So you've had your DNA tested, and then you
hear about this site called GEDmatch. Now, how do you get started in GEDmatch?
And what is it gonna do for you? Howdy, I'm Andy with Family History Fanatics, and this
is a segment of DNA. Be sure to subscribe to our Channel and click on that bell if you want to be
notified about upcoming episodes. GEDmatch is a third-party database where you can upload your raw
DNA files and be able to use their tools to match with other people regardless of what company those
other people tested from. So let me go through setting up account and getting your first upload
on to GEDmatch. So here we are on the GEDmatch website www.gedmatch.com, and if you scroll
down just below the login, there is the link for those who are not registered. So we're gonna
register a new account. Now for your registration, you just have to fill in some things. I'm going to
fill in my name, and if you want to have an alias, that's shown. In this case, I'm just gonna
put FHF for my alias. Then put in your email address. You're gonna have to do this twice,
and finally, you want to enter in a password. And then just click on the register button.
Now a confirmation code will be sent to you, and you just need to enter that here in order to
complete your registration, and you have got your account registered. Now the first thing you're
going to do is you're going to go through and read the terms and conditions of the website. After
you've read through these and you understand them, it's going to ask you at the bottom to verify
that you understand these and you accept them in order to use the different parts of their
website. So I am going to go here to option 1, and I am going to click here because I've
actually read these terms several times before, and once you've done that, you are now on the home
page. Now, this is the page whenever you log in that you're going to get to. You only have to go
through those terms and conditions one time or whenever they update them. Now the very top of the
page, the GEDmatch programmers actually put some different bits of information that gets updated
periodically that is good to go through and read. Now, as I scroll down, I can see some different
information. So on the left-hand side is going to be information about the kits that I've uploaded
as well as any gedcom files. And in this case, you can see I haven't uploaded anything. There's also
a link that if I want to change anything about my profile, I can change that information right from
here on the right-hand side. There's going to be some information about the different tools that
I can use, but right now, what I want to do is I want to upload my first kit, and for that, I'm
going to go over to the upload your DNA files. And I can just do the generic upload. Now there
are detailed instructions to upload your kit on to GEDmatch, and you can go over those by clicking
on this link here but let me show you what it is going to be. First off, the name of the donor,
in this case, this is me. Now I want to have an alias on here. I can have an alias on here,
and so I'm just going to put my initials. Now different people put different things you don't
have to put an alias I recommend it though for most people because that way people are going to
have to contact you before they find out too much information about you. You want to know whether
the donor is a male or female. Now, if you test it with one of the companies that reports your
haplogroups, you can put this information in here, but you don't have to. I'm gonna leave it
blank because I'm using an Ancestry kit, and Ancestry doesn't test for those. So the next
is the company or the source of your kit. And in this case, I said Ancestry. And then if it is
not one of those kits they have listed there, you can always put in something in the other
field. And I've used this whenever I've created my own kits from different things for testing or just
for research purposes. I've listed it as a - and then I put some information in there. So that is
a clue to me as to where that kit is coming from, but I'm gonna keep this as Ancestry. Now the next
is how your kit is going to be classified. And so whenever you upload your raw DNA file, you want
to select one of these. So first off, is this your DNA. Now that's what this is for me. So I'm gonna
close like that. It's my DNA. Now is this the DNA of a person that you are a legal art guardian? so,
for instance, when I uploaded my children's DNA, I would have clicked on that is this the DNA of a
person who's granting a specific authorization to upload their DNA to GEDmatch. This is what I have
tested different relatives, and I've wanted to use their DNA on GEDmatch that's where I would click.
That is this the DNA of a person known by you to be deceased. So if you have a deceased person's
DNA, you can upload that as well. Now then, there's some others that may get a little bit
confusing to some people. So I'll just go through those real briefly. This is DNA obtained and
authorized by law enforcement to identify the remains of a deceased individual. And this is for
things like the DNA Doh project where there are unknown persons that they found the body, and the
DNA Doh project seeks to actually figure out who that person is. Next, is the DNA obtained and
authorized by law enforcement to identify the perpetrator of a violent crime? Now, this is just
for law enforcement use that, and that's going to actually put some different restrictions on that
kit number as far as who is able to be matched to that. Now next is an artificial DNA kit if
it's intended for research purposes. It may not be used to identify anybody in the ditch at the
match database. I've used this one for some of the artificial kits that I've done in doing some
of the research, and you've seen some videos about those. This is DNA obtained from an artifact,
and this is really something that's new. There are some companies that they will test envelopes,
or they will test hair, or they will test other objects that may have some DNA, and this is used
by those to identify who that may be next is an anonymized sample for a donor to a large scale
population study. This allows certain researchers at universities and other groups that are doing
population studies to upload that DNA but not necessarily have any identifying information on
it so that they can use that for their research study. Now, if you are part of these and you want
to do a massive research study, then make sure you contact the GEDmatch administrators before
you upload. And finally, the last one is none of the above, which they tell you right away if
you click on this box, your DNA is not going to be uploaded. So hopefully, by going through all
those other ones, you've actually identified one of those that could be what your DNA sample is. So
that is where the DNA came from. So the next group here of question is about the privacy about how
you want your DNA to be used. So the first one is the kit to be shown in match results for all other
kits in the database. And what this means is this means that it allows anyone in the database
to see your kit whenever it's matched to it, and that includes law enforcement kits in their
match lists. So that is the opt-in option now if you don't want the law enforcement kits, and we
just talked about those above if you don't want those to be able to see your match in their match
list, then you can click on the opt-out you still have all the same functionality of everything
else on the GEDmatch database it's just that when somebody is using a law-enforcement kit
to do a one-to-many or a one-to-one match, it will not show your kit. The next is for research
kits, and this will not be shown in match results, but you still have functionality to be able to see
what kits match with that. And really, this is a good idea because what it does is it keeps a lot
of clutter out of the database. So, for instance, I have a lot of research kits. Now, if they were
always showing up in other people's results, then somebody that matched me might end up having
10 or 20 matches that are just me when really they only need one. And so if you are doing this for
research like for instance, if you upload a kit from Ancestry, a kit from 23andMe, a kit from
MyHeritage, and a kit from LivingDNA, you really only need to have one of those as an opt-in or an
opt-out kit all the others can be researched kits, and you're still gonna get the same benefit from
them. And finally is the private. If you don't want to be able to have that kit used to match
with other kits, then select it as private. Maybe it is something that you are just doing for a
short time, and you're not ready to actually make that kit public. In that case, make it private.
