffrey and now I can
go back over here click on this icon
type Jeffrey and I can connect to Jeffrey and when I
go back to my DNA match list Jeffrey is connected and
there it goes through, pretty slick.
One thing to keep in mind if you do add living people to
the ancestry tree, ancestry will automatically privatize their
information. So only you when you log in can see the
information about living people, but when other
people access your tree even if it is a public tree no one will
be able to see all the details about the living person. So do keep that
in mind. So that's how you do it let's talk about
should you use it, what are the some great things about it, and maybe not so
great things about it that people have been discovering
since this tool has been out since early 2020.
So my colleague Larry Jones who put this video
out in May the question Larry posed that I agree with the most. His answer
was does this linking tool help your research? And the jury's still
out on this. Now what Larry says and if you have
never seen Larry on camera you'll want to check out
this video interview that we did with him where he
actually showed his face. A number of followers over on DNA Family
Tree really enjoyed that series so be sure to check it out. You will have to
sign up to FHF Extra and all the information
is in the description. But what Larry said was that the gene
ancestry DNA linking tool for him right now is a lot
of busy work. Now if he was actively working on a
question, which you might be, you might not find it so
busy, but if you're a little casual right now
if you're on break he's not completely motivated that
this is a game changer just yet.
The jury's still out and I tend to agree.
Now a number of people have complained that you cannot
have your tree that you go and connect all of the links to other
people's trees be reflected in the trees of others that
you manage. So now you have to do all of your tree
linking and then all of the trees that you also manage
and it becomes a lot of busy work. So I don't know, what do you think?
Let me know, I personally didn't jump up and down
with this tool because for me I find more value like I shared with you in
this video. Color code your DNA matches by using these colored dots
this tells me where people are linked and then I use a lot of notes.
So I guess this is a way to navigate to where those people
are quickly and back and forth which brings me to
my next problem. In my blog post and reduce your Unnecessarily Large
Family Tree I talk about my strategy for using paid
service programs versus using the One World
Family Tree over Family Search which is free. You could also use WikiTree
for this as well, but I build my large family trees over on
FamilySearch and then I have a research tree
on ancestry. Typically I like to combine the records in the DNA,
but if we're supposed to as some big fans of this service say they
build everybody out like every DNA connection they have they try to match
them into their tree, but then I am going to lose my mind
because ancestry gives me tree hints. And when I
am struggling to do genealogy and I need a little pick-me-up or i'm
working on a brick wall and I want to just do something casual well then i'll
go look in my hint feature and I will go through and just start
working the hints. So i'll go through and and work this person and this person, but
the more people that I put into
the family tree on ancestry the more hints
I'm gonna have and it's gonna drive me crazy.
Are you like me or are you vastly different I
would really like to know. So what's my solution if i'm going to take
advantage of this DNA aspect and still keep my sanity for
my research. Well I think then the only solution is to
have two trees on ancestry and you can do
that. I actually have several trees on
ancestry I have my Geiszler Brown tree, I have a project tree
that I have, I have my Uncle Bob Street, and I
have several others that I throw on from time to time when i'm working on a
project. So i'm on the fence whether I really
want to jump up and do this, but the only solution then in order to
do all the DNA matches would be to have a
research tree and or a DNA tree in my research tree and my
DNA tree. I guess it would have to be a public
tree without sources which is going to make other
genealogists think i'm not a good researcher, but i don't want to manage
sources in multiple places. But i would have all of my family
lines and I would ignore any hints that come
up through this tree and it would just be genetic so I have
my grandmother, who was adopted, so i'd only put the DNA relatives.
We had some DNA surprises so I would only put the biological
relationships in this tree and I wouldn't have the record
relationships just the biological relationships
and then I would know that when i'm working in history i'm
only using it to build a tree and get all these third fourth and fifth
living people cousins thrown into that tree and call
it good and then I would have to have another tree which would be my research
tree and it could have biological and
genealogical but the emphasis of this tree would be
the genealogical data with a little bit of the DNA thrown in as I find the
caveats and the surprises and get them all untangled in that way
and this way I can focus on my relatives specific relatives. So let's
use my surname table chart and if you've never seen a surname table
chart if you haven't built one yet hold on a minute and I will show you
where you can learn more about it, but this is my surname table. This is my
four great grandparents, but this is the adopted line.