Now, these settings can be changed at any time on that homepage. So if you select one and you decide
to change your mind later or if circumstances change and you need to change it, then feel free
to go in and change your kit to what you want. In this case, I'm just going to opt-in. Now the
next part is the choosing your file. You need to know where on your computer your file is. So
you're gonna click on the choose your file, and then it's going to go through, and you're going
to find where that document is, and it's going to either be a txt file or maybe even a zip file.
And then once you've selected that, it should pop up right there. Now it warns you before you click
on the upload button that this process may take several minutes. I've only seen it take a couple
of minutes really to as little as just, you know, 10 or 20 seconds. So let's just go through this,
and I'll talk you through what's happening. I click on upload, and it's going. And it is taking
that file from the computer, and it is putting up to their servers. And it's opening that file, and
then it's going to start looking at that data. And as it's looking at that data, it's going to see
what that data matches up with, whether it is complete, whether it is not the correct file size.
It's going to look at a lot of different things, and then it's going to start the processing of
that data. And I can see that my files have been uploaded now. And you can see is the chromosomes
are numbering across. It's looking into each one of those chromosomes. It's then assigned a kit
number. And you can write down this kit number if you want, but this kit number is going to show
up on that home page. The great thing is, is once you have done this, you are going to be able to
use those one-to-one comparisons and some other utilities really just within a couple of minutes.
So that's awesome. Now the rest of the tools, the one-to-many and probably a lot of the tools
that you want to use, is going to take a couple of days because they got to do some more processing
to it. But really, you can be up and running in just a couple of days. So back on the homepage, we
can actually see in my user section that the kit is now up there. It is still being tokenized based
off of this 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 icon they have, and it said that I could use the one-to-one autosomal
DNA comparison within a couple of minutes. So you don't have to wait very long till you can start
using some of the tools, but if you wait a couple of days, then you'll start to be able to use a
lot of these other DNA applications that are on here. Now, if for any reason you want to delete
the kit, or you want to delete your account, let me just go through and delete this kit, and that
will delete the account. So you know how to do that in order to let the kit go. And click on the
little pencil icon, and that is going to give you the kit profile management. And for this, you can
do whatever changes that you want to make to the information that you put in initially, but you can
also go and remove the kit. Now to remove the kit, you're going to have to pipe your current password
and then click on delete. And it says confirmation of this is going to take some time, and then the
kit was deleted. So now, on my home page, I don't have any kids anymore. Now let's say that you want
to delete this profile. In this case, I do want to leave this profile because this is just a junk
profile that I created for this video. I click on the user management, and it allows me to change
whatever I want. So if you do want to change your alias or if you want to change your email
password, that's fine. I'm gonna go over here to the profile registration deletion. Now you can
use this page to delete everything you don't need to go through and delete things one at a time,
but you can delete everything from this page, and this includes your profile. So once you do this,
you're not gonna be able to log in to GEDmatch anymore. You're gonna have to set up another
account. So you're gonna have to enter your password and then click on the authenticate. Now
it's going to give you another warning because, again, this is the last time to be able to save
any of that information that you may have had. It says remove registration all associated DNA
and gedcom resources permanently. Click on that, and it has deleted your entire account. So when
you click on continue, it goes back. And so let me try to log in with that information again,
and I've entered in the email and the password, and it's as an invalid login that account has
been deleted completely. So for those of you who are just starting in genetic genealogy
and want to get involved in GEDmatch, that's how you set up an account and get your
first DNA kit uploaded. Now you can upload as many DNA kits as you want. Just make sure that
you have permission from the owners of those kits before you upload them. I've been using GEDmatch
for about six years now, and it is a wonderful website. It's got a lot of great tools and has
helped me a lot in my DNA research. So if you have any questions about the GEDmatch website, put
it in the comments below, and I'll try to answer it. And if you like this video be sure to give it
a thumbs up and share it with all your friends.