So in that first tree the DNA tree I would have to exclude everybody here
and then there are some oopsies along some of these lines and so I kind of
have to exclude them and any other times. Let's say this was
an oopsie line a DNA surprise line I would have to exclude all of them just
to focus on the biological portions of the tree and then
if I just want to do the genealogical tree
then I can do everybody here, but remember I want to do targeted targeted
research. So as much as I love these folks and I
claim them as my ancestors i'm only really researching these guys
i'm researching my Townsends, which also picks up a Lynch
i'm researching. Actually i'm not researching any of these guys sorry
there's so many researchers over here I really can't make any headway on there,
but I care about these names right here
and then I would just have to put these guys in there. I'm actually kind of
interested in the Weakly and the Anderson.
So then my genealogical tree would just be focused on them. So i'm just
tailored laser focused on just the brick walls that i'm working on and the
casual building up the tree. Maybe I really
haven't decided it's kind of hard to
make a decision because of the bigger you make your tree the more
data there is and you can easily go down rabbit holes and not make progress on
the research that you're hoping to make on.
Now if you haven't built a surname table before
make sure you find this video handy and accessible through the links in the
descriptions. Now before I give you a few more things that I would
like to see in the link matching tool in order for
me to say yes this is awesome let me invite you to check out Andy's
book Andy is my husband that does most of the DNA videos here on
family history fanatics he has a book called DNA Q&A
real questions from real people about genetic genealogy
and if you haven't picked up a copy of this yet you're going to enjoy
the questions that you probably have already thought of and the ones you
probably don't know you should have thought of all in one book
really easy to read and super fun. So what would I like to see
improved on the DNA match linking tool for me to be jumping up and
down and say this is the best thing ever one of the things I would like to
see is that we have these through lines and if this is going to be an awesome
tool it really needs to feed into the ThruLines.
What I would really like to see is that if you
do this extra linking that those people should show up on your
ThruLines no matter where they are. So on my tree
I should have my brother and he's not here.
I should also have a branch for another two aunts and they're not there and a
cousin and they're not here because we're all descendants from
Samuel Curtis Brown, but Samuel is not in their trees
and for some reason it's not passing through and picking them up.
There's also a son of brain and he's not showing up
but i've done that linking thing that new tool
that they have and it's not showing up so if that could get fixed
then I would be more excited about the
usefulness of the jewel maybe it's coming
maybe I did something wrong i'm not sure, but
the jury's still out on how excited I would be
about that. Another thing I've alluded to before
if this is my brother's tree I would really like
for when I link to him he links to me and I don't have to do that extra step
and that's just because I manage history. Now you can't automatically
improve that in other people's trees because that could create a
nightmare, but if you're a manager of these trees
it would be nice to be able to make it populate to the other
person's tree and create that back-link super quickly. The other thing
someone suggested and I thought this was really interesting
and that was once you make a link you see how this says close family
and this is my brother's DNA match list. What would be really great
is if it changed once we click that little link
that this becomes aunt and then this becomes aunt and this becomes first
cousin or second cousin depending on where they
fall in the tree. So it'd be nice if that happened and that would be kind of cool
the one thing that would make it just knock it out of the park as I mentioned
in this video is that I want a chromosome browser.
Because with a chromosome browser I can know the quality
of the matches that ancestor is recommending
more than just the trees people have built, because remember
a tree is only as good as the people who created it but a chromosome browser
can definitely validate how you're related. So what do
you think? Are you excited to have these new tools from
ancestry? Let me know how you're using them.
If you want to learn more about ancestry ThruLines check out the videos right
there. If
you've seen those videos already then check out
this video that we think you might like.
